Absolutely dead or just mostly dead?

[rancke]

Second, presumably, the character's heart has stopped beating.

If he's clinically dead that's likely.

For the shot of Fast Drug to work, it has to circulate through the body. No heart pumping, no circulation.

Fast Drug is TL10, three levels in advance of current medical technology. Maybe the active components are automotile. Drugs that can be administered to the clinically dead sounds like a useful invention.

Based on my reading of World War 2 accounts, one way of telling a man was dead was when he was given a shot of morphine for pain, the shot made a hard lump under the skin, as the morphine did not go anywhere because of no blood circulation. So, how is the Fast Drug gong to work?

Not like TL5 drugs, that's for sure.

Anyway, once you get the victim to a medical facility -- an ultra-tech medical facility, that is -- you hook a blood supply to the brain arteries and a blood drain to the brain veins and keep the brain cells alive until the body has been repaired. Perhaps you can even do that in the field.


Hans

 

[CosmicGamer]

Second, presumably, the character's heart has stopped beating. For the shot of Fast Drug to work, it has to circulate through the body. No heart pumping, no circulation.

Good point.

I figured with the futuristic medicine where brain death is the most critical concern and anything else is repairable or replaceable, the standard medical response (with proper med kit) might likely be a Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation machine. Insertion of an IV cannula into the carotid artery and a return tube in the great cerebral vein then add the drug.

Main issue is having someone with the proper training and equipment close by.

 

[McPerth]

Good point.

I figured with the futuristic medicine where brain death is the most critical concern and anything else is repairable or replaceable, the standard medical response (with proper med kit) might likely be a Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation machine. Insertion of an IV cannula into the carotid artery and a return tube in the great cerebral vein then add the drug.

Main issue is having someone with the proper training and equipment close by.

Extracorporeal circulation works because you start it before the heart stops.

If the heart has already stopped and blood left circulating for more than a few minutes at most, other effects (like clots) are quite damaging for the brain (and other organs for what's worth).

And using anticoagulants (any kind) to avoid it on a traumathic patient would mean bleeding him/her more often than not.

Off course, things may be changed by the time we reach TL 10...

 

[rancke]

Off course, things may be changed by the time we reach TL 10...

If it hadn't changed, it wouldn't be TL 10.


Hans

 

[Nerhesi]

Hopefully this hasn't been mentioned yet, but:

Central Supply Catalogue, Page 167:

Trauma Pack (TL8-TL14) - TL determines weight.

Throw Medic 8+, restory 1d6 Endurance points. "This can be used to bring dead characters back from 0 or less Endurance (so long as the new total is above 0) and they suffered the last wound within 30 seconds. blah blah lasts only 1d6 hours

So By RAW - you're not dead with stats at 0, but you're damn close.

 

[rancke]

Hopefully this hasn't been mentioned yet, but:

Central Supply Catalogue, Page 167:

Trauma Pack (TL8-TL14) - TL determines weight.

Throw Medic 8+, restory 1d6 Endurance points. "This can be used to bring dead characters back from 0 or less Endurance (so long as the new total is above 0) and they suffered the last wound within 30 seconds. blah blah lasts only 1d6 hours

Thank you. No, that hasn't come up yet.

New total? Is that total stats or total End? What happens if your stats are 1-0-0 and you take, say, 6 points of damage. Would you end up with -5 Str, 0 Dex, 0 End? And if you then get your End up to 4 by using this trauma pack, is the new total above 0?

How do you get End below 0? Doesn't any excess damage carry over to Str or Dex according to choice once End is down to 0?

So By RAW - you're not dead with stats at 0, but you're damn close.

That sounds just like what I thought made the most sense. Thanks again.


Hans

 

[atpollard]

That is actually strange since, IIRC, the RAW say that abilities cannot go below 0. Excess points just evaporate once you reach 000xxx and are 'killed'.

I think that I agree with an earlier poster that this is a good topic for a S&P article to clarify.

 

[flyamanito]

After several hours he's absolutely dead.

Now, if the incident took place in front of the starship and the friends reacted fast enough to pop the head into an autodoc like the one in Larry Niven's Procrustes in a couple of minutes, is the character dead? If the friends quickly pop the head into a Schlockiverse nannybag, is the character dead?

Now, both the Known Space autodoc and the nannybags are (presumably) above TL15, but MgT is a generic rules set, right? So given a sufficiently advanced TL (17 or 19 or whatever is the appropriate level), the MgT rules ought to accomodate this sort of thing.

Sorry if this has been mentioned before, but again, the Central Supply Catalog (pg. 169) has another answer for us, potentially alluding to Larry Niven's own Autodoc:

"At TL 14, an Autodoc is capable of reanimation, provided no more
than 15 minutes have passed since the subject’s death. This period
can be extended by extremely cold conditions or placing the corpse
in a low berth. Cr. 1,000,000"

As a GM, like to combine this with the old CT JTAS issue 11 pg. 24-25 section of their medical treatment article, where they go into reanimating characters. As such, my house rule is that if a character's injuries are judged by me to be reasonably reversible, and they're placed in a specialised medbay cryoberth or have appropriate intervention and ongoing monitoring, they can be eligible for reanimation for 1D6 + Medic roll effect months in suspended animation. The reanimation can be performed by a TL14 Autodoc or at a TL13 medical facility without an Autodoc. In both cases, success is not guaranteed.

Having said that, judging whether the injury is reversible becomes more complex. Case in point: the captain in my Pirates of Drinax campaign, who essentially received a left-hemispherectomy via arc-field axe from the first mate. In this case, the cut was so clean, the heat (presumably) so intense that the bleedout would have been minimised before treatment. If he survives, he's got a few years (one term?) and cybernetic mods before he retains some level of his previous functioning. Personality changes obviously expected.

 

[flyamanito]

Sorry, didn't mean to come across as angry in that previous post. Must've hit the wrong key.

 

[atpollard]

Sorry, didn't mean to come across as angry in that previous post. Must've hit the wrong key.

Fixed it.
(It can be changed in the "Advanced Editing" tab.)

... and welcome to the conversation.

 

[maksimsmelchak]

Mike, there was a two part medical article by Alex Greene in Signs and Portents. It has things like medical innovations and drugs broken down by TL, over a dozen medical specialties, a bunch of medical task examples, variation of task difficulty by medical TL, additional drugs and equipment, and so on but it was not specific to high tech nor specific to the issue being discussed, death and stats and recovery. I never read it, just skimmed it in the past and reskimmed it to comment on it now.

The closest info that pertains to this discussion was
and

There is also supplement 8: Cybernetics.
Here is saysHowever, this Full Body Simulacrum costs Cr. 10,000,000 and it is a body composed of a full array of all the replacement arm, leg, torso, heart, lung, and so on. The composite need not match the patients height, girth, or race. It has a synthetic skin that can appear similar to the prior body of the patient or they can opt for something different. A version that has no appearance enhancement is cheaper but looks robotic. It has 777 stats (pay more for slight enhancements max of A/10 possible at TL 15). Cloned bodies are discussed too for TL15+.

Transhumanism, for the most part, came after Traveller's foundation is the late 1970's and 1980's. So did Cyberpunk, mirrorshades, Dieselpunk and related sci-fi genres and movements. So, did much of the current understanding of nanotechnology. And modern computing makes most of Traveller look like ENIAC.

GURPS Traveller addressed some of these issues in the main rulebook and made suggestions for how to incorporate some of these later movements and technologies into a Traveller game.

But I still wonder just what sort of place nanotech, transhumanism, and related movements have in a OTU campaign. I personally like the older, lower tech environments of 1960s and 70's space opera environments.

It's like the old days of fighter aircraft dogfighting with guns... When missiles finally became dominant, some of the fun of gaming aircraft dogfights went away.

Positive vibes to all!

Shalom,
Maksim-Smelchak.

 

[mike wightman]

IMTU - the humans that are left after the long night are the ones left behind by the second singularity event...

Spoiler:

terrans invent SI during their war against the vilani - the machines/transhumans decide to remove themselves to avoid the war with the baselines, this triggers the long night - the baselines are still heavily modified e.g. their immunity to all the diseases that should affect people travelling from world to world

As to early transhumanism in sci fi I would recommend the books written by Olaf Stapleton during the thirties that show just how far back some of these tropes go; Last and First Men and Starmaker are well worth the read.

 

[nobby-w]

...
But I still wonder just what sort of place nanotech, transhumanism, and related movements have in a OTU campaign. I personally like the older, lower tech environments of 1960s and 70's space opera environments.
...

I'll summarise the sort of things I've done to retcon this into MTU.

• Starship computers are not just a computer, but a complex of computers, redundant miles-long wiring looms, sensors, large, high-resolution antenna arrays, redundant avionics systems, large redundant backup battery and UPS systems, and a number of other components. They're hardened, rad-shielded aerospace-grade kit and at least quad-redundant. Ergo, they're quite heavy.
  
• Nanotech is fundamentally a materials technology. People can make nano-robots but a hand-held gizmo consisting of a power source, a cavity magnetron and a wave guide will crispy-fry smart dust type devices quickly and cheaply. RF shielding this sort of nano-bots is not a trivial exercise due to the small size, so it isn't that stealthy in the face of good ECCM. Ergo, it's tech that a spook service might be able to deploy, but then again it might not.
  
• Small robots are a thing but we have insect-zapper tech today that could be adapted fairly trivially to shoot down any small flying objects. Point defence fire control is available from TL9 in the OTU.
  
• Society has a significant taboo on ubiquitous surveillance tech dating back to a backlash against its use in pre-stellar times (a sort of mini Butlerian Jihad against warrantless surveillance). One of the reasons that the Vilani accepted Solomani rule in the 2I/ROM is that the Solomani effectively banned this tech, even for their own spook services. Ubiquitous surveillance is viewed as barbaric in much the same way we might view medieval torture instruments as being barbaric.
  
• Brain implants just don't work all that well. They can be used for medical reasons, but the immune system tends to grow cysts around electrodes in the brain, meaning that the devices have to be replaced every (say) 5-10 years. In the end, the market of folks willing to undergo periodic brain surgery for cool cybernetic mods is fairly limited. High tech (say 12+) improves this issue but never completely makes it go away. Thus, it works quite well for medical applications but never becomes the fashion accessory that it is in a typical cyberpunk 'verse.
  
• Ubiquitous internetworking gets somewhat popular on a planetary scale, although most lower population (say: <=8) worlds never implement more than a cellular network (or even just satellite comms) across their less densely populated regions. This is common in developing countries today as it's orders of magnitude cheaper than wiring up the countryside with land lines.
  
• For obvious reasons, internetworking doesn't work on an interstellar scale. Something a bit like old-style UUCP/usenet/mail forwarding is run through Xboat networks for news and email¹. The influence of 'Interstellar time' actually slows down the pace of local society to some extent as well, although you might get big cities with enough local economy that the local influence outstrips the interstellar influence.
  
• Computers and any other equipment intended to be used in frontier regions has to be field-maintainable, so cheap, ultra-compact black-box consumer devices running complex, opaque software stacks tend not to be so popular in the field. I.T. infrastructure that's as complex and fragile as today's Hyper-V clusters would not last long-term in a remote area where you didn't have access to vendor support over the interwebs. That sort of thing is a recipe for two-month outages while you send an XBoat-a-gram off to your vendor and a technician arrives several weeks later, then has to escalate it to head office to get a fix². It only takes so many of those for people to start looking for workarounds or tech they can fix and maintain locally.
  
• Popular suspicion of ubiquitous computer technology drives market demand away from 'Internet of things' type devices (i.e. ubiquitous connectivity through your smart phone/hand computer), and also pushes toward simpler, more transparent computer platforms that can be verified publically. Imperial (2nd or 3rd, take your pick) emphasis on interstellar technology drives a more aerospace like culture in the computer industry, putting an emphasis on reliable and trustworthy systems that won't bite you in the arse when you're in jump space. This might be especially prevalent in frontier regions like the Spinward Marches.
  
• You could certainly have genetic engineering or eugenics programmes to breed super-humans, but finding 2,000,000 foster families for your genetically engineered clone army is something of a logistic problem. It also doesn't help when 90% of them decide they would really prefer to go to university, settle down and have 2.4 kids. What you got when you tried to raise them as Janissaries wasn't a pretty sight either.
  In the end, super-soldiers have a significant limiting factor. It doesn't matter how fast your reflexes are - you just can't dodge a cluster-bomb.
  I have had NPCs kicking around who were the results of attempts to do this (think something like Taura from the Vorkosigan Saga, or Khan from Star Trek or the Sauron Supermen). It just turns out that attempts to create a race of ubermenschen don't work any better than the results of good old natural selection.

So, you can have the technology present in your 'verse, and make things with nanotech, nano-materials and high-tech computers - but have them present in moderation and not forming the ground-shaking social upheaval that some folks predict. I don't think any of the moderating influences I listed above stretch credulity.

¹At one point within living memory, I've seen an ISP that got its usenetnews feed from the local university on a 60MB QIC tape.
²Pop quiz - how many of you work for organisations who have staff on the payroll with (a) the skills to troubleshoot and fix a software bug in your hypervisor platform and (b) access to the source code. Of those who can answer 'yes' to (a) and (b), how many of you work for a company that is not an O/S or virtualisation plaform vendor.

 

[Leitz]

On the subject of death, there are stories.

Some years ago I was in a F2F D&D game. The DM asked me how many hit points my paladin had, and oddly enough, he soon took one more than that and went unconscious. His eyes said he was lying. I found that frustrating, because I built the character as a fighter type, and he was doing well. He was true to character, and making him go unconscious just for effect frustrated me and I mentally checked out right about then.

Some of you have run games for me, and I appreciate your efforts by putting a lot of time and effort into my characters. We have a richer game, I hope, and you know how much I like my characters. Yet there have been times when my characters stand up in ways that might get them killed. Occasionally I've told the DM up front; "I know this is dangerous and if my character dies dong something this big, I'm fine with that." It's part of the story, and a good story is what gaming is about.

Really, if you are just going by dice rolls and rules, why game with others? Unless you're telling a grand story, isn't reading a book or playing PacMan the same? I game for stories, and sometimes those stories are tragic. Usually, though, I want a fun, up-lifting story. I can get tragedy in the news. Heck, I've lived enough tragedy, time for something better.

If you're playing the game, do audacious stuff. If you're running the game, make the story so dramatic and engaging that the players can't wait for the next scene. That's gaming.

 

[mike wightman]

I'll summarise the sort of things I've done to retcon this into MTU.

• Starship computers are not just a computer, but a complex of computers, redundant miles-long wiring looms, sensors, large, high-resolution antenna arrays, redundant avionics systems, large redundant backup battery and UPS systems, and a number of other components. They're hardened, rad-shielded aerospace-grade kit and at least quad-redundant. Ergo, they're quite heavy.
  
• Nanotech is fundamentally a materials technology. People can make nano-robots but a hand-held gizmo consisting of a power source, a cavity magnetron and a wave guide will crispy-fry smart dust type devices quickly and cheaply. RF shielding this sort of nano-bots is not a trivial exercise due to the small size, so it isn't that stealthy in the face of good ECCM. Ergo, it's tech that a spook service might be able to deploy, but then again it might not.
  
• Small robots are a thing but we have insect-zapper tech today that could be adapted fairly trivially to shoot down any small flying objects. Point defence fire control is available from TL9 in the OTU.
  
• Society has a significant taboo on ubiquitous surveillance tech dating back to a backlash against its use in pre-stellar times (a sort of mini Butlerian Jihad against warrantless surveillance). One of the reasons that the Vilani accepted Solomani rule in the 2I/ROM is that the Solomani effectively banned this tech, even for their own spook services. Ubiquitous surveillance is viewed as barbaric in much the same way we might view medieval torture instruments as being barbaric.
  
• Brain implants just don't work all that well. They can be used for medical reasons, but the immune system tends to grow cysts around electrodes in the brain, meaning that the devices have to be replaced every (say) 5-10 years. In the end, the market of folks willing to undergo periodic brain surgery for cool cybernetic mods is fairly limited. High tech (say 12+) improves this issue but never completely makes it go away. Thus, it works quite well for medical applications but never becomes the fashion accessory that it is in a typical cyberpunk 'verse.
  
• Ubiquitous internetworking gets somewhat popular on a planetary scale, although most lower population (say: <=8) worlds never implement more than a cellular network (or even just satellite comms) across their less densely populated regions. This is common in developing countries today as it's orders of magnitude cheaper than wiring up the countryside with land lines.
  
• For obvious reasons, internetworking doesn't work on an interstellar scale. Something a bit like old-style UUCP/usenet/mail forwarding is run through Xboat networks for news and email¹. The influence of 'Interstellar time' actually slows down the pace of local society to some extent as well, although you might get big cities with enough local economy that the local influence outstrips the interstellar influence.
  
• Computers and any other equipment intended to be used in frontier regions has to be field-maintainable, so cheap, ultra-compact black-box consumer devices running complex, opaque software stacks tend not to be so popular in the field. I.T. infrastructure that's as complex and fragile as today's Hyper-V clusters would not last long-term in a remote area where you didn't have access to vendor support over the interwebs. That sort of thing is a recipe for two-month outages while you send an XBoat-a-gram off to your vendor and a technician arrives several weeks later, then has to escalate it to head office to get a fix². It only takes so many of those for people to start looking for workarounds or tech they can fix and maintain locally.
  
• Popular suspicion of ubiquitous computer technology drives market demand away from 'Internet of things' type devices (i.e. ubiquitous connectivity through your smart phone/hand computer), and also pushes toward simpler, more transparent computer platforms that can be verified publically. Imperial (2nd or 3rd, take your pick) emphasis on interstellar technology drives a more aerospace like culture in the computer industry, putting an emphasis on reliable and trustworthy systems that won't bite you in the arse when you're in jump space. This might be especially prevalent in frontier regions like the Spinward Marches.
  
• You could certainly have genetic engineering or eugenics programmes to breed super-humans, but finding 2,000,000 foster families for your genetically engineered clone army is something of a logistic problem. It also doesn't help when 90% of them decide they would really prefer to go to university, settle down and have 2.4 kids. What you got when you tried to raise them as Janissaries wasn't a pretty sight either.
  In the end, super-soldiers have a significant limiting factor. It doesn't matter how fast your reflexes are - you just can't dodge a cluster-bomb.
  I have had NPCs kicking around who were the results of attempts to do this (think something like Taura from the Vorkosigan Saga, or Khan from Star Trek or the Sauron Supermen). It just turns out that attempts to create a race of ubermenschen don't work any better than the results of good old natural selection.

So, you can have the technology present in your 'verse, and make things with nanotech, nano-materials and high-tech computers - but have them present in moderation and not forming the ground-shaking social upheaval that some folks predict. I don't think any of the moderating influences I listed above stretch credulity.

¹At one point within living memory, I've seen an ISP that got its usenetnews feed from the local university on a 60MB QIC tape.
²Pop quiz - how many of you work for organisations who have staff on the payroll with (a) the skills to troubleshoot and fix a software bug in your hypervisor platform and (b) access to the source code. Of those who can answer 'yes' to (a) and (b), how many of you work for a company that is not an O/S or virtualisation plaform vendor.

This is one of the best posts on this subject I have seen

Hope you don't mind me borrowing bits of it for MTU

 

[wbyrd]

Good point.

I figured with the futuristic medicine where brain death is the most critical concern and anything else is repairable or replaceable, the standard medical response (with proper med kit) might likely be a Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation machine. Insertion of an IV cannula into the carotid artery and a return tube in the great cerebral vein then add the drug.

Main issue is having someone with the proper training and equipment close by.

CPR artificial compression of the chest to force circulation.
Applying CPR is a good way to stave off brain death in the case of cardiac arrest..assuming they didn't take a Plasma gun bolt through the chest.
as long as there is an intact heart, brain, at least one reasonably intact lung and enough blood, CPR can prevent brain death for a pretty good amount of time.

It also allows you to inject a drug and have it circulate. Another person is providing the force to compress the heart, and force air into the lungs. as long as you effectively apply CPR ( most likely still taught in every first aid class in the Imperium) Te person can survive with no independent heartbeat or respiration....for a while.

In the original post the hospital was 10 minutes away...with CPR and someone t drive like a bat out of hell unless there is massive tissue disruption of a key organ survival odds are pretty good.

Lack off oxygen causes brain damage in abut 7 minutes, people have been successfully revived after longer periods due to cold, or other factors. I've witnessed Paramedics applying CPR for 20 or 30 minutes before they could get an independent heartbeat. But they got the heart beating again.

 

[nobby-w]

This is one of the best posts on this subject I have seen

Hope you don't mind me borrowing bits of it for MTU

Help yourself.

 

[DickNervous]

I'll summarise the sort of things I've done to retcon this into MTU.

.
.
.
.

So, you can have the technology present in your 'verse, and make things with nanotech, nano-materials and high-tech computers - but have them present in moderation and not forming the ground-shaking social upheaval that some folks predict. I don't think any of the moderating influences I listed above stretch credulity.

That post is pure poetry, seriously. So well thought out and presented. Bravo!

²Pop quiz - how many of you work for organisations who have staff on the payroll with (a) the skills to troubleshoot and fix a software bug in your hypervisor platform and (b) access to the source code. Of those who can answer 'yes' to (a) and (b), how many of you work for a company that is not an O/S or virtualisation plaform vendor.

I have the exact opposite type of problem. I work for an organization where we have web-based courses that were developed 12-15 years ago and nobody knows where the source code is. Nor is there anyone left who worked on it originally. This has led us to have to stop selling them because they don't work in modern browsers (anything newer than IE8) and the expense to rebuild them from scratch is to high since we don't sell much of those course anymore even though the subject matter is still relevant.

 

[Leitz]

[*]Computers and any other equipment intended to be used in frontier regions has to be field-maintainable, so cheap, ultra-compact black-box consumer devices running complex, opaque software stacks tend not to be so popular in the field. I.T. infrastructure that's as complex and fragile as today's Hyper-V clusters would not last long-term in a remote area where you didn't have access to vendor support over the interwebs. That sort of thing is a recipe for two-month outages while you send an XBoat-a-gram off to your vendor and a technician arrives several weeks later, then has to escalate it to head office to get a fix². It only takes so many of those for people to start looking for workarounds or tech they can fix and maintain locally.

²Pop quiz - how many of you work for organisations who have staff on the payroll with (a) the skills to troubleshoot and fix a software bug in your hypervisor platform and (b) access to the source code. Of those who can answer 'yes' to (a) and (b), how many of you work for a company that is not an O/S or virtualisation plaform vendor.

Hmm...I'd have to disagree. Once the IoT collapses because people actually start to care about businesses monitoring and messing with their lives, I think a more open source style of appliance will get more traction. The issues with appliances are just as you describe; they are black boxes and are difficult to make fit a variety of field uses, and any change requires corporate activity. While evil empires will continue to pervade in the highly civilized areas, out on the fringes people will need access and control to survive.

And yeah, I work with those sorts of things.

 

[nobby-w]

Hmm...I'd have to disagree. Once the IoT collapses because people actually start to care about businesses monitoring and messing with their lives, I think a more open source style of appliance will get more traction. The issues with appliances are just as you describe; they are black boxes and are difficult to make fit a variety of field uses, and any change requires corporate activity. While evil empires will continue to pervade in the highly civilized areas, out on the fringes people will need access and control to survive.

And yeah, I work with those sorts of things.

I don't think you're disagreeing with me - what I'm saying is that anything used on the frontier will have to be maintainable on the frontier, including electronic devices, software and infrastructure. This means that sealed black box units will be less attractive than simpler, open devices that can be repaired and modified with local resources.

Do you mean you work with open-source IOT software or O/S platforms and hypervisors?