Cyberpunk Fantasy Heartbreaker: Magic and Technology

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Post by Username17 »

Grek wrote:God damn, people. I already posted a perfectly coherent rewording of the teleportation clause on page one. Here's how it works:

1. You establish a connection to the object somehow.
2. You decide how far you want it to move in what direction.
3. You cast your teleporting spell, targetting the object.
4. The object is now displaced relative to where it started.

At no point do the terms "distance between target and caster" or "distance between caster and end point" come into play here.
Yes.

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Post by Endovior »

Grek wrote:God damn, people. I already posted a perfectly coherent rewording of the teleportation clause on page one. Here's how it works:

1. You establish a connection to the object somehow.
2. You decide how far you want it to move in what direction.
3. You cast your teleporting spell, targetting the object.
4. The object is now displaced relative to where it started.

At no point do the terms "distance between target and caster" or "distance between caster and end point" come into play here.
This actually is a good explanation. Problem was, your original post came on page one, where everyone had a different idea about things and no one had half a clue if you were remotely close to what Frank was proposing, because no one could figure out what Frank was proposing at all.
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Post by Orion »

Also your explanation, while good, is long, and can't be inserted into another paragraph as an aside because it's a bulleted list. My explanation is designed to be a shorter version that is conversational in tone and can thus directly replace the "come from" sentence.

The finished product should include both, mine at the top of the chapter and yours in the description of the actual spell effect.
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Post by Username17 »

A Schizophrenic World
There has never been a stable time. Periods of history without events of note are ones too chaotic to allow proper records to be kept for future generations.

The future portrayed in the 2075 Asymmetric Threat world is one in which technology has advanced considerably, especially in the realm of information technology. Advances in flight, energy production, and human ecology have been substantial and there are now cities under the seas, on the Moon, and even Mars. And yet for all of these demonstrable advances, progress is nothing like uniform. Several major calamities have occurred, and many things we take for granted today are practically fantasy in the world of 2075. While the people of the world have access to things that are beyond our current reach, many things people do in 2075 appear quite backward to us today.

The Network of 2075 is not a world wide web in any meaningful sense. The major arteries of digital traffic we use today are fiber optic cables that run under ground and under water between cities. Those have almost all been cut by 2075, meaning that the essentially instant communication of high volumes of digital traffic that we rely upon today are a thing of the past. If 2070s teenagers want to download pornography, they have to find a local server hosting it or wait for the request to be sent up to a satellite, have the request forwarded to a different satellite (often through several intermediaries in orbit), have the request sent back down to Earth, and then have the data sent back through the same path the other way. There are serious time delays there, and performing real-time hacking through such a connection is essentially impossible. Depending on where you are, the servers on the Moon might be easier to access than other servers that are on Earth.

But just because every city is a data island doesn't mean that The Network doesn't exist or that it isn't useful. WiFi techniques have continued to advance, and WiFi access is pretty much everywhere and used by pretty much everything. Further, the chances of you being able to find things you want on The Network in your area are pretty good, because copies of information get made and re-archived on servers all over the world all the time. Whenever satellites have spare bandwidth, they use it to copy, update, and recopy data from servers in one area of the world to servers elsewhere. It makes the system a lot faster than you'd think, but also makes the system vulnerable to being fooled with fake information updates for short periods of time.
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Post by Endovior »

It's not unreasonable to say that the cables were all cut by some disaster or something. However, since we've been able to lay working transoceanic cables since 1865, it really does need to be explicitly stated just what it is that's stopping people from laying new cable.
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Post by kzt »

Also, there a whole lot of very large companies who make a LOT of money from these cables. They are very capital intensive to install, but highly profitable. And are also fairly easily repaired.

Having their be no fiber optics is a lot like their being no high voltage electric distribution, and hence no electricity. Except that I can think of several ways to make the power grid go down and stay down that doesn't require hundreds of attacks repeated every few weeks for years. I can't think of any for long-haul fiber. Eventually the JSDF will "accidentally" drive a destroyer over your sabotage boat, or the Texas Rangers will fire a warning shot into your left eye when they spot you with a backhoe.

Cyberpunk Fantasy without electricity or worldwide computer networks isn't cyberpunk fantasy. It's post apocalyptic fantasy.
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Post by Vebyast »

Alternate solution: the transoceanic fiber is all there and extremely profitable, but it isn't normally accessible because it's become too profitable. You can't get space on it any more because there are people (militaries and governments, major corporations, Important People) that are willing to pay more than you for space. Satellite has huge delays, so the rich people (who have enough money to use fiber) don't care about it and Average Joe has a shot at some satellite bandwidth. It just takes minutes to get packets across, because transmissions involve waiting to get lucky in a lightning-fast futures market involving you and every other person in your WAN. You can mess with targeted connections in realtime by tricking targets into buying forward contracts from you for cheap satellite retransmission, then messing with the data that you're retransmitting.

WiFi is also interesting. WiFi has probably become so prevalent that it's become a massively decentralized ad-hoc network. You don't get WiFi by driving by Starbucks; you get WiFi by asking the guy next door to relay your packets to someone who has a wire, and he gets internet by asking the guy in the coffee shop downstairs to relay his and your packets, and the coffee shop gets internet by asking the guy across the street to forward packets, and so on until it reaches someone that's on a wire. If you can break encryption (and we're assuming that strong encryption doesn't exist because there is a trivial constructive proof of P=NP), you can falsify information simply by getting your target's traffic to pass through your node in the network. This is difficult, but possible, and it can be done in realtime if you have a good grasp of protocols, an understanding of RF technology, and an antenna in the right place.
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Post by Endovior »

Vebyast wrote:Alternate solution: the transoceanic fiber is all there and extremely profitable, but it isn't normally accessible because it's become too profitable. You can't get space on it any more because there are people (militaries and governments, major corporations, Important People) that are willing to pay more than you for space. Satellite has huge delays, so the rich people (who have enough money to use fiber) don't care about it and Average Joe has a shot at some satellite bandwidth. It just takes minutes to get packets across, because transmissions involve waiting to get lucky in a lightning-fast futures market involving you and every other person in your WAN. You can mess with targeted connections in realtime by tricking targets into buying forward contracts from you for cheap satellite retransmission, then messing with the data that you're retransmitting.
NO.

That's totally retarded.

If there was cable available, and it was that profitable, there'd be more cable[/b], because it'd be too profitable for the megacorps to lay more to not do that. Not to mention that it's actually vastly cheaper to lay cable then to use rockets to put big hunks of metal in the air, especially when there's no longer any notable fossil fuels. That's why cable connections are so much more profitable then satellite ones; much more signal at much less cost. And even if all the cable bandwidth was mostly eaten up by megacorps (laughable), we'd still have a unified Internet, since there'd still physically be connections between all the relevant places, and the megacorps could get little bits of profit reselling the parts of their connections they're not using to the Internet cache people.
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Post by Grek »

The reason why cable is so hard to lay down can just be "Devil's Reef and other Deep One terrorists keep tearing it up constantly, because they hate technology.
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Post by name_here »

Also, transoceanic cables are up to two thousand miles long. A year or two back, a whole bunch of them got cut by anchors completely by accident, and for a few days Africa's internet connection to Europe was largely down. And that's an accident in a time period when every major world power wanted transcontinental internet.

Guarding the cables is completely impractical, so if Deep Ones who want to cut them exist, they're simply not going to remain intact. That applies even if a majority of Deep Ones want them to remain intact, because cutting them requires an item you can just buy at Home Depot and five seconds if you are a deep one. You know how the US is trying to keep out Mexican immigrants? Kind of like that, except there's a few dozen cables, they're even longer, and they're at the bottom of the ocean. Also, it's entirely possible that the countries on the ends of the modern cables are now at war.

Now, Intra-national cables can and probably do exist, simply because digging up a land-based cable requires a gigantic machine and the neighbors are far more likely to notice, except in nearly uninhabited areas, where they're only like forty miles long and can be guarded.
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Post by Stahlseele »

Welcome, to IronHell.
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TFwiki wrote:Soon is the name of the region in the time-domain (familiar to all marketing departments, and to the moderators and staff of Fun Publications) which sees release of all BotCon news, club exclusives, and other fan desirables. Soon is when then will become now.

Peculiar properties of spacetime ensure that the perception of the magnitude of Soon is fluid and dependent, not on an individual's time-reference, but on spatial and cultural location. A marketer generally perceives Soon as a finite, known, yet unspeakable time-interval; to a fan, the interval appears greater, and may in fact approach the infinite, becoming Never. Once the interval has passed, however, a certain time-lensing effect seems to occur, and the time-interval becomes vanishingly small. We therefore see the strange result that the same fragment of spacetime may be observed, in quick succession, as Soon, Never, and All Too Quickly.
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Post by zeruslord »

name_here: Guarding major inter-city lines is impractical, especially if there's suburbs in the way. You don't even need legit cyber-ninjas, just some SINless dayworkers in neon green vests and hard hats with a backhoe. The neighbors are likely to notice that some generic construction-type people are doing something, but tracking down the actual guys that did it is hard, let alone the people who paid them in whatever the standard anonymous currency is.
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Post by fectin »

Okay, remember the difference between high latency and low speed though. Satellites have really high latency, but their pipes are plenty fat. You can download porn just fine over satellites, it just takes fifteen minutes of negotiation, then all the DVDs arrive at once.
That means that long distance data transfer works just fine, but anything that requires a lot of back and forth (like hacking) does not. Also, you can receive arbitrarily huge emails without problems, but all chit-chat has to be face to face (meaning that you are very likely to get your job offers from a local client).
Oddly, that probably means it is more efficient to squirt over an entire website at a time, instead of individual pages.
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Post by kzt »

name_here wrote:Also, transoceanic cables are up to two thousand miles long. A year or two back, a whole bunch of them got cut by anchors completely by accident, and for a few days Africa's internet connection to Europe was largely down. And that's an accident in a time period when every major world power wanted transcontinental internet.
That's because Africa has very limited connectivity, with vast areas unserved because there is no essentially money in Africa. Tiny Japan has a lot more paths.

This map is as of 2008. Not sure where their data comes from, and I think this is clumping multiple cables together too as I'm fairly sure the actual number greatly exceeds what is shown.
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Post by kzt »

fectin wrote:Okay, remember the difference between high latency and low speed though. Satellites have really high latency, but their pipes are plenty fat.
Optical connections are both much faster and have much less latency. IIRC, the standard for long haul today is 24 lambdas of 10Gb/sec, with some people running 40 or 100Gb/sec lambdas.

That means EACH fiber pair today has 240 Gb/sec, with something like 24 pairs per cable. So you get 5.7 Tb/sec today.

"High Speed" satcom seems to be 4mb up/18mb down. The total capacity of the most recent military communication sats is 2-3 Gb/sec. That's not per connection, that is everyone combined. So 1900 of the most advanced military comsats can replace one submarine cable, as long as you also have the required 1.4 million expensive uplinks.

Anyhow, no, if you lose the submarine cables nobody who doesn't work for a large government or huge corp will have access to sat bandwidth. Or only if you pay through the nose. Really pay, as this is going to cost per minute like long distance did before Microwave Communications Inc., better known as MCI Inc and have your traffic being routed via a large corps transmission system. So don't send anything sensitive.
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Post by Vebyast »

Endovior wrote:Not to mention that it's actually vastly cheaper to lay cable then to use rockets to put big hunks of metal in the air, especially when there's no longer any notable fossil fuels.
FTCFH has permanent, city-sized moonbases and marsbases. They aren't using rockets any more. End of story. The only reasonable way to get that much stuff to mars is with a mass driver or some other non-rocket launch tech. Some of those are estimated to bring cost-to-orbit down to ranges where satellite launch would be available to the population at large. There's also the possibility of a fundamental revolution taking place that gives satellites huge individual pipes, something like broadcast RF transmissions being replaced with massively multiplexed lasers.

[edit for thought: giving every satellite and base station a giant laser would also explain why nobody is worried about nuclear strikes despite there being dozens of terrorist nations hanging around.]

[quote="Endovior]we'd still have a unified Internet, since there'd still physically be connections between all the relevant places, and the megacorps could get little bits of profit reselling the parts of their connections they're not using to the Internet cache people.[/quote]That's true. The entire thing would be a hierarchy of bandwidth being resold and resold, inflating the cost as things go down. So, yes, the internet cache people will eventually maintain the internet's consistency, but it'll be kind of patchy as individual cachers get unlucky at auction. As Frank explains originally, the network will be mostly consistent, and surprisingly fast, but also vulnerable to spoofing.
Did we ever figure out what the energy situation was like? Availability, comparison to fundamental cost of living and to median annual income, availability for large-scale industrial processes, methods for generation and transmission?
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Post by Endovior »

The ideas regarding how you could attack these cables are not invalid... but at the same time, I would note that the physics of how cables work allow the owners of the cables to track down exactly where the damage was done pretty much instantly... and in a world where the owners of those cables are megacorps with their own highly-equipped private armies, you can bet that there'll be some very quick and deadly responses to that kind of thing.

Video cameras are cheap. In fact, they're so cheap, they can put them in the sort of phones that they give away. You could easily position cameras such that the whole of any major cable route is under constant surveillance. You don't even need anyone to watch the cameras either; whenever anything happens to the cable, just pull up the logs... then the strike force will know exactly who to kill when they get there.

Those hypothetical SINless workers with the backhoe? Helicopter gunship ends them, if not anything heavier. It's really not feasible to attack overland cables, since the ease of access they provide comes with an equal ease of defense, and since their owners are in an excellent position to do just that. Word would quickly get out that anyone trying to hire you to cut a cable is pretty much trying to send you on a suicide mission, which would rather decrease the number of suckers you can find to do so.

The underwater cables are trickier to secure, but at the same time, it really does take a lot more then a $5 pair of clippers to sever any cable that can survive the pressures you get on the floor of the ocean. The Deep Ones will need to bring some rather specialized power tools. And if we're acting on the assumption that there are more Deep Ones who are sane and on the side of metahumanity rather then those that are mad and side with the Old Ones... then it would totally be feasible to have anti-sabotage patrol and repair teams on standby. And it'd cost a lot less to do repair operations on underwater cables if you can hire people that can comfortably survive on the ocean floor without any equipment at all. Underwater construction and repair of this sort could quite plausibly be the most profitable work Deep Ones can do, period; since they can do it so much more cheaply and safely then any other metatype.

So yeah, there's going to need to be a rather more convincing argument for the lack of connectivity.
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Post by Endovior »

Vebyast wrote:
Endovior wrote:Not to mention that it's actually vastly cheaper to lay cable then to use rockets to put big hunks of metal in the air, especially when there's no longer any notable fossil fuels.
FTCFH has permanent, city-sized moonbases and marsbases. They aren't using rockets any more. End of story. The only reasonable way to get that much stuff to mars is with a mass driver or some other non-rocket launch tech. There's also the possibility of a fundamental revolution taking place that gives satellites huge individual pipes, something like broadcast RF transmissions being replaced with massively multiplexed lasers.

[edit for thought: giving every satellite and base station a giant laser would also explain why nobody is worried about nuclear strikes despite there being dozens of terrorist nations hanging around.]
Even so, you're neglecting just how cheap it is to lay a high-bandwidth intercontinental cable. This is technology that's seriously over two centuries old, at the time of the game. If you give a big spool of cable to a couple of guys with a big boat, you can seriously have a connection to Europe online in under two weeks, and no one will notice unless they stumble across it underwater (somewhat unlikely) or you tell people. The better connections are a little more complicated, with amplifier relays and junctions and all kinds of other stuff that you need specialized equipment to set up... but it's still fairly old stuff in these days, and with the easy availability of Deep Ones to do the job for you, it's beyond cheap to set up. If there's constant sabotage, then it's a constant war between the megacorps who are constantly patrolling and repairing their networks, and sending out new branches in secret without publicly revealing the locations of the new links; and the chthonic squid-terrorists that go around cutting the cables wherever they find them for the lulz... but though it's somewhat easier for the terrorists to cut the cables then it is for the megacorps to build or repair them, it's still quite straightforward for the megacorps to have a network resilient enough to have multiple concurrent high-bandwidth connections to any continent they care to be dealing with online at any one time... the only question being which of those connections are up at the moment, given the state of the war.
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Post by Vebyast »

Endovior wrote:If there's constant sabotage, then it's a constant war between the megacorps
Don't even need the part about cthonic terrorists, now that I read that sentence. If megacorps have underwater cable-maintenance armies, why can't they have underwater cable-sabotage armies, which they use to cut opponents' cables at critical times? Earthquake off the coast of Japan -> world population starts paying through the nose for high-quality bandwidth to check on their friends and family -> Megacorp A triples their prices to take advantage of a sudden increase in demand and cuts Megacorp B's cables to drive as much traffic as possible to their own cables.
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Post by kzt »

Vebyast wrote: If megacorps have underwater cable-maintenance armies, why can't they have underwater cable-sabotage armies, which they use to cut opponents' cables at critical times? Earthquake off the coast of Japan -> world population starts paying through the nose for high-quality bandwidth to check on their friends and family -> Megacorp A triples their prices to take advantage of a sudden increase in demand and cuts Megacorp B's cables to drive as much traffic as possible to their own cables.
For the same reason that United doesn't use ads like "Fly Air France and DIE!!!". It's obviously self-destructive, and also obviously opens you up to civil and criminal penalties. If you did that in Japan you are going to find that the Japanese government is going to a) crawl up your ass with every inspector in the country to check every permit and code compliance issue you have and b) shut down every facility you have with customs delays of critical parts, sewer construction, road closures, power outages, dredging, problem with visas, etc.
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Post by Chamomile »

Can we come up with some reason why these cables will be laid through tunnels big enough for people to walk through? I just think it'd be cooler to have a run that starts on a ship, goes underwater, into the target corps' tunnel, then back out into the water for extraction by ship again.
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Post by kzt »

Chamomile wrote:Can we come up with some reason why these cables will be laid through tunnels big enough for people to walk through? I just think it'd be cooler to have a run that starts on a ship, goes underwater, into the target corps' tunnel, then back out into the water for extraction by ship again.
The fiber is about 75mm in diameter iirc, so I can't see why they would use tunnels that big. Plus it runs inland to facilities like the NAP of the Americas.
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Post by Vebyast »

kzt wrote:For the same reason that United doesn't use ads like "Fly Air France and DIE!!!".
Well, we're proposing a world where megacorps are roughly comparable to medium-size countries and where more than a few nation-states have abdicated the monopoly on violence. Two megacorps fighting a shadow war over underwater fiber would definitely result in economic sanctions from other states, but it could happen in extreme cases.
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Post by Chamomile »

kzt wrote:
Chamomile wrote:Can we come up with some reason why these cables will be laid through tunnels big enough for people to walk through? I just think it'd be cooler to have a run that starts on a ship, goes underwater, into the target corps' tunnel, then back out into the water for extraction by ship again.
The fiber is about 75mm in diameter iirc, so I can't see why they would use tunnels that big. Plus it runs inland to facilities like the NAP of the Americas.
That's why we'd have to come up with a reason. It significantly increases the cost of laying the cable, but potentially it also significantly increases the defensibility of the cables, depending on exactly what Deep Ones are capable of and how dedicated the terrorists are.
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Post by Endovior »

Vebyast wrote:
kzt wrote:For the same reason that United doesn't use ads like "Fly Air France and DIE!!!".
Well, we're proposing a world where megacorps are roughly comparable to medium-size countries and where more than a few nation-states have abdicated the monopoly on violence. Two megacorps fighting a shadow war over underwater fiber would definitely result in economic sanctions from other states, but it could happen in extreme cases.
I could see it happening now and then, but I'd be skeptical if it was the status quo... mostly because different megacorps operate in different parts of the world, and thus will at least occasionally need to use each other's networks. Sending teams to go around sabotaging those networks is burning a pretty dangerous bridge... so unless two megacorps are in a state of intense competition over a particularly lucrative connection, I can't quite see that happening.

Of course... by the same token, it wouldn't especially surprise me if most of the cable-cutting equipment people like Rl'yeh and Devil's Reef get is 'unofficially' lost their way in conjunction with maps of the competition's cable network. Megacorps in a state of even causal competition wouldn't have much qualms about doing something fairly cheap and untraceable to impose costs on their rivals... though only the foolish would go too far with this, as equipment of that sort could just as easily hamper your own operations. That said, whichever Megacorps control the satellite network might be more inclined to sabotage the cable network... and vice-versa, though satellites are harder to go after.
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