Cognisant
cackling in the trenches
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- Today 12:05 AM
- Joined
- Dec 12, 2009
- Messages
- 11,155
Set in a near future megacity, Tokyo is the obvious choice, various hacker groups compete for dominance in an invisible war fought every night on city streets, a war for control of the city's telecommunications infrastructure because in the hacker world he who controls the flow of data controls everything.
Cellular transmission/reception towers mark the boundaries of territory as they can be used to both jam and triangulate enemy transmissions, although in the underground honeycomb of subways the domination of the towers doesn't apply, there's no reception down there, only relatively obsolete hard lines.
Anonymity is an essential part of hacker culture, it's not legal after all, also using colours, insignias or whatever to signify affiliations is a tactical error, nobody else does it so if your guys do that just makes them easy targets, this also helps explain the significance of the towers. If a tower is captured all wireless transmissions in its range can be monitored, making it simple for the group that captured the tower to identify anyone still engaged in hacking activities, so they know who to go after but the people they're going after don't know who's coming for them.
That pretty much sums up the nature of information warfare, they've all got guns and fancy gadgets but those are useless if they can't communicate without giving their positions away to an enemy they can't even recognise. So the firefights really only occur underground or at night on the surface if someone's trying to sneak a wired connection through. The connection is essential, guys with guns and laptops can't take a tower by themselves, they need the number crunching power of a mainframe to defeat the tower's defences, and the mainframes could be anywhere in the world, what matters is establishing a direct connection, once that's established taking control of the tower can begin.
Key to doing this is a specific gadget, the tech gun, it's somewhere between an oversized revolver and a small grenade launcher, what it does is it fires modular electronic components that stick to what they hit. Individually these don't do much but if several are stuck in close proximity to each other they'll connect by very short range very high frequency radio, creating a functional cluster. The function of a cluster is determined by the components in it, for example a sensor and an explosive creates a simple mine, or if a transmitter is added instead it becomes a early warning device.
There's a wide range of different components but by far the most important are the transmitters and receivers, there's various types that work in various ways, some are more stealthy than others, and with them you can make a network of clusters linked up by relatively short range communication. So to capture the enemy tower you need to establish a connection from your base to their tower, which is easier said than done when they're looking for and destroying your clusters, although if your network has lots of clusters it becomes tricky to sever a connection once it's established.
Complicating factors is that your allies and enemies look the same, rather they're all different and can change their clothing/hairstyle during a game to their heart's content so keeping track of who your friends are and aren't without the enemy figuring out how you're doing it becomes a game in of itself. There's also components that for example enable someone to switch off a cluster based trap you've made in a corridor so they can pass safely through, assuming you've told them the password, and they're making traps of their own which they need to tell you about, so a lot of communication is necessary to work as a team, but you're building your communications network with these clusters and they can be hacked, and there's failsafe components to help prevent that.
I can imagine about halfway through a match a bunch of guys showing up in one room at once and trying to deduce who is on which team, even making deals with each other to exchange information because they all need it to avoid each other's traps but are unsure as to whether they're dealing with a friend or foe.
Cellular transmission/reception towers mark the boundaries of territory as they can be used to both jam and triangulate enemy transmissions, although in the underground honeycomb of subways the domination of the towers doesn't apply, there's no reception down there, only relatively obsolete hard lines.
Anonymity is an essential part of hacker culture, it's not legal after all, also using colours, insignias or whatever to signify affiliations is a tactical error, nobody else does it so if your guys do that just makes them easy targets, this also helps explain the significance of the towers. If a tower is captured all wireless transmissions in its range can be monitored, making it simple for the group that captured the tower to identify anyone still engaged in hacking activities, so they know who to go after but the people they're going after don't know who's coming for them.
That pretty much sums up the nature of information warfare, they've all got guns and fancy gadgets but those are useless if they can't communicate without giving their positions away to an enemy they can't even recognise. So the firefights really only occur underground or at night on the surface if someone's trying to sneak a wired connection through. The connection is essential, guys with guns and laptops can't take a tower by themselves, they need the number crunching power of a mainframe to defeat the tower's defences, and the mainframes could be anywhere in the world, what matters is establishing a direct connection, once that's established taking control of the tower can begin.
Key to doing this is a specific gadget, the tech gun, it's somewhere between an oversized revolver and a small grenade launcher, what it does is it fires modular electronic components that stick to what they hit. Individually these don't do much but if several are stuck in close proximity to each other they'll connect by very short range very high frequency radio, creating a functional cluster. The function of a cluster is determined by the components in it, for example a sensor and an explosive creates a simple mine, or if a transmitter is added instead it becomes a early warning device.
There's a wide range of different components but by far the most important are the transmitters and receivers, there's various types that work in various ways, some are more stealthy than others, and with them you can make a network of clusters linked up by relatively short range communication. So to capture the enemy tower you need to establish a connection from your base to their tower, which is easier said than done when they're looking for and destroying your clusters, although if your network has lots of clusters it becomes tricky to sever a connection once it's established.
Complicating factors is that your allies and enemies look the same, rather they're all different and can change their clothing/hairstyle during a game to their heart's content so keeping track of who your friends are and aren't without the enemy figuring out how you're doing it becomes a game in of itself. There's also components that for example enable someone to switch off a cluster based trap you've made in a corridor so they can pass safely through, assuming you've told them the password, and they're making traps of their own which they need to tell you about, so a lot of communication is necessary to work as a team, but you're building your communications network with these clusters and they can be hacked, and there's failsafe components to help prevent that.
I can imagine about halfway through a match a bunch of guys showing up in one room at once and trying to deduce who is on which team, even making deals with each other to exchange information because they all need it to avoid each other's traps but are unsure as to whether they're dealing with a friend or foe.
