Zarkonnen answered this already: "Yep. You got it pretty much right. Cancer. Floating cancer. You're welcome.
Inhaling the stuff as dust is a sure-fire way to developing horrible lung problems - the people running Suspendium chambers tend to die young in a nonpretty fashion.
As for the general populace - a lot of animals and plants have gained the ability to safely accumulate and store Suspendium, so there's not a lot of it freely floating around in most places. But desolate, rocky places, or areas where there's sand grains made of Suspendium, are very bad news.
Equally, eating the tissues of animals and plants where the Suspendium is accumulated is generally known to be unhealthy.
I do like the idea of Suspendium Blood Syndrome. Your blood gently decides to move upwards inside your body during thunderstorms..."
Note these are the boring kind of mutations that mostly just make you sick in weird ways or give you cancer.
I'm kind of ambivalent as to whether people ought to be able to actually float by ingesting enough Suspendium. I feel like it would kill them way before that point.
Hmm. Maybe there's a beneficial mutation out there that lets humans bio-accumulate Suspendium like a lot of the other creatures out there. Mutant floaty humans. Still don't live that long, but hey, they can kind of fly.
Can you make alloys out of suspendium? I don't think it would melt and if it did you would probably just have molten liquid death flying everywhere..
If not you wouldn't use the crystal directly as armour, you'd put it underneath and then wear something that would decently protect you under that.
Even if that means your soldiers would get cancer easily it would still be pretty damn effective to have a guy in really thick armour be able to move decently fast. Granted the armour would still give you some resistance.
If you scrap the armour part you have unpowered flight suits.
That is a good question. I'm not sure if it's meltable or alloy-able. You could definitely strap Suspendium crystals to people, and you could definitely make some kind of battery-powered Suspendium backpack to allow people to hover. Though note that you'd also need a means of propulsion.
Maybe pressurized suspendium dust would work for a good cheap/simple thrust system.
Jet propelled boarding troops would be a great enemy, probably goons for the mad scientist. Human torpedoes with close quarter shotguns.
I can just see it:
An enemy ship appears armed with what looks like diving boards, but they actually are just the runways for crazed suspendium packers as they descend upon the ships below.
Suspendium would probably act like ice/glass and shatter when heated from thermal shock.
That would make for some pretty interesting weaponery.
I'm thinking of this something like a unique anti-crew weapon.
Shrapnel cannon: Does low pierce and blast damage as well as minimal damage to modules but maims and kills all crew in a room if it manages to hit an exposed module. The shrapnel can have a chance to hit crew on adjacent rooms.
Speaking of: Why is crew damage not a unique weapon stat?
I feel like anti-crew weapons would be an amazing and quick addition even if it were added as a weapon tag to have chance to kill crew.
Think about it, crew are the heart of anything in this game so naturally being able to take them out like this would make for some pretty interesting new tactics... and allow for new boarding measures like killing enemy crew from a distance before boarding with your once outnumbered forces.
It feels as if Airships could benefit the same as FTL for having anti crew weapons, it's just not the same game without them (in a very good way).
Yeah, that's a good point. Blast damage weapons do actually do more damage to crew than piercing, a fact that is indicated absolutely nowhere right now. :D
Air Admiral
How deadly is it? Is it "harmless" enough for people to take on mutations without quite dying?
Air Lord, Engineering Corps
Zarkonnen answered this already: "Yep. You got it pretty much right. Cancer. Floating cancer. You're welcome.
Inhaling the stuff as dust is a sure-fire way to developing horrible lung problems - the people running Suspendium chambers tend to die young in a nonpretty fashion.
As for the general populace - a lot of animals and plants have gained the ability to safely accumulate and store Suspendium, so there's not a lot of it freely floating around in most places. But desolate, rocky places, or areas where there's sand grains made of Suspendium, are very bad news.
Equally, eating the tissues of animals and plants where the Suspendium is accumulated is generally known to be unhealthy.
I do like the idea of Suspendium Blood Syndrome. Your blood gently decides to move upwards inside your body during thunderstorms..."
Link
Commander
^Proper link.
Zarkonnen, make it easier to locate the full URL to a comment. I had to go digging for that.
Air Admiral
Must be a very high level of birth defects. Quite mortifying when you think about it. A big chunk of the population is walking around with mutations.
Aerial Emperor
Note these are the boring kind of mutations that mostly just make you sick in weird ways or give you cancer.
I'm kind of ambivalent as to whether people ought to be able to actually float by ingesting enough Suspendium. I feel like it would kill them way before that point.
Hmm. Maybe there's a beneficial mutation out there that lets humans bio-accumulate Suspendium like a lot of the other creatures out there. Mutant floaty humans. Still don't live that long, but hey, they can kind of fly.
Air Lord, Engineering Corps
Suspendium plated armour to fly would work instead of eating it.
Would also let you armour the heck out of yourself and not get crushed by the weight of it.
Air Admiral
I'm not sure crystal makes a good armor. It tends to be quite brittle and suspendium tends to be quite unstable.
Air Lord, Engineering Corps
Can you make alloys out of suspendium? I don't think it would melt and if it did you would probably just have molten liquid death flying everywhere..
If not you wouldn't use the crystal directly as armour, you'd put it underneath and then wear something that would decently protect you under that.
Even if that means your soldiers would get cancer easily it would still be pretty damn effective to have a guy in really thick armour be able to move decently fast. Granted the armour would still give you some resistance.
If you scrap the armour part you have unpowered flight suits.
Aerial Emperor
That is a good question. I'm not sure if it's meltable or alloy-able. You could definitely strap Suspendium crystals to people, and you could definitely make some kind of battery-powered Suspendium backpack to allow people to hover. Though note that you'd also need a means of propulsion.
Air Lord, Engineering Corps
Waving your arms around manically.
Maybe pressurized suspendium dust would work for a good cheap/simple thrust system.
Jet propelled boarding troops would be a great enemy, probably goons for the mad scientist. Human torpedoes with close quarter shotguns.
I can just see it:
An enemy ship appears armed with what looks like diving boards, but they actually are just the runways for crazed suspendium packers as they descend upon the ships below.
Air Admiral
That would be hilarious. On a similar note, can crystal be melted down?
Air Lord, Engineering Corps
Suspendium would probably act like ice/glass and shatter when heated from thermal shock.
That would make for some pretty interesting weaponery.
I'm thinking of this something like a unique anti-crew weapon.
Shrapnel cannon: Does low pierce and blast damage as well as minimal damage to modules but maims and kills all crew in a room if it manages to hit an exposed module. The shrapnel can have a chance to hit crew on adjacent rooms.
Air Admiral
Yeah, I like the idea of a shrapnel cannon...
Air Lord, Engineering Corps
Speaking of: Why is crew damage not a unique weapon stat?
I feel like anti-crew weapons would be an amazing and quick addition even if it were added as a weapon tag to have chance to kill crew.
Think about it, crew are the heart of anything in this game so naturally being able to take them out like this would make for some pretty interesting new tactics... and allow for new boarding measures like killing enemy crew from a distance before boarding with your once outnumbered forces.
It feels as if Airships could benefit the same as FTL for having anti crew weapons, it's just not the same game without them (in a very good way).
I'm going to dedicate a thread to this later.
Aerial Emperor
Yeah, that's a good point. Blast damage weapons do actually do more damage to crew than piercing, a fact that is indicated absolutely nowhere right now. :D
Air Lord, Engineering Corps
That makes me think of some kind of 0.3 damage gun with a 100x100 blast damage radius for crew jellification.