New Reality Seeds

[Prince Charon]

Originally Posted by PTTG

When did the LAPD get a conveyor?

Originally Posted by Drifter

I'd like to know that too :)

Same. Also why. I mean, if criminal kingpins have them (and they do), I can see major police departments maybe wanting them, but there's a jurisdictional issue, here. Then again, the NYPD has spies in other countries in real life...

[Drifter]

Originally Posted by Prince Charon

Same. Also why. I mean, if criminal kingpins have them (and they do), I can see major police departments maybe wanting them, but there's a jurisdictional issue, here. Then again, the NYPD has spies in other countries in real life...

Its a scenario that writes itself. Any city can have a crime syndicate gain control of a conveyor and set up drug labs or import sex workers from other timelines. The LAPD might even be fighting cyborgs used as muscle by the gangs from some failed (or not all that failed) Reign of Steel parallel.

[patchwork]

Originally Posted by Drifter

Wouldn't that lead to a situation like with have with North Korea and nukes? We are worried about how they use them, and who they might sell one to under the table. The leak of the technology would undercut Infinity's monopoly, and the UN is beholden to Infinity for some unspecified reason.

Absolutely; I thought that was a pretty explicit part of the setting, frankly. Given the relatively low cost and no apparent choke points in the supply line, and the unimpressive lack of accuracy in its parachronic sensors, Infinity's monopoly on conveyors is theoretical and frequently observed in the breach. They don't have the manpower or technical ability to keep Homeline's idiots from wandering Quantum 5 in search of truth and fun. They just do what they can, clean up the messes they find, resort to terror tactics at least once, and drink lots of ulcer medicine. Which is the main thing that scares the bejeezus out of Centrum. Projectors are another matter; their cost really is beyond the reach of all but a few, and since they're immobile, the number of transit blips at one location will give them away quickly even if you managed to hide that expensive a construction project from the accountants. It's also a matter of scale; big enough to have an economic or cultural impact is big enough to get noticed and flattened. But the American neo-Nazi who managed to build a conveyor, lit out to Reich-2, found it crushing and depressing and not at all like his fantasies, and decided to keep going rather than return to Homeline? Or worse yet, walked up to the Reich-2 "authorities" only to have his ass chucked into an insane asylum, then killed when he didn't seem worth the effort to rehabilitate, leaving his functioning conveyor in a barn somewhere on Reich-2? That guy keeps Infinity and Interworld Services up at night. They know he's out there and there's very little they can do about him.

And there's nothing explicit in canon about the LAPD having a conveyor. But it's within their budget, they'd argue it was a legitimate and constructive tool for fighting drug smuggling and human trafficking, and I'm pretty sure the US national government and Infinity would accept that. They're hardly the scariest Homeline agency one might encounter outtime, after all. I find them a useful illustration of just how widespread conveyors probably are, and thus how limited Infinity's ability to monitor and control them is. Heck, Infinity concerns itself with Centrum and Reich-5 because those are its and its alone; people like the LAPD poking around Quantum 5 could be argued as constructive, even.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by patchwork

Projectors are another matter; their cost really is beyond the reach of all but a few, and since they're immobile, the number of transit blips at one location will give them away quickly even if you managed to hide that expensive a construction project from the accountants. It's also a matter of scale; big enough to have an economic or cultural impact is big enough to get noticed and flattened.

Who does the flattening? And in fact the scale of a projector isn't *that* huge - the largest ones cost about as much as an airport, which isn't cheap but certainly isn't going to break the budget of Israel.

There's a problem of illogical scales baked into the setting - Infinity is spun as a private corporation - one small enough to be run by a single proprietor even - who invented and built this stuff out of his own resources. And it keeps everybody else from getting in on a trade so important it has transformed the world's economy by somehow preventing duplication of said individually affordable technology. It simply does not make sense.

[Drifter]

Originally Posted by malloyd

Who does the flattening? And in fact the scale of a projector isn't *that* huge - the largest ones cost about as much as an airport, which isn't cheap but certainly isn't going to break the budget of Israel.

There's a problem of illogical scales baked into the setting - Infinity is spun as a private corporation - one small enough to be run by a single proprietor even - who invented and built this stuff out of his own resources. And it keeps everybody else from getting in on a trade so important it has transformed the world's economy by somehow preventing duplication of said individually affordable technology. It simply does not make sense.

Maybe the presumption is is the situation in Rumfuddle by Jack Vance. Read it if you don't know it, the ending is the basis for allowing Infinity (or the name of the company in the story) complete control. Basically no one is going to mess with however is the first person to come up with crosstime tech. Some of the assumptions in the story aren't in the IW setting, but its close; and who knows what Infinity is keeping to themselves? Crosstime travel might be only the least "explosive" technology.

[fchase8]

I thought that Infinity had copyright on all parachronic technology, so that any projector or even conveyor had to be registered to/overseen by Infinity.

I don't know how available parachronic technology is on Homeline. I would think of it like nuclear technology in the real world, only obtainable illegally with massive effort. It would be easier to steal a conveyor than build one from scratch, only because only a very few know how to actually build one, and building one would take some very expensive and hard-to-find parts.

There wouldn't be the slow scale-up there is with nuclear technology - going from dirty bomb to early a-bomb and on upward. But it would be easier to steal existing conveyors, even projectors, or buy on the black market, because there are more of them - they are very profitable.

[tshiggins]

Originally Posted by fchase8

I thought that Infinity had copyright on all parachronic technology, so that any projector or even conveyor had to be registered to/overseen by Infinity.

I don't know how available parachronic technology is on Homeline. I would think of it like nuclear technology in the real world, only obtainable illegally with massive effort. It would be easier to steal a conveyor than build one from scratch, only because only a very few know how to actually build one, and building one would take some very expensive and hard-to-find parts.

There wouldn't be the slow scale-up there is with nuclear technology - going from dirty bomb to early a-bomb and on upward. But it would be easier to steal existing conveyors, even projectors, or buy on the black market, because there are more of them - they are very profitable.

I would imagine that most intelligence agencies, and even Infinity, Inc., have a whole bunch of algorithms paging through commodities purchases and resource allocations, looking for signs that somebody is building a projector.

In that sense, nuclear non-proliferation provides a decent model. If somebody in, say, Uzbekistan, started to buy uranium, that would create a blip and intelligence agencies would start making some pretty energetic inquiries.

About the only people who might get away with that are national governments, and even then it could be tough. After all, Iraq no longer has a functional nuclear reactor -- the aforementioned Israelis made sure of that. Given what's going on in that country, now, there is no way the Israelis regret that decision.

I'd imagine that, in the case of our putative Uzbek, a quiet little special op team would probably show up in the middle of the night and do to them what we did to Bin Laden. However, if that fails, a half-dozen stealth bombers with bunker-busters might pay a call, and those who sent the sorties would adopt the Israeli response -- "Yep, sure did, and if you wanna make something of it, we're right here."

[Astromancer]

Suddenly I have vision of eccentric Welsh seaside villages and penny-farthing cycles. I can hear out time captives shouting "I am not a number! I am a man!" And distant laughter following.

[patchwork]

Originally Posted by Astromancer

Suddenly I have vision of eccentric Welsh seaside villages and penny-farthing cycles. I can hear out time captives shouting "I am not a number! I am a man!" And distant laughter following.

I think Coventry was pretty transparently designed to let people play Prisoner in IW ^^ and it's one of my favorites >.>

[somecallmetim]

Originally Posted by Astromancer

Suddenly I have vision of eccentric Welsh seaside villages and penny-farthing cycles. I can hear out time captives shouting "I am not a number! I am a man!" And distant laughter following.

I ran a GURPS Prisoner game a long time backwhere the Village was a more sinister crosstime power's equivalent to Coventry. It nicely explained why none of the inmates could identify a common enemy or even agree on what year it was. The power in question had kept crosstime travel a secret even to most on their home line, but had used the resources it provides (technological, material, and informational) to subvert every institution with any real power there. On other worlds they established lesser analogues to their main organization to subvert them. They had a cabal trying to subvert King Richard and abort the Magna Carta to create an absolute monarchy under the heirs of King John and used the Terror to root out enemies in Revolutionary France (which conveniently lets the PCs team up with Robin Hood and the Scarlet Pimpernel to fight them). Their home world looked like our history, but was riven through with seemingly opposed conspiracies taking orders from the bad guys, who called themselves the Illuminati.