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Stupid bluebox hacks

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Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture
Stupid bluebox hacks
I ran my first gatecrashing adventure yesterday, and an interesting situation came up: The team had found a gate, a good connection, and needed to relocate to the other side. But they had just one bluebox gate interface to control the gate. Being a bit desperate they tried to see if it was possible to use the bluebox to open the gate, detach the box and still keep the gate open. When they removed the interface the gate wobbled in a frightening way (one engineer became convinced he had the solution for making a gravity wave gun - botches on theoretical physics are fun!) but held open for several minutes before disconnecting. They decided to evacuate this way. Everything went well until the last man through, the gatehacker himself, tried to detach the bluebox. Bloop - there went the gate connection. Worse, he managed to break the box. The remaining team on the other side had a fairly good gate hacker equipped with bush robot nanomanipulators, a lot of cognitive enhancements and a downloaded copy of the blue box operating system. He managed to open the gate *by hand*. Once this story gets out somebody is going to get more x-rep than you can shake a gate probe at. [ I decided that detaching the bluebox safely took an Interface (gate) test at -30 in order to keep the gate open. Each minute afterward I rolled 1d10 and the gate closed if a 1 came up. The character managed to roll a critical failure though, and I decided this broke the box. Running a gate "by hand" was largely a matter of *really hard* gate Interface rolls.] The team also tried to see if they could force an already connected gate to redirect to their gate ("gate hijacking"); they didn't succeed, and I have not decided if it could even in principle be done. But it is an intriguing possibility. Any other stupid or desperate gate hacking tricks?
Extropian
Unity Unity's picture
Re: Stupid bluebox hacks
How hard are we talking when it comes to the Interface roll??
Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture
Re: Stupid bluebox hacks
I was using a -50 modifier.
Extropian
Unity Unity's picture
Re: Stupid bluebox hacks
Truly massive x-rep right there. That is the sort of feat that, if you can prove it to have been done, would have pretty much everyone interested in understanding more about gate operations clamoring to get your attention and efforts. I'm sure Pathfinder or Gatekeeper or Terragenesis would love to make offers to know more.
Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture
Re: Stupid bluebox hacks
Unity wrote:
I'm sure Pathfinder or Gatekeeper or Terragenesis would love to make offers to know more.
Yup. And the PCs would *love* to boast. Except that they need to keep quiet or Proactionary will lose the chance to claim an entire gate nexus and a planetary supercomputer... assuming they can fix the pesky exhuman problem (there was a good reason for the desperate gate hacking). I will post a writeup of the setting later. In any case, blueboxes might allow a lot of other fun stuff. One PC is convinced gates can be used to produce gravity waves. After all, if an open gate is a wormhole we are talking about an equivalent mass-energy to Jupiter. He has seen one wobble violently, and thinks the right program might produce massive gravity waves. Definitely a "don't try this at home" experiment... if it fails too badly it might break the gate, the vicinity or make a black hole. Another idea: what about translating software to run on the gate femtomachines? It could be a really good computational medium. A Seed AGI might think this to be the ideal place to be. Or the exsurgent virus. Of course, something else might already be living there.
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Monican Monican's picture
Re: Stupid bluebox hacks
One thing I wondered about when my group was gate-hopping is how, exactly, we brought the blue box with us. I didn't think to question that until the campaign was over but now I assume the blue-box must keep the gate open for a moment after it's disconnected, otherwise we couldn't have brought it with us. I think there's even a story in Gatecrashing where the PCs are described as continuously going through new gates, using only their blue box.
CodeBreaker CodeBreaker's picture
Re: Stupid bluebox hacks
Monican wrote:
One thing I wondered about when my group was gate-hopping is how, exactly, we brought the blue box with us. I didn't think to question that until the campaign was over but now I assume the blue-box must keep the gate open for a moment after it's disconnected, otherwise we couldn't have brought it with us. I think there's even a story in Gatecrashing where the PCs are described as continuously going through new gates, using only their blue box.
It is never said that disconnecting a bluebox from a gate shuts down the connection, in fact it makes some sense that it would not. The bluebox might simply be a means of interfacing with an already existing control system built into the gates (They are in my universe). So disconnecting the bluebox just removes the teams ability to control the gate for a while, and it stays open until it shuts itself down or someone reconnects an interface and forces it shut (from either end). Or they might be pre-programming an automatic shut-down into the gate (144 of Gatecrashing) so that it closes itself after 5 minutes. It isn't really that much of an issue, there are mechanics and fluff that allow for it. ----- The only real bluebox shenanigan type thing I have done in one of my games is allowing the resident Psi async to force open a connection. In my universe the Exsurgent virus is actually an ETI sourced form of uplift. The intention is to infect species with Psi abilities, everything else (All the other effects are caused by the virus trying to work itself out properly). So in my universe it makes sense for asyncs to be able to control ETI devices. I added a new skill (Psi Interfacing) and just had him use that whenever a normal Interfacing/Programming roll is required. It went quite well.
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Gee4orce Gee4orce's picture
Re: Stupid bluebox hacks
That was a pretty brave bit of GM-ing ! Sounds like you ran the risk of marooning one of your PCs lightyears away from the others. Did you have a plan what to do if the characters weren't able to get the gate open again ? This is the sort of story that makes great reading, but is very hard to do in an RPG because you effectively need to run two groups separately. Imagine if the players opened the gate again only to find their compatriot missing - what do they do now ? Great story, but pretty hard to run it effectively if the other person is still sat at the table !
Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture
Re: Stupid bluebox hacks
Gee4orce wrote:
Did you have a plan what to do if the characters weren't able to get the gate open again ?
In my case the plan was to have him slowly eaten by exhumans ;-)
Quote:
This is the sort of story that makes great reading, but is very hard to do in an RPG because you effectively need to run two groups separately. Imagine if the players opened the gate again only to find their compatriot missing - what do they do now ? Great story, but pretty hard to run it effectively if the other person is still sat at the table !
Yes, splitting groups is a common headache. And mysteriously lost groups even more so. Right now I merely have the team split on different sides of the planet, with a wonky communications link in between. And some PCs might even be away in the solar system (I keep the positions of characters belonging to players not present a bit undefined in cases like this, allowing them to pop up where they make sense). Fortunately my players are good at remembering what their characters know and doesn't know, so I don't have to physically split the players.
Extropian
cenrae cenrae's picture
Re: Stupid bluebox hacks
Your team simply needed to preprogram the connection with a timer. See page 144 GC.
Axel the Chimeric Axel the Chimeric's picture
Re: Stupid bluebox hacks
One gatecrashing adventure I've been involved in had a rather odd twist. The four crashers ended up on a Dyson Sphere that had a single inhabitant: A super-powerful AI living inside a computronium shell that lined the insides of the sphere - a mind so large that it had a light-speed lag in its thought processes. As it turned out, the species that built the Dyson Sphere had long since moved on, and the AI was left behind. Now, it was lonely, and they were the first sentients to arrive in a long time. Aside from what was one of the most horrific incidents I've had occur in any game in recent memory when one of the Exhumans in the group was infested with nanites that acted as a mind-numbing, frenzy-inducing aphrodesiac (the AI wanted to... Speed up repopulation), it was quite amusing. After the AI reshaped the landscape to hide the Pandora Gate, the scientist in the group used a nanofabber to create rod of smart materials that resonated with the gate's unusual structure. The closer they were, the more it vibrated. Essentially, it was a Dowsing Rod that found Pandora Gates within a few hundred meters.
Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture
Re: Stupid bluebox hacks
Here is another fun trick the PCs learned the hard way from the Factors: turning gates into singularities. The PCs were fighting with the Factors through a gate (the Factors tried to open it to let through tentacle monsters, the PCs were trying to keep it locked - very Lovecraftian). They lost control long enough for the Factors to send a team over to reprogram the gate. The first sign that something was wrong was a wweeiirrdd distortion of space - a gravity wave. Then aannootthheerr one. They discovered that the factors had started a program that made the gate oscillate faster and faster and with stronger and stronger amplitude, producing noticeable gravity waves. Now, consider the spacetime curvature in a 2 meter diameter wormhole. That corresponds to the Schwartzschild radius of Jupiter - there is an enormous amount of mass-energy embodied in that field. Maybe Pandora gates are not true wormholes, but even a minuscule fraction of that energy would be enough to break up a planet. So a likely result of allowing this program to run to its conclusion would be to have the gate implode/explode in a way that at the very least ripped apart the planet with gravity waves, and quite likely left a gas-giant mass black hole on its surface. Bad. The PCs managed to stop the program and think they might even have a copy. Good that one of them leaked it to Firewall. Whether this scenario is actually possible or not is likely best left as a frightening possibility. Suddenly every single gate is a potential xrisk. Especially... remember that paragraph in Sunward discussing xrisks related to the sun? There is a Vulcanoid gate very close to it, and changing the orbit of an asteroid to become a sun-intersector and then activating the program is entirely doable...
Extropian
evapor8 evapor8's picture
Re: Stupid bluebox hacks

Strange. That idea made me think of a recent XKCD strip.

Axel the Chimeric Axel the Chimeric's picture
Re: Stupid bluebox hacks
I've suddenly got to ask: That guy who interfaced with the gate using the robo-fingers... Did he, by any chance, get infected with anything as a result? Any risk of alien programming infecting him? If he didn't, I can't imagine someone else isn't imagining it.
Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture
Re: Stupid bluebox hacks
Axel the Chimeric wrote:
I've suddenly got to ask: That guy who interfaced with the gate using the robo-fingers... Did he, by any chance, get infected with anything as a result? Any risk of alien programming infecting him? If he didn't, I can't imagine someone else isn't imagining it.
Nobody *noticed* anything...
Extropian
The Doctor The Doctor's picture
Re: Stupid bluebox hacks
Please tell me that, at some point the blue box played a couple of 2600Hz tones (I guess it would have been 2400Hz and 2040Hz simultaneously followed by a couple of pulses on your side of the pond) for the characters. :)
Re-Laborat Re-Laborat's picture
Re: Stupid bluebox hacks
The Doctor wrote:
Please tell me that, at some point the blue box played a couple of 2600Hz tones (I guess it would have been 2400Hz and 2040Hz simultaneously followed by a couple of pulses on your side of the pond) for the characters. :)
Heh. Showing the old dinosaur scales. Just so long as your blue box isn't making pink noise. That might be bad.
Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture
Re: Stupid bluebox hacks
"Did you get your bluebox in a cereal packet?"
Extropian
Xagroth Xagroth's picture
Re: Stupid bluebox hacks
Arenamontanus wrote:
"Did you get your bluebox in a cereal packet?"
"Why no sir! I got my whistle in Captain Crunch's cereal packet! I hand-made my bluebox after recording the whistle's notes!" XDDDDDD
Re-Laborat Re-Laborat's picture
Re: Stupid bluebox hacks
This, this is why I lurve this game so much. I swear, the PEOPLE it attracts... Ah, the good old days. ACOUSTIC couplers. Whistles. When you could cut yourself on the bleeding edge and your response was to go 'Ow.' and fetch your mill file and soldering iron.
The Doctor The Doctor's picture
Re: Stupid bluebox hacks
Arenamontanus wrote:
"Did you get your bluebox in a cereal packet?"
*laughter!* Well played, sir. Well played. That is two beers I owe you. ;)
CodeBreaker CodeBreaker's picture
Re: Stupid bluebox hacks
I have no idea what you people are talking about... I am going to guess it has something to do with the old phone system and the phreaker scene? There are a few words in there that I think I recognised? I suddenly feel very, very young :S Or wait... dial-up modems? Goddamnit... Sometimes I really wish I had been born a decade earlier. Then I remember I get the better odds on still being around when the singularity goes through :D Edit: Yay Google. The power of the internet is edumacating me.
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Re-Laborat Re-Laborat's picture
Re: Stupid bluebox hacks
CodeBreaker wrote:
Edit: Yay Google. The power of the internet is edumacating me.
Excellent work, young grasshopper. It you haven't yet, google for "whistle," "phreak," and "Captain Crunch." That's not just a "serial" packet pun!
Xagroth Xagroth's picture
Re: Stupid bluebox hacks
Re-Laborat wrote:
This, this is why I lurve this game so much. I swear, the PEOPLE it attracts...
I'm from Spain and 28 years old... so it's not that I lived it in the first line, but rather I got wind of the things after it all ended... But yeah, merely knowing that makes me a "rara avis" indeed XD
weaver95 weaver95's picture
Re: Stupid bluebox hacks
i'm disturbed that I actually got that reference...