Ziusudra / Nyx questions

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Keiko

I
I guess you could have the subject spend those years in a VR world, run at very high speed... but even if that's possible it would still be essentially giving them a largely preprogrammed personality, like a bioroid. But that might not be an issue to their creator/parents.

I could see this working for something like a Pandora/Prometheus Parahuman who have Enhanced Time Sense. Then there's someone given the right nanosymbionts.

If Vicky wonders we all knew that the Bioroid education rules were unrealistic back in the original playtest but it was another one of those things that was necessary to getting "vat people" to be cinematically abused in the setting.

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

I could see this working for something like a Pandora/Prometheus Parahuman who have Enhanced Time Sense. Then there's someone given the right nanosymbionts.

Actually, ETS is not ATR. It doesn't let you perform more actions, including study.

OTOH, the original Nyx slept 8 hours per week. So that's potentially 48 more hours of learning per week. 28 hours in case of the Changing Times version.

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

If Vicky wonders we all knew that the Bioroid education rules were unrealistic back in the original playtest but it was another one of those things that was necessary to getting "vat people" to be cinematically abused in the setting.

Of course, TL10 bioroid education is only 25% better than TL1 boot camps. The big deal in bioroid education is that they don't require HT 12, and can do an extra 4 hours per day. To say that 10 TLs of advancement, including 2-3 TLs of rapidly advancing neuropsychological technique, are cinematic, then we might as well argue that other revolutionary technologies, such as language, mathematics, double-entry accounting, Internet and social networks, are cinematic. And it's also not TL^ in the 4e classification either.

[Keiko]

I'm not sure if its canon but I've been running fresh bioroids as behaving like extremely well educated and talented children, very well behaved and "adult" but child like: bundles of skills, enthusiasm and curiosity well suited for their intended function but otherwise naive, only very simply socialized and simple in the personal development not intellectual sense. Wunderkind and child savants but creepier since there physically adults (usually). I guess this type of parahuman would be like that in my game then.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

Actually, ETS is not ATR. It doesn't let you perform more actions, including study.

.

It does let you perceive things faster and I suspect you could watch movies in fast forward mode.

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

It does let you perceive things faster and I suspect you could watch movies in fast forward mode.

Can watch them in fast-forward mode, but not accumulate skill points / socialisation faster. I.e. you can't just take less time on study and get a result as good as spending full time. See Kromm's long explanation about all the related things (though not study specifically):
http://forums.sjgames.com/showpost.p...5&postcount=80

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by Keiko

I'm not sure if its canon but I've been running fresh bioroids as behaving like extremely well educated and talented children ...

Seems entirely reasonable to me. They may well "mature" rather faster than children, of course.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

Of course, TL10 bioroid education is only 25% better than TL1 boot camps.

That has to do with (a) GURPS training rules being generally dubious (boot camps aren't realistically that much more efficient than other forms of learning, it's just that it takes unrealistically long to learn the skills gained in boot camp using the normal training rules), and (b) grossly underestimating the amount of learning actually required. TL10 bioroid education is cinematically fast by at least an order of magnitude.

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by Anthony

That has to do with (a) GURPS training rules being generally dubious (boot camps aren't realistically that much more efficient than other forms of learning, it's just that it takes unrealistically long to learn the skills gained in boot camp using the normal training rules), and (b) grossly underestimating the amount of learning actually required. TL10 bioroid education is cinematically fast by at least an order of magnitude.

'Germ theory is totally cinematic; would you really have us imagine that in a few hundred years humans would cut down the rate of badly-healing wounds and disease of those who were wounded by something as simple as washing hands and boiling instruments!? It's an order of magnitude too good.'

Given that early memetics are to TL8 educational/propagandistic/diplomatic/etc. techniques as germ theory is to miasma theory, it is not all that surprising that THS-2100 people reap the fruits of two TLs worth of a technological revolution in the field.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

Given that early memetics are to TL8 educational/propagandistic/diplomatic/etc. techniques as germ theory is to miasma theory, it is not all that surprising that THS-2100 people reap the fruits of two TLs worth of a technological revolution in the field.

Even if we assume that's true, it would apply to everyone, not just bioroids, and it would still take 20 years for a bioroid to reach the performance of a 20-year old TL 10 person (well, probably more like 10 years, bioroid training camps might be different from normal growing up).

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by Anthony

Even if we assume that's true, it would apply to everyone, not just bioroids, and it would still take 20 years for a bioroid to reach the performance of a 20-year old TL 10 person (well, probably more like 10 years, bioroid training camps might be different from normal growing up).

Well, in a way, everyone does benefit from it. It's just that not everybody bothers to use it. Notice that in places where people are willing to use it, it is possible to raise highly trained human workers by age 10-12, and this age is rapidly dropping (DB82, DB101). Or 13-14-year-olds working full-time as docs at a clinic. This is without said kids having Early Maturation, and without having their brains designed for rapid learning. Compare to bioroids, who have Early Maturation 4 (i.e. ×1/16), have brains radically redesigned for rapid learning, and assembled in precisely the stage that is both smart enough to learn complex subjects and plastic enough to learn fast, and are trained on the setting's best training devices by direct interface, and are more motivated to learn as compared to your average kid (HF7), and are taking Mnemotropins for the whole duration of the training (something kids probably don't more often than they do).