(That said, clones are already basically just masses of super-dense muscles, steroids, adrenals, and nanites. The clone body we use is a FAR cry from even a athlete. It's what allows us to walk around nearly unimpeded in heavy armor, and use our weapons.)

So I was reading the description of the drop uplink and it got me thinking. According to the games description the drop uplinks cause a small localized wormhole that exposes anything travelling through it to massive doses of radiation.

This implies that everytime you spawn at a drop uplink your clone is actually doomed to an impending death of radiation sickness, cancer etc. But I guess that since it's a combat clone and it isn't expected to live longer than like 20 minutes (roughly the length of time a battle takes), the Mercs of New eden probably dont care about possible radiation sickness or cancer, and that's why nobody makes a fuss over using the eventually lethal drop uplinks.

Now, this got me thinking: what else wouldn't a combat clone need if it's only expected to live for a few minutes? For instace, would a combat clone "need" a digestive system? If the assumption is that a clone is a "consumable asset", then being able to eat and digest nutrients would be somewhat redundant.

So why not grow the clone to maturity, surgically remove it's intestines and then perhaps implant something a little more useful in the newly available space? Perhaps like a bomb wired to go off of the clone dies with the possibility of taking it's killer with it? Or perhaps a drop uplink that activates upon death?

Wouldn't cybernetic implants like these (and others) make sense in the game setting and also give the players more interesting options beside dropsuit fittings?

I wouldn't be in favour of internal bombs, but I like the lore of it. Whenever we spawn, we use generic clone templates - as Avallo says above me, incredibly enhanced, but also made to be cheap. I figure in our merc quarters we have our personal clones that while a bit more costly, are functional.

I'm interested in longer mission game modes and if we'll have to use different, more expensive clone for that.

My EVE toons have heads full of implants, a cybernetic arm and an electronic eyepiece. In DUST we have boosters and the implant that allows us to clone jump, all clones are cyborgs in New Eden

Biomass is cheap and easy to turn into clones once you have the genitic code. Disposable cyborgs take much more time and money to make.

The races of new Eden are a bit wary of manipulating their physical bodies too much, even those of disposable clones. This is due to what happened to the much more advanced Jovians, with the Jovian Sickness.

As such most races tend to shy away from modifying the human -too- much. (That said, clones are already basically just masses of super-dense muscles, steroids, adrenals, and nanites. The clone body we use is a FAR cry from even a athlete. It's what allows us to walk around nearly unimpeded in heavy armor, and use our weapons.)

So basically you want to implant a bomb _INSIDE_ a cocoon of super-strong bio/nanite body mass designed to withstand damage by weapons that would make today's wepons look like nerf guns?

Perhaps for comical effect, like the suicide anal-bomber that tried to kill that head of the Saudi security agency?