Thoughts- is the characters total reliance on the fabricator impeding their ability to survive?
sayerulz
oregon Join Date: 2015-04-15 Member: 203493Members
oregon Join Date: 2015-04-15 Member: 203493Members
It seems to me that, while certainly a very useful tool, the fabricator has a lot of severe limitations that would not exist if the character would build things for themselves.
Weapons are an great example. Irregardless of wether or not they should be in the game, a simple spear made from a bit of wreckage would be very useful in our characters situation. Certainly if I were stranded on an alien planet, water or otherwise, it would be one of the first things I would build. But, because we refuse to make anything that is not in the fabricator database, we cannot have one.
Farm plots are another example. It should be quite easy to make something that works to farm plants in on our own, but we need to scan them instead.
Anyone agree?
Weapons are an great example. Irregardless of wether or not they should be in the game, a simple spear made from a bit of wreckage would be very useful in our characters situation. Certainly if I were stranded on an alien planet, water or otherwise, it would be one of the first things I would build. But, because we refuse to make anything that is not in the fabricator database, we cannot have one.
Farm plots are another example. It should be quite easy to make something that works to farm plants in on our own, but we need to scan them instead.
Anyone agree?
Comments
I would also propose that, in a world where you have replicators/fabricators to spit out everything you need, it's not likely you'd learn to do it yourself. We already have that case currently in the USA, where most goods come in from over seas and it doesn't even occur to people that they could produce the same goods themselves. I mean, ask your average person if they know how to sew a pair of pants or a shirt? A few crafty ones could probably disassemble one if you gave them time, but for the most part they'd end up with something more similar to a loin cloth or a toga than pants.
We don't know what the player's character was on the ship. They could have been a janitor.
People are way more reliant on technology than we'd probably like to believe. Just imagine all the people who have trouble memorizing appointments and dates without using their smartphone calendars for reference. You'd be surprised how dependent people are on small things like that.
So maybe... on a theoretical level? Yes, it's impeding the character's ability to survive without a fabricator on the long run. But practically speaking, it's highly likely that the character would not survive at all without the fabricator in a very short term. They need food, shelter, and advanced tools to survive.
Fixed that for you.
True enough, particularly on an alien planet. But we are still growing plants as it is without that apparently being an issue. The main thing is just why we can't make a metal box and fill it with dirt without the help of the fabricator.
A spear as well, could really be nothing more than a bit of pipe or structural reinforcement from the ship with a pointy end. Since we have a welder and a laser cutter, that should be no trouble to make, and unless the ship itself was remarkably poorly constructed, then it should not break easily. But instead, because we don't have it in the fabricator, we can't make that.
Assuming they can. I don't think we are one of the usefully skilled engineers from the ship. That's why we're restricted to what the fabricator can make for us and need to scavenge blueprints.
Biter swarms are dealt with via Seamoth impact, and I sure ain't going to jab a Bone Shark or Reaper with a spear!
Space is extremely limited aboard the Lifepod. The current inventory of survival gear doesn't even include a knife or any appreciable quantity of water. It is therefore quite reasonable to have a device that can construct sophisticated equipment, provided that the survival scenario has sufficient available raw materials to feed into the Fabricator.
It's a bit like a rough camping trip with a high-tech twist. Bring along as much as you can, and create solutions for problems using your available tools and local materials. Build shelter, furniture, cooking equipment and even clothing from what's found around your campsite, and scale up the technology levels as required. There's virtually no real difference between the two situations.
You'd probably have a very hard time building a Cyclops using only a survival knife as your starting point.
On the other side ... lately, somewhere else in the galaxy, far in the future ...
Here is the Galactic News Report interview with Rob Cruz, who survived 1000 days on a barren planet:
GNR "That's the most incredible we all heard of. 1000 days on a lonely planet with a single tool. Tell us your story."
Rob Cruz "Well, I only had this replicator I found there, stranded on the barren planet. So I replicated everything I needed. Food, water, shelter, etc."
GNR "Incredible. Tell me, how did you get something to eat. People like me are really amazed, getting all their food served from public transmitters right into the mouth. I wouldn't know how to help myself."
Rob Cruz "First I got the panic, not knowing what to do. Then I discovered this strange extension on the surface of the replicator. I hesitated for a while and then took the risk pressing against it and it went all in and suddenly I could hear an AI speaking to me. It turned out that this extension was called a button, an invention that got extinct over 100 years ago, which then started to activate the AI build inside. The AI then replicated everything I needed for survival, including materializing my rescue spaceship."
GNR "You are certainly one of the most famous survival masters our modern civilization has seen, since 2000 years ago Mark Watney survived on Mars. This is Whiney Willy on Galactic News."
Or grav sphere.
Too big. The sphere should be smaller and easier to handle. And the vortex torpedo should bind creatures like the grav sphere instead whirling them around.
Things that me go hmm.
This space explorer is a little dumb if he cant make a grow bed or pot.
With that said the fabricator is a pretty cool idea and fun to use for me.
This means that unless our next-to-silent cypher of a protagonist was an actual construction engineer, someone who designed things, they wouldn't consider trying to step outside the STC fabricator/constructor methodology. It also explains how they are able to make use of not only the welder, but the laser cutting tool, with such proficiency. I think that our protagonist was a member of engineering or support crew, specifically in maintenance.
EDIT: Changed the last words of the first paragraph.
Old: ...not starting a skill set with imprint first.
New: ...not starting a skill set without an imprint first.
That'll teach me to post while tired.
Personally, I don't have a problem with this. Our knowledge is very specialized compared to the past. Take building a grow bed. We would go buy some lumber, nails, specially designed soil, and seeds. If we had to create our own lumber, nails, soil, and grab our own seeds from the environment, then the majority of us would be lost.
At least, Subnautica is more realistic than other crafting games. Hammer a bunch of lumber and steel together on a workbench and somehow my character ends up with an AK-47. It is as if the protagonist has doctorates in metallurgy, electrical engineering, and numerous others. At least, Subnautica has the Fabricator which means that anyone can build any object without the necessary knowledge. All that is needed is the appropriate blueprint.
That explains everything- its tech heresy to build stuff ourselves!
But that does make some sense. I think that the devs have accidental created a distopian future where people are like robots programmed to do a single task, and anything else just doesn't register.
The most amazing game event though is how you zap the Cyclops out of the air from your inventory. And if I think of it, maybe it's only natural to awake at your base or lifepod after dying in the ocean. You simply get fabricated back to life as Alterra stores all bioscan data of its employees for fabricated emergency revivals. Of course that doesn't include your new inventory.
So much about fabricators and survival problems. And the game tricking into making us believe that those two things fit together. Really fantastic game though and fun to play.
Actually, no. The Fabricator is not advanced enough to do that. It would need Star Trek's teleporters to do that. The teleporter breaks down a person's molecular structure, stores the person's pattern in its buffers, and creates an identical copy at the destination. In other words, the teleporter is a cloning machine that kills off the original and makes only one copy. Creating life is far too complex for the Fabricator. All it can do is cook and cure animals. Creating food and water, on the other hand, should actually be possible for the Fabricator. All it needs is the correct amounts of Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, and Nitrogen to form the necessary organic molecules like Sugar, Protein, Carbohydrates, Fat, and Vitamins. Won't be as tasty as eating a cooked Peeper, but you could live off of Creepvine samples.
The impressive part of creating the Cyclops is not creating it out of air, but where those drones store the materials necessary for creating the Cyclops. The drones create a holographic blueprint of the Cyclops before filling it in. It is not as amazing as zapping the Cyclops out of the air.
Hey, if it would spit out a Land Raider and Power Armor, I'd give that fabricator a gold star.
But Star Trek has the same problem. The teleporter is based on molecular replication using blueprints of lifeforms and should thus be able to recreate people from the dead. That's why I call this tech godlike.
In Subnautica the fabricator, builder and construction drones use the same replication tech, but get the ingredients from the players inventory. It's incompatible with survival, but I can accept it being a game and using a comic version of science.
By the way, a real sub isn't a plastic toy with a few parts but enough to match lifeform complexity. Normally even a single cpu inside a sub of our time needs a whole factory to get produced. A big sub uses millions of parts all produced in other factories around the world and needs millions of workers from our civilization to contribute to the submarine construction. A sub blueprint unfolds to an armada of smaller part blueprints easily matching dna complexity in the end. And that's only our time and not some future, where all products probably run with quantum processing networks and nanotech machinery architectures.
but i dont think it can rip atoms apart and rearrange the molecules because if it could do that we wouldnt need the titanium we find to make a base, but instead use water and convert it to titanium to make it.
also if it could replicate people could it replicate personalities and memories?
Ah, a lapdog of the false emperor!
Now all I can imagine is some Demon-Engine that's fused with a Reaper Leviathan.
The reaper is already a demon.
I don't think it does.
Sure, two idiots and a little bit of alcohol can produce a human. But no amount of workers, factories or laboritories can presently produce a human from completely raw materials.
The future card might work. It's at least theoretically possible. Putting aside any philosophical or religious notions of the soul, the hurdles are memory and personal identity. We don't know precisely how they're encoded yet but it's conceivable we might by the time that Subnautica is set in and that fully functional life forms could be fabricated with their technology.
Well I did say that the teleporter is a cloning machine that kills off the original and makes only one copy. As long as enough raw material is available, then it could create an army of Kirks. All of the main characters in Star Trek are merely copies of copies. There is good reason why Bones feared teleporters.
For building a sub, only the computers would have any real complexity. By real complexity, I mean at the nanoscale. The human body, on the other hand, is full of complexity from our neurons to each of our cells. We have been studying the human body for decades and we still don't know why we work and discover new secrets every year. Subs are impressive works of man, but they come no where close to the complexity of humans.
A submarine with more than a million parts (not speaking of how many workers were needed to produce such parts, just putting all preproduced parts into the sub).
You might acknowledge the 100 buisnesses in their supply chain network and that's only the first level hierarchy of production dependance. I think you underestimate the complexity of our modern tech getting close to biocomplexity. You especially underestimate the hierarchy of parts inside parts and the time designers spent throughout history to perfectionize the technology.
Sure, every idiot who can produce a human can also make a phone call. But the tech behind both is amazingly complex. Your teacher told you how complex the human is as part of your education. Unfortunately, school doesn't tell you the other side of tech complexity, so most people think it's not that complicated. Some have heard of the complexity of computers, but not that of mechanical or other microscale sytems and how things are really produced in factories.
Maybe I'm not fair. Subs and space tech come from NASA and DARPA and aren't really today's standart tech. They can build complex products on a really tiny scale ahead in years or decades. Maybe only military subs, big org computing centers, giant particle accelerators or the ISS are really close to dna complexity today. So a private looking sub like the Cyclops might be less complex if it were present time (especially looking at those clumsy, old fashioned bulkheads).
What does giant factories have to do with the technology of Subnautica? As long as you have the right blueprint, energy, materials, and drones, then you can create the Aurora. Subnautica's technology level is at the level of Star Trek's Replicator, but not at the level of the Teleporter since the Teleporter can create life. Biocomplexity is far more complex than anything we can currently create due to nature spending millions of years to get it working right. Instead of creating certain technologies by themselves, scientists are using biomimcry to create new technology. Biomimcry is using nature to solve some complex problem. Then there is the scale of complexity. Subs, computing centers, particle accelerators, and the ISS are complex at the macroscopic level, but not the microscopic level. There are just areas within each where the complexity comes close to biocomplexity like the CPU, but on average it fails miserably. To reach that level of complexity, then every single component has to have nanometer dimensions.
Subnautica is able to compress an entire factory into a hand-held object in the case of the Habitat Builder. In fact, why do we even need a Fabricator when the Habitat Builder can create Fabricators, Nuclear Reactors, Bioreactor, Thermal Plants, Water Filtration Machines, and Scanner Rooms? All you need is the spare parts and you can create almost anything with the Habitat Builder.
So yes, the human has trillions operational parts inside his body. Billions defining his major state. And a sub of our time would only have millions of product parts (including cpus), thus probably billions on average alltogether. And taking much more space, less sophisticated in design.
Scale of complexity difference about 1:1000 and density difference even more. But that's still very close comparing it with other tech products. And that was our time tech. 20 years ago it might have been 1:10000, 40 years ago 1:100000, so maybe in 60 years we get 1:1. It's science fiction and it's allowed to assume better tech on a plausible level. We live in a time closing to biocomplexity in decades. Not even counting our quantum victories, surpassing even bioscale level.
And that's the reason why replicators would be able to create life. Too sophisticated for our time that already approaches biocomplexity without reaching it at this time. We won't have replicators anytime soon and probably reach biocomplexity far before being able to replicate on molecular level like a 3d printer.
By the way, Star Trek teleporters can be simply explained by accepting their replication tech. And count in the holodeck too. It's just a big sophisticated 3d printing tech based on energetic projection on nanolevel scale. Print a cup of tea, a human or a the hms bounty, for the 3d nanoprojector it's just all data. Not this one, you know what I mean.
That's true mainly to the how and not the complexity or scale. But generally the gap is closing faster than before. And we knew almost nothing 100 years ago compared to now, although we tried to know 1000s of years before, yet achieving almost nothing but illusions for centuries.
It might be funny, but at the time we will be able to understand the human brain and body fully, the machines helping us to do so will have surpassed human complexity and understanding. It's really no miracle, as goedel's logic would tell us that nobody could be able to fully understand himself. But poor machines trying to understand themselves in the far future.
Well it's a game and for me the funny aspect is that replicators are generally enemies of basic survival needs. The game should focus on survival progression from single food problems, then energy problems, finally reaching problems of surviving alien dangers in the deep. And that means the devs are right to focus on creature behaviour changes to make the play with creatures more interesting.