The netX network controller family (based on ASICs), developed by Hilscher Gesellschaft für Systemautomation mbH, is a solution for implementing all proven Fieldbus and Real-Time Ethernet systems. It was the first Multi-Protocol ASIC which combines Real-Time-Ethernet and Fieldbus System in one solution. The Multiprotocol functionality is done over a flexible cpu sub system called XC. Through exchanging some microcode the XC is able to realize beside others a PROFINET IRT Switch, EtherCAT Slave, Ethernet Powerlink HUB, PROFIBUS, CAN bus, CC-Link Industrial Networks Interface. == The Hilscher netX family == === Multiplex Matrix IOs (MMIO) === The Multiplex Matrix is a set of PINs which could be configured freely with peripheral functions. Options are CAN, UART, SPI, I2C, GPIOs, PIOs and SYNC Trigger. === GPIOs === The GPIOs from Hilscher are able to generate Interrupts, could count level or flags, or could be connected to a timer unit to auto generate a PWM. The Resolution of the PWM is normally 10ns. In some netX ASICS is a dedicated Motion unit with a resolution if 1ns is available.
Data exploration
Data exploration is an approach similar to initial data analysis, whereby a data analyst uses visual exploration to understand what is in a dataset and the characteristics of the data, rather than through traditional data management systems. These characteristics can include size or amount of data, completeness of the data, correctness of the data, possible relationships amongst data elements or files/tables in the data. Data exploration is typically conducted using a combination of automated and manual activities. Automated activities can include data profiling or data visualization or tabular reports to give the analyst an initial view into the data and an understanding of key characteristics. This is often followed by manual drill-down or filtering of the data to identify anomalies or patterns identified through the automated actions. Data exploration can also require manual scripting and queries into the data (e.g. using languages such as SQL or R) or using spreadsheets or similar tools to view the raw data. All of these activities are aimed at creating a mental model and understanding of the data in the mind of the analyst, and defining basic metadata (statistics, structure, relationships) for the data set that can be used in further analysis. Once this initial understanding of the data is had, the data can be pruned or refined by removing unusable parts of the data (data cleansing), correcting poorly formatted elements and defining relevant relationships across datasets. This process is also known as determining data quality. Data exploration can also refer to the ad hoc querying or visualization of data to identify potential relationships or insights that may be hidden in the data and does not require to formulate assumptions beforehand. Traditionally, this had been a key area of focus for statisticians, with John Tukey being a key evangelist in the field. Today, data exploration is more widespread and is the focus of data analysts and data scientists; the latter being a relatively new role within enterprises and larger organizations. == Interactive Data Exploration == This area of data exploration has become an area of interest in the field of machine learning. This is a relatively new field and is still evolving. As its most basic level, a machine-learning algorithm can be fed a data set and can be used to identify whether a hypothesis is true based on the dataset. Common machine learning algorithms can focus on identifying specific patterns in the data. Many common patterns include regression and classification or clustering, but there are many possible patterns and algorithms that can be applied to data via machine learning. By employing machine learning, it is possible to find patterns or relationships in the data that would be difficult or impossible to find via manual inspection, trial and error or traditional exploration techniques. == Software == Trifacta – a data preparation and analysis platform Paxata – self-service data preparation software Alteryx – data blending and advanced data analytics software Microsoft Power BI - interactive visualization and data analysis tool OpenRefine - a standalone open source desktop application for data clean-up and data transformation Tableau software – interactive data visualization software
Clinical decision support system
A clinical decision support system (CDSS) is a form of health information technology that provides clinicians, staff, patients, or other individuals with knowledge and person-specific information to enhance decision-making in clinical workflows. CDSS tools include alerts and reminders, clinical guidelines, condition-specific order sets, patient data summaries, diagnostic support, and context-aware reference information. They often leverage artificial intelligence to analyze clinical data and help improve care quality and safety. CDSSs constitute a major topic in artificial intelligence in medicine. == Characteristics == A clinical decision support system is an active knowledge system that uses variables of patient data to produce advice regarding health care. This implies that a CDSS is simply a decision support system focused on using knowledge management. === Purpose === The main purpose of modern CDSS is to assist clinicians at the point of care. This means that clinicians interact with a CDSS to help to analyze and reach a diagnosis based on patient data for different diseases. In the early days, CDSSs were conceived to make decisions for the clinician in a literal manner. The clinician would input the information and wait for the CDSS to output the "right" choice, and the clinician would simply act on that output. However, the modern methodology of using CDSSs to assist means that the clinician interacts with the CDSS, utilizing both their knowledge and the CDSS's, better to analyse the patient's data than either a human or a CDSS could do on their own. Typically, a CDSS makes suggestions for the clinician to review, and the clinician is expected to pick out useful information from the presented results and discount erroneous CDSS suggestions. The two main types of CDSS are knowledge-based systems and non-knowledge-based (machine learning–based) systems: An example of how a clinician might use a clinical decision support system is a diagnosis decision support system (DDSS). DDSS requests some of the patient's data and, in response, proposes a set of possible diagnoses. The physician then takes the output of the DDSS and determines which diagnoses are likely and which are not, and, if necessary, orders further tests to narrow down the diagnosis. Another example of a CDSS would be a case-based reasoning (CBR) system. A CBR system might use previous case data to help determine the appropriate amount of beams and the optimal beam angles for use in radiotherapy for brain cancer patients; medical physicists and oncologists would then review the recommended treatment plan to determine its viability. Another important classification of a CDSS is based on the timing of its use. Physicians use these systems at the point of care to help them as they are dealing with a patient, with the timing of use being either pre-diagnosis, during diagnosis, or post-diagnosis. Pre-diagnosis CDSS systems help the physician prepare the diagnoses. CDSSs help review and filter the physician's preliminary diagnostic choices to improve outcomes. Post-diagnosis CDSS systems are used to mine data to derive connections between patients and their past medical history and clinical research to predict future events. Early speculation that AI-based decision support would replace clinicians in common tasks has largely given way to a consensus around assistive models, in which AI augments rather than supplants clinical judgment. Contemporary deep learning-based systems, unlike earlier rule-based tools, can be trained directly on clinical data without manual rule authoring and integrated into electronic health record workflows at the point of care. Another approach, used by the National Health Service in England, is to use a CDSS to triage medical conditions out of hours by suggesting a suitable next step to the patient (e.g. call an ambulance, or see a general practitioner on the next working day). The suggestion, which may be disregarded by either the patient or the phone operative if common sense or caution suggests otherwise, is based on the known information and an implicit conclusion about what the worst-case diagnosis is likely to be; it is not always revealed to the patient because it might well be incorrect and is not based on a medically-trained person's opinion - it is only used for initial triage purposes. === Knowledge-based === Most CDSSs consist of three parts: the knowledge base, an inference engine, and a mechanism to communicate. The knowledge base contains the rules and associations of compiled data which most often take the form of IF-THEN rules. If this was a system for determining drug interactions, then a rule might be that IF drug X is taken AND drug Y is taken THEN alert the user. Using another interface, an advanced user could edit the knowledge base to keep it up to date with new drugs. The inference engine combines the rules from the knowledge base with the patient's data. The communication mechanism allows the system to show the results to the user as well as have input into the system. An expression language such as GELLO or CQL (Clinical Quality Language) is needed for expressing knowledge artefacts in a computable manner. For example: if a patient has diabetes mellitus, and if the last haemoglobin A1c test result was less than 7%, recommend re-testing if it has been over six months, but if the last test result was greater than or equal to 7%, then recommend re-testing if it has been over three months. The current focus of the HL7 CDS WG is to build on the Clinical Quality Language (CQL). The U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has announced that it plans to use CQL for the specification of Electronic Clinical Quality Measures (eCQMs). === Non-knowledge-based === CDSSs which do not use a knowledge base use a form of artificial intelligence called machine learning, which allow computers to learn from past experiences and/or find patterns in clinical data. This eliminates the need for writing rules and expert input. However, since systems based on machine learning cannot explain the reasons for their conclusions, most clinicians do not use them directly for diagnoses, reliability and accountability reasons. Nevertheless, they can be useful as post-diagnostic systems, for suggesting patterns for clinicians to look into in more depth. As of 2012, three types of non-knowledge-based systems are support-vector machines, artificial neural networks and genetic algorithms. Artificial neural networks use nodes and weighted connections between them to analyse the patterns found in patient data to derive associations between symptoms and a diagnosis. Genetic algorithms are based on simplified evolutionary processes using directed selection to achieve optimal CDSS results. The selection algorithms evaluate components of random sets of solutions to a problem. The solutions that come out on top are then recombined and mutated and run through the process again. This happens over and over until the proper solution is discovered. They are functionally similar to neural networks in that they are also "black boxes" that attempt to derive knowledge from patient data. Non-knowledge-based networks often focus on a narrow list of symptoms, such as symptoms for a single disease, as opposed to the knowledge-based approach, which covers the diagnosis of many diseases. An example of a non-knowledge-based CDSS is a web server developed using a support vector machine for the prediction of gestational diabetes in Ireland. == Regulations == === History, United States === The IOM had published a report in 1999, To Err is Human, which focused on the patient safety crisis in the United States, pointing to the incredibly high number of deaths. This statistic attracted great attention to the quality of patient care. The Institute of Medicine (IOM) promoted the usage of health information technology, including clinical decision support systems, to advance the quality of patient care. With the enactment of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA), there was a push for widespread adoption of health information technology through the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH). Through these initiatives, more hospitals and clinics were integrating electronic medical records (EMRs) and computerized physician order entry (CPOE) within their health information processing and storage. Despite the absence of laws, the CDSS vendors would almost certainly be viewed as having a legal duty of care to both the patients who may adversely be affected due to CDSS usage and the clinicians who may use the technology for patient care. However, duties of care legal regulations are not explicitly defined yet. With the enactment of the HITECH Act included in the ARRA, encouraging the adoption of health IT, more detailed case laws for CDSS and EMRs were still being defined by the Office of National Coordinator for Health Informati
Data processing unit
A data processing unit (DPU) is a programmable computer processor that tightly integrates a general-purpose CPU with network interface hardware. They are also occasionally called "IPUs" (infrastructure processing unit) or "SmartNICs". They can be used in place of traditional NICs to relieve the main CPU of complex networking responsibilities and other "infrastructural" duties; although their features vary, they may be used to perform encryption/decryption, serve as a firewall, handle TCP/IP, process HTTP requests, or even function as a hypervisor or storage controller. These devices can be attractive to cloud computing providers whose servers might otherwise spend a significant amount of CPU time on these tasks, cutting into the cycles they can provide to guests. They see use in other kinds of data center environments as well due to their improved power consumption efficiency for routine networking tasks compared to general-purpose CPUs.
House of Suns
House of Suns is a 2008 science fiction novel by Welsh author Alastair Reynolds. The novel was shortlisted for the 2009 Arthur C. Clarke Award. == Setting == Approximately six million years in the future, humanity has spread throughout the Milky Way galaxy, which appears devoid of any other organic sentient life. The galaxy is populated by numerous civilizations of humans and posthumans of widely varying levels of development. A civilization of sentient robots known as the Machine People coexists peacefully with humanity. Technologies of the era include anti-gravity, inertia damping, force fields, stellar engineering, and stasis fields. Also of note is the "Absence"—the mysterious disappearance of the Andromeda Galaxy. Large-scale human civilizations almost invariably seem to collapse and disappear within a few millennia (a phenomenon referred to as "turnover"), the limits of sub-lightspeed travel making it too difficult to hold interstellar empires together. Consequently, the most powerful entities in the galaxy are the "Lines"—familial organizations made of cloned "shatterlings". The Lines do not inhabit planets, but instead travel through space, holding reunions after they have performed a "circuit" of the galaxy; something that takes about 200,000 years. House of Suns concerns the Gentian Line, also known as the House of Flowers, composed of Abigail Gentian and her 999 clones (or "shatterlings"), male and female: exactly which of the 1,000 shatterlings is the original Abigail Gentian is unknown. The clones and Abigail travel the Milky Way Galaxy, helping young civilizations, collecting knowledge, and experiencing what the universe has to offer. Members of the Gentian Line are named after flowering plants. == Synopsis == The novel is divided into eight parts, with the first chapter of each part taking the form of a narrative flashback to Abigail Gentian's early life (six million years earlier, in the 31st century), before the cloning and the creation of the Gentian Line. Each subsequent chapter is narrated from the first-person perspective of two shatterlings named Campion and Purslane, alternating between them each chapter. Campion and Purslane are in a relationship, which is frowned upon, even punishable, by the Line. The primary storyline begins as Campion and Purslane are roughly fifty years late to the 32nd Gentian reunion. They take a detour to contact a posthuman known as ‘Ateshga’ in hopes of getting a replacement ship for Campion because his is getting old (several million years old). After being tricked by Ateshga, Campion and Purslane manage to turn the tables on him and leave his planet with a being he had been keeping captive, a golden robot called Hesperus. Hesperus is a member of the "Machine People", an advanced civilization of robots, and supposedly the only non-human sentient society in existence. The two shatterlings hope that the rescue of Hesperus will let them off the hook for their lateness, as returning him to his people (who will be at the reunion as guests of other shatterlings) will put the Gentian Line on good terms with the Machine People. However, before reaching the reunion world, Campion and Purslane encounter an emergency distress signal from Fescue, another Gentian shatterling. There was a vicious attack on the reunion world; an ambush in which the majority of the Gentian Line was wiped out. The identity of the responsible party is unknown, but the attackers used the supposedly long-vanished 'Homunculus' weapons – monstrous spacetime-bending weapons that were created ages ago, but were ordered to be destroyed by another Line. Despite Fescue's warning, Campion and Purslane approach the reunion system to look for survivors. They manage to find the remains of a ship with several Gentian members still alive, and rescue them and the four enemy prisoners they had captured. Hesperus, however, is gravely injured in the process by remaining ambushers. The group escapes and make their way to the Gentian backup meeting planet, Neume, in the hope of re-grouping with any other Gentians who may have survived the ambush. Upon reaching Neume, Campion, Purslane and the other shatterlings they rescued are greeted by the few Gentian survivors of the ambush (numbering only in the forties, compared to the hundreds that existed before the ambush). They also meet two members of the Machine People: Cadence and Cascade, guests of another shatterling. During the next few days, the interrogation of the prisoners commences. Another Gentian, Cyphel, is mysteriously murdered, which fuels the Line's concerns that there is a traitor among them. As a way of punishing Campion for transgressions against the Line, Purslane is made to give up her ship, the Silver Wings of Morning (one of the fastest and most powerful in the Line) to Cadence and Cascade, ostensibly so they can return to the Machine People with news of the ambush, in a bid to gain the Line some assistance. Hesperus, still critically wounded following the rescue of the survivors, is taken to the Neumean "Spirit of the Air", an ancient posthuman machine-intelligence, in the hopes that it will fix him. The Spirit takes Hesperus away and returns him some time later, though apparently still not functioning. The robots Cadence and Cascade make preparations to leave on Purslane's ship. They agree to take him aboard and return him to their people, who they promise may be able to help Hesperus. Purslane accompanies them to her ship, where she must be physically present to give the ship order to transfer control over to the robots. On their way to the bridge, Hesperus suddenly springs to life, grabbing Purslane and hiding her while Cadence and Cascade are whisked along to the bridge. Hersperus quickly explains that Cadence and Cascade are actually planning on hijacking the ship. Bewildered by this sudden change of events, Purslane delays in acting, not sure if she should trust Hesperus, before deciding to ask the ship to detain and eject the robots in the bridge. By then, though, it is too late. Cadence and Cascade hack into the ship's computer, taking it over, and take off from Neume with Hesperus and Purslane still aboard. Campion and several other shatterlings immediately launch a pursuit. Together Hesperus and Purslane find a hideout in a smaller ship in the hold of the Silver Wings of Morning. Using information gained from the other two robots and his own memories, Hesperus (who is now an amalgamation of both Hesperus and the Spirit of the Air) has pieced together what is going on: Cadence and Cascade have discovered that the Line was involved in the accidental extermination of a forgotten earlier race of machine people, dubbed the "First Machines". The Commonality (a confederation of the various Lines), horrified and ashamed of this pointless genocide, erased all knowledge of the event from historical records and their own memories. Unfortunately, Campion, in a previous circuit, unwittingly uncovered information pertaining to the extermination. Hesperus believes that the ambush at the reunion was seeking to destroy this evidence before it could spread, carried out by a shadow Line known as the "House of Suns", tasked with maintaining the conspiracy. Cadence and Cascade, on the other hand, are racing for a wormhole which leads to the Andromeda Galaxy, to where the few survivors of the First Machines are revealed to have retreated. They plan to release the First Machines back into the Milky Way, thus effecting a revenge against the Commonality for the genocide. As Campion and the shatterlings are pursuing Purslane's hijacked ship, transmissions from Neume confirm that a shatterling within their midst, Galingale, is the traitor and a secret member of the House of Suns. The shatterlings open fire on both Galingale's and Purslane's ships, and while they manage to capture Galingale, they are unable to stop Purslane's ship. Unable to get within weapons range, Campion pursues Purslane's ship for sixty thousand light years, during which time he and Purslane, on their separate ships, are suspended in "abeyance", a form of temporal slowdown or stasis. Despite efforts to stop the hijacked ship from reaching the concealed wormhole by local civilisations, the robot Cascade succeeds in opening the "stardam" enclosing the wormhole and travelling through it to the Andromeda Galaxy. On board Silver Wings of Morning, Hesperus reveals to Campion that while he managed to destroy Cadence before they could leave the Neume star system, Cascade survived and he and Cascade had engaged in a marathon battle, several thousand years. Hesperus was ultimately victorious, but Cascade has fused the ship controls before his defeat and they are past the point of no return. Campion, now the only shatterling still in pursuit, enters the wormhole after them and emerges in the Andromeda Galaxy, a place apparently devoid of all sentient life. In his search for Purslane and her ship, he travels to a star enca
Probiv
Probiv (Russian: пробив, literally "to pierce" or "to punch through") is an illicit data market operating primarily in Russia, where personal information from restricted government and corporate databases is bought and sold through networks of corrupt officials and insiders. The probiv market operates as a parallel information economy built on corrupt officials from various sectors including traffic police, banks, telecommunications companies, and security services who sell access to restricted databases. For fees ranging from as little as $10 to several hundred dollars, buyers can obtain passport numbers, addresses, travel histories, vehicle registrations, and telecommunications records. The market operates through various channels, including specialized Telegram bots and darknet forums. == Notable uses == Probiv services have been utilized by diverse actors for various purposes. Investigative journalists have used the market to conduct high-profile investigations, including tracing the FSB unit allegedly behind the poisoning of Alexei Navalny. Russian police and security services themselves have routinely used the black market to track activists and opposition figures. Since Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Ukrainian intelligence services have exploited the market to identify Russian military officials. == Government response == In late 2024, Russian authorities introduced legislation imposing penalties of up to ten years in prison for accessing or distributing leaked data. Several operators of probiv services, including the teams behind Usersbox and Solaris, have been arrested. However, the crackdown appears to have had unintended consequences. Many operators have relocated their businesses abroad, where they operate with fewer constraints. Some services that previously cooperated with Russian authorities have severed those ties and moved staff out of the country.
Warframe
Warframe is a free-to-play action role-playing third-person shooter multiplayer online game developed and published by Digital Extremes. First released for Windows in March 2013, it was later ported to PlayStation 4 in November 2013, Xbox One in September 2014, Nintendo Switch in November 2018, PlayStation 5 in November 2020, Xbox Series X/S in April 2021, iOS in February 2024, Android in Canada on February 11, 2026 followed by a global release on February 18, 2026, and was released on Nintendo Switch 2 on March 25, 2026. Support for cross-platform play was released in 2022. Cross-platform save began in December 2023, rolling out in waves to different groups of players before becoming fully available to all players in January 2024. In Warframe, a player controls a member of the Tenno, a caste of ancient warriors who have awoken from centuries of suspended animation far into Earth's future to find themselves at war with different factions in the Origin System. The Tenno use their powered Warframes, along with a variety of weapons and abilities, to complete missions. While many of the game's missions use procedurally generated levels, it also includes large open world areas similar to other massively multiplayer online games, as well as some story-specific missions with fixed level design. The game includes elements of shooting and melee games, parkour, and role-playing to allow players to advance their Tenno with improved gear. The game features both player versus environment and player versus player elements. It is supported by microtransactions, allowing players to purchase in-game items with money, while also offering the option to earn them at no cost through grinding. The concept for Warframe originated in 2000 when Digital Extremes began work on a new game titled Dark Sector. At the time, the company had been successful in supporting other developers and publishers but wanted to develop its own game in-house. Dark Sector suffered several delays and was eventually released in 2008, incorporating some of the initial framework but differing significantly from the original plan. By 2012, in the wake of the success of free-to-play games, the developers took their earlier Dark Sector ideas and art assets and incorporated them into a new project, their self-published Warframe. Initially, the growth of Warframe was slow, hindered by moderate critical reviews and low player counts. However, since its release, the game has experienced significant growth. It is one of Digital Extremes' most successful titles, reaching nearly 50 million registered players by 2019. == Plot == Warframe is set in a far future version of the Solar System, now known as the Origin System. At the start of the game players are given control of members of the Tenno, warriors who have awoken from a millennia-long cryosleep on Earth by the Lotus, who acts as a guide for the player. They join an interplanetary war between the Grineer, a violent war-driven matriarchal race of militarized human clones; the Corpus, a cult-like megacorporation dedicated to profit; the Infested, disfigured victims of the Technocyte virus; the Sentients, a race of self-replicating machines made by a long-dead transhuman race known as the Orokin; and the Corrupted, brainwashed variants of the previous three factions' units defending ancient Orokin towers. All of the factions encountered in the game, including the Tenno, were created by or are splinter groups of the old Orokin Empire, which the Tenno learns was an ancient fallen civilization and former reigning power in the Origin System. Although virtually all of them are long dead by the time of the Tenno's awakening, their lingering presence can still be felt throughout the Origin System. Before their fall, the Orokin had realized the Origin System was becoming dangerously depleted of resources, and their solution to keep their empire alive was to colonize new star systems. The Orokin sent out colony ships through the Void, a trans-dimensional space that enabled fast travel between stellar systems. They had also sent out the Sentients beforehand, to arrive in the Tau system first, and terraform it, so the colonists would arrive to garden worlds, capable of supporting human life. None of these residential ships returned, and those they had loaded with Sentients returned with the Sentients now deciding to wipe out the Orokin, leading to the Old War, the creation of the Tenno, and finally, the collapse of the Empire. In the game's "The Second Dream" quest, which was introduced in December 2015, the player discovers that the Lotus is a Sentient known as Natah, rebelling against the Sentients to protect the Tenno, desiring to have surrogate children after losing her ability to procreate. The Lotus' father, Hunhow, sends a vengeful assassin called the Stalker to Lua (the remains of Earth's Moon), which the Lotus had hidden in the Void, to find its secret. The Lotus dispatches the Tenno there to stop the Stalker, arriving too late as the Stalker unveils the entity that the Lotus had protected: a human child known as the Operator, who is the real Tenno controlling the Warframes through the course of the game. The Operator is one of several Tenno children that survived the passage of the Zariman Ten 0 colony ship through the Void; the adults have all gone mad from its travel. When the ship returned to the Orokin Empire, the children had all been put to sleep for thousands of years, outlasting the fall of the Empire, to be found by the Lotus and becoming the Tenno (Tenno short for the "Ten Zero" of the ship's name). The power of the Void gave these children the power of Transference, an ability that allows them to control Warframes. From this point forward, the player can then engage in missions both as the Warframe and the Operator. Throughout various updates, various quests have been released after the Second Dream that elaborates on the story. "The War Within" quest introduced the Grineer Queens, rulers of the Grineer, and their asteroid-based Kuva Fortress, also giving the Operator the ability to act fully on their own as another playable entity, rather than a single-use attack. Quests afterward would introduce figures such as "The Man In The Wall," a mysterious entity, presumably from the Void, who takes on the visage of whoever sees them, most often as the playable Operator, and Ballas, one of the last living Orokin, assumed to be responsible for creating the Warframes. == Gameplay == Warframe is an online action game that includes elements of shooters, RPG, and stealth games. The player starts with a silent pseudo-protagonist in the form of an anthropomorphous biomechanical combat unit called a 'Warframe', possessing supernatural agility and special abilities, a selection of weapons (primary, secondary, and melee) and a space ship called an 'Orbiter'. The Orbiter is supported by a Cephalon, a type of Artificial Intelligence created from the minds of living people. The Cephalon in the player's Orbiter is named Ordis, and refers to the player as 'Operator'. The player's primary goal from this point is to explore the Origin System. Later in the course of the game, the player unlocks the ability to gain direct control of the Operator, which is the true Tenno protagonist in physical form. The Operator can physically manifest themselves in the environment by projecting out of the Warframe, and disappear by resuming control of it through a telekinetic process called 'Transference'. The Operator also possesses weapons and abilities of their own. After that, the Operator can use Transference to control a larger, purely mechanical combat unit called a 'Necramech', which is the technological precursor to the Warframes. Players can engage in space-bound combat using an auxiliary combat platform called 'Archwing', mounted on a Warframe, which comes with a unique set of abilities. 'Archguns' are heavy weapons designed for Archwings and Necramechs, but can be adapted for Warframe use. Late in 2019, an update to the game allowed players to pilot and manage a spacefaring gunship called the 'Railjack', which is deployed in combat, unlike the Orbiter. Railjack was designed as a co-op experience with up to four people working together, performing different tasks to keep the ship operational while destroying enemy ships and completing objectives. A Railjack-focused update was released in 2021, which brought expanded content and a new skill tree system aimed at making solo play more accessible. Through the Orbiter's console, the player can select any of the missions available to them. To progress through the Solar System, players must complete mission 'nodes' on each planet to reach Junctions, and use these Junctions to travel to other planets. Other missions rotate over time as part of the game's living universe; these can include missions with special rewards and community challenges to allow all players to reap benefits if they are successfully met. High-di