[hobgoblin]

Shadowrun fans and writers needs to stop being afraid of Shadowrun's absurdities, and needs to embrace them once again.

This i can agree with. Like having a kraken snack on commuter cars as a "nuisance" rather then a catastrophe for instance?

[CanRay]

Yeah, a fleet of re-transmitter semi-trucks with Nexi-Trailers on the top of parkades and you got a limited Wireless Matrix System up and running again at a pretty cheap price and rapid speed.  Great selling point for MSPs.

[Crimsondude]

Semi-rig trains are the coolest. One of my favorite stories is about a land/t-bird pirate busting his cherry hijacking one.

[CanRay]

Modern Day Train Robbery.   

[Crimsondude]

Indeed.

Nothing like doing a backflip jump from the rear hatch of a LAV onto the top of a speeding rig going 200kph.

The heist crew of this particular pirate family (literally. His father was the pilot, mother is the navigator, brother now runs his own t-bird) topped themselves by doing a HAHO jump from a helium balloon hovering at over 100,000 feet AGL onto a cross-country zeppelin.

There should be links to both stories in my tumblr. If not, they'll be there by tomorrow.

[Darkeus]

I like to think it was several of the reasons already mentioned but also one other.

Extraterritoriality gave the large corporations free reign to delve into whatever tech they wanted, no more government restrictions.  To me, that explains the huge boom in medical science, neurological science, etc, since they could quickly proceed to human testing.  After all, Sim Sense, cyberware, etc, wouldn't have been possible so quickly without that.

They were free to explore areas that they couldn't before.  That said, they didn't have an unlimited budget for research, nor limitless personnel, innovators, etc.  The big corps would allocate their research in areas they deemed to be profitable.  So naturally the direction the tech developed was different as well.

So to me it went something like this:

• timeline diverges
• wireless being explored
• extraterritoriality comes into play
• advances that make simsense and VR possible occur, wireless continues to advance in the form of more capable cell phones that can use the internet (like today)
• the internet is replaced with the matrix, using simsense and VR as types of interface.  current cellphones can no longer work with the new standard and data requirements and cannot be used with the matrix
• wireless communications research is placed on the back burner as it doesn't seem profitable research at the time.  the research continues but at a much slower pace
• wireless tech advances enough to transmit the amount of data required by the matrix standard
• the size requirements of cyberdecks continues to decrease
• commlinks created in R&D, obvious potential for benefits and profits but cost of updating infrastructure to have wireless transmitters around will make it a hard sell.  expected slow integration and eventual replacement
• crash 2.0 occurs, heavy damage to current infrastructure
• a new infrastructure proposed, using wireless as a major component.  Spun to work on the fears after Crash 2.0 saying the widespread damage could not be duplicated with this system

That's pretty much how I see it.

That is also how I have pretty much imagined it.  It all comes down to what was cost effective to develop and use at the time.

That totally makes a lot of sense.

[Man Who Walks At Night]

From Corporate Shadowfiles, page 102.

>>>>>I Beg to differ, Hangfire. I can think of a fragsing good
reason for unwritten laws. Publicly declaring something illegal also
publicly declares that it's possible. To use a simple example:, no
law exists against breaking the speed of light because no one can
pull It off. Laws of nature see to that.
So think about this reason for unwritten laws. Everybody
knows about the: Crash of '29, right, Well, a lot of data got lost
when the computer systems went down, The viral code had a
weird propensity for encrypted data, which suggests It might well
have been a core-wars weapon gone haywire. Because of the
virus' preferred snacking pattern, the corps lost the data that they
considered the most Important and most sensitive. They lost stuff
on secret corp drawing boards before '29 that never reared it's
head afterward. Ten to one, some of that lost data probably had
enormous potential to destabilize the balance: of corp power, and
l"m sure most of the: megacorps prefer that It rernain lost. Secret
concords could make certain of that. Say the triple-A megacorps
all know that detalls on a particularly destabilizing technology
disappeared in the Crash. The court establishes a concord making
research Into that technology illegal so the major megacorps don 't
pursue It, and an Omega Order wipes out any minor corps that do.
Makes sense, doesn't it<<<<<
-Hersh (23:05:57/ 4- 17-54)

That's the reason I have always used.

The details are not so important, for some reason this stuff was considered highly dangerous after the crash of 29, and the corps stopped any research into wireless technologies. Now, some odd 40 years later, something changed this - Maybe Dunkelzahn's death had something to do with it

[CanRay]

The details are not so important, for some reason this stuff was considered highly dangerous after the crash of 29, and the corps stopped any research into wireless technologies. Now, some odd 40 years later, something changed this - Maybe Dunkelzahn's death had something to do with it

Considering some of the secret packages and files that went out to certain people, this is certainly a possibility.

Another one, Captain Chaos is trying to get out, and the Wireless Matrix is his attempt.