FTI> Feedback

[Lord Caedus]

Furthermore, lore adherance to such a rigid level should not be expected, nor crammed down the throats of others.

Freelancer's world is built on the foundation of no high-end automation or man-made artificial intelligence. The entirety of Sirius' heavy industry, and really the economy at large, is done manually by actual people. The vast majority of domestic conflict and corporate/unlawful plot threads are based on their exploitation of human labourers.

Rigid lore adherence being "crammed down the throats of others" would be getting anal about Plasmaball team names, not pointing out one of the core tenets of the setting we're playing in.

Black Market Augments cover a range of cybernetic products, from replacement limbs to brain altering implants. A thriving underground industry exists on Honshu, thanks to the accessibility of local Optronics and Robotics, and an abundance of jaded Scientists who have rejected the traditional keiretsu career path. These devices are largely based on stolen Kishiro IP, and are frequently modified to conceal weapons or otherwise facilitate criminal activities. Kusari’s Black Market Augments are sold to the highest bidder, with clients including pirates, terrorists and revolutionaries.

I think if we're at the point that we can have relatively easy access to cybernetic body part replacement, then having a completely cybernetic body isn't that much of a reach. It would certainly be very cutting edge technology in Disco's universe, but it wouldn't be entirely impossible. We also have canonical AI being used in industrial settings.

GMS employees are very hostile to the use of advanced Robotics in mining operations if they use artifical intelligence. The miners rightly fear that the thinking machines will replace them. Toulon Mining Facility in the Provence system, however, is a fairly dangerous place to work due to all the criminal activity in the system, so the miners don't seem to mind so much if they can send the Robots out to do the mining, or can sit at a console safely on the station and direct the Robots out in the mining fields.

The Luxury Liner was initially designed for Orbital Spa and Cruise by the renowned ship architect, Peter Englund, a designer employed by White Spa Lines, a subsidiary arm of Orbital Spa and Cruise itself. Orbital Spa and Cruise ordered several of the vessels, the most notable of which are the tourist liners Hawaii and Shetland, although there are known to be several others. With all the latest in holographic entertainment and artificial persons, as well as utilizing the latest in VI technology, the liners are the pinnacle of luxurious ship design and architecture, allowing OSC VIPs and dignitaries to travel in style.

Now to be fair that first one about GMS hating AI is from an old Solar Engineering rumor, so I'm unsure if it's still canon or not, but we have all the things that would be needed to have a fully synthetic humanoid that looks like an actual person, it would just be extremely expensive and unlikely to be useful in most of the situations that we see the robots that we interact with on a regular basis. There isn't much need for a human-looking robot out in deep space when ease of maintenance is what you're most concerned about, or in a setting where they need to be more robust that a human would be.

EDIT: I forgot that weapons platforms are also canonically housing an AI that runs the platform, so Freelancer has always had man-made AIs.

---