[Modern Firepower] Technothriller gear for secret DHS team in 2017

[Þorkell]

Originally Posted by Icelander

Well, I can find mentions of 'Nikkor 5x zoom lens' and 'AF-S VR Zoom Nikkor 24-120mm' lens as something that seems to be extremely widespread in federal law enforcement inventories 7-12 years ago.

A AF-S VR Zoom Nikkor 24-120mm would be a useful lens for shooting photos of someone in the same room. Incidentally it is a Nikon 5x (ish) zoom lens, since you know how many times 24 goes into 120.

Nikon has a fairly useful focal length simulator at http://imaging.nikon.com/lineup/lens/simulator/, just select the D7000 there (it's going to be under the DX format tag) and find the lens you're curious about in the lens menu.

Since we're in the same city I can show you my camera equipment so you get an idea of how big and heavy the stuff is, and how it can be used. Shoot me a line if that interests you.

[Þorkell]

Originally Posted by Icelander

So, I guess, would the DHS have long-range lenses for their crime scene cameras? Or can you use lenses on multiple models of camera?

Generally you can use all Nikon lenses (for some reason they're branded as Nikkor) on Nikon cameras, and all Canon lenses on Canon cameras. Though there was a major change in Canon lenses in the middle to late 1980s, so lenses from before that change don't fit cameras made after the change. There is also a slightly similar but not as serious age issue with Nikkor lenses.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Þorkell

Generally you can use all Nikon lenses (for some reason they're branded as Nikkor) on Nikon cameras, and all Canon lenses on Canon cameras. Though there was a major change in Canon lenses in the middle to late 1980s, so lenses from before that change don't fit cameras made after the change. There is also a slightly similar but not as serious age issue with Nikkor lenses.

Ok, so what are likely Nikon lenses that might have been bought by such agencies as the US Customs, US Secret Service or the Immigration and Naturalisation Service in 1996-2001 for various surveillance details, but are now relagated to being viewed as second-line equipment*, as remote cameras, drones and other higher tech solutions replace agents with long lenses for many surveillance tasks?

What do you need to control such a camera remotely, from a laptop or dedicated doohickey? If it's extremely expensive, O'Toole won't have it, but if it's affordable compared to the lenses or a better digital camera, he might. Especially if it is older gear that exists in storage and he can requisition.

What kind of Night Vision can you get in GURPS terms?

What else might make a decent camera a useful tool for an adventurer who might have to perform surveillance, investigation or collect various data that can be analysed by various Homeland Security computer programs?

Basically, as a CBP agent using high Administration, moderate Scrounging, a willingness to flat-out-lie on any requisition form and about $1,000 of his own money, what could Agent O'Toole have acquired to make his camera useful for adventuring purposes?

Note that O'Toole has spent all of his adult life preparing for this mission, i.e. making contact with Raul Vargas, whom he believes to be his father. His work for Customs and Border Protection, Homeland Security and the Onyx Rain task force was all designed to allow him access to secret files about Vargas and eventually, some way of finding him and talking to him. Which is precisely the mission he has now been assigned by his superiors, who are, of course, unaware of his ultimate goal and believe O'Toole to be a loyal government employee, if inexperienced as a field agent and perhaps not reliable in kinetic situations.

So the odds are that the character would have used every bit of his Administrative savvy to get extra stuff from the US government, if only because it's not clear at all what O'Toole intends to do after finding his father. Have a heart to heart? Fight him? Kill him? Join him to rule the galaxy as father and son? Play catch?

In any event, O'Toole may not come back to the US at all. He's probably already liquidated as much of his assets as he could and I imagine he wouldn't object to leaving with as much government property as possible, if he's going to be leaving at all.

*And thus available from stores with less hassle than the ultra-high-tech surveillance drones, camouflaged, smart IR or thermal cameras and other recently purchased surveillance equipment that O'Toole would really want.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by (E)

Depending on the type of desert dust can be a major issue with using a camera. The red dust in Aussie is especially bad, getting into unopened camera bags and every where else it isn't wanted.

Well, the closest desert that looks like an actual desert would be 'Los Medanos' or the Área Natural Protegida Médanos de Samalayuca. That's a federal protected area which contains some amazing sand dunes that, among other things, were used to film desert scenes in the Dune (1984) movie.

These are some 20-30 miles away from the ranch where the PCs are expected to stay, the Rancho Viejo. The most direct route to the closest store and gas station technically crosses some of the protected area, but the terrain looks more like this than the iconic dunes to the northwest.

The roads that the PCs* are worried about are mostly gravel. You can see the side of one typical road here. This is a road they can see from the ranch they'll be staying. This picture is taken from the 'road' that they'd take for a shortcut to the nearest gas station.

Most of the driving is liable to be on Mexico's federal highways 2 and 45. This is highway 2 entering the area of Guadaloupe, where the PCs hope to find the people they are expected to contact. Some street life from Guadaloupe Bravos, one of several tiny villages there.

Actually going off-road can quickly get pretty hairy, as you can see from aerial photos. Here is a picture looking toward the area where the PCs are. The villages of Guadaloupe and Barreales would be off to the far left and the Rancho Viejo, where the PCs are expected to stay, would be in off in the distance in the middle of the screen, to the right of the scary ridges. Basically, if you want to cross the scary ridges, you use a pass, which usually contains a goat track that the locals probably call a road.

The local elevation is 3,500'-5,000' in most areas. The scary ridges reach up to 5,700'+. The Rancho Viejo is at 4,100'.

This should give some background on the terrain, which might help savvy forumites give useful feedback on the Ford F-350 pick-up we'll be driving and what we want to take or avoid accessory-wise. We'll have larger, thicker tires that is useful for luxury trucks that only drive on good roads, but not quite monster truck level.

*Well, to be honest, only one PC seems to be worrying at all. The others seem pretty confident that they can just drive in and out by the highway, talk to the nice informants and arrange an incident-free meeting with the team of US Army Special Forces deserters and the murderous, crazy cartel boss where we convince them to accept conditional immunity in exchange for working for Onyx Rain.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by Icelander

Ok, so what are likely Nikon lenses that might have been bought by such agencies as the US Customs, US Secret Service or the Immigration and Naturalisation Service in 1996-2001 for various surveillance details, but are now relagated to being viewed as second-line equipment ...

Here's a list of all the Nikon lenses ever produced, with production dates. 500mm focal length gives you x15 magnification, 1000mm gives x30, 2000mm x60, and so on. Þorkell can probably translate the various series codes into their usability with the camera body in question - I'm not a Nikon expert.

[RogerBW]

Originally Posted by Icelander

What do you need to control such a camera remotely, from a laptop or dedicated doohickey? If it's extremely expensive, O'Toole won't have it, but if it's affordable compared to the lenses or a better digital camera, he might. Especially if it is older gear that exists in storage and he can requisition.

The remote control is pretty basic. It's mostly there to be a shutter button that doesn't shake the camera, or that you can trigger while the camera's pointing at you.

The camera can be controlled, I think fairly completely, via a USB cable or the add-on wireless network dongle, with appropriate software on a PC, but there's not a lot of reason to do this most of the time since you need to touch the camera to re-point it anyway. (Being clever about time-lapses, perhaps.)

This camera doesn't have the stacking features of some more recent ones (e.g. take multiple pictures at different focus or exposure settings, then combine them). You could do that in software, I guess.

http://cdn-10.nikon-cdn.com/pdf/manu..._ENnoprint.pdf is the manual.

[Kalzazz]

If you are putting oversize tires on your truck, need to see whether or not you can have a similarly oversized spare. The spare tire on the truck probably fits in a designated well under it, and you might not be able to fit a bigger spare there

You also might or might not be able to use the stock jack that comes with the truck when changing the tire

And local tire stores are much less likely to have matching tires if you are using a non stock size

Also, fun note, Ford trucks come with a 'spare tire key' used for releasing the spare tire, it is important to make sure you have that for the truck and the previous owner didn't lose it

[Þorkell]

Originally Posted by Icelander

Ok, so what are likely Nikon lenses that might have been bought by such agencies as the US Customs, US Secret Service or the Immigration and Naturalization Service in 1996-2001 for various surveillance details, but are now relegated to being viewed as second-line equipment*, as remote cameras, drones and other higher tech solutions replace agents with long lenses for many surveillance tasks?

Looking at the list johndallman posted a link to, and not really knowing what focal length of lens is useful for surveillance, I'd just pick something in a 200mm focal length or longer and go with that. The longer the focal length the further away the photographer can be but the lens gets bigger and heavier.

Originally Posted by Icelander

What do you need to control such a camera remotely, from a laptop or dedicated doohickey?

Depends on what you mean by control. I have a remote (like this, though this one is for Canon but the size and specs are the same) that cost about $80 that I can use to trigger my camera from 328' away (manufactures claim). You can also get slightly more expensive stuff, such as by PocketWizard, which I believe is the go to gadget used by sports photographers and other photographers that want to remotely trigger their cameras. Said doohickeys are small (fit in the palm of your hand), usually consist of two units one of which is attached to the camera and the other one is the unit with the button you push to trigger the camera.


As to Night Vision, I don't have a clue how to translate that from photography terms into GURPS. When I am taking photos in little or no light situations I use long exposures or a flash. Long exposures can take as fast as one second or as long as you have patience for, but the drawback is that the longer the exposure is you're not going to get anything that moves in focus. For example, these are all long exposures I've taken and you'll note that there aren't many clear photos of people in them.

Flash has the obvious drawbacks for surveillance.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Þorkell

Looking at the list johndallman posted a link to, and not really knowing what focal length of lens is useful for surveillance, I'd just pick something in a 200mm focal length or longer and go with that. The longer the focal length the further away the photographer can be but the lens gets bigger and heavier.

Yeah, you'd want some size that occupies a sweet spot between cost, bulk and effectiveness. As you inform me that the Nikon D7000 is a fairly modest camera in this gee-whiz future of ours, it probably wouldn't make sense to pair it with huge, enormously bulky lenses. At some point, that would begin to feel like putting a scope meant for the M82 on an MP5.

Unfortunately, I had expectations that digital night vision and telephoto magnification for cameras would be a lot cheaper and more effective than seems to be the case. GURPS High-Tech had put visions of cheap and light magnification into my head, as the TL6 'Telephoto Lens' on p. 43 is just $500 and weighs 8.5 lbs. for 30x magnification.

$12,000 and $16,000 are entirely out of the question, but it was plausible enough that O'Toole might be able to score a $500 piece of kit that transformed his modest crime scene camera into a long-range surveillance device.

Aren't there any modern telephoto lenses that are lighter and cheaper than the ones meant for artistic photography, but still work well enough for government purposes, i.e. long-range surveillance?

Originally Posted by Þorkell

Depends on what you mean by control. I have a remote (like this, though this one is for Canon but the size and specs are the same) that cost about $80 that I can use to trigger my camera from 328' away (manufactures claim). You can also get slightly more expensive stuff, such as by PocketWizard, which I believe is the go to gadget used by sports photographers and other photographers that want to remotely trigger their cameras. Said doohickeys are small (fit in the palm of your hand), usually consist of two units one of which is attached to the camera and the other one is the unit with the button you push to trigger the camera.

In my utter ignorance of how photography works, I used GURPS High-Tech. On HT p. 43, you can get an accessory called the 'Wireless Pan-Tilt-Zoom' that is TL8 and described as 'A motorized aiming system that's mounted on a tripod and operated by remote control'. It purports to cost $1,000 and weigh 3 lbs.

Naively, no doubt, I assumed that as modern DSLR cameras are video cameras as well, you could get one of these for them. As these have obvious functions for surveillance and aren't outrageously expensive, I figured that O'Toole might have a decent shot at having obtained one that could be used to transform what was issued as a crime scene camera into a remote surveillance camera.

Using some dongles and doohickeys, he might perhaps connect these to his laptop or the computer system in the truck and control the whole contraption remotely. That way, he could rig a camera to watch a given location from a camouflaged spot while being better hidden himself, entirely out of the line of sight.

Are there real accessories that could do this? Are any of them available at prices even close to what High-Tech proposes?

Originally Posted by Þorkell

As to Night Vision, I don't have a clue how to translate that from photography terms into GURPS. When I am taking photos in little or no light situations I use long exposures or a flash. Long exposures can take as fast as one second or as long as you have patience for, but the drawback is that the longer the exposure is you're not going to get anything that moves in focus. For example, these are all long exposures I've taken and you'll note that there aren't many clear photos of people in them.

Flash has the obvious drawbacks for surveillance.

Again, I'm going by GURPS High-Tech and enthusiastic ignorance, so it is entirely possible that I am communicating through my posterior. What I did was assume that modern, 21st century DSLR cameras tended to have the functions of video cameras as well. By the kind of metrics that manufacturers put up, Megapixels and what not, they even tend to be better than a lot of professional movie-making gear made between 1980-2000, at what GURPS still insists on calling the same TL8 that we are supposed to be stuck in.

Anyway, on HT p. 43, there is a 'Mini-DV Camera' that costs $500 and weighs 1 lbs. In GURPS terms, it is rated Night Vision 3 and Telescopic Vision 2.

I guess I assumed that you could get digital night vision for a DSLR camera for a more reasonable cost than you can get real night vision gear. Obviously, O'Toole first tried to get a pair of AN/PVS-7B NVGs, but Border Patrol makes heavy use of those and would use more if they could get them. So he couldn't get purpose-designed NVGs and would probably welcome even the comparatively smaller boost of NV 3 for his surveillance camera.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by RogerBW

The remote control is pretty basic. It's mostly there to be a shutter button that doesn't shake the camera, or that you can trigger while the camera's pointing at you.

The camera can be controlled, I think fairly completely, via a USB cable or the add-on wireless network dongle, with appropriate software on a PC, but there's not a lot of reason to do this most of the time since you need to touch the camera to re-point it anyway. (Being clever about time-lapses, perhaps.)

What about a powered tripod controlled through a laptop? Like the example I gave in the post above, on HT p. 43, the 'Wireless Pan-Tilt-Zoom'?

Originally Posted by RogerBW

This camera doesn't have the stacking features of some more recent ones (e.g. take multiple pictures at different focus or exposure settings, then combine them). You could do that in software, I guess.

If necessary, Agent O'Toole has Electronics Operation (Media) skill 14. He's a lot more used to working with photos and video feeds that are collected remotely than he is personally photographing things while physically present.

Originally Posted by RogerBW

http://cdn-10.nikon-cdn.com/pdf/manu..._ENnoprint.pdf is the manual.

Great, thanks.