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Originally Posted by Seneschal
To reinforce the core premise of the setting, any upstart blueprint/media IP holder will run into two problems - most "plain, generic" stuff exists in public domain, and if they undercut the main IP holder with cheap trendy designs, they'll be bought and dissolved by the monopoly.
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Ergo, go for non-publicly-traded corporations if you're an upstart. SJG isn't publicly traded, as far as I can tell, for the closest example.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Seneschal
The setting would have to be really connected (or really tiny) for the "trendiness" to be so urgent and profitable. Might also come across slightly comical - "We're live. We need to sell a million copies in the next 2 hours before the price drops. If any pirates crack our system before then, our profit margin is ruined!"
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What's wrong with the same 'trend shockwaves' happening all over again in a different solar system two weeks later?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Seneschal
My initial idea is was to have one big triple-star system (colonized slower-than-light quite a while ago), but the players requested something bigger and interstellar. To take advantage of that, I thought I'd make use a few other reviled corporate practice: regional locks and forced exclusivity! Different systems, or even different parts of a single system, would get their latest IP at different times and at different costs, maybe even modified and tuned just for the audience in that system (possibly in concert with the local authorities).
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The question is would this be
profitable for them? At some level of control, the expenses for draconian measures will be greater than the profits from cutting down on movement of commercially-sold information.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Seneschal
Undoubtedly, but if 90% of the nanofacs are made by the same company that holds 90% of the blueprint rights, they'll tie the two together. You won't be able to print one of their super-trendy guns on just any fabricator, you'll need their fabricator. And if you stick to open-source hardware, you only have access to 10% of the available technologies, with all the unpolished unintuitiveness that comes with open source design.
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10% of the
new-and-trendy technologies. There's still the issue of generics/public-domain stuff being less cool but
much more cost-efficient. This is an interesting dynamic in that it means that (a) you have to work really hard for a minuscule improvement, and there are rapid diminishing returns and (b) this makes the open-source armies/mercs/pirates quite competitive with the cutting-edge corporate armies/mercs/goons.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Seneschal
True, intercepting signals seems like something that won't crop up for the PCs, but is probably useful as a setting assumption - it will force sensitive information transfer to be physical, which enables many heist-movie plots.
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Key movement will be physical. Or they will be sent between secure stations using quantum comms (obviously this doesn't work where a laser comm doesn't work). The keys will be long - long enough to prevent decryption for a year on a cluster taking much if not more than a planet's processing power. If a key is stolen, all stations will instantly cease using it (or its public pair) for encryption. And the valuable info will be sent encrypted, just like that.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Seneschal
Actually, all of this sounds great - moles, contacts, blackmail, hacking, surveillance, and social engineering will be vital in the preparatory phase of the data-theft. The current party makeup seems well-suited for this: a Buddhist monk/AI programmer, a glitzy socialite memeticist, and a extroverted, internet-famous vlogger.
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The important point is that you can't afford to let victims know their security has been compromised. As soon as they do, the operation becomes pretty much doomed.