Alright Veeky Forums dust off your decks and grab your favorite Duran Duran eight track.
I'm planning on running a homebrew setting which could be summed up as "Firefly, but Miami Vice and Bladerunner instead of quippy cowboys"
Here's the question, in a setting of spaceships, FTL, instant communication, cybernetics, and the like, what in universe reasons would there be for >decks for hacking >football sized cell phones >common place payphones >Neuromamcer like hacking
The actually style and fashion choices can be handwaved, but I'm having a hard time justifying putting the clunky modularity back into future tech.
Also, what's the best system for hacking/netrunning? I'm going to run a reskinned FFG SW system, which is very narrative focused.
Cameron Sanchez
Also, have some cyberpunk for your viewing pleasure.
Cooper Young
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Tyler Cook
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Samuel Phillips
Also, Robocop is cyberpunk as fuck.
Andrew Morris
>decks for hacking Requires sophisticated equipment, custom and illegal modifications, and all kinds of integrated networking connections. These all take a lot of room and can't fit into a person.
>football sized cell phones The comms take a lot of room, and also the power source is bulky. As a trade-off they are extremely powerful devices, both in terms of how much literal energy they have and in their computational capabilities.
>common place payphones Instant/FTL communication is expensive and has to go through the large hubs which are available for public use via "payphones." They are more like private booths rather than standing-room only, and you rent a room for a time.
>Neuromamcer like hacking I stopped reading Neuromancer because it was 2edgy for me. Explain?
Mason Davis
Hey thanks for the responses.
I have tried to get through Neuromamcer a million times myself, I know what you mean.
What I'm getting at is computer systems that are abstract/spatial that feel more like physical spaces. Maybe Android: Netrunner would be a better comparison.
Caleb Williams
>decks for hacking futuristic laptop >football sized cell phones Have you seen how big some of them are now? >common place payphones In case you get stuck and your phone runs out of juice. >Neuromamcer like hacking I assume that this is using your mind to hack, in which case augments/modifications like decks and phones put into your body but its really expensive.
>The actually style and fashion choices can be handwaved, but I'm having a hard time justifying putting the clunky modularity back into future tech. Computer systems work better the more space can be used. All that apple sleek shit is good. but it can't out perform the clunky stuff. And that aesthetic is in vogue.
That's just how they 'see' the data maybe? or maybe its a byproduct of having clunky designs allowing data to be 3D maybe?
Jaxson Long
>computer systems that are abstract/spatial that feel more like physical spaces "Listen kid, I know what you're asking yourself. Why the drek am I in a psychedelic digital world? Why spend all that effort to generate a physical space representation of numbers? Well look, the human brain's pretty good. It's pretty much the best, until you slap some ware in there, then it's better. But even with all that it doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell it's going to be able to keep up with the sheer complexity of all the data flowing around. Look, see that bit of code there? Not being lit up? Unused. Ripe for picking through. See that blue cobweb covering everything? That's the ice. Don't trip it or you'll get dumped. Oh yeah, it moves. Notice the pattern? Yeah, of course you don't, you're too green. I've seen it before, though. That's where experience comes in.
Some point you'll think to yourself, hey, I'm pretty wizard at this stuff. Let's see if I can see the matrix for what it really is. Then you'll think about going in and messing with the settings enough to see the raw data and let me tell you that is a BAD idea. Ain't no one wiz enough to see the matrix for real. You won't know what you're doing and some spider's gonna see you for the reckless giant you appear to be when you mess with the matrix in raw form. Just stick to this way, kid, it's much simpler. Trust me."
-t. dataslave
Zachary Lewis
"Efficiency? Pah, generating the visualization ain't nearly as intensive as actually crunching the numbers. Think something like three orders of magnitude more intensive."
Bentley Butler
>decks for hacking Ad hoc hardware rigs. You could use a normal computer, much in the same way you could enter a car race with a minivan, but it's not the ideal equipment for the job.
>football sized cell phones A satellite phone capable of brute forcing an encrypted signal through any sort of jammer and piggybacking it disguised through a commercial channel needs a lot of power, both processing and electric.
>common place payphones Hardlined communication systems requiring physical tapping are the bread and butter of most criminal organizations.
>Neuromamcer like hacking A few implants and drugs is easier than scratch building your own AI designed to take down security AIs. Plus if they start getting screwy you can just shoot them and be done with it.
Elijah Mitchell
I have a sub-folder in my Cyberpunk folder called Neon 80s. Have some more, totally radical anons.
Luke Williams
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Hudson Jenkins
Ever seen Cowboy Bebop?
Parker Adams
>Bubblegum Crisis
Right in the nostalgia feels.
Alexander Lopez
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Jacob Brooks
T-t-that's RIGHT, my little amigo!
Jack Anderson
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Aiden White
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Lincoln Brown
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Jaxson Long
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Colton Parker
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Thomas Cooper
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Gavin Wood
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Noah Powell
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Josiah Green
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Hunter Martin
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Kayden Lopez
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James Miller
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Austin King
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William Bailey
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Joshua Rodriguez
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Anthony Ramirez
Firefly didn't have FTL, it takes place in a giant mutistar systerm with dozens of terraformed planets.
Not that it makes any more sense or it was even mentioned on the show but that's the background.
Michael Wood
>decks for hacking The corporations won and closed up hardware; you could get a modern terminal that fits in the palm of your hand, comes with all sorts of whistles and bells. But it's locked down tight, phones home to the corp at every available opportunity, and that little silver fucker will tattle on you when you start doing anything you should do. When it breaks down, you're expected to throw it away and get a new one. They are mass-produced disposable consumer goods, designed to do only what their manufacturers want them to do.
Decks are big and clunky partly because they're a rejection of that philosophy. There's space to fit in new parts for upgrading, it's easy to access components that need replacing, it's designed not to be replaced but continually tinkered with. There are times where you're going to have to pull things out of it, or plug things into it, "in the field" - and the size of the thing means you won't need specialist equipment to perform emergency upgrades. It's not illegal to have one of these "old fashioned" things, but it's often seen as a sign that you're into some shady digital shit - which basically makes it cool. As much as deckers might complain about the counter-culture adoption of decks over smart-terminals, it provides some plausible deniability for carrying one.
Or at least, that's how I'd explain it - cutting edge corporate technology is too risky to use, while a hand-me-down deck might not be the fastest thing in the world, but it's not inherently compromised and locked down.
Hudson Hughes
This is a good explanation to me. Plus a custom deck is just going to be bigger because it has more powerful and customized hardware, like extra ram and processors. Plus the case needs to be robust to protect the hardware (anyone whose ever dropped their fucking phone knows this)
So clunky decks are basically custom laptops with fucking bullet and waterproof case frames that can be opened and tinkered with, without specialized tools. You might even pull or slap in a new data card on the fly in the field to spoof detection and traces
Owen Wright
As for football phones, same thing as decks. Those phones are essentially also computers, and the future equivalent of smart phones, but customizable, jail broken and robust. Google will probably even sell non jailbroken models with cases like that to cash in on the wiz fad.
As for payphones, the payphone booths are actually multipurpose data centers which let you face time, download shit to your phone, jack it to streamed porn or whatever
Kevin Johnson
You could run with payphones being one of the last options for almost anonymous communication. The sort of game you're running would help determine how they continue to function.
If you're going for an organised resistance sort of vibe, the maintenance of the crumbling wired infrastructure that they operate on is maintained by your underground resistance movements. The anonymous nature of them serves the underground resistance well, and identification systems - cameras, additional microphones - are often missing in these payphones.
If you're going for a corporations-are-awful vibe, make payphones something that exist predominantly in poorer areas, a half-hearted gesture towards giving the disadvantaged "access to the information superhighway" for a dollar a megabyte, because they're unlikely to scrape together the cash to buy a phone that'd become obsolete fairly quickly.
