EMP, Are there EMP cannons in SR? Options

[Bodak]

Are there any ElectroMagnetic Pulse generators in SR? The kind of things that fry the circuitry of pocsecs, cyberware, decks, autodoors, etc and live in the back of your combivan?

[Bane]

I hope not.

[k1tsune]

I asked this once. It was around a year ago, though. I was being evil in plotting things to threaten my players with.
The general response fell into two categories:
1.) An EMP generator wouldn't hurt most Sixth World stuff.
and
2.) It's not feasable for some other reason.

[Eyeless Blond]

Well, 1 is pretty true. Most all-metal computer/laptop cases today act as Faraday cages, which should defeat EMPs fairly well, if I'm remembering my physics correctly. Most cyberware wouldn't be affected either; what isn't optical is buried under the skin in a giant sack of electrolytic meat. Most delicate electronics have some sort of grounding or other protection istalled by default that should protect against most EMP attempts, I should think.

[Adarael]

As per canon, 99% of all cyberware, computers, electronic devices, storage memory, et cetera is optical. The remaining pieces that are not are very well insulated. Ergo, it's next to impossible to have EMP affect things.

Now, anything that makes use of solenoids, radio/microwave transmission, et cetera, is next to impossible to insulate. Which is why the Zapper rockets can mess up drone networks.

My suggestion is this - adapt the zapper rocket's damage and effects into a cannon type of thing, and only have it affect a limited number of things - pretty much the same things the Zapper rocket's EMP field will affect, plus maybe it'd fuzz out phone/radio communications.

[Edward]

Almost everything is optical. Computers, cyber, telecoms. It’s all based on optical chips and durable motors. The electronic transistor is out and it takes a truly masiv EMP to affect a motor.

Any man portable (or light vehicle mounted) EMP would have no effect and it isntworth the expense for the really heavy ones.

Actually when they detonated a nuke in bug city nobody’s cyber dyed so I guess its all good.

Edward

[Thistledown]

Whether the optics are there or not, some people just won't pay to replace their stuff with it. I know, BBB page 28 has the first optical chip developed in 2002, but I think it would be a while before they spread to things besides computers. Even then, most people will wait for what they have to wear out.

Also remember, those computers at some point have to be plugged in. That means actual electrical wire with fuses, transistors, and all the other goodies that EMP's love so much. So, even if you don't end up doing much to the computer (maybe bust it's power unit), you'll at least turn it off. (Which may not always be what you want to do.)

Also, it'll stop cars pretty well. If it's a gas car, I suppose it could interfere with the distributer cap, making the cylinders go off randomly. Electric cars, not sure what effect it would have, but probably not good.


Char. of mine once has an EMP generator in the back of his van. Had his cyberware specially insulated for it (agreed, most is optical here, so it wasn't that hard to insulate the rest), and had a ballista and other low-tech weapons on hand for when the power's out. Granted, the van wasn't going any place, but it worked well enough as a headquarters.


Or you could throw out the whole optical thing as a house rule. Then things get relly fun.

[hobgoblin]

to get a emp blast from a nuke you have to detonate it high up i belive, atleast thats when the emp effect was first noticed...

[Edward]

An airburst nuke just gets better spread on its EMP. (I assume this is because the ground dampens it a bit) if you detonate even a small nuke under a city (as was don in Chicago) every item of electrical equipment in that city would be fried. The ward may have dome something funny with that however, it did stop the radiation.

Also the fuses and capacitors in a power supply are far sturdier than a computer chip. How are you going to generate a non nucellar man portable EMP that will fry them given 50 years of improved durability. Most computer systems are replaced every 3 years. After 10 it is in a museum. Unless a computer has the archaic host modifications (from matrix) you need a bomb to take it out.

Of cause if you do house rule it otherwise then you will find quite quickly that cyber wear is useless because every sec force is a bio soldier packing EMP grenades. Maybe not that bad but what runner worth his salt would cyber a critical system (like limbs) when they can with relative ease be disabled.

Edward

[Cray74]

[Bodak]

Okay so chips in SR are optical, but they need LEDs and LDRs and amplifiers at the ends of each optic fibre to do stuff with the signal conveyed by the optic fibre. How do you make logic-gates without electricity, only light? With prisms?

As for cyberware, applying a voltage to a neuron makes it fire but shining light on it does nothing. Likewise 'reading' the activity of a neuron would require its voltage be read continuously to measure how frequently it fires. These things are electronic, even though the signal is then converted to light and sent to other parts of the cyberware.

I agree there have been advances in technology and insulation etc... but surely there would also be advances in the power / portability of EMP? Isn't it an 'arms race'? What now fits in the back of a truck can fry a mobile phone. Maybe what in the future sits in the back of a future truck is powerful enough to melt a current-day shielded supercomputer, or a future pocsec?

I thought that such EM radiation can pass through most structures, just as radio-waves do, although they may be attenuated somewhat. A Faraday-cage rigged to resonate at the same frequency as the EMP radiation would quench it to nothing, but I think otherwise some EM will get through.

[Tanka]

Cyberware is powered more by body-created electricity, hence taking Essence, as it is attached to your body. It isn't just your "soul," but your overall humanity and how much of it is being taken up by bits and pieces of metal.

[Arethusa]

Essence != bioelectricity. I know the explanation at the start of Man and Machine states this, but this explanation is quite frankly insane. Just take a look at the essence values for dermal armor and bone lacing and it's pretty obvious that Essence is a composite measure of the cyberware's impact on you overal (abstract) 'humanty' plus game balance (in most cases, much more emphasis on this).

As for optical computers being almost purely optical, it's a bit hard to believe, but take it as one part faith in future advancement and one (rather big) part convenience. Besides, while it does take a bit of willing suspension of disbelief, there is enough believable, real science (the already mentioned faraday cage effect, etc) to ground it.

[Bodak]

[Arethusa]

And that's why you lose essence when you install... bone lacing? And get pieces of armor sewn into your skin?

[Jason Farlander]

Well, the pieces of armor sewn into your skin have flavor text (somewhere) indicating that they are self-regenerative... which would require a somewhat complex interaction with the body to acquire materials and energy. Bone lacing is trickier, admittedly, but you can either consider it to be the nanochemical treatment that convinces your brain that the laced bones really are a part of your body that causes the essence loss, or you could say that there is a fixed nanite component that allows the laced bones to grow with the bearer.

As with all cases, you can either decide that the ruling is stupid and disregard it, or come up with creative ways to make it make sense for cases where it isnt obvious.

[Da9iel]

Absolutely right Jason! I like the Essence=bioelectricity argument. I think that's one of many "creative ways to make it make sense."

[Arethusa]

Which is, of course, where it starts to sound a bit too much like the classic Star Wars Parsec Apology.

[Da9iel]

Board police please forgive me. This isn't really SR, but what exactly is that apology? Based strictly on hearing it misused in the movie, I hypothesized that hyperdrives somehow fold space. Han's boast was a measure of how much the hyperdrive on the Falcon folded space on the "Kessel run." Was I even close?

[Arethusa]

As the Kessel Run was never sctrictly defined by Lucas, plucky fans decided that the Kessel Run was a race through a black hole cluster; the closer you pull to the black holes, the less distance you have to cover (and, I guess, the faster you go, slingshot effect and all), but, of course, the more dangerous it is. So, the fewer parsecs, the more efficient the run.

It's the same concept: an explanation that works its way around the obvious mistake(s) of the writer (in Star Wars' case, the fact that Lucas had no idea what a parsec is, and still may not, for all I know). Where some people see it as clever, I just see desperation. Ultimately, you end up with far less confusion if you just acknowledge that Lucas didn't know anything about astronomy— and that Mulvihill was talking out of his ass and just didn't want to flatly admit that the Essence numbers were mostly game balance based (well, except for those nights of heavy drinking that produced the .75 essence headware radio).

[Adarael]

Certainly, cyberware can't be all optical. That's a given. But it's much *less* electric/mechanical than it is now - even cyberlimbs I think of as having myomers, not solenoids or servos. I've just assumed that the really vulnerable parts are better shielded in 2064 than they'd have to be nowadays. Sure, things like a hydraulic ram, limbs, or eyes/ears would probably be more affected by an EMP than a datajack or chipjack, but as a rule of thumb I'd say almost all cyberware would be relatively unaffected by EMP.

Why?

Twofold reason:
1) Ease of play. Do you really want to make up a chart that shows how badly someone gets slagged every time they get tazed, electrocuted, walk near a microwave, get a heavy-duty radar beam swept across them, et cetera? Do you want your players' nervous system to break if they get tazed? Or they eyes to be 'worn out' if they fall in the path of a microwave target designator? I mean, if you do, more power to you, but I don't feel like dealing with alla that.

2) Physical interactivity problems. How much interference does your bone lacing give your cell phone? Does your encephalon scramble your radio link? Does the smartlink in your hand occasionally build up a magnetic charge, scrambling the input when you grab a gun? These are all good questions, great for a story or a really gritty ass game, but they all serve to make the game less smooth/playable.

[Arethusa]

More than simply not wanting to deal with it, there's a very serious issue with the world: how can you have a world with any believable amount of cyberware if the stuff fails that easily? The only sensible answer is that these problems have largely been compensated for by any point at which cyberware has progressed beyond protoype.

[Jason Farlander]

As a minor clarification, I did not mean to imply that either proposed option was superior to the other. Whichever one maximizes your enjoyment of the game is the better option to take, which will vary from person to person.

[otomik]

http://www.starwars.com/community/askjc/jo...jc20020221.html
there's two ways of explaining it.
i seem to recall the later maw cluster blackhole explanation was used in the one novel i read Jedi Search. the kessel run has been defined as a route from the kessel spice mines to the core worlds (coruscant and correllia, basically Columbia to LA). of course there's still the problem that kessel is far away from coruscant and correllia (way over 12 parsecs) but nobody knew how to draw a map of the galazy anyway because the so called "core worlds" shouldn't be habitable in any spiral galaxy (stars too concentrated, too much radiation, i did get something out of my astronomy class).
http://www.supershadow.com/starwars/map.html

[mattness pl]