Fortuna NPCs

[Faerleena]

Okay so I get that the whole reason for the massive debt that Fortuna has is because things get passed down between generations and the interest just keeps rising more and more so no one is able to ever actually get out from under it (Sort of like college loans).  But, after thinking for a little bit I don't actually understand just how the whole community of Fortuna even functions at all.  So, if anyone can think of how this works, I'd love to hear it.

Some things that the NPCs tell us:

When unable to pay debts, the corpus will repo both parts as well as 'organics' from the workers. So limbs are the main thing that come to mind.

Debts are passed down through generations.

The NPCs have lifespans since there's children and adults.

 

My thoughts:

HOW are there generations?  All of the people in Fortuna we see are at least 50% mechanical.  So, the only way to have future generations would be to build them.  This means they'd need to have a lot of spare parts around despite the fact that no one seems to have any money and have had most of their organic parts taken.  

WHY are there children?  If the future generations are being built, why would you ever make a child?  In terms of labor and earning pay, they serve little to no purpose.

If children are made naturally, then wouldn't that mean that any worker who has their body repod and replaced with a mechanical one is essentially a wasted source of income?  Since they won't be able to pay off their debt and they won't be able to make a future generation to transfer that debt to.

Looking closer at Roky and his group, they seem to be mostly organic.  So... how are they being born if the adults are mechanical.  Also why do none of the children have necks?  It looks like there's a spinal cord still there since there's a thick cord going from the head to the torso.  So did the Corpus repo their... necks?  Are they born without necks?  Did their parents have them removed so it'd be easier for their bodies or heads to be taken away by the corpus later on?  If it's the last one, WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT?

Looking at the NPCs scattered around, it seems pretty split.  Half of them have a human torso while the other half look as though their torsos are entirely mechanical in nature.  However, some of those who have the mechanical torsos have organic limbs, whether it be an arm or a leg.  Does this mean that their mechanical torsos still have a heart inside of them?  Or at least some form of circulatory system as well as a nutrient distribution system in order to keep the limb alive?  Clearly it's still alive otherwise it wouldn't be called 'organic'.  Because, if they have all these things it seems to me that they're replacing the worker's bodies with something far more complex than what they're taking away.  Pretty bad decision on the Corpus's part!

 

Parting note:

Fail your bounty bonus objectives people!  In the past several days, I was among the majority that couldn't get any Medical Debt-Bonds from the bounties.  But I noticed that all the rewards we were getting seemed to be either rare or uncommons.  Got a metric buttload of relics.  So I got a group yesterday where we did 3 straight bounty chains and failed every bonus objective.  Aside from the final bounty stage which is unable to be common, we got almost entirely common rewards.  This included 3 Medical Debt-Bond rewards.  Got more in those 3 bounties than I had in the past DAYS.   

[Tazrizen]

I was wondering about that plothole. 

 

Like are all the workers transferred in from extended family? Why even work for Nef, there are clearly ways to get offworld, he's bent on working them to absolute death. Where's the end? Is this all leverage? What happens if they are done working on the tower? No one's mentioned a bomb or turn off for their prosthetics. What exactly is the gameplan of solaris united? 

[TheVeiledScion]

I’m just trying to figure how what work the Solaris are actually doing. Looks like half of them are just doing the most basic maintenance on Fortuna, while the rest are just sitting around.  This despite the fact that Nef somehow keeps telling them to work harder on stuff in the Orb Vallis.  Where are the labor camps? Where are the Solaris doing actual work? And why are there so few of them?  DE needs to put A LOT of Solaris in the Orb Vallis itself, doing actual work.

[fishworshipper]

1. It’s possible that Solaris isn’t so much a town that people live and procreate in, but rather an industrialized concentration camp for those hopelessly indebted to the Corpus. If debts are inherited, this also explains the children. 

2. Only like 1% of you needs to be organic in order for you to procreate. Having robotic heads and arms would by no means necessitate building children.

3. Since debts are inherited, the Corpus could be incentivizing the Solaris people to procreate so that the debt gets passed on when they die. As to how, there could be any number of methods: slicing off part of your debt, reducing interest, increasing your wages, whatever.

3. People have their mechanizations and upgrades because they’re necessary for living in Fortuna at all. “Complexity” is completely irrelevant. If you don’t get upgrades, chances are you die.

4. The children could be just as mechanical as the adults. The Corpus might just be leaving their faces intact to exploit the adults’ parental instincts.

5. Brain shelving is a punishment, not standard practice. The Corpus lose an unproductive worker (aka nothing), and possibly gain whatever money family/friends are willing to spend to un-shelf them.

Edited November 12, 2018 by fishworshipper

[Faerleena]

1 hour ago, fishworshipper said:

2. Only like 1% of you needs to be organic in order for you to procreate. Having robotic heads and arms would by no means necessitate building children.

4. The children could be just as mechanical as the adults. The Corpus might just be leaving their faces intact to exploit the adults’ parental instincts.

It's WAY more than 1% that needs to be organic.  But I get what you're saying.  It's still... odd to me though

And if the children are mechanical, then when do they decide to give them adult body parts?  Also, where would they get the adult body parts from since everyone's in crippling debt.  Hell, Legs couldn't even get arms.  And it's not like the children would be able to do much work since they're, well, children.  So it would have to be the parents or adults giving them parts to 'grow up'.

[(PSN)UltimateOutcast0]

Hm....kind of reminds me of Repo: The Genetic Opera. People who don’t have organs rent them, when they can’t keep up with their pay, a repoman comes to take the organs and they don’t care if you are alive or not. 

 

Seems to me that if that is the case then I genuinely feel sorry for the Solaris. Hell, even Eudico doesn’t look like a woman anymore. But what I think DE are trying to convey is that while humans do most of the work in the world and since there is no replacement for human beings, machines do just as much or even more work than an average human. Binding them into 1. “We all loft together” may be a song about man and machine becoming one working together as a single body. Kind of like us Tenno and our Warframes. If the sacrifice taught us anything it’s that the bodies we control have a past to them, they work for us and we work for them. Man and machine in one body. One mind. All lifting together.

 

Sure, they may look creepy to look at. I find myself awaiting a story mission where we kill Nef Anyo once and for all. But until then I can’t help but feel sorry for the Solaris. Screw the Eidolons, you will find this Tenno building a snow Kubrow.

[EmberStar]

On 2018-11-12 at 10:52 AM, Faerleena said:

Okay so I get that the whole reason for the massive debt that Fortuna has is because things get passed down between generations and the interest just keeps rising more and more so no one is able to ever actually get out from under it (Sort of like college loans).  But, after thinking for a little bit I don't actually understand just how the whole community of Fortuna even functions at all.  So, if anyone can think of how this works, I'd love to hear it.

Some things that the NPCs tell us:

When unable to pay debts, the corpus will repo both parts as well as 'organics' from the workers. So limbs are the main thing that come to mind.

Debts are passed down through generations.

The NPCs have lifespans since there's children and adults.

 

*clip*

It's loosely based on things that have actually happened in the real world.  One example of the situation would be "The Company Store" that happened in some mining towns in the past.  Nearly all the citizens of some mining towns were company employees.  The local General Store (usually a combination of hardware store, grocery, clothing outlet and pharmacy) was owned and stocked by the same company that owned the mines.  The goods in the store were deliberately priced at a point where just keeping food on the table and clothes on their back would cost more than the workers earned in the same period.  The Company would be happy to run a tab, or the worker could just, you know, NOT EAT for two days a week.  Eventually, almost all the employees were deeply in debt to the mining company, and effectively enslaved.

Since the mining company controlled the only supply of food and goods, there wasn't any way around it, either.  They usually forbid anyone else from coming in and setting up a competing store.  In some cases a competing store would open... *also* owned by the mining company.  And often the miners were expected to purchase their own tools and gear.  Picks, shovels, hardhats, boots.  So someone who hadn't paid their tab might be cut off from the tools they needed to *keep* paying their tab.

The resulting abuse of employees, riots, and general chaos are one of the reasons that Unions exist in the first place.  The original point of collective bargaining was that only if *every* employee refused to work could they gather enough leverage to force the various mines and factories to agree to stop exploiting their workers and abusing them, in some cases quite literally, to death.

[ReaperOfTheSouls]

On 2018-11-12 at 10:28 PM, Arktourus said:

I’m just trying to figure how what work the Solaris are actually doing. Looks like half of them are just doing the most basic maintenance on Fortuna, while the rest are just sitting around.  This despite the fact that Nef somehow keeps telling them to work harder on stuff in the Orb Vallis.  Where are the labor camps? Where are the Solaris doing actual work? And why are there so few of them?  DE needs to put A LOT of Solaris in the Orb Vallis itself, doing actual work.

They stopped working for nef after you came to orb vallis and started the rebillion. You wont see anyone from fortuna out there because of the giant orbs that roaming orb vallis, that way nef trying to choke fortuna as they give up beacuse of the lack on resources, thats why they need you to contribute resources. Actually you can see in several camps one or two guys from fortuna working on something, they keep working even when you kill everyone and libirate the camp.

Edited December 12, 2018 by ReaperOfTheSouls

[EmberStar]

3 minutes ago, ReaperOfTheSouls said:

They stopped working for nef after you came to orb vallis and started the rebillion. You wont see anyone from fortuna out there because of the giant orbs that roaming orb vallis, that way nef trying to choke fortuna as they give up beacuse of the lack on resources, thats why they need you to contribute resources. Actually you can see in several camps one or two guys from fortuna working on something, they keep working even when you kill everyone and libirate the camp.

I think there's a couple in each of the big named settlement areas.  They're less likely to be noticed than Grineer workers though because they never move around or attack you.  As far as I've noticed, they just curl up and cower with their hands over their heads, and aren't possible to target or damage.  Unless you're searching for them or wander around just looking at details, it's entirely possible that some people might never have noticed they're even around.

As far as the lack of Solaris wandering around - it's pretty much the same conflict of "lore vs game mechanics" as each of the player characters.  According to the story, *each* player Tenno has experienced the Second Dream, and talked to Hunhow repeatedly.  (And also the events of War Within and Sacrifice.)  Which is of course completely silly.  *Every* Tenno can't be the Chosen One.  But it's way too much effort to reasonably expect DE to craft a custom storyline for each individual player.

Same with the various bosses - it's canon that some of them are just stupidly hard to kill.  Captain Vor, for one.  He actually gets demoted and reassigned every time you "officially" take him out, until finally being "killed" and then resurrected as the "Oh gods please just shut up and attack us already" guardian of the high level Void nodes.  But even then, it's silly to think that he actually gets chopped to pieces by every single Tenno to awaken from cryosleep.  The game mechanics require that bosses be possible to fight over and over.  The lore is that many of them are quite completely *dead* after the first time they get killed.

[FlusteredFerret]

On 2018-11-12 at 8:28 PM, Arktourus said:

I’m just trying to figure how what work the Solaris are actually doing. Looks like half of them are just doing the most basic maintenance on Fortuna, while the rest are just sitting around.  This despite the fact that Nef somehow keeps telling them to work harder on stuff in the Orb Vallis.  Where are the labor camps? Where are the Solaris doing actual work? And why are there so few of them?  DE needs to put A LOT of Solaris in the Orb Vallis itself, doing actual work.

Simple answer FPS (framerate).

The more characters the game has to load in...the more of a load it puts on player PCs. DE have to balance the game so it runs well on the majority of computers. Presumably consoles also have an upper limit on how much they can process.

Some people have already complained they find Fortuna & Orb Vallis runs slowly on their machines. Putting even more NPCs in would not help this.

 

Think some people are expecting a little too much realism from a F2P online game. All we really need is the gist of the situation. If folks want to go ahead and pick holes in the plot, thats up to them.

The only nitpick I really have is the way they have some workers using massive wrenches and hammers on something that is basically a flat island in the middle of the coolant channel.

Edited December 12, 2018 by FlusteredFerret

[0_The_F00l]

Hmm there are going to be some assumptions, some practicality and some common sense in my reply. 

Please do not take it as absolute fact. 

So here goes:

Where is everyone:

We only see a very small part of Fortuna, highly likely there is a residential complex (and a more industrial one) which has family accommodations where there are non or minimal modified humans and children (you can see buildings if you look furthest from the gate) the one we are at is kind of like the commercial district. 

What about family and inheritance :

Family connections can be noticed from Tickers debt bond purchases as well. Where they highlight that the person has dependents, having dependents makes a person work harder (usually). 

For the debt inheritance, quite possibly you may choose to share your debts with your offsprings (or they will inherit on your death) ,

but they will have the debt from the moment they are born and due to how the economy works they will reach the same place with children of their own,

having more children would allow you to distribute it, hence an incentive to have children, but they too will start at less than zero, a vicious cycle will be maintained. 

If you progress to the highest level of the Solaris united you will get why there are people with chest areas that look like they are robotic. I will not spoil it. 

But the reason for the modifications is to allow them to work in toxic Conditions, many of the modifications are made by choice to work more effectively or not to work at all (and hence not pay off debts), not a pleasant choice but not having much choice is the theme here. 

About the vent kids and kids in general :

... I speculate that the moment any child is born they undergo basic augmentation, non essential parts are removed and mech templates, with basic life support, are placed to make repossession easier at later date (they are literally made modular), not difficult to imagine if all hospitals are under the control of the taxmen. 

When the parents run out of time and the taxmen come to collect, the parents hide them in the vents, hence the moniker. The previous generation of children take care of themselves, but remember they have basic life support, they never make it past puberty that's why there are no vent adults, only children, their modules cannot support a full adult body. Instead they cannibalize themselves. And try to survive with what they can steal.

The heads you see will again be made more clear after you reach highest rank. 

Why can't you find any Solaris on the surface:

It's too friggin cold, 

The corpus have paused the Terra forming so its either freezing cold or slightly less cold. 

Only select specialists civilians can survive outside, most workers are underground, in complexes like Fortuna but more closed off. 

Why don't they just revolt :

They tried once, they were crushed, we are the new hope. 

 

Hope I helped shed some light. 

 

 

[digritz]

"HOW are there generations?" Nef follows the same rules as every other greedy SOB. All parts have planned obsolescence build in.

And remember in another Universe the Tenno are the NPCs

 

 

Edited December 18, 2018 by digritz

[kgabor]

On 2018-11-12 at 7:52 PM, Faerleena said:

Also why do none of the children have necks?

Because the void gods decided they aren't worthy of operating Excal Umbra.

[Dabnician]

On 2018-12-12 at 1:16 AM, EmberStar said:

As far as the lack of Solaris wandering around - it's pretty much the same conflict of "lore vs game mechanics" as each of the player characters.  According to the story, *each* player Tenno has experienced the Second Dream, and talked to Hunhow repeatedly.  (And also the events of War Within and Sacrifice.)  Which is of course completely silly.  *Every* Tenno can't be the Chosen One.  But it's way too much effort to reasonably expect DE to craft a custom storyline for each individual player.

Thats every story line from every game, every player also saved what ever it was in destiny they fought the thing in destiny. sorta how your deaths in video games are non cannon to the main story of the video game.

Edited December 18, 2018 by Dabnician