SRWU application
Apr. 6th, 2014 08:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
anewmachinePlayer name: kamikasei
AIM contact: on file
Alternate contacts:![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
kamikasei
Character name: Liz Butler (OC)
Source canon: Soul of a New Machine (OC)
Community tag: liz butler
Do I want a HMD: Yes
Notes: I've put up an info post which covers some detail that's out of scope for an app, including hooks to connect the Butlers and their canon to other characters.
Background: Sometimes, when a woman and a gynoid love each other very much, they take advantage of modern medical technology (and invent some new AI and robotics technology) to start a family. Some twenty-three years ago, Grace and Violet Butler did just that, and the result was their firstborn daughter Catherine. Three years later their research reached the point of bringing online their second daughter, Elizabeth. Elizabeth represented a novel approach to artificial intelligence, one aimed much more at the production of a human-like person than at general usefulness or broader applications, developed from the ground up using sense and motion data from Catherine to give Elizabeth a body image to grow in to like a human child. As a result the sisters are very close, with Cathy acting as Liz’s eyes, ears, and hands since early childhood, and getting cybernetic implants in her early teens which let Liz literally share her senses and even treat Cathy’s body as her own. The two have a form of technological telepathy, and Liz can “possess” Cathy to speak and act through her (though Cathy at all times can assert control and even shut Liz out fully).
This was a somewhat odd family arrangement and childhood, but when one of your mothers is a remarkably advanced robot and you live on a space colony known for scientific innovation, your baseline for normal is pretty flexible. It was a natural development for the pair to use their unique situation to help their parents work, volunteering to test pilot the latest prototype mobile suit they’d developed, the LZ-251 Rose. Among the several innovations the Rose represented was an AI co-pilot system designed for pilots with modest cybernetic enhancements, and though the planned system is far cruder than Elizabeth, having the two pilot the unit was the obvious way to gather the necessary data on which to base it. And so, as an Erewhon Colony militia pilot on secondment and her “consultant”, the Butler sisters are assigned to work with the Unity Group...
Original canon background: Early in the period of strangeness that began more than twenty years ago, some thrilling adventures took place involving an intrepid mechanic and an android of mysterious origins. Once those adventures concluded, the pair settled down and started a family, and a business, working on the neutral scientific colony of Erewhon on new mechs and technologies based on reverse-engineering the work of the android’s creators - slow and tricky work, as the anonymous mad scientists or whoever had constructed her had leaped ahead of the state of the art and left no notes. Over the last twenty-plus years, they’ve established a mom-and-pop workshop and skunkworks of no small repute, contributed to several advances, and pushed that state of the art forward some of the way to recreating Violet in the form of their daughter, Elizabeth.
Personality: Liz is a more careful and controlled sort compared to her sister, having always to be aware of the limits of her physical form. From her point of view, after a succession of temporary, experimental puppet bodies that she grew out of like a kid out of clothes, the Rose now gives her a real true body of her own in which she's genuinely located rather than remote operating it, and it's one with amazing new senses and capabilities that she revels in exploring. For this reason, she doesn't generally do much with robots at the human scale; Cathy is her window into the SS-sized world and the human sense experience, and otherwise she interacts with people via net, screen and hologram. She does that a lot, too - her parents were fairly protective while she was growing up, during most of which time she was behind the normal development curve for a child her chronological age, and so attending college with Cathy and (especially) subsequently leaving Erewhon for the Unity Group was for her like a sheltered homeschooled kid getting to experience the wide world. She's curious, ingenuous, and a little wary of all these new people with their uncertain attitudes towards people like her.
One thing she is not, it's important to note, is ignorant about emotions or the human experience - she's effectively been riding backseat in Cathy's head through much of her life since preadolescence, and is almost fully human in psychology. Nor is she a superintelligent calculating machine, nor even much talented with computers - she's a very comfortable user, having plenty of time at night to herself where online activity is her primary outlet, but not a super hacker or puppet master. She is a pretty dab hand at manipulation of virtual environments, however, which she uses to customize her appearance online or in AR and decorate the spaces in which she interacts with those capable of using them.
Capabilities and Resources: The Butlers’ workshop is not insanely wealthy, but they have a solid pool of resources and talent available, as well as connections to government and the scientific and engineering communities. The sisters don’t command any of this directly, but they’re well-placed to pull some strings if necessary.
Type: Combatant
Unit Name: LZ-251 Rose
Unit Description: The Rose is an experimental prototype, serving as a testbed for several technologies at once. It looks like a slim, streamlined mobile suit, proportioned like a long-limbed human. It’s primarily geared towards ranged combat, being maneuverable but not very durable - it could mix it up quite effectively in a melee duel, but face considerable risk doing so. The technologies driving it are:
- The neural link system, allowing a pilot with relatively minor cybernetic implants to interface directly with an AI co-pilot to enhance reaction times, proprioception, and control of the other systems;
- The artificial musculature, the basis for the mech’s construction, enabling human-like movement that synergizes well with the neural link system and is power-efficient enough to operate for hours on battery;
- The armor skin system, a close-fitting mesh of anti-beam cloth in segments which can be discarded and replaced during combat as they’re used up. This acts as a lightweight, adaptable, ablative defense which can be cheaply replenished outside of battle, though it definitely sacrifices durability for maneuverability. In a pinch, a segment can be “foamed” to act as a thick armor plate, replacing its anti-beam properties with kinetic defense good for one or two hits.
Each of these technologies can in principle be spun off into relatively low-cost versions which can be installed independently, though they work best in tandem, and the prototypes installed on the Rose and operated by Elizabeth are higher-spec than the planned mass-production versions. Notably, Elizabeth herself is much more powerful than the non-self-aware AIs envisioned for the final product, and the Rose uses a standard reactor rather than relying on battery power.
Beyond these systems, the Rose operates like a normal Mobile Suit in most respects and uses “standard” MS weaponry, whatever that amounts to in the game. By default, it deploys with a beam rifle, beam sabers (2-4), and head-mounted vulcans, but it can use other weapons of the appropriate scale as available.
Size: M (regular mobile suit size)
Terrain compatibility:
Air: No
Ground: Yes
Water: No
Space: Yes
Favored terrain: Space
Upgrade: Drones: Self-propelled modules running slaved copies of Liz’s software on hardened systems, these come in two versions. “Thorns” are remote weapons platforms, both beam and missile, while “Petals” can deploy large armor skin shields at range. Both also extend the Rose’s sensors. Neither are effective outside of space, though Petals can in a pinch be held or placed as normal, immobile shields. When first installed four can be mounted, two on the upper arms and two on the upper legs.
Upgrade: Wing Binders: Telescoping wings boost the Rose’s thrust and AMBAC maneuverability, provide mount points for two additional drones, and anchor extra armor skin mesh sufficient for the Rose to wrap itself in a “cloak” of additional protection. These are primarily useful in space, though they do provide enough thrust to increase aerial maneuverability, and the cloak can be made partially aerodynamic - enough to glide, but not much more than that.
Mission requirement: None
Suggested Event List: Here
Sample post: Testrun
AIM contact: on file
Alternate contacts:
Character name: Liz Butler (OC)
Source canon: Soul of a New Machine (OC)
Community tag: liz butler
Do I want a HMD: Yes
Notes: I've put up an info post which covers some detail that's out of scope for an app, including hooks to connect the Butlers and their canon to other characters.
Background: Sometimes, when a woman and a gynoid love each other very much, they take advantage of modern medical technology (and invent some new AI and robotics technology) to start a family. Some twenty-three years ago, Grace and Violet Butler did just that, and the result was their firstborn daughter Catherine. Three years later their research reached the point of bringing online their second daughter, Elizabeth. Elizabeth represented a novel approach to artificial intelligence, one aimed much more at the production of a human-like person than at general usefulness or broader applications, developed from the ground up using sense and motion data from Catherine to give Elizabeth a body image to grow in to like a human child. As a result the sisters are very close, with Cathy acting as Liz’s eyes, ears, and hands since early childhood, and getting cybernetic implants in her early teens which let Liz literally share her senses and even treat Cathy’s body as her own. The two have a form of technological telepathy, and Liz can “possess” Cathy to speak and act through her (though Cathy at all times can assert control and even shut Liz out fully).
This was a somewhat odd family arrangement and childhood, but when one of your mothers is a remarkably advanced robot and you live on a space colony known for scientific innovation, your baseline for normal is pretty flexible. It was a natural development for the pair to use their unique situation to help their parents work, volunteering to test pilot the latest prototype mobile suit they’d developed, the LZ-251 Rose. Among the several innovations the Rose represented was an AI co-pilot system designed for pilots with modest cybernetic enhancements, and though the planned system is far cruder than Elizabeth, having the two pilot the unit was the obvious way to gather the necessary data on which to base it. And so, as an Erewhon Colony militia pilot on secondment and her “consultant”, the Butler sisters are assigned to work with the Unity Group...
Original canon background: Early in the period of strangeness that began more than twenty years ago, some thrilling adventures took place involving an intrepid mechanic and an android of mysterious origins. Once those adventures concluded, the pair settled down and started a family, and a business, working on the neutral scientific colony of Erewhon on new mechs and technologies based on reverse-engineering the work of the android’s creators - slow and tricky work, as the anonymous mad scientists or whoever had constructed her had leaped ahead of the state of the art and left no notes. Over the last twenty-plus years, they’ve established a mom-and-pop workshop and skunkworks of no small repute, contributed to several advances, and pushed that state of the art forward some of the way to recreating Violet in the form of their daughter, Elizabeth.
Personality: Liz is a more careful and controlled sort compared to her sister, having always to be aware of the limits of her physical form. From her point of view, after a succession of temporary, experimental puppet bodies that she grew out of like a kid out of clothes, the Rose now gives her a real true body of her own in which she's genuinely located rather than remote operating it, and it's one with amazing new senses and capabilities that she revels in exploring. For this reason, she doesn't generally do much with robots at the human scale; Cathy is her window into the SS-sized world and the human sense experience, and otherwise she interacts with people via net, screen and hologram. She does that a lot, too - her parents were fairly protective while she was growing up, during most of which time she was behind the normal development curve for a child her chronological age, and so attending college with Cathy and (especially) subsequently leaving Erewhon for the Unity Group was for her like a sheltered homeschooled kid getting to experience the wide world. She's curious, ingenuous, and a little wary of all these new people with their uncertain attitudes towards people like her.
One thing she is not, it's important to note, is ignorant about emotions or the human experience - she's effectively been riding backseat in Cathy's head through much of her life since preadolescence, and is almost fully human in psychology. Nor is she a superintelligent calculating machine, nor even much talented with computers - she's a very comfortable user, having plenty of time at night to herself where online activity is her primary outlet, but not a super hacker or puppet master. She is a pretty dab hand at manipulation of virtual environments, however, which she uses to customize her appearance online or in AR and decorate the spaces in which she interacts with those capable of using them.
Capabilities and Resources: The Butlers’ workshop is not insanely wealthy, but they have a solid pool of resources and talent available, as well as connections to government and the scientific and engineering communities. The sisters don’t command any of this directly, but they’re well-placed to pull some strings if necessary.
Type: Combatant
Unit Name: LZ-251 Rose
Unit Description: The Rose is an experimental prototype, serving as a testbed for several technologies at once. It looks like a slim, streamlined mobile suit, proportioned like a long-limbed human. It’s primarily geared towards ranged combat, being maneuverable but not very durable - it could mix it up quite effectively in a melee duel, but face considerable risk doing so. The technologies driving it are:
- The neural link system, allowing a pilot with relatively minor cybernetic implants to interface directly with an AI co-pilot to enhance reaction times, proprioception, and control of the other systems;
- The artificial musculature, the basis for the mech’s construction, enabling human-like movement that synergizes well with the neural link system and is power-efficient enough to operate for hours on battery;
- The armor skin system, a close-fitting mesh of anti-beam cloth in segments which can be discarded and replaced during combat as they’re used up. This acts as a lightweight, adaptable, ablative defense which can be cheaply replenished outside of battle, though it definitely sacrifices durability for maneuverability. In a pinch, a segment can be “foamed” to act as a thick armor plate, replacing its anti-beam properties with kinetic defense good for one or two hits.
Each of these technologies can in principle be spun off into relatively low-cost versions which can be installed independently, though they work best in tandem, and the prototypes installed on the Rose and operated by Elizabeth are higher-spec than the planned mass-production versions. Notably, Elizabeth herself is much more powerful than the non-self-aware AIs envisioned for the final product, and the Rose uses a standard reactor rather than relying on battery power.
Beyond these systems, the Rose operates like a normal Mobile Suit in most respects and uses “standard” MS weaponry, whatever that amounts to in the game. By default, it deploys with a beam rifle, beam sabers (2-4), and head-mounted vulcans, but it can use other weapons of the appropriate scale as available.
Size: M (regular mobile suit size)
Terrain compatibility:
Air: No
Ground: Yes
Water: No
Space: Yes
Favored terrain: Space
Upgrade: Drones: Self-propelled modules running slaved copies of Liz’s software on hardened systems, these come in two versions. “Thorns” are remote weapons platforms, both beam and missile, while “Petals” can deploy large armor skin shields at range. Both also extend the Rose’s sensors. Neither are effective outside of space, though Petals can in a pinch be held or placed as normal, immobile shields. When first installed four can be mounted, two on the upper arms and two on the upper legs.
Upgrade: Wing Binders: Telescoping wings boost the Rose’s thrust and AMBAC maneuverability, provide mount points for two additional drones, and anchor extra armor skin mesh sufficient for the Rose to wrap itself in a “cloak” of additional protection. These are primarily useful in space, though they do provide enough thrust to increase aerial maneuverability, and the cloak can be made partially aerodynamic - enough to glide, but not much more than that.
Mission requirement: None
Suggested Event List: Here
Sample post: Testrun
