Cyberpunk Fantasy Heartbreaker: Magic and Technology

Endovior · Post by **Endovior** » Sun Jul 31, 2011 11:21 pm

Vebyast wrote:
Endovior wrote:In 2070, we don't even have fast STL travel.
Yes. I agree with that. It's no longer a major problem as far as the game is concerned. It's just that we absolutely need technobabble for this situation and it would be a shame if the technobabble here was distinctly lower-quality than the rest of the technobabble. People are also confused about it and asking for help, and providing a definitive answer will hopefully end that conversation.

I do think we need an explanation of why it doesn't work, though, just so people don't wonder why the space agencies haven't even attempted to build a super-voyager. Even a quarter-second of time travel would be enough to, say, blow explosive bolts on every internet connection you own before an attacker sends "rm -rf /" to your root server.

This is very true. Once we've thrown out locality, you don't even need magic to do this; you can accomplish the same thing with a probe that contains nothing but piles of qbits which you fire out of the system on an oblique trajectory at as high a speed as you can manage. That's cheap enough to be very worth doing, even for microsecond-level rewards; after all, a big quantum computer could do a lot with microsecond-level warnings from the future. Accordingly, no amount of time-traveling information is permissible, and we need a statement that it definitively doesn't work, which explains it at least well enough to say "this is an unsolved problem in physics, and scientists have multiple unsatisfactory competing theories as to why it is this way".

jadagul · Post by **jadagul** » Mon Aug 01, 2011 3:27 am

Endovior and zeruslord: I'm pretty sure I've decided my objection is irrelevant at best. Relativity is weird.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Mon Aug 01, 2011 10:21 am

name_here wrote:I've never really seen a clear explanation for how sending information faster than light violates causality. Specifically, I've never seen an answer to why it doesn't work like this:

1. Alice sends an FTL message to Bob.
2. Bob receives the message and sends a reply.
3. Alice receives the reply

OK, here's the super short version:

When I go really fast, I have experienced less time than other people. "Now" for me is simply less minutes than it is for other people. So if I send a message five minutes into my trip, it will be some greater number of minutes into the trip for an outside observer if I send it relativistically. If I send it non-relativistically, it will be five minutes into the trip for them too, but they won't have seen me go five minutes of distance yet. If they can respond to the message in a relativistic way, it will then arrive based on the amount of time they see me having undergone. I will have in essence sent that message into my own past by sending it to someone who is traveling through time more quickly than I am.

Now here's the part where it doesn't make any fucking difference at all: in order to get that effect, I have to go super fast so that I can bounce a non-relativistic message to someone going faster through time enough that they can then send a relatisitic reply back to me so that I receive the "reply" before I send the initial message. And by super fast, I mean literally dozens of times faster than anything in the setting is posited as traveling for years at time in order to get time blips of a few seconds.

jadagul's description of 1 light minute of distance creating 1 minute of time travel is just factually wrong. The time travel that relativistic interactions cause are actually really small and we need atomic clocks in order to measure them.

-Username17

Vebyast · Post by **Vebyast** » Mon Aug 01, 2011 3:13 pm

FrankTrollman wrote:The time travel that relativistic interactions cause are actually really small and we need atomic clocks in order to measure them.

You can get about 100 nanoseconds of kinematic time dilation with nothing more than a commercial airliner. My computer runs about 1000 instructions in that time; a specially-designed system talking to an ansible in Mars or Jupiter orbit would have more than enough time to break everything in half. Computers are fast.

Anyway, I like a simple solution: if you try time travel of any sort, it mysteriously fails. Every. Single. Time. Even if you've used your system a million times without a single error, as soon as you attempt to send information back in time it will fail in the least believable way possible. The guy next door randomly flubs a cast and it turns into Dispel Magic, you get a note from the future saying "Do not mess with time", a cosmic ray flips a bit and your computer crashes, it turns out that a pigeon flew into your power supply yesterday and it fails right as you're about to start, that sort of thing.

sabs · Post by **sabs** » Mon Aug 01, 2011 3:15 pm

Time is a Frigid Bitch who doesn't like to be played with.

virgil · Post by **virgil** » Mon Aug 01, 2011 3:49 pm

If the ritual has the intended message determined at the start and takes a long time to complete, it will make the debate just that in the setting, a debate. As Frank pointed out, you need to have a frame of reference that's moving fast in relation to us in order to take advantage of this, and it needs to be big enough for either another mage to sit to receive and send a message back, or at minimum big enough for the mage to scry at it and get a functional message.

Endovior · Post by **Endovior** » Mon Aug 01, 2011 5:21 pm

Vebyast wrote:
FrankTrollman wrote:The time travel that relativistic interactions cause are actually really small and we need atomic clocks in order to measure them.
You can get about 100 nanoseconds of kinematic time dilation with nothing more than a commercial airliner. My computer runs about 1000 instructions in that time; a specially-designed system talking to an ansible in Mars or Jupiter orbit would have more than enough time to break everything in half. Computers are fast.

This. Seriously, Frank, we have quantum computers, which are inordinately fast, and we have space probes. Tiny fractions of seconds of time travel are easily possible with the technology posited in the setting, and a HUGE deal, especially when people do the sensible thing and use quantum communicators to take advantage of it, instead of magic with it's built-in five minute delay. If you don't want it to happen, it doesn't have to happen. But since this is a game that will be played mostly by geeks, who tend to have at least some understanding of science, you do need at least a sidebar floating around somewhere explaining "no, you can't actually do that", and give a reason why that's better then "the effect is trivial", because the effect actually isn't nearly trivial enough to be irrelevant to the setting.

RiotGearEpsilon · Post by **RiotGearEpsilon** » Mon Aug 01, 2011 5:43 pm

Serious question: Why do we need or want FTL magic? At all? In all this arguing I've lost track of what the actual advantage is.

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Mon Aug 01, 2011 6:05 pm

it's magic.
the casting takes time
the ritual takes time
the effect after casting/ritual is instant.
range is limited to some kilometers i think?

tzor · Post by **tzor** » Mon Aug 01, 2011 6:20 pm

First and foremost, before we start to rip to shreads the faric of space time for a simple god damn gimic, let's see what it is we are trying so desperately to change.

Distance from Earth to Mars (the mileage may vary because we are both IN ORBIT ABOUND THE SUN) is between 3:17 light minutes and 5:24 light minutes. Now if you are talking about Jupiter (30 light minutes) or Saturn (1 light hour) you may have a compelling interest in this technology.

P.S. I believe the commercial airliner is mostly gravatational time dilation, not velocity based dialation. It would be therefore much more than the earth mars link since mars has its own gravity well.

Gravitational time dilation has been experimentally measured using atomic clocks on airplanes. The clocks aboard the airplanes were slightly faster with respect to clocks on the ground. The effect is significant enough that the Global Positioning System's artificial satellites need to have their clocks corrected.

Back to the original though. I don't think it's worth the effort to develop FTC comm for earth/mars. The moon is only 1.5 light seconds; you can really develop a crappy telepresence there.

Lokathor · Post by **Lokathor** » Mon Aug 01, 2011 6:24 pm

On the subject of Software Is Dead I'd like to point out that we already have the tools available in the modern age to have things be like it's proposed (specialized carts running specialized programs), but we don't have things like that because:

It's a fucking bother to carry around a ton of carts. Anyone with a gameboy can tell you that and they've probably got like 8 to 10 games they picked up over the years. More programs than that are initialized just to startup my laptop. I've got more game than that that I don't ever play on Steam just from getting bundle packs from time to time. If it's supposedly that all software on your Anchor is run on special lighters you'd seriously end up with a bag of lighters in your back pocket, and that's stupid.
Limits on how many programs you can physically stick onto the side of your Anchor at the same time would mean that either a person is constantly swapping out programs to switch to the program they want to use as the situation changes around them or that the programs would have to be stupidly versatile to handle all sorts of situations. In a modern computer, you've got a web browser which plays media files using external programs you've already set up; in Asymmetric Threat every browser would need it's own media player with all it's own codecs, for example. That's also stupid.

So, while the battle hackers might need every inch of speed they can get on Blackhammer and Icebreaker and other such programs, and while the limitations of a cyberware might make it practical for it to have 99% of its programming in firmware, the average wageslave in the average parts of the world would still be using software on generic processors because they don't need that speed, they just need the utility of having all their programs accessible at the same time. Why isn't piracy rampant? Because many things are Network services which you can't pirate, and because when you treat your users well enough they won't pirate things in the first place. Well, some people will always pirate things juts to do it, but most won't once the price is low enough compared to the value of the thing they're buying.

CatharzGodfoot · Post by **CatharzGodfoot** » Mon Aug 01, 2011 6:58 pm

Thank you.

Murtak · Post by **Murtak** » Mon Aug 01, 2011 9:11 pm

Lokathor wrote:

It's a fucking bother to carry around a ton of carts. Anyone with a gameboy can tell you that and they've probably got like 8 to 10 games they picked up over the years. More programs than that are initialized just to startup my laptop. I've got more game than that that I don't ever play on Steam just from getting bundle packs from time to time. If it's supposedly that all software on your Anchor is run on special lighters you'd seriously end up with a bag of lighters in your back pocket, and that's stupid.

Limits on how many programs you can physically stick onto the side of your Anchor at the same time would mean that either a person is constantly swapping out programs to switch to the program they want to use as the situation changes around them or that the programs would have to be stupidly versatile to handle all sorts of situations. In a modern computer, you've got a web browser which plays media files using external programs you've already set up; in Asymmetric Threat every browser would need it's own media player with all it's own codecs, for example. That's also stupid.

I suppose it is necessary to spell it out:
Obviously you'd only use hardware on performance-critical applications or applications that you want to be hard(er) to counterfeit. A web browser is neither. However most programs you can buy in games like Shadowrun or Cyberpunk are. As are virtual drugs. Or, perhaps most importantly, ice. Sure, most runners will never buy ice. But thousands of corporations will, and what they do shapes the world. As ice is definitely not streamable it will need to be run on a corporations servers or be it's own hardware. Either way it will be under the physical control of the corporation running it. And physical control + software = unlimited copies. And unlike today, you don't even have legal recourse, what with a fragmented world and extraterritorial rights.

That leaves you with four possibilities:
1. Everyone programs their own ice.
2. Ice is open source software.
3. Ice is hardware.
4. Ice requires special hardware to run, which you have to buy from the vendor.

1 and 2 are bullshit and 3 and 4 are virtually identical for our purposes. Ergo: Ice is hardware. Similar reasoning applies to all hacking programs, except on a smaller scale. As far as I can tell, if you want companies that are famous for producing ice, if you want fixers dealing in specialized icebreakers, if you want chipheads burning out their brains on the street - then important programs need to be hardware.

Lokathor · Post by **Lokathor** » Tue Aug 02, 2011 12:51 am

Everyone should be running their own ice on their own anchor. Corps should also be running their advanced Ice on designated firewall systems.

I think it's reasonable to say that the first four points of Ice (assuming a standard 1 - 6 [9] rating system) are available as open source software (Soft Ice) Beyond that, the software limitations become a nuisance to Ice operations and you need to run your Ice on designated hardware (Hard Ice).

The common person will use Ice to keep their money from being stolen and their brain free-enough of ads, but that's all they'll be able to do.

fectin · Post by **fectin** » Tue Aug 02, 2011 1:53 am

It's a pretty big jump from "hardware firewalls are better" to "there is no software".

Draco_Argentum · Post by **Draco_Argentum** » Tue Aug 02, 2011 9:50 am

No software we care about. The game shouldn't be tracking office productivity applications because we don't care. OTOH we do want hackers to buy expensive illegal software. Pretending that hackers won't just pirate anything hackable is retarded and the hardware implementation cuts that out nicely.

Murtak · Post by **Murtak** » Tue Aug 02, 2011 10:11 am

Draco_Argentum wrote:No software we care about. The game shouldn't be tracking office productivity applications because we don't care. OTOH we do want hackers to buy expensive illegal software. Pretending that hackers won't just pirate anything hackable is retarded and the hardware implementation cuts that out nicely.

Precisely. Also it gets them to solder their illegal icebreakers in the basements. Or it gets some other freak to solder the extra-special +2 to against Fuchi ice chips. Either way you get an underground trade in illegal chips, which is pretty much a cyberpunk staple.

RiotGearEpsilon · Post by **RiotGearEpsilon** » Tue Aug 02, 2011 3:13 pm

"No software we care about" is probably a good approach. The closest things to 'software' that matter for real-time hackers are field-programmable gate arrays with configurations stored in RAM, or something like that. But consumer toys and equipment - media editing and playback, casual network access, games - are all still software.

Lokathor · Post by **Lokathor** » Tue Aug 02, 2011 6:34 pm

http://www.ted.com/talks/harald_haas_wi ... _bulb.html

I think incorporating more wild and crazy sounding technology into things, even if we don't have modern hints at it, helps get people into the feel of "this is the future; the future is weird".

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Tue Aug 02, 2011 9:44 pm

The question of what is "gained" by having instant communication is a good one. As I see it, you gain several things that are really important:

Special Communication Rooms. Plus they get to b decked out in baroque magitech accouterments. You have a reason to "go to the com tower" rather than just having your sat phone send slow ass messages through a relay.
Not having to check a fucking calendar. The signal delay for speed of light bullshit to Mars varies by 14 minutes based on the time of year. That is bullshit, and I don't want to have to figure out what part of the Martian Year it is in the middle of a game. Having distance independent communication be the standard lets us avoid that incredibly annoying issue.

As for sending a messag a whole microsecond back in time: so fucking what? The amount of calculations a computer can do in that time doesn't mean shit, because the actual issue is signal transduction speeds. And those aren't anywhere near that fast. Your eye has a 30,000 microsecond delay between signal pulses. Fucking photons take 67,000 microseconds to get through fiberoptic cables to get around the planet.

Getting information to go backwards in time isn't functionally different from just "going faster" unless and until you can send it far enough back in time that you can transcribe it and then process it and then act on it. And that's simply not an issue - yet - for the proposed civilization.

-Username17

Chamomile · Post by **Chamomile** » Tue Aug 02, 2011 9:48 pm

Having there be a time delay for communications between Earth and Mars actually seems like it would be interesting. It also seems like the kind of thing you could put into a chart. If you don't know the current date, roll for it.

Endovior · Post by **Endovior** » Tue Aug 02, 2011 10:05 pm

FrankTrollman wrote:The question of what is "gained" by having instant communication is a good one. As I see it, you gain several things that are really important:
Special Communication Rooms. Plus they get to b decked out in baroque magitech accouterments. You have a reason to "go to the com tower" rather than just having your sat phone send slow ass messages through a relay.

Not having to check a fucking calendar. The signal delay for speed of light bullshit to Mars varies by 14 minutes based on the time of year. That is bullshit, and I don't want to have to figure out what part of the Martian Year it is in the middle of a game. Having distance independent communication be the standard lets us avoid that incredibly annoying issue.
As for sending a messag a whole microsecond back in time: so fucking what? The amount of calculations a computer can do in that time doesn't mean shit, because the actual issue is signal transduction speeds. And those aren't anywhere near that fast. Your eye has a 30,000 microsecond delay between signal pulses. Fucking photons take 67,000 microseconds to get through fiberoptic cables to get around the planet.

Getting information to go backwards in time isn't functionally different from just "going faster" unless and until you can send it far enough back in time that you can transcribe it and then process it and then act on it. And that's simply not an issue - yet - for the proposed civilization.

-Username17

Uh... Quantum Computers. We've transcended mere optical computing some time ago, so microseconds actually are relevant. And appropriately fast qbit-bearing space probes can get you notably better then a mere microsecond... some quick math suggests that millisecond transmissions are feasible, which is a good long space of time for a quantum computer. Now, if you want to model that simply as 'the biggest megacorps have defenses so good, they're reacting to your attack an instant before you make it, that's fine. But it is notable that they have that kind of thing.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Tue Aug 02, 2011 10:09 pm

Endovior wrote:
FrankTrollman wrote:The question of what is "gained" by having instant communication is a good one. As I see it, you gain several things that are really important:
Special Communication Rooms. Plus they get to b decked out in baroque magitech accouterments. You have a reason to "go to the com tower" rather than just having your sat phone send slow ass messages through a relay.

Not having to check a fucking calendar. The signal delay for speed of light bullshit to Mars varies by 14 minutes based on the time of year. That is bullshit, and I don't want to have to figure out what part of the Martian Year it is in the middle of a game. Having distance independent communication be the standard lets us avoid that incredibly annoying issue.
As for sending a messag a whole microsecond back in time: so fucking what? The amount of calculations a computer can do in that time doesn't mean shit, because the actual issue is signal transduction speeds. And those aren't anywhere near that fast. Your eye has a 30,000 microsecond delay between signal pulses. Fucking photons take 67,000 microseconds to get through fiberoptic cables to get around the planet.

Getting information to go backwards in time isn't functionally different from just "going faster" unless and until you can send it far enough back in time that you can transcribe it and then process it and then act on it. And that's simply not an issue - yet - for the proposed civilization.

-Username17
Uh... Quantum Computers. We've transcended mere optical computing some time ago, so microseconds actually are relevant. And appropriately fast qbit-bearing space probes can get you notably better then a mere microsecond... some quick math suggests that millisecond transmissions are feasible, which is a good long space of time for a quantum computer. Now, if you want to model that simply as 'the biggest megacorps have defenses so good, they're reacting to your attack an instant before you make it, that's fine. But it is notable that they have that kind of thing.

SO FUCKING WHAT?

It doesn't matter how fast your computer is. It matters how fast you can input a message into it. And Quantum Computers are slower than optical computers on that score.

-Username17

Endovior · Post by **Endovior** » Tue Aug 02, 2011 10:18 pm

FrankTrollman wrote:
Endovior wrote:
FrankTrollman wrote:The question of what is "gained" by having instant communication is a good one. As I see it, you gain several things that are really important:
Special Communication Rooms. Plus they get to b decked out in baroque magitech accouterments. You have a reason to "go to the com tower" rather than just having your sat phone send slow ass messages through a relay.

Not having to check a fucking calendar. The signal delay for speed of light bullshit to Mars varies by 14 minutes based on the time of year. That is bullshit, and I don't want to have to figure out what part of the Martian Year it is in the middle of a game. Having distance independent communication be the standard lets us avoid that incredibly annoying issue.
As for sending a messag a whole microsecond back in time: so fucking what? The amount of calculations a computer can do in that time doesn't mean shit, because the actual issue is signal transduction speeds. And those aren't anywhere near that fast. Your eye has a 30,000 microsecond delay between signal pulses. Fucking photons take 67,000 microseconds to get through fiberoptic cables to get around the planet.

Getting information to go backwards in time isn't functionally different from just "going faster" unless and until you can send it far enough back in time that you can transcribe it and then process it and then act on it. And that's simply not an issue - yet - for the proposed civilization.

-Username17
Uh... Quantum Computers. We've transcended mere optical computing some time ago, so microseconds actually are relevant. And appropriately fast qbit-bearing space probes can get you notably better then a mere microsecond... some quick math suggests that millisecond transmissions are feasible, which is a good long space of time for a quantum computer. Now, if you want to model that simply as 'the biggest megacorps have defenses so good, they're reacting to your attack an instant before you make it, that's fine. But it is notable that they have that kind of thing.
SO FUCKING WHAT?

It doesn't matter how fast your computer is. It matters how fast you can input a message into it. And Quantum Computers are slower than optical computers on that score.

-Username17

That's irrelevant for our purposes; it's not like a human operator is going to be hemming and hawing over whether or not to send messages back in time. It works like this; in certain extremely time-critical applications (like defense of key systems), you can just tell a quantum computer to automatically send itself messages back in time as needed, and it will do so, generating an essentially automatic boost to reaction times without the necessity of slow manual output. In game terms, it means little but "some megacorp systems have program ratings slightly higher then the normal rules allow, because they've been designed to exploit time travel to gain slight speed advantages over even other quantum computers", but including a mention that this is the absolute pinnacle of time traveling information silences any questions had by others trying to replicate the trick.

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Tue Aug 02, 2011 10:24 pm

Didn't scientist just figure out that NOTHING is faster than light?
And why are we getting so hung up on this tiny little issue which, in actual play, probably even WON'T BE AN ISSUE, because most stuff players are interested in doing usually isn't further away than the other end of the city . .
and usually involves killing shit in interesting new ways or with the biggest boom available anyway . .