[X] My Assistant

[Talia Invierno]

Oh, what a G3 solar flare could do to the UCAS SIN network!

[Shadow]

Think about how vulnerable the corprate court and the Gbank are up there in a high orbit. Sure the magnetosphere is protecting them, but there essentially naked.

[nezumi]

Most likely not a huge amount. This sounds a lot like a LOT of threads created about mixing EMP and cyber.

By 2050, fiber optics have largely replaced copper wires and silicon. As far as I'm aware, that makes them largely invulnerable to x-rays and magnets. Satellites will have significantly better resistance than we have on ours now, and repairs in space will be significantly easier. Radio waves are probably still used, and would be disrupted temporarily, but I'm pretty sure the SIN network would work just like credit card servers do today. Not all of your credit card transactions actually go to the servers; there's a feature built in that, if for whatever reason, the server doesn't respond, credit transactions can continue within certain criteria.

What'll happen? Your international television shows might be blocked, mister super rich might not be able to buy his new mercedes on credit quite as quickly. Your local military installation may temporarily lose contact with headquarters 5,000 miles away. Rest assured, with the amount of cash and power lying in that network, there'll be plenty of redundancies to make sure the world keeps rotating. (Although, it could make a great excuse for a run, sort of like the server reboot in Entrapment).

[Cray74]

[Kanada Ten]

Isn't the electrical grid suppling power is still vulnerable, however, to surges from Solar flares?

How would these affect Microwave Satellite power output?

[mfb]

no more than it is today. i admit, i don't know how vulnerable our grids are to solar flares, today, though the relative rarity of power outages leads me to believe that the answer is "not very".

[Herald of Verjig...]

If you can see an aurora, there is a chance a circuit breaker on a line will flip and down a section of the power grid. Yes, this means very northern and very southern regions are most vulnerable. Most of the time, even where you can see an aurora, the effect is too small to cause any perceptible effect.

Natural storms and manastorms are both drastically more likely to cause a power outage than solar activity.

[Kagetenshi]

Oh, it would play hob with a lot of things, it just wouldn't be that hugely bad.

~J

[Cray74]

[Nath]

Concerning power grid failure, the precedent was set by a solar flare in 1989 that caused a shutdown of the Hydro-Québec power grid for nine hours (I let you google on that one).

[Talia Invierno]

Things remain rather more vulnerable today than is generally believed - which may be a factor as to why there is no perceived need to upgrade networks to current technology possibilities. Given the bottom-line perspectives of so much of the SR world, I can't see priorities being much different.

Still, experience personally the everyday effects of destruction of a primary communications satellite (it's happened!), and you might have an entirely new perspective on reliability of even basic things such as landline networks ... which, I suspect, could complicate SIN verification exponentially.

[Talia Invierno]

Add one more (which could potentially be more disruptive than equipment failures ... especially during a run :evil: ): interference with radio waves.

* radios (cyber and external)
* wristphones
* wireless connections of any kind ...

[Cray74]

[Talia Invierno]

I can only go by what I read and what I've experienced. I'm also going by Seattle's rather closer geographic location to magnetic north (by some thousands of miles) than Eurasia and most of the continental United States.

I also did assume that SR wireless would be based on radio-band technology, perhaps similar to the [url]Bluetooth system[/url] (albeit at a slightly more developed stage). So you are correct, "any kind" would be a misnomer (it wouldn't affect infrared at all, I don't think), but most radio-based communications would have at least the potential to be disrupted.