Shadowrun
Shadowrun General => General Discussion => Topic started by: Wolfman on <04-15-11/1326:00>
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I really want to know... what do Commlinks look like. Especially the Fairlight Caliban. A picture or a drawing would be really cool...
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The best visual I had for a 'link is a smart phone + a set of sunglasses.
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The major thing I enjoy about the ebooks, they're firearm/vehicle/drone/gear porn! ;D
But, yes, I see them as smart phones as well, with various accessories that I like, such as bracer typepads.
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I remember seeing one in some artwork somewhere. Maybe the cover of Unwired on the dudes belt.
It kinda looked like a walkie talkie.
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Ok... I started working on a little something...
Now, what I need is to figure out the... "menu" portion...
Like Notepad has:
File/new/open/save/save as/
Edit/undo/cut/copy/paste
...And whatnot.
Now what would a Fairlight Caliban, decked out to the max with everything rat.6, look like "menu-wise" ?
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(http://i55.tinypic.com/sbpo4j.jpg)
Oh, you said Fairlight Caliban... my bad.
There really isn't much in the way of commlink art. You have two pictures of what I'm guessing are supposed to be commlinks on page 328 of SR4A (one looks like a walkie-talkie, one... like a scroll?) and a picture of what I think is a commlink on page 48 of Unwired. There is a whole lot of art that depicts what looks like wrist-mounted commlinks, but nothing specific. They're usually described as accessories that you can pretty much clip/wear anywhere... not like the hulking cyberdecks of old.
As to menus and such, that's all done in AR for the most part... hence all the Minority Report style data entry you see in the art. The operating systems can be assumed to be virtually idiot proof and very intuitive... so I don't think you'd be looking at a lot of menus.
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So a decker with a Custom OS on his commlink could have menus on it since he pretty much knows what he's doing, right?
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I don't even know if you'd need a custom OS, as I'm sure the UI of any given OS is very flexible. But if you're using a custom OS you can, of course, set it up however you want. Go wild!
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Any suggestion?
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Iconography is the term used as the "New Literacy" that most people have, with Shadowrunners being a strangely intelligent and literate percentile of the population due to their self-taught, DIY attitude.
Voice commands and typing, intuitive icons, simplistic controls, even clerks that "Type" for a living are likely to use a 'Trode or Datajack, and do so at the speed of thought. A lack of literacy is good for the Megacorporations. The less people think...
Well, I think we've all read the Shadowtalk.
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Makes sense en esti (pardon my french ;) )
Guess I'll go create some pretty little icons then :)
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Custom OSes will likely have written menus as well as icons. Stock OSes are more likely to have just Iconography.
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Closest picture I know of is the cover of the SR4 core rulebook (not the Anniversary). The dwarf hacker's holding a commlink and it looks kinda like a smartphone/pda.
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Also keep in mind that Sixth World computers are so complex that nodes have an entire sculpture and metaphor.
Instead of thinking like modern OS design, design a metaphor concept, like an old western or Wonderful Wizard of Oz with each of the icons representing programs and files. Even in AR, this is how people are able to interact with such massive amounts of data.
My hacker used The Great Gatsby, which was fun in Cybercombat.
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There's also the fact that there would be different cases for CommLinks, just like there's different cases for desktop and laptop computers today. Or even cell phones. Each one looking different.
Some look like beige boxes. Others look like something out of H.G. Wells' Opium Dreams. Some look like something that would give H.P. Lovecraft nightmares. Some look like (And possibly can) stop bullets.
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There's also the fact that there would be different cases for CommLinks, just like there's different cases for desktop and laptop computers today. Or even cell phones. Each one looking different.
Some look like beige boxes. Others look like something out of H.G. Wells' Opium Dreams. Some look like something that would give H.P. Lovecraft nightmares. Some look like (And possibly can) stop bullets.
And some look just like a couple of chips, since they are implanted and I don't think they're going to implant a complete phone, including casing, microphone and vibration. Imagine if you left it on vibrate before they implant it, talk about buggy ware. ;D
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It depends on where you implant it. ::)
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Art on Seattle 2072 pg. 98 has a pair of commlinks.
EDIT: spelling
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Art on Seattle 2072 pg. 98 has a pair of commlinks.
So that's how you stuff nuyen into a garter belt. I was wondering.
I figured it was just UCAS$5 bills myself...
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Do you ever wonder why cyber decks stayed roughly the same size for decades (roughly keyboard-sized) and suddenly shrunk to Pocket Secretary-sized, especially considering you would have been toting at least a backpacks worth (probably closer to a van full) of hardware upgrades to get to where they're at in 2070?
I understand the whole micronization with time issue, but it really wasn't represented... Suddenly *POOF* decks were 1/5 of the size and wireless, among other things. Would you think that with such a sudden jump in tech that mass implementation would still be an issue? New tech seems to be slow to get absorbed into the mainstream, there's usually a 10-20 year lag before major leaps in tech start to show up in the masses. People just naturally resist change.
Just some thoughts that have been lurking in the back of my mind since 4e emerged.
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The real world caught up and passed the tech they wanted to represent as "high tech?"
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Desktops haven't changed much in size since the "Old Days"... Yet laptops and PDAs/Smartphones are the sizes they are now. (Yes, there's "Shuttle Cases" now, but the Motherboard and accessories are still the norm for Desktops.).
I see the main reason for Cyberdecks not having to be smaller is the lack of a want for them to BE smaller. They weren't mass produced items like CommLinks are, where everyone would own one. They were either produced cheaply (Low-End Decks) or hand made (High-End Decks). They're the tools of professionals, ones that want to be able to work on the insides as much as possible as well as keep them portable. The Cyberdeck size is a perfect compromise of both of those items.
With CommLinks and wireless coming back after a long time away (I blame Crash 1.0 for that, BTW), the need for a smaller size and cheaper cost made development of them in such a way much more imperative. As components were already shrinking in size due to R&D, it was just a matter of gearing up the factories to get to work.
Don't forget, Cyberdecks HAD shrunk in size enough that you could get one implanted into your skull.
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Many of the AAA corporations have a vested interest in keeping things status quo and keeping technology out of the public domain.
Think of it like the electric car; we've known how to make one since the 70's, but are just now making them commercially available.
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Look at Ethanol. That's been know at least since Prohibition.
And while growing corn for it is a great way to get farmers involved (Always a good voting pool), any decaying matter that has sugar in it can be used.
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There's definitely a big divide between tech levels and production abilities between prior editions and 4e that wasn't explained. Lost tech is still lost tech and has to go through the same reintegration period when it's rediscovered. People are use to using what they have. It would be like switching back to the original keyboard setup instead of using the QWERTY setup (I can't think of the name at the moment). By all studies it's faster and we don't have to worry about jamming up our keyboards by typing too fast, but no one's using them... Change is slow and sometimes never happens! Roll-up keyboards have been around since the early 90's, but there isn't a demand for them. They've been using the tech more recently to make keyboards thinner.
You have to remember that people that wanted matrix access walked around carrying their phones, cyber decks, and all the other accessories they wanted. Now commlinks include the previous stuff, but also the equivalent of rc decks, signal boosters (previously a kilo per increase and requiring an external power source), satellite dishes, and a bunch of other things that were shrunk overnight into a single package that's phone sized. Don't get me wrong this new tech fixed some glaring gaming problems, but it really wasn't explained.
Compare the Fairlight Excalibur cyberdeck @ 1,500,000¥ vs the Fairlight Caliban commlink @ 8,000¥, 9,500¥ with the high-end stock OS, the low end mass-produced deck was still 14,000¥. If the Excalibur were still being sold a decade later I'd expect a lower price, but not that low, and the Caliban has all the perks of the older model plus all this new tech. There's a huge unexplained gap in production ability or so I would guess (and ¥ possibly appreciated a lot) for this package to be this small and this cheap.
You could insert a deck into your head at the cost of 1.9-3.5 essence, not including all the goodies you would normally tack on vs the 0.2 essence for a commlink (by those number the commlink is ~10-18 times smaller than a cyberdeck).
Electric and Ethanol aren't leaps forward in efficiency, new tech was explored and it benefited other fields more than the intended areas. Ethanol will always be the cheaper, less powerful little brother. Whereas electric isn't disposable or recyclable, isn't as safe, jaws of life can't be used on the car, you can be electrocuted more easily than you would think when under the hood, they have the nickname of 'road flares' because if something happens in the battery compartment the car will be a pile of molten slag in under two minutes (there are plenty of records of it happening in fender benders), and it has a larger footprint than petroleum based cars. They don't sell like they should to be sustainable in business models, they're purely a political statement (and manufacturers make their money back through political deals). The company that was selling the cool electric cars back in the 90's, they could do 200 MPH, went belly up before the turn of the millennium (they were all over Popular Science magazine back then).
There's a lot of factors involved and I would love for a multifaceted back story on how all this came to be... Or is this like when you turn on the new season of your favorite tv show to find the all the characters have different actors playing them and there's changes to the back story (previous seasons) to play to the new actors strengths...
I understand that the guys in charge of SR weren't necessarily the same group when 4e was being brewed... Are there any insights from the current El Jefe('s) on this topic?
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Corn is a poor producer of ethanol. Switchgrass would work much better, and can net more energy per acre than corn ever could.
Ethanol wasn't used back in the day because gasoline has a far greater energy density. Also, no one thought about pollution that much back then (a few did, but it wasn't in the public consciousness).
Electric vehicles haven't been used because of the whole energy density thing. Gasoline packed more punch back then, and still does. Electric cars are just now starting to come out for a few reasons:
1) Pollution. That whole carbon footprint thing. Electrically driven vehicles centralize energy production and allow for (potential) carbon capture at the source. This makes it attractive to those who are aware of the need to control pollution (which is a lot of people, now).
2) Energy density is climbing up and up for the battery in electric cars. Research has pushed this techology toward viability.
3) With a centralized power source, big corporations and governments can have greater control over citizens if the majority switch to electric. And, no, this isn't just from a Shadowrun point of view. IRL people think of these things. If I thought of it, you can bet someone with political or financial clout thought of it, too.
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There's definitely a big divide between tech levels and production abilities between prior editions and 4e that wasn't explained... <snip>
This is one of those situations that you just have to suspend belief and/or rationalize things. The technology side of Shadowrun is, after all, a lot more believable than a dragon waking up on Mt. Fuji and buzzing the Shinkansen.
If it helps you rationalize things, System Failure took place in 2063 and then you had a jump forward of, what, seven years? In real life, seven years ago the Nokia 1100 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_1100) was SOTA, the MQ-1 Predator was the envy of other armed forces, iPods looked like this (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ipod_backlight_transparent.png), and the world's first (legitimate) media downloading service was launched with the iTunes Music Store.
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I'll admit that it was a hard pill to swallow when 4e came out with how much they overhauled the system. It was a good change, mostly, but it feels like there's a missing decade somewhere. Maybe some awakened group grabbed it out of time to fuel a jumbo ritual or some weird initiate rite or maybe they just wiped it from people recollection... I'm reaching here, but those could lead into some interesting campaign leads and a big uncovering of the truth?!
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I just assume that since it's an alternate/parallel/fictional universe the technology will progress along different lines at different rates.