-- Being loaded down with GURPS 4e projects does that I'm co-authoring the new GURPS Ultra-Tech BTW, which is entering playtest now over on Pyramid.

a figures. sometimes i wonderd why you where around shadowrun as you where allways rambleing on about gurps (that to me is a worse system then sr, but thats personal taste). good luck with the book...

wow. nobody's discussing the WMI. maybe it's just because i'm such a decker-geek, but that is the section that most caught my eye, out of the entire book.

what i'm pondering the most is what the WMI will entail. at a guess, i'd say the goal is twofold: 1) make a wide-area, high-bandwidth wireless network that is very stable; 2) make a wide-area, high-bandwidth wireless network that is standardized.

1) okay, one of the things with wireless networks is that each possible transmission method (laser, radio bands, microwave, whatever) has advantages and drawbacks. in any given situation, one transmission method might excel and another might fail completely. for a truly stable wireless network, you cannot have that sort of inconsistency--ideally, the network should perform optimally in any concievable environment.

so, which transmission method do you choose, in order to achieve that lofty goal? all of them. if the WMI works the way i think it should, deckers will be able to purchase all-encompassing wireless modules for their cyberdecks, packaging everything from laser to commercial radio to microwave into one little plugin. main transmission base stations will work the same way, though there will also be also substations dedicated to individual transmission methods, depending on the area.

the advantage of this is obvious: at any given time, your network connection will be streaming in on two or more methods of transmission. if some jackhole jams commercial radio in the area, well, you've still got microwave. moreover, your bandwidth is going to be pretty much limitless--the "300 to 500 Mp" figure they quoted, i'm guessing is per transmission method. of course, you'll probably need a license to access certain transmission methods (or, if SR wants to take a turn for the technical, certain bands within a given transmission method--that way, you could, for instance, pull in 1000Mp combined bandwidth on microwave, by taking data from two microwave frequencies), so most legal users will probably be limited to the book figures.

the only disadvantage i can think of is synchronizing the data being fed over all those transmission methods, but that's already been covered--why do you think one of the shadowposters calls the base stations "AIs in the making"?

2) this is the really exciting part. once a standard is set and widely-endorsed (three countries and two high-end AA corps counts, i think, as wide endorsement), wireless matrix transmission points can be set up anywhere and everywhere. the hard part about standardization, of course, is that different countries and megacorps use different frequencies for their own use--for instance, in the US, certain radio bands are used for commercial television, and others are used for commercial radio. if your deck's wireless module is set to use the radio band reserved for television, you're not going to be doing much wireless decking--though you'll probably be able to catch up on Leave It to the Beaver Shaman reruns.

the answer to this, of course, is to customize the WMI frequencies for each country/area that buys a license. each country/area would define what bands and transmission methods would be useable for wireless matrix, just like they define what bands are used for television and radio. then, build a low-grade GPS reciever into the wireless module, that tells the module what country/areait's in; the module will then automatically adjust its settings to use whatever frequencies have been designated for wireless matrix use.

I'm also surprised the topic hasn't come up more often. Maybe it's because it's still only in the testing phase. I guess it will attract more attention when/if it will be described more in detail, maybe in the SOTA format, I don't know. It has the potential to change how deckers are used, and involve them a whole lot more in the action, so the reactions will come, but maybe just not yet.

-- I'm going off memory as well since my old emails on the subject are now on a separate archive hard drive . . .
-- IIRC the argument was over how to interpret the fallout of the 2011 Black Tide. I do note that everyone but the Netherlands gets off without a narrative scratch in SoE (at least from the parts I've read so far). No mention of it at all in the AGS section for example.
-- I still haven't digested all of the book yet though, and quibbling about an event a half-century in the game's past is not a productive line of argumentation IMO. To be honest, I no longer get a fire in my belly in regards to continuity and logical problems

I hope the WMI uses some undisclosed technology like Electron Fields, or Quantum Echo, or yeah; or something better than frelling radio waves. I'm kind of glad the rules weren't in it just becuase they had to cut so much anyway.

cellular's nice, but it's not all-encompassing. how many times per day do you have to do the no-bar jig, trying to get enough reception to make a call?

SR does a bang-up job mangling the current technology; i'm honestly terrified of using anything more advanced.

you must live on top of a cellular tower. most of the rest of the world has to deal with bad reception, hence those annoying 'can you hear me now' ads. of course, the US seems to be about five to ten years behind the technology curve when compared to places like south korea, so maybe i'm talking about a problem that doesn't exist in the rest of the world.

I used to have bad reception when I lived 100 feet underground, like I said. But even there were some sort of systems to allow mobile phones to operate through all that rock and metal. I do not remember having any problems with reception talking to anyone in Finland since I got a cellphone (3½ years). I don't remember seeing anything but perfect (4 out of 4 bars) or near-perfect (3/4) anywhere in or near cities that's not deep inside a large building. I even have perfect connection at our summer cottage, which is 10 miles from the nearest urban areas. You can see cellular towers everywhere these days.

Of course, it makes sense for Finland (while we're not exactly South Korea or Japan) to have slightly better connectivity than the US. But I guess that's why WMI is happening in Scandinavia.

Well i finally got htrough this chapter. I had toruble because of the union section. I just kept getting bogged down. I finally skipped it, read the individual national section and then went back to the overall theme.

I liked the Denmark section thebest, probably because at least one author was dnaish he could give it the best feeling, the most filled out. Tough little Denmark makes it's own way. Norway are impovrished beggers. The Laps are retreating into themselves and the Swedes dominate everyone (Did Llorg write this?) and hte Fins? I can honestly say I can't remember that part.

So like danny Kaye sang:
Wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen
Salty ol' girl of a town
with her tavern light, and her city nights
we will klink,
and drink one down!

heh, i made surprise phone call the other day with my cellphone. it had 1 bar of signal and the conversation was crystal clear. no packet loss, nothing. and im used to have about 3-0 in my rual area. depending on where i am compared to the nearest mast, there are some crasy mountains around here (norway you got to love the contry )

personaly i see this as a sr take on umts, you know the cell system that is supposed to bring dsl like connections to your phone. but then i have yet to read the book...

and snow_fox, the norwegian section to had a local guy write the stuff, namely deeweef

as for norway going belly up, with the direction the state is takeing right now and our reliance on oil income its not that hard to envision that happening, sadly...

I know the guy who did Denmark, so I recognized him. I didn't know who did Norway. I'm guessing Llorg didn't do the Sweden part?

With the exception Tir na Nog all countries are written by Europeans IIRC. And only Italy doesn't have a writer or contributor local to the country. For the SU adhoc wrote Denmark with Dutch_Dk contributing, I wrote the rest with the help of lorg, a Finn (don't know his dumpshock handle), audun, Synner and Tzeentch.

I was half joking about llorg but thant you. Maybe I should re look at the credits, I thought the SU only had two writers

Yes, only two writers, but with the others as contributors (proposing and working out ideas, and giving feedback on drafts etc)

Most countries had multiple non-author contributors (the guys are grouped in the credits), Scandinavia and France had the most. UK and Spain went through quite a few and though I make regular trips to Italy the past couple of years and I did the writing, quite a bit of groundwork was laid by natives Paolo Marcucci(ThatPaolo) and Paolo Falco. We also lost the Czech Republic and Swiss contributors early on and German authors Lars Blumenstein and Tobias Wolter and myself stepped in to the former while Lars handled the latter. Other than TNO and the Czech Rep, though all the other countries had some level of contributions from the locals and native writers.

...next time I'll just wait for Synner to answer...

No need, some of what went during the transition to Development easily slips the mind, especially when you have your hands full like you did Dag.

Recon Deeweef (Dag) already made it clear, but yes Snow I did. I wrote the outline and basic layout of the 'Sweden' part. Then it was fleshed out and finished in co-op with Dag and the others.

Just wanted to add my opinion regarding the chapter being a scandinavian myself..
Thumbs up on Denmark, Finland & Norway, all three were interesting chapters with plenty of interesting hooks and positive and negative spin.

But the spin on Sweden nearly made me loose my lunch, oh my god, the whole union chapter was laced with a extreme push of Sweden being the top dog in the Union, not only concerning politics etc., but for some unexplained reason it's a swede that is aiming to become the king of the vikings.... how does that fit the image of the oh so perfect & stable country??????? It doesn't it's just an example of the odd attitude in the chapter of putting Sweden in control of everything in the union, so very very sad...

The Sweden chapter must be regarded as being the most boring, unrealistic & bias chapter in the entire book, even topping switzerland in bias!! It's sad to see that it has to be so perfect in all aspect I mean it's one of the most advanced alternative clean energy producers in the world, it easily the healthiest and best run democracy in the Union, it population is a well-educated and politically smart. It has two of the three biggets corps in the Union. Stockholm is some sort of urban paradise, Gothenburg is the headquaters of the Union, a swede it the chief of the commission. NO space was used to show any negative aspects of the country not even in the commentaries except for one regarding Stockholm, at least we should have seen some more of those to give a more balanced view of the country!!!!!!!

Maybe the author of the chapter, who must have been a swede, should have gotten some critique on these aspects of the chapter, so that it didn't turn out to be such a bias chapter in the end, very very sad.............

Looks to me that Blue Eyes is Danish, and the two Danes in the SU group, adhoc and dutch_dk are the least 'to blame'. As audun is a Norwegian living in Denmark I can understand his confusion though.
I'm sorry that you didn't like the Swedish bit BE, but I can assure you that 'bias' had no effect on how it turned out. IMHO the whole SoE team was very cautious with that.
Actually, the mindset of the group would imply that countries that turned out being more dystopic (like Norway ) would be more affected by 'bias'.

To bad you didn't like it Blue Eyes, but I guess we can't please all and everyone.

Someone needs to nuke Denmark, before AH gets too much power...

But I wana do it now...Okay I will wait .

No, AH is Ancient History..he has a post on page 137 of SOE about Denmark...And thus I have to nuke him,before it is too late.

Well, AH is not even European, you'll have to nuke somewhere else if you really want to get rid of him (or are you talking about his SR alter ego?)

sorry double post

I found cool that Sweden looked like ending on top. But as always in shadowrun all is not what it seems. Use that and your imagination and you can get a long way.