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Question about Emergency Farcaster and Communications jamming

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Masa Masa's picture
Question about Emergency Farcaster and Communications jamming
Hi wise and honorable posthumans. In my last game sesion the players were chasing a Les Ghoules leader. They located her in a isolated small habitat in Mars southern hemisphere. They settled some military grade jamming devices near the habittat, approached it and activated the jamming devices as they stormed in. A few minutes later they located their target and she used her emergency farcaster, burning her morph and egocastng hershelf to a secure haven. Sure? It was our second game session, and both me and the players were a bit lost in the setting. After the game we were not sure if the communications jammers can stop the Neutrino broadcaster. I supose that normal radio jammer can´t. But they were trying to block specifically ego casts. What happened, the criminal is now safe in a new habitat?, they jammed the cast and she "died" needing to use a backup?, or they have a copy of her ego? Thanks for your help guys.
Smokeskin Smokeskin's picture
Re: Question about Emergency Farcaster and Communications ...
Since a farcaster was used for encryption, they won't have a copy of her ego - the quantum cryptography is unbreakable. The rules clearly state that you can't block neutrino communications, and I believe this is the intent. Jamming doesn't exactly block the communications signals themselves, rather it puts out so many signals a receiver can't pick out the signal from the jamming noise. I don't see why you couldn't, with a sufficiently powerful neutrino jammer, put out so many neutrinoes that the receiver couldn't tell them apart. If there's a good scientific explanation for why you can or can't jam a neutrino signal this way, but I believe it is clearly not supposed to be possible. Bottom line is, if you as a GM want the signal to be jammed, but you should come up with a very good, one shot mechanism for it (experimental/TITAN/alien tech, unusually large power sources, the alignment was just so, etc.). If you don't want to stretch things for this encounter, then the criminal succesfully egocasted out.
Masa Masa's picture
Re: Question about Emergency Farcaster and Communications ...
Thank you for the fast reply Smokeskin. I just want to be fair with the players, they belived they had blocked all communications in the area, but you can´t win everytime. For future games I will rule that you need some class of battlecruiser equivalent system to jam neutrino communications.
Yerameyahu Yerameyahu's picture
Re: Question about Emergency Farcaster and Communications ...
AFAIK, there are no neutrino jammers in the game, anyway. So the players would have no basis for assuming they'd covered that; it's what neutrino comms are *specifically* for.