Cyberpunk Fantasy Heartbreaker: Magic and Technology

[kzt]

With 20 mt bombs you're talking proper planet buster weapons. But such weapons have never actually been made. There have been a couple dozen 20+ mt bombs produced (almost all of them by the Soviet Union), but none of them have been made to be deployed under deep water.

It's not that you couldn't make an ocean floor deployable 20 megaton nuke - it's that no one ever has. So basically one of the countries that fractured off the 20th century empires would have to either get their hands on one of the 10 Soviet Voivode Mark 6 ICBMs (they were supposedly decommissioned in 2009, but maybe one of them is still around?) and retrofit it to be deep underwater-capable, and then deploy it against Devil's Reef. Or start up a new planet buster strategy, wherein your nation scratch-builds weapons capable of wiping out major cities and then uses one in anger.

http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Weapons/B41.html

No, the US had about 500 of them. Probably the cores are still in a drum in a bunker at Pantex outside Amarillo, since we have never really funded the recycling programs.

But 20 mt was just an arbitrary number, the 9 megaton W-53 or Mk-53 would work fine. We have lots of them.

The W-55 SUBROC or W-44 ASROC nuclear depth charges would be fairly effective against a well defined target.

There is a reason that the United States does not now respond to Somali pirates by nuking Mogadishu or to Afghan terrorists by nuking Kabul. Well, when you consider the very real possibility that privateers are so distributed that leveling the capital cities may not seriously reduce their capacity to make war I guess it's two reasons. But the first reason is that the game theorists do not give good answers when generals ask them what happens if they use nuclear weapons to eliminate power centers from a multi-polar global power balance. Not even if the power centers in question are super dicks that everyone hates.

If you are prohibiting all ocean shipping you are more effective than the Nazis subs were. This is isn't a minor annoyance off the coast of Africa, it's a full blown worldwide war. And several countries will starve to death, others face energy disasters. And some of these have track records of killing a few tens of millions of people when they got in the way, killing large numbers of actual aliens who are involved in an existential war seems perfectly plausible to me.

[Username17]

The B41 bombs had a "maximum" yield of 25 megatons, but only a few "dirty" variants were ever set up to actually do that. The vast majority of them were "clean" varieties that were less than a quarter of that. The US has made 20+ megaton bombs, but never tested any and made far fewer than the Soviets did.

-Username17

[Fuchs]

I do not think the loss of global shipping is something people will tolerate, not given the gruesome consequences it has.

[Korgan0]

This might have been covered earlier, but just how bad is the Deep One interdiction of shipping? Alternatively, how bad should it be? If they were preventing anything at all from going across the waves, it seems plausible that the world would band together to stop them: it would be equivalent to, say, all oil supplies in the world being under the control of a single power who stops trading with everyone. On the other hand, if the Deep Ones are just pesky pirates who tend to prey on unprotected shipping, enough trade could probably make it through via armed convoys/really fast freighters to make water-based commerce viable, albeit at a much smaller level, since the amount of shipping is limited by the number of armed vessels available to a given corp/polity. That means that there's still a lot of conflict, and raids on pirate havens and such can still happen if there's a good opportunity, but enough can still get through to make nuking R'lyeh not worth the risk/retribution.

[Endovior]

It makes some sense that the different Deep One states would be at war with each other; they're devoted to competing elder gods and such, after all. That would decrease the danger to any individual nation, and decrease the incentive for the surface nations to get involved in that kind of fight.

Additionally, I'd suggest that there should be at least one prominent case of a nation that did decide to get involved with the Deep One nations in a big, probably nuclear way... which backfired fairly massively, and resulted in another one of those big deadly uninhabitable zones that nobody can safely pass through; now also full of creepy Astral Horrors or something. That would be another reason why people don't want actual war with the Deep Ones.

[Grek]

Ok, here's a thought.

In the writeup I did before, the collective of the Deep One Terrorists were
-Currently divided up into three nation-states based on which phased-in city they live in/around. There's Y'ha-nthlei (Aka Devil's Reef) in the Atlantic off America, Ker-Ys near the UK and R'lyeh in the South Pacific.
-Fighting a pair of ongoing wars to claim the remaining two phased-in Deep One homelands. Not sure who they'd be fighting, exactly, but they're fighting them.
-Each Deep One state has a population of about 126 million people, with the remaining Deep Ones fighting at the South and North poles to reclaim their ancient homelands.

[name_here]

Um, nukes do kind of not detonate if they get holes blasted in them. Deploying one in 2075, especially against the bottom of the ocean, is going to be a nontrivial problem. Also, a good chunk of the US nukes won't work because the unstable isotopes decay and there's not a lot of spare material in them, and no one would have been maintaining them.

Though really, I expect the result of Deep One terrorist attacks is that ships sent across the ocean sometimes make it and sometimes don't. This adequately describes pretty much the entire history of oceanic shipping, and it probably would not be too much worse than the combined effect of pirates and bad weather in the Age Of Sail.

[kzt]

Um, nukes do kind of not detonate if they get holes blasted in them. Deploying one in 2075, especially against the bottom of the ocean, is going to be a nontrivial problem. Also, a good chunk of the US nukes won't work because the unstable isotopes decay and there's not a lot of spare material in them, and no one would have been maintaining them.

Making a quite large numbers of nukes rapidly is something that multiple nations have done. You are not going to build dozens overnight, unless you are Japan who reprocess 50 tons of plutonium and just might "happen" to "find" a few hundred kg of weapons grade PU sitting in a vault somewhere, but in a few years?

The main radioisotope that ages is tritium. Which has commercial uses. Now there are some interesting questions about how reliable anyone's nukes are these days, but the claim is made that they can be sustained forever without further testing. Given that we have a pretty good supply of proven designs it seems unlikely that nobody could successfully build a weapon that worked reliably in fairly short order. Particularly when nobody gives a damn about test ban treaties.

And pressure vessels, parachutes and timers are a pretty well understood set of engineering problem.

[DrPraetor]

If we assume that R'lyeh has any sort of credible deterrent - including, especially, their own nuclear-armed submarines - this entire discussion is moot. The one thing that would be worse than some hostile power shutting down Transatlantic and Transpacific trade would be generalized global thermonuclear war. Actually, the Deep Ones have Shoggoths, right? So generalized war with 21st century biological weapons might also be worse.

A check for realistic biology, however - Deep Ones have clearly adapted to survive a lot of water pressure (this is actually sensible - even the pressure at the bottom of the sea isn't enough to chemically convert your lipids by sheer force; and regular humans can survive at 700m for a while, so 4km for the average sea bottom should be fine). Surface humans can't do that, but it's an entirely realistic adaptation to give them. However, it is not realistic to have them survive arbitrarily low temperature, or arbitrarily low oxygen concentrations. Presumably, Deep Ones are capable of getting to and from their underwater cities by entering a sort of torpor and then sinking (with weights) or floating to the surface. But this presumably takes a while and you may be eaten en route so it's something sensible modern Deep Ones would wish to avoid.

So we have to assume that Deep Ones use a lot of submarines themselves, because although their sea-floor cities are kept warm and oxygenated using geothermal heat and/or magic, in order to travel to and from those cities, they'll prefer vehicles. Star Spawn aren't constrained to have near-human physiology so this isn't an issue for them of course.

The interesting question is how the various land powers accomodate to the existence of undersea countries. Deep Ones are more or less human, have free will (and thus are bribable), many are former residents of various land nations, etc. So presumably there are at least spies and probably diplomats. So deals may be reached to protect the most essential surface shipping (which would probably be rare earths or something, not oil), and there are persistent rumors that various corporations use secret deep one intermediaries to pay off the Star Spawn with human sacrifices and the like.

Finally - wouldn't most of the Deep Ones live in relatively shallow, warm water? Like, for example, off the coast of Maine (the north Atlantic is actually fairly warm there because the surface water is sinking, as opposed to the Pacific coast where deep water is rising so it's fucking cold.) R'lyeh itself is at 47°9′S 126°43′W, which puts it on the "top of the cliff" near the Eltanin Trench, which is boss so that's where it is.

But that city was built by/for the Star Spawn. The major Deep One populations are presumably concentrated on the nearby mountain ranges to the north; the tops of those mountains are barely under sea level, it looks to me.

But from satellite images, you sea a huge shallow sea stretching from New Zealand to Vietnam. Wouldn't most of the Deep Ones be reef dwellers? The meractor projection makes this hard to judge by eye, but the second largest shelf is off the coast of the Eastern U.S. So we know that Deep Ones live in Innsmouth, Maine - and they also live somewhere full of Brown People but HPL couldn't be bothered to distinguish.

[Endovior]

I won't speak to the biological questions; that's all Frank.

That said, the social implications of Deep Ones being human is something entirely different. The comparison of Deep Ones to Muslims is rather accurate... again ignoring the biology, they're just a different race of metahumans who live in a different part of the world and practice a different religion. Also like Muslims, they fight amongst each other a lot, and the bulk of the people sacrificed and murdered by the Deep Ones are, in fact, other Deep Ones, either because they follow a different elder god then the murderer, or perhaps because they're a heretical non-observant surface-dweller. The servants of the elder gods are, admittedly, far more bloodthirsty then the followers of Mohammed, but the basic idea remains the same... and, accordingly, some nationstates host actual diplomatic envoys from R'lyeh or Devil's Reef, where the representatives of the Star Spawn wheedle and lie, and maybe trade shipments of particular resources for promises not to do anything too evil. Rather like, say, Iran; people are open to the idea of discussing trade relations... there's valuable resources down on the ocean floor, after all, and all kinds of trade possibilities that open up if you can somehow manage to convince Devil's Reef to scale back on that piracy a bit. Naturally, this goes approximately as well as modern diplomatic relations with Iran; there's only so far negotiations can go with a militant theocracy whose tenets ultimately demand that unbelievers must submit or die. But the important bit is that there is an actual dialogue; although Devil's Reef IS a rogue state, it remains an actual state, and is more then just a pit of monsters that eat passers-by.

[fectin]

It's probably really helpful for that if one or two other nations pay Devil's Reef massive protection monies and can move stuff unmolested. That gives those states a huge advantage, and stalemates anyone who wants to nuke Devil's Reef.

That also opens up some more stories about renegotiating with them, about rogue or "rogue" Deep Ones, and about forging or stealing flags. Long term plotwise, it probably means one corporation controls shipping in a big way (which incidentally justifies shipping being super expensive, and leads to everyone's favorite game, "random attacks on your convoy"), and means if you bushwhack caravans too often, a megacorp might specifically notice you.

[Lokathor]

With all this talk of magic, I think we've lost sight of technology just a bit. Let's talk about that a moment because I recently came upon an item of interest.

There was a report that came out as a result of a 12-month research grant from the DoD, in which the idea of "Ultra Large Scale" Systems was explored. A ULS is any system that exists on a massive scale in terms of code lines, data stored, data processed, connectivity, etc. Basically the DoD was concerned that their systems weren't going to scale up properly over time (they were right), and so what could be done about it. The report is 150 pages, and I haven't read it all obviously because I just heard about it like an hour ago, but the overall idea seems to be that unless there are some radical breakthroughs in the way that software is written and managed, as well as the way that devices that run on software are designed and deployed, as well as the way that we think about the interactions that people will have with those devices, then we'll be essentially trapped at our current level of tech. We've hit the point, or will very soon, where incremental advances won't cut it anymore.

http://www.sei.cmu.edu/uls/ (provides a summary as well as a link to the PDF of the full report)

The sheer scale of ULS systems will change everything. ULS systems will necessarily be decentralized in a variety of ways, developed and used by a wide variety of stakeholders with conflicting needs, evolving continuously, and constructed from heterogeneous parts. People will not just be users of a ULS system; they will be elements of the system. Software and hardware failures will be the norm rather than the exception. The acquisition of a ULS system will be simultaneous with its operation and will require new methods for control. These characteristics are beginning to emerge in today’s DoD systems of systems; in ULS systems they will dominate. Consequently, ULS systems will place unprecedented demands on software acquisition, production, deployment, management, documentation, usage, and evolution practices.

Fundamental gaps in our current understanding of software and software
development at the scale of ULS systems present profound impediments to the technically and economically effective achievement of the DoD goal of deterrence and dominance based on information superiority. These gaps are strategic, not tactical. They are unlikely to be addressed adequately by incremental research within established categories. Rather, we require a broad new conception of both the nature of such systems and new ideas for how to develop them. We will need to look at them differently, not just as systems or systems of systems, but as socio-technical ecosystems. We will face fundamental challenges in the design and evolution, orchestration and control, and monitoring and assessment of ULS systems. These challenges require breakthrough research.

Now this is all well and good, but what does it mean for the game? Well obviously the technical details of the new systems that the players will use aren't important other than that the descriptions of them match up with the game mechanics the players will be playing. What is important is that right now in 2012 basically everyone on earth is struggling with this problem and shrinking their R&D department at the same time. They're bolstering production staff to get products out now and get money now instead of funding research teams that will (probably) pay off in 10 or 20 years. Then everyone points fingers at everyone else and says "oh you guys should be solving this". The world of Asymmetric Threat is a world built upon a similar corporate greed and total disregard for the far future.

To me this suggests that if there is a set of ULS breakthroughs at all in AT, then they were ones that came about before the fall of the major nations. This isn't hard to agree with because it means that such technology would be ubiquitous and Lancers would fear the Panopticon and stuff (things we want). It does mean though that there would be no particular power still in control of the distribution of these technologies; everyone stole the designs as the US broke apart and now ULS tech is like a modern automobile: everyone can create and use it at the basic level, and the more tech you have to throw at the problem the better a setup you can get, but a person has to be extremely resource starved before they fall off the bottom end of the scale (eg: Corps have APUs, but even African rebels can deploy Technicals). The other effect is that the citizens of the future would have a rather different psychology and world view compared to us as much as we have an altered world view compared to citizens of the industrial revolution. In this area we can only guess at the full ramifications, and it will depend on the particulars we pick as far as what ULS of the future actually means for AT, but the psychological differences of the citizens of the future will be stark and they will be alien to us, and skipping out on that subject will be a colossal shame.

On the other end of things, it's possible that the ULS technology of the future is the same as it is for us now: we (humanity as a whole) can kinda make a worldwide network, but it has all sorts of problems everywhere, and it's not at all properly integrated. It's a bleak kind of future more suited to After Sundown than to Asymmetric Threat. It could be used, but doing so would severely limit the capabilities of a Hacker type of character. Samurai have physical space everywhere, Mages have mana flowing all about, but Hackers would have only small pockets of digital reality to act upon. It adds dystopia, but I think the wrong kind of dystopia because it's killing a character type.

[kzt]

You have to realize just how large a system they are talking about. for example, a recent report suggested that there are some really serious issues with continuing the growth of super computers.

He suggested the limit where things got really hard was likely to be about 32 Exaflops, compared to 20 petaflops today. A very nice PC processor is about 70 gigaflops, so a modern supercomputer is 250,000 times faster. Hence we are talking about a system today with many thousands of processors and extremely difficult problems with scaling systems with millions of processors.

It's not like a PC is going carry one of these around or even have an apartment where he parks 250,000 100w (or even 10w) processors, as I suspect the high-tension power lines and thousands of tons of air conditioning are going to make it just a bit distinctive. So I'm not really sure these issues are the kind of thing that would bother PCs.

I hate typos.... A lot.

[...You Lost Me]

tee hee... exaflops.

[Lokathor]

...A PC obviously doesn't carry a ULS System in their pocket, they are a device within a ULS System that's all around around them and spread across the Archology/ City/ Region/ Nation/ Planet/ Star System.

We're not talking about "one system" being a single super computer, we're talking about "one system" being "the LA municipal water system", or "the Seattle Grid Guide network", or "UCAS military intra-net Matrix traffic".

Here are some example questions that the PCs might have about the world around them that technology decisions in this area would affect:

• If I knock out a guard, who notices that? how quickly? what will the automated responses be? what about non-automatic responses?
• If I "drop" a lifestyle to increase my Anon rating because my Heat is too high, who can I still talk to? Where can I still go?
• Can I hack into the local traffic grid and make their screens all say "I am the Napster" while I direct traffic wherever I want? What is the Grid Guide admin's response to that? how long will the cars within the Grid Guide keep taking in info that's clearly causing crashes before the cars themselves shut down as part of their automated "public safety" regulation systems?
• How much of the "legwork" stage of the mission can the hacker assist with and how easily? Are building plans available? are video feeds available?
• If I blow up an Aztech facility on the west side of town, how long does my buddy breaking into the Aztech facility on the east side of town before they automatically heighten security as well?

[Username17]

On Deep Ones and deep water: the abyssal zone is about 3 degrees all the time. That's cold, but it's not freezing cold. It's actually warmer than the North Atlantic surface. Deep Ones would need heat sources, but not continuously. Oxygen and pressure are much bigger concerns: there is too much pressure for a human to survive and not enough oxygen for a human to live. However, Astral Magic is all about moving shit around, and can be used out to a Deep One's aura length without a Marker. What that means is that Deep Ones can simply passively collect Oxygen from the water around them and passively reduce pressure around themselves as well. That has an additional advantage that more powerful, higher Stress Deep Ones can go deeper, and that when you get into actual trenches you can ancient inhuman monsters.

Now, a very real problem is the actual distribution of Oxygen. The Abyssal zones aren't much different in Oxygen content to the rest of the sea. If you can ram scoop enough Oxygen to survive as a humanoid in shallow water, you can do that a kilometer down. But the actual sea floor is pretty much Oxygen-free. Life on the bottom scavenges Oxygen as it arrives and doesn't make any new Oxygen because there is no photosynthesis down there. Obviously, the Deep Ones have some sort of work-around. Maybe chemo-voric plants, or electolysing crystals or something. I'm not sure it actually needs to be explained, since the people on the surface might not even know. But the short version is that there's plenty of Oxygen for a Deep One to get by if they stick to the submarines and settlements, or if they swim well away from the actual sea floor. Also: you have to be more powerful and more ancient to go deeper than the "basic" abyssal depths. And the rumors of the stuff in the really deep trenches are horrible.

---

...A PC obviously doesn't carry a ULS System in their pocket, they are a device within a ULS System that's all around around them and spread across the Archology/ City/ Region/ Nation/ Planet/ Star System.

Yeah. The logical extension of the world being an ad hoc mesh network is that the world is an ULS system that literally no one in the entire world understands. Things fall out of communication all the time, either because something got turned off, something stopped playing nice, or something went out of range, or some interference picked up somewhere, or whatever.

What this goes down to is a hacking system that is way more abstract than Shadowrun's. You do not have "icons" that punch each other Tron-style. Hell, you don't keep track of the number of devices there are - let alone the stats on any particular device. The actions are goal oriented, and the actual number of devices involved only matters when you're doing Basilisk Hacks and the targeted "devices" are actual people. As a Hacker, you are passively fucking with hundreds or thousands of devices all the time - since of course you're passively fucking with hundreds or thousands of devices continuously as a legitimate user as well.

If I knock out a guard, who notices that? how quickly? what will the automated responses be? what about non-automatic responses?

When a patrol drone gets shot and explodes, it stops transmitting, stops being part of the network. Unfortunately, technology being what it is, drones fall out of the network all the time. And while it's cause for concern, it's not cause for concern within a 12-second combat turn window, and probably not even 3. Data packets simply get lost, all the time. Sometimes for extended periods of time because The Network is way over the complexity threshold of any actor in it to competently direct.

Hackers have a couple things they can do:

• Patch The Network. This is the hardest, and may require some sort of preparation or inside knowledge. Basically, you start sending off information that the Drone was supposed to be sending, but without crucial details like the ongoing ninja attack. It's just like the Drone never went down.
• Scratch The Network. Basically, the Hacker sends out error messages consistent with shit having broken down somehow. Maybe he sends out encrypted garblefuck from the drone's IP to simulate the drone having flipped to the wrong encryption channel. Or maybe he sends out factory default startup bullshit to simulate a hard reboot. Or maybe he just fills up the area with static to simulate the area being filled up with static. Much easier than Patching the Network, but still raising flags (just yellow flags instead of red flags).

Another issue is the opposite: wireless devices appearing where there are not supposed to be any. Shadowrun 4th tried to do something with this concept, but ultimately never really succeeded in writing up anything that made any sense.

The idea here I think is that there should be electromagnetic sensors that pick up wireless signals and biosigns. And hackers can mask those, providing Network Stealth to their team.

-Username17

[kzt]

With proper preparation you should always be able to isolate a given building, etc and have it not send any alarms. Pretending to be the entire building and all the contents would seem like something that requires a lot more planning, recon and equipment.

[Ancient History]

Would Deep One aura extension let them bring non-Deep Ones into the deep with them?

[fectin]

If deep ones rip oxygen from water whenever DO is too low, that water will end up with a whole bunch of free H- in it, and be extremely acidic. That could be cool, and play well with horrible deep one slime effects.

[Username17]

Would Deep One aura extension let them bring non-Deep Ones into the deep with them?

Not inherently, but it seems like an easy enough technique to master. Passively allowing someone else in their aura to breathe underwater would be a useful and generally available technique.

If deep ones rip oxygen from water whenever DO is too low, that water will end up with a whole bunch of free H- in it, and be extremely acidic. That could be cool, and play well with horrible deep one slime effects.

That seems like another technique that would be generally available. Strip the Oxygen out of water as hydroxide and then you'd be able to breathe indefinitely regardless of how low-oxygen the water started at. Plus you'd be able to turn salt water into hydrochloric acid whenever you wanted.

Those both seem like good Deep One abilities that flow naturally from their basal abilities.

-Username17

[...You Lost Me]

I'm not 100% sure on that chemistry... Pulling out oxygen out of water gives you two H molecules (no charge), which will spontaneously form H2 gas.

Pulling hydroxide out of the water will leave you with an OH- base which I'm pretty sure can't help respiration, and a H+ ion that will kill things.

So you either get your oxygen or your acid; I don't think you can get both... anybody care to clarify?

[Username17]

I'm not 100% sure on that chemistry... Pulling out oxygen out of water gives you two H molecules (no charge), which will spontaneously form H2 gas.

Pulling hydroxide out of the water will leave you with an OH- base which I'm pretty sure can't help respiration, and a H+ ion that will kill things.

So you either get your oxygen or your acid; I don't think you can get both... anybody care to clarify?

When you split water, you actually get O-- and two H+ ions. Electron attractions being what they are, the simplest stable form is for every two split waters to form O2 and two H2s. But if the electrons end up elsewhere (and they very well might), then what's left is just a strong acid. If you're actually teleporting the Oxygen into your gills, it's entirely possible that the electrons end up in between or just somewhere else entirely.

-Username17

[DSMatticus]

The problem is when you're teleporting those oxygen ions, you're going to want to make O2 out of them before you use it for respiration. I highly doubt you could get a bunch of O-- ions to behave the way they're 'supposed' to for the purpose of keeping living things alive. And you won't get two O-- ions to bond into O2.

So your deep one has to grab electrons while he's at it, and it makes the most sense for him to just magically decompose H2O into H2 and O2 and then magically grab the O2.

Edit: That said, I see no reason that deep ones can't do a little bit of both. Sometimes, the process works, sometimes it doesn't, so they simultaneously pull breathable oxygen out of their environment and turn it acidic, and Deep One mages can do this deliberately and make a bunch of water acidic by eating a bunch oxygen ions all at once.

[fectin]

If you rip hydroxide out of the water, the H+ ions (typo before) will not spontaneously form H2 while surrounded by water. Instead, they'll glom onti H2O and make H3O+. Remember, pH is a direct measurement of the proportion of H3O+ ions to OH- ions (arrhenius acids are, anyway, and that's what you care about in water). Ripping apart OH- to get O-- and H+ is much higher energy, but works the same way. You'd have to assemble O2 out of the O--, but if you can rip OH- apart, assembling O2 should be trivial. Though IIRC, hemoglobin transports O-- anyway, so you can probably skip right to that.

[DSMatticus]

Though IIRC, hemoglobin transports O-- anyway, so you can probably skip right to that.

Oh, really? Scratch my complaints then.