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Old 11-08-2017, 03:45 PM   #131
Flyndaran
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Default Re: Centrum Light, Homeline Dark.

It means that no place is safer than any other on Homeline from sudden terroristic mass murder. While that may seem obvious to many real world cultures, it still sounds very alien to most Americans.
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Old 11-08-2017, 03:59 PM   #132
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Default Re: Centrum Light, Homeline Dark.

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Originally Posted by Flyndaran View Post
It means that no place is safer than any other on Homeline from sudden terroristic mass murder. While that may seem obvious to many real world cultures, it still sounds very alien to most Americans.
Having access to parachronics is more of a barrier than having access to airliners is on this Earth, I'd think.
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Old 11-08-2017, 04:06 PM   #133
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Default Re: Centrum Light, Homeline Dark.

And yet, the Swagmen apparently have regular access to conveyors.
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Old 11-08-2017, 04:50 PM   #134
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Having access to parachronics is more of a barrier than having access to airliners is on this Earth, I'd think.
Only because the setting specifically says on world bad guys always fail, despite swagmen and other criminal groups having little trouble.

And it only takes one conveyor to drop multiple bombs anywhere on a world. Planes tend to be obvious coming and going.
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Old 11-08-2017, 05:05 PM   #135
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Default Re: Centrum Light, Homeline Dark.

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And yet, the Swagmen apparently have regular access to conveyors.
Do they? Or could they be smuggling on commercial runs? This isn't rhetorical, I honestly don't remember.

Also wasn't there something about countries securing sites in strategic locations one jump away from Homeline? And doesn't Infinity strictly control projectors?
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Old 11-08-2017, 05:23 PM   #136
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Default Re: Centrum Light, Homeline Dark.

Well, crosstime terrorism may be like 9-11, an attack that only works once before society adjusts. Despite the arguable effectiveness of 9-11 (attacks against soft targets rarely hinder the military effectiveness of enemies), no one has successfully repeated 9-11 in 16 years. I imagine that it would only take one major crosstime incident for Homeline to make similar adjustments (like recruiting every available precognition psi from every world where psis exist).
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Old 11-08-2017, 06:02 PM   #137
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Default Re: Centrum Light, Homeline Dark.

One critical difference, I think, between crosstime crime and crosstime terrorism is that crime is relatively easy to piggyback on legitimate jumps - a swagman can hire onto a company doing bulk freight jumps, get off on the world they want, grab a few small-but-valuable items, and slip back with the next jump. It doesn't matter where exactly the jump comes out, so long as it's reasonably adjacent to something valuable and easily stolen. Whereas terrorism, it seems to me, is much more location-limited. Getting a bomb within two blocks of the Houses of Parliament does you little good if those two blocks are crawling with security - carrying that bomb from your home, through another world, and then back to Homeline might be easier than making the same journey through Homeline itself, but then again, it's easy to see many situations where it wouldn't - if the world is lower-tech in the bomb-detecting department than Homeline, it's probably also worse for transport tech for instance.

And let's remember that going to a place with a conveyor is not a simple matter of moving your conveyor to the corresponding location in another world and hitting a button. It requires custom coordinates for each set of physical locations and parachronic destinations. And coming up with a new set of coordinates requires 5-10 days of supercomputer time, with a hefty pricetag to boot (the book's a bit unclear if the $1 million - $20 million price is for just the supercomputer time required for one calculation, or the cost of the whole computer). Regardless, I can fairly easily see no terrorist group having the resources to calculate new jump coordinates for the tempting locations, and general security measures being taken by Infinity and others to not distribute coordinates for sensitive locations in any case. (See Conveyor Operation, p. B530, for reference for all this.)
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Old 11-10-2017, 05:21 PM   #138
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Default Re: Centrum Light, Homeline Dark.

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Originally Posted by Kelly Pedersen View Post
One critical difference, I think, between crosstime crime and crosstime terrorism is that crime is relatively easy to piggyback on legitimate jumps - a swagman can hire onto a company doing bulk freight jumps, get off on the world they want, grab a few small-but-valuable items, and slip back with the next jump.
...Which would make swagmen a minor problem, and mostly a concern to the customs branch. But anyhow, having finally laid hands on my copy of Infinite Worlds, I thought that I should check the canon position.

It turns out (p.71) that swagmen do operate that way a lot of the time, but they've also gained control of at least one conveyor, and "a book of coordinates". (One of the lesser issues with Infinite Worlds, actually, is that it makes crossworld travel actually quite tricky and chancy if the GM remembers to enforce the rules as written, while implicitly assuming in the flavour text that it's pretty safe if you just get the right coordinates.) Meanwhile, the Chicago Outfit and the Mafiya have gained access to crosstime travel by way of suborned commercial operations (p. 70), and the latter are recruiting out-time soldiers, while the Triads are running a veritable crosstime network, with several hijacked conveyors (p. 71).

So honestly, canonically, Infinity's control over conveyors isn't that great, though projectors are of course easier to restrict. Somebody sufficiently sneaky and ruthless, with reasonable illegal resources, can get hold of one, and can probably make it go to a known target world. People are doing exactly that.

As to whether there are, canonically, terrorists on Homeline who'd seek to abuse this possibility - yep, and there are at least seven "rogue states" supporting them (p. 44). Nor have parachronics exactly calmed one of our timeline's biggest sources of terrorist anger; see "Israel and the Alternity Exodus", p. 43. The book acknowledges that the I-Cops can't afford to fail even once in this regard, but doesn't address the question of how they've got to be so lucky so far.
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Old 11-10-2017, 10:07 PM   #139
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Default Re: Centrum Light, Homeline Dark.

I suppose a cross timer could ask a similar question about how we haven't use a nuke in war since WWII.
It would seem nearly impossible from outside, especially with how many have been lost over the decades.
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Old 11-11-2017, 09:50 PM   #140
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Default Re: Centrum Light, Homeline Dark.

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Both options seem to come with making IW significantly more grimdark than intended (the setting / campaign / game line in general, not just Infinity).
That's an issue with RPGs in general, though. Unlike a story with a single author who can skip over inconvenient implications, PCs have a tendency to do logical stuff with what the setting has available, and that means that if the logic of the setting tends toward 'nasty'', nasty starts to appear unless everybody is consciously trying to avoid it.
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