Smartlink precursor?, Potential 1st gen SL Options

[Kakkaraun]

[Voran]

[I Eat Time]

[Brazila]

I am an SR fan to the core, all the way back to SR1 baby, but I don't think it has the depth of story of WW games. Those games are just a different style of play. I have played both, and I prefer SR, but can see the draw of the WW products. SR is an actions game, it is not about what happened in the past, it's about how many guys you can frag in the next 3 seconds. WW games are more involved and have more plot complexity. I am not saying you can't RP in SR, but why shoot hoops with a soccer ball. It just comes down to the fact that the two games are way different. One is set in a somwhat near future, and the other is set in an alternative past. I do have to say that the alien attack was pretty bad, but cheese can be a great thing if it is in the hands of a cheese master!

[MrSandman666]

I really don't see the problem here.
No one ever said that Captain Chaos has his act together. No one ever claimed his collections where even close to complete. In fact, most of the time he reminds us to keep in mind that the documents he presents are personal accounts and most likely biased and at least partly wrong or incomplete.
And I just looked up Ghostwalkers entrance in YotC and it's completely made up of protocols, news articles, logged conversations, etc. The same holds true for most any event in YotC as well as RA:S. Even New Seattle is merely a collection of reports of a few locals.
Besides: like every RPG, Shadowrun explicitly states that everything written in the books is just a guideline and by no means a definite law that has to be adhered to under all circumstances. The Shadowrun timeline has enough gaps for you to build your own version of 'the truth'.
Yes, they didn't provide you with ten different timelines. I guess they where busy pulling 60 years out of their arses. And maybe they assumed that GMs might have enough creativity to come up with their own version of the truth from what they were handed but that assumption may be totally wrong for such uncreative folks like roleplayers... Damn creativity! :please:
And being someone who does a fair bit of amateur writing I think I can roughly estimate that it's not much more complicated to write ten (contradicting!) timelines around existing and well documented history than to completely make up 60 years of history with not much of a framework and still make it seem consistent.

Just my 0.02 :nuyen:

[Eyeless Blond]

Especially making everything happen so *fast*. I mean, the US broke up into a good half-dozen little nationss in the span of like 20 years? Sheesh, it took almost that much time to get from the Articles of Confederation to the Constitution.

[The Jopp]

[I Eat Time]

MrSandman, I agree with you. SR, like almosdt, or all Tabletop RPG lets the GM or ST or DM rewrite history as convenient. I don't have to go with the Trademark History if I don't want to, and for a while I even highly considered rewriting a history for a version of Shadowrun that I would consider historically 'fixed'. Main barrier is, I don't do a lot of amateur writing, and I'm lazy. :grinbig:

The availability of alternate worlds and histories was a point brought up a few posts from me ago, but I think we're really arguing the quality of the existing timelines. In which case, I simply find the Mage timelines more elegant, natural, and intuitive than the Shadowrun "crap here's where we gotta introduce magic, crap here's where we gotta somehow let the NAN get a hold of a nuke" timeline. It's too rushed, too many things don't make a lot of sense, and it's hard to rationalize or imagine some of the things (politics of course, not magick) happening in real life.

Anyway, wrong thread for this. As far as the smartlink precursor goes, I've always wondered if the SR technology is really dumbed down, or represents a direction I doubt we'll go in? Not that it's a bad view, it's hard to guess at some of that stuff, but I think as far as decking and stuff, we're gonna go for a much more wireless route.

[MrSandman666]

Anyways, can someone explain to me in which way this new laser sight thingy is better than the monocles that airforce pilots (and others) have been using since the 80s?

[Crusher Bob]

The laser on the retina can give the illusio of depth that the monocle can't, also the laser is probably less subject to glare.

On the minus side, the laser is probably moer subject to vibration, so don't expect this to work as well when you are driving a car or something.

[MrSandman666]

So the laser is not a monocle... I know there are "old school" systems (i.e. non-laser) that use *two* monocles to create this illusion of depth. I really can't see (no pun intended) how you can create an illusion of depth by using only one eye.
You might be right about the glare thing though.

The way I see it from this article the two systems use the same principle. A semi-translucent mirror reflects a ray of light into the eye without hindering vision. Just that the one system uses conventional ligt and the other uses a laser. The way I see it the only advantage could be a sharper, crisper image since the laser light doesn't refract so much like "normal" light.

[Smiley]