Random Ideas (Input Requested!)

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Re: Random Ideas (Input Requested!)

Post by Invictus »

I'm leaning towards some kind of innocuous NGO-ish name, myself. Because those are waters that would be entertaining to muddy.

Also, don't forget these guys.
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Re: Random Ideas (Input Requested!)

Post by Siege »

Magister Militum wrote:If they're predominately anarchists then perhaps something like the Black Internationale? I guess this depends on how radical they really are. When you say they're radical Marxists, what does that really mean?
Broadly speaking they consider themselves the vanguard party, they aim to intensify class conflict, and they aggressively push for the establishment of a classless, stateless, moneyless society. I imagine they have a cadre of theoreticians (that don't always agree with each other) to interpret Che's intitial directives and argue about just how far is far enough, but they're aggressive enough with their revolutionizing that it gives Moscow the heebie-jeebies. After Zhadanova active expansion of the communist sphere became really unpopular; the USSR is extremely insular and the only recent people to advocate expansion were the Ultramilitants, and they're quite decisively out of favor post-Crisis.

Except now here's this bunch of South American whackos going about feeding the poor, preaching the gospel and spreading revolutions like wildfire by shooting warlords and dictators in the face. And they won't obediently shut up when the Red Room tells them to, either. What on Earth do we do with these people?

Invictus wrote:I'm leaning towards some kind of innocuous NGO-ish name, myself.
I like that; I'm angling for something that looks innocuous but still makes for a kick-ass name. That pretty much means anything "black" "red" "front" or "communist" is out, unfortunately. In an old game I recall Stas' communist state had an "Institute for Experimental History"; that's the perfectly normal at first yet on second thought slightly ominous sort of thing I'd like.

FRONT International? Claret Light Foundation? Meh, still not there. Maybe something Spanish?
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Re: Random Ideas (Input Requested!)

Post by Mobius 1 »

Hey, I wanted to hash out what's going down in Africa come late 2010's. We'd mentioned that the Soviets had massive agriculture and uplifting programs going (probably to the point of cheap cyberization as the century progresses), but I don't know if the US had any influence in the region beyond what was basically trying to the undermine what some probably see as the Soviets' all-carrot approach to shoring up allies in the region. Originally we had talked about MIDNIGHT and Carson and co treating the more lawless parts of Africa as a testbed for their various mad science (or more practical stuff, whatever) weapons - while some parts of Africa were getting markedly better, others were reflectively more chaotic that IRL.

Anyway, the idea I had been toying with for a future story was a faction emerging in Africa that sorta creates a 'grey zone' in the region - no one one's what's going on (be it for a lack of intel, or better, at the center, a massive region of interference and storm activity). There's a hugely popular local leader leading it - like a more morally ambiguous version of COLONEL SCAR from OZC (in that he's clearly a warlord but his anti-imperialist rhetoric is, at it's core, his big selling point to the region) and he's attacking both US and Soviet interests in the area. The idea being that someone took all the shit that the factions had been funneling into the region and played both sides against each other to create a unified power in the region of Africa the story would play out in.

Feel free to help me flesh it out - the last thing I want to do is have it turn out like some of the more offensive parts of Heart of Darkness, considering the story would involve American and Russian characters running around driving the plot (be them mercenaries brought in to support the NULL ZONE like Strike Team Akula or operatives like Gold and Follow sent in to see why ENEMIES OF AMERICA(tm) are seen palling around with this new warlord). I wanted to craft a couple of African characters who would ultimately be the ones' solving the crisis in the region (or perhaps taking over for the new polity ME2 SHADOW BROKER style and behind-the-scenes pushing this coalesced nation-state on a more benevolent path) - sorta like how, despite it at times being pretty insensitive, RE5 had half its player character's be West African. The key, I guess, would be handling a decent CSW thriller in the region without it turning out as shitty as, say, Far Cry 3.

Kinda get what I'm saying?
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Re: Random Ideas (Input Requested!)

Post by Siege »

I always figured the Americans play a minimal role in Africa; it's mainly Soviets and Europeans and South-Africans, with maybe a bunch of Arab League type dudes thrown in the mix somewhere up near Somalia.

Africa-wise we have the Europeans irrigating the Sahara with nuclear pumping and desalinization; the Soviets invaded Libya to fix up a massively dangerous pathogen (insert VECTOR BLACK plug here) sometime in the early 2000s; and the South Africans basically run everything south of the Congo through proxies, assassin commandos and the occasional airborne invasion. They're fighting a continuous brushfire war with communist insurgents in the vicinity of Angola that's been going on for a good 20 years or so by the 2010s.

Enoch Razaq is holed up somewhere in the middle of the continent too; his base of operations has the sort of null field shenanigans you mention but it's a highly local weird science effect that should be reserved exclusively for stuff dealing with him and his pseudo-Lost World full of dinosaurs and mutants. I'm very hesitant to deploy that sort of thing in a wider setting because, well, it's the sort of storytelling device that works if you've got a small band of adventurers dealing with compasses going wonky in a remote corner of the world, but when you're in full-scale major-stakes technothriller mode it'd be horribly awkward. If Indiana Jones has to navigate by the stars that's all right, but the militaries of nations for whom bases on the moon are a piece of cake shouldn't have to worry about that sort of thing, you know?

However, "we don't have HUMINT here" is something I could totally get behind. I always assumed that everything south of Chad and north of Angola is a more or less 'forgotten region' that's been mostly ignored by the major powers for the last couple of decades. International flyover country, the sort of place you might sponsor a particular warlord in or maybe send deniable mercenaries or occasionally bomb if the natives get too restless but for the love of god don't send troops in there because they'll get chewed up and spat back out and that's bad PR we can do without. Plenty room to set up all sorts of nastiness, then.

Having said that, if Carson goes in there with troops to test things out, the way I'm imagining it, sooner rather than later the Europeans are gonna do to his guys what he did to theirs in SHADOW TEMPEST. You're in the WEU's back yard down there, and I bet the Star Chamber would jump at the opportunity to gank a guy like Carson the second they get wind of him being down there.
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Re: Random Ideas (Input Requested!)

Post by Mobius 1 »

Image

Listening Post - it's an art installation by Mark Hansen that culls text fragments in real time from thousands of unrestricted Internet chat rooms.

Basically, I love reading cyberpunk boards and finding stuff like this. I've got tons of it.
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Re: Random Ideas (Input Requested!)

Post by Siege »

Wow. I'd love to see that for myself, it looks pretty darn awesome.

Image

Protected Control Platform Europa, ca. 2020. This artificial island off the coast of Gabon in West Africa was built by the WEU for the express purpose of serving as a base station for a prospective space elevator.


PS: Moby I'm gonna read your story soon as I have time. Which may be this weekend. May. :(
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Re: Random Ideas (Input Requested!)

Post by Booted Vulture »

that looks like exactly the thing Dead Cell is going to try and blow up.
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Re: Random Ideas (Input Requested!)

Post by Mobius 1 »

Complete with nooses for them to hang themselves on.
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Re: Random Ideas (Input Requested!)

Post by Invictus »

Reading some of the earlier posts, as well as seeing this:

Image

(yes, it's called the Dark Sword, and it's apparently a fighter-sized anti-air interceptor UCAV that China wants to build, and as the linked article pointed out has what looks much like a ramjet-powered hypersonic delta airframe. Adventurous project to say the least in OTL, but it does fit right in with CSW.)

Got me to do a bit of speculation on what the PRC looks like in CSW: lots of floating variables here, like what's up with Taiwan by 2015? What's different with the Sino-Soviet split? Did the hellhole that is PRC history from the 1950s to the 1970s have different repercussions? Did the USSR's successful shift to info-socialism hinder the PRC's decision to open up and capitalize in the 1980s? Assuming that the PRC ends up thematically as sort of the Soviets' WEU and is therefore quite conscious of the limits of their own power (unlike its relatively unchecked ascendence in OTL), is its attempts to build its own sphere of influence a little less horribly abortive than in OTL? CSW Japan is presumably still a one-party democracy and an American military client, standing as a bastion of liberty in the Far East against the undying Soviet menace etc etc*, so it presumably still serves as the lynchpin to the USA's Pacific Rim geopolitical containment strategy that prevents the PLAN from venturing out very far into the Pacific, so presumably there is tension on that front.

*Japan also possibly suffers from a more pointed social dialogue between its postwar pacificm and its Cold War fortress mentality, since it took the 70's detente and ultimately the end of the Cold War for its relations with East Asia to unfreeze and normalize properly - well okay and the Lost Decade, which is the kind of thing that always leads to some national soul-searching. I won't push a vision of CSW Japan as a gerontocracy of the children and grandchildren of war criminals in bed with the zaibatsu - that's a cliche about 20 years out of date, and Japan's economic collapse (and resultant fall from international prominence) happened largely as a result of this arrangement anyway - but I do wonder what effect a neverending Cold War with far more advanced foes would have had on the national psyche, as well as that of a JSDF that may actually have been used in anger a few times.

Another thought comes to me while looking at that mobile seabase writeup: it's easy to forget about India and the NAM when the Cold War is going stronger than ever, so correspondingly I wonder how much of the PRC's espionage and covert operations efforts fall under the WARPACT/Comintern umbrella, since the CPC left the latter as early as 1942. There can't be much ideological rappoachment bewteen the USSR and the PRC in any case, if only for the fun factor of Communism with Chinese Characteristics (state capitalism) being sold and sponsored by a parallel Maoist GOSPLAN ("MAOPLAN?")**.

**Fun fact: the PRC's opening up into a market economy was technically another Five-Year Plan. The 12th Five-Year Plan was quite happily embarked upon in 2011.

This, by the way, is a simple and fun (yeah, right) reference guide to the political structure of the PRC from the top down (with a focus on the recent leadership transition followed the 18th CPC National Congress).
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Re: Random Ideas (Input Requested!)

Post by Siege »

That's a very helpful post, Vic. Like I said, I've been hesitant to dip into Asia because I'm no expert and it's easy to fall back onto terrible stereotypes that I'd much rather avoid.

I think the PRC and the Soviets parted ways much like they did in 'our' timeline. The PRC is much more closed-off and doesn't get along with the USSR all that well; at the same time I imagine it provides the Warsaw Pact the same it does the western world today: cheap and plentiful labour. I could see the PRC brute-force industrializing and turning entire cities into industrial parks as a counterpoint to the more digitally oriented WARPAC nations. The sleek skyline of 2020 Moscow is built with Chinese steel and concrete, something along those lines. But by the 20th century their efforts have begun to pay off, and Chinese high-tech like railgun tanks and maybe that drone thingie have begun to proliferate.

In return India I envisage as filling more or less the role China does for the west today, so in that sense China and India would have a major rivalry going. I could see regular tank clashes in the Himalaya passes. I'm considering the idea that the Indian government (or possibly just its military) was bought wholesale by Korovin's pirate cartel sometime in the 2010s, if only so I have a reason to explain how pirates managed to acquire a fully fitted aircraft carrier...

Taiwan I haven't much clue about beyond 'they make the artificial plutonium that makes Japanese mobile suits go zoom', because I don't really know anything about Taiwan. I figure they and Japan and to an extension Australia make natural allies though. Like that nation Mobius played in ye olde RPG, just with less presidents punching crocodiles.

Japan... Is one of those really easy to get wrong nations for me. 'Cause I like zaibatsus and yakuza and cyberninjas, like, a lot, but it'd probably be wrong to make Japan a nation full of ninjas on motorbikes being chased by decrepit old war criminals Probably. I like to think they try to keep their immediate neighborhood clean, and have deployed the JSDF in support of illicit ops quite a few times (a Japanese officer is part of SOLIDSIX); I have an idea for an organization called TENGU that would act as the Japanese equivalent to the Activity; but mostly I think their idea is to avoid horizontal expansion in favor of the vertical. I think a Japan that's very active in near-Earth exploration and the exploitation of asteroid mining and things like that would simultaneously feed into at least some 'high tech' tropes and avoid the more egregious stereotypes. Or so I hope.
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Re: Random Ideas (Input Requested!)

Post by Invictus »

Hmm, on one hand instead of opening up its markets to the West in the 1980s, the PRC began engaging the Second World (which is actually a thriving thing in CSW and not a tottering puppet show propped up by a faltering USSR) and importing Soviet goods, culture and technocratic expertise. It would be a hard and uncomfortable reversal of the Sino-Soviet split, but hey if it took Nixon to go to China in RL maybe it took Zhardanova to go to China in CSW. It would still be the ideological equivalent of going back to Mother Russia's door with hat in hand, but if the decades of Maoist depredation before that are laregly in line with RL, then I see it as an indignity that the populace at large could live with. The exchange clearly benefits both sides - the PRC stops being a mouldering Maoist slumhive with a surge of eocnomic development even as it leans on the Soviets for R&D and strategic defence, and I very much doubt that the Zhardanovite technocratic revival would have been nearly as spectacular if it weren't for cheap Chinese resources and cheap Chinese labor, as you noted.

Of course, the PRC may well retain a great deal of independence compared to the USSR's WARPAC associates (which it guards jealously), and there's always going to be a nationalist-autarkist streak in state policy that leads to the country developing its own copies/equivalents/substitutes for everything the Soviets have - something that by 2020 is plainly noticeable. National focus might grow on the north and west where the country shares its border with WARPAC, and you might find those places a lot better developed as a result - pipelines, industrial boomtowns, epic desert-and-mountain-crossing railways to the grain baskets of Central Asia, etc. It's also where the old Silk Road is. That said, the metropolitan ports of the Pacific coast get along well enough on their own, maybe with a few Free Trade Zones here and there to faciliate trade from the West. But those cities become somewhat politically marginal even though they're relatively well-off, which is probably the way Daiyu Xifeng likes it.

So what does this make CSW China look like at a hypothetical present? Maybe less rust belts, maybe more food imports. A more successful artifical hydrological network, certainly, controlled with Soviet cybernetics and overseen by local Party cadre-technocrats who are merely ideologically hidebound instead of being enthusiastically venal robber barons. Maybe more pollution too, because the industrialization train never stopped, but then wide-scale implementation of nuclear power for electricity generation, irrigation and water purification could help with that. Actually, there may be less pollution because the CSW Second World is presumably a less insatiable consumer of goods than the RL West, and less privatization means more effective industry regulation. Bribery isn't going to vanish, of course, but one possible pro of CSW PRC over RL PRC is at least you won't have to take a gas mask with you if you want to go out for a jog in Beijing. The con is probably that the people of the CSW PRC won't be as crazy flush with money as in RL. Socially and culturally...that depends a great deal on what happened in place of all those Eastern European protests at the tail end of the RL Cold War. But I get the feeling that a billion people will make their own entertainments in any case.

India as RL China is fun. I won't comment much either on grounds of ignorance, but it's a big, fractous place of jockeying ethnicities and regions - far less homogenous than China. The CSW West would take its rise in a rather different manner.

Out of all the East Asian countries with histories of Japanese colonialism, Taiwan's probably the friendliest with Japan both diplomatically and culturally. It was also for the longest time another US military client and a potential base from which to liberate Red China - until everyone decided to recognize the PRC as the "real" China instead as it became a third party to be courted as the Cold War wound on. I wonder if the PRC's retrenchment into the Soviet sphere of influence would have reversed that a bit, and the ROC gets a lot more cachet as Blue China again, but domestically...well, currently RL Taiwan is divided into two political camps: the Guomindang/KMT/Blues/Nationalists who are the party of Chiang Kai-Shek and cares a great deal about rappochment and eventually unification with mainland China because they have established their identities on the fact that they're the inheritors of the rightful pre-PRC regime* (and still sometimes mutter things about "them Communist bandits"); and the DPP/Greens who are the nativist, self-avowed "Taiwanese", party who remembers the time when the KMT was just the dregs of a corrupt junta who fled over to Taiwan in 1949 and spent several subsequent decades oppressing and murdering the people who already lived there. That may be one reason why even the Japanese seemed relatively benign while they ruled, but the Japanese did put quite a lot of effort into their colonial possession IIRC.

*Fun Fact: the current diplomatic status quo between the PRC and the ROC is enshringing in something known as the "1992 Consensus", which basically says that both sides agree that "There is only one China", but also agrees to disagree about what exactly the "One China" is referring to.

Anyway, assuming the US and the WEU gets a face-saving way to approach Taiwan because of the Chinese retrenchment thing, I can see the KMT staying on top becuase when your island is no longer a diplomatic unperson and in fact has a relatively valued place in the grand scheme of the Free World, nativist sentiments don't get under way as much. So the selling artifical plutonium with American mediation to Japan is plenty plausible considering the above. Also in the spirit of the never-ending Korean War, we might well see a lot of skirmishes between the PLAN and the American-proxy ROCN in the South China Sea.

As for Japan...hoo boy, next post.
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Re: Random Ideas (Input Requested!)

Post by Heretic »

I would be most interested in seeing what's up with Japan in CSW (chalk it up to heritage bias).

On another note, where the hell do I start with my second new year's resolution? I got 8 months, and I need to get rolling if I want to keep my online integrity. I already commented on STB, and I was wondering if that was a good way to start off orienting myself with CSW. If not, do you guys know any good articles or stories that'll help a noob like me?
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Re: Random Ideas (Input Requested!)

Post by Invictus »

Hokay, Japan.

To understand what the foreign policy, defensive posture and general geopolitical attitude of Japan is like in CSW, we should probably start with WWII where the country reached its apogee of homebrewed nationalism, got nuked, and eventually surrendered to be remade under American occupation.

The constitutionally-enforced postwar pacificm of Japan is something of a historical artifact, I feel, but not a weak one. It was originally imposed by the Americans as part of a kind of whoelsale reformatting of the Japanese nation, and arguments can be made that this policy was in turn a response to what became the wartime American view of Imperial Japan: as this inexplicable, aberrant monster that can neither be appeased nor bargained with. (See John Dower's War Without Mercy. And Embracing Defeat too, which I haven't read but probably says what I'm saying a lot better.) There was a lot of wartime 'victory or death' rhetoric from the Japanese side too, and considering that they had already been losing the war for years at the point (and the civilian populace also having hung on grimly through years of rationing, bombing runs and not much good news), the country was just about traumatized enough to buy this.

Of course, it's not to say that the ordinary people of Japan bought into the new position of pacificsm because of the above - I'd imagine that they were more glad about not having to die from more bombings, continued starvation or some final apocalyptic battle in defence of the Japanese home islands. And of course with the whole American military occupation thing which was carried on with the acquiesence of the remnants of their own dynastic government, they weren't in much of a position to, or want to resist.

And there were the nukes. Again there are arguments that other possible ways of inducing the unconditional surrender of Japan would have caused a lot more casualties, but there is something intimitable (and certainly unique) about the wartime use of atomic bombs - and with Japan as the only target of them ever - that provides the country with a good deal of fodder for its pacificm narrative. Look, they say, look at these scars, look at these solemn dove-releasing commemorations. As a result of war we were nuked, which is such a singularly horrible thing in its wider implications for the history of mankind that nobody should wage war again, lest this really horrible thing happen again. It doesn't matter why it got started, it doesn't matter who was wrong or who was right or who was justified. It just needs to not ever happen again ever. And since at that point the USA has on some level taken on the defence of the entire free world, it leaves Japan free to be the noble martyr while sweeping its own wartime atrocities under the historiographical carpet - or rather, arranging them in a tableau with the rest of the evils of WWII and then baking it into one big War Is Hell cake with Hiroshima icing.

Cold War geopolitics get in the way, as do the realities of running a sovereign country. The Americans policy-makers, for all their wartime demonization of Japan had a pretty fast turnaround and would have been happy with reconstructing Japan into a happy, democratic, pacifist ally. (after justice had been meted out, of course, with the Tokyo War Crime Trials and everything) But more than that, they needed a staunch bastion against the Red Menace. A few years after the end of the war you saw the retrenchment of a great deal of the political right wing that was blamed for starting the war in the first place, because at least they wouldn't have Soviet sympathies. And with the insular and dynastic nature of the Japanese political establishment, the descendants of many of them are still in power today. And of course, the JSDF is a national military in all but name, but its ROE is still pretty limited.

Skipping forward to today, you've got both sides of a discourse existing side by side. Most Japanese in fact do know about, and have views in line with a general repentence over, what the IJA did in WWII - albeit with the caveat of "buuut we got nuked, so everything is bygones okay?" The pacifism is something that many Japanese are proud about, and I'd venture that this pride comes from some level of awareness of the causes of this pacifism (we did bad stuff, and we got nuked for it), along with a dash of myopia tying the country's postwar prosperity to the success of this stance. You do get a lot of sincere angst and anxiety about the continuing development of nuclear warfare in the rest of world (See: Godzilla), but on the other hand Cold War factors did help in making the pacifism a bit solipsistic - many of Japan's former WWII victims were cast into the role of ideological enemies, and as I mentioned in the last post it took the normalization of diplomatic relations during the 70s detente for the Japanese national consciousness to see the other side and develop a more nuanced repentance.

And then there's the right wing, all revisionist textbook a-writin' and sacred shrines venerating war criminals a-visitin' and and a reliable parade of senior politicians making statements that outrage Japan's neighbors at the cost of their political careers a-paradin'. They feel that the postwar capitulations of the country were way too much and couch their policies as "normalization of a state" or the "rescovery of national pride", and there's certainly an argument to be made that as a source of national pride and identity, Japan's technological and cultural achievements is not commensuate with its geopolitical or plain diplomatic influence, and that the nation will always be living under the shadow of its WWII defeat until it fixes this. But then the mere suggestion of having a more muscular foreign policy is enough to get the country's neighbors harumphing about "the revival of the spectre of Japanese militarism", which causes diplomatic tension, and let right-wingers bang the "see, with our pacifism we'll always be picked on" drum. The ring-wingers don't often get their way: the general approach of the Japanese government towards WWII is as much reconciliation is possible without violating national dignity, and there's a reason why all these ministers and mayors are forced to resign after denying the Rape of Nanking or whatever it is this time.

Still, the relation between Japan and her neighbours is far from healthy. And when some in America are inclined to see Japan as this weird emasculated rodeo clown, some Japanese agree. And that's not counting the general Japanese national/racial/cultural superority complex that goes much further back from everything I've thus far described, but has certainly been helped along by Japan's modern successes as a nation as well as its own isolating demographical and geographical experiences.

You can tell I did my BA on this.

So what's different in CSW? A neverending Cold War leading to ETERNAL VIGILANCE over the Sakhalins and the Inland Sea, Soviet space superiority making a mockery of whatever sense of security an island nation like Japan would have had. A sincere committment to pacifism is more strongly challenged by any number of non-state threats, the JSDF's mission of self-defence gets stretched further either legitimately or less so, the USA possibly focuses more on the Pacific Rim in the face of stronger Commonwealth and WEU counterweights to its influence over at the Atlantic, possibly leading to a tighter alliance, possibly for even more restiveness over being a junior partner. Extradimensional incursions/rogue nanogoo/individual supervillains/alien motherships get nuked as well, which means that Japan's martyr status (a cornerstone of its national narrative of pacifism) weakens, awww. Militarist cliques in the government and their paramilitary pawns threaten domestic security in coup d'etat attempts or intervene secretly overseas in the name of national interest (common themes in lots of Japanese speculative fiction too, I note*). This may be reflective of the consent from a public more willing to adopt a passive siege mentality over anything from the Eurasian mainland. Japanese space development may indeed be a way for a country to find its own geopolitical-military niche, and partly to counter the Soviet threat (the Japanese have beeen worried about the Russians for a lot longer than the Americans have, and they're a lot closer). Some of those 1000m-tall arcology projects might even come true, as well as land reclamation and all sorts of fun stuff because CSW seems to tend towards technological solutions.

*I also note that there has been plenty of Japanese fiction where Japan or its narrative analogue finally mans up to smite some implacable invaders, and judging from that there really isn't much the Japanese have against national self-defence in general, lest I misguide you into thinking that the country really is an emasculated hippie rodeo clown beside some shrill right-wingers.

Granting that CSW history wasn't much off the rails during the formative years of what I've described above about RL, I don't see how Japan could have avoided its economy falling over during the 90s, which would have added more tension and which may have triggered military and R&D cutbacks mirroring what the Clinton-analogue did to Star Wars in CSW USA. With their protector's attention focused elsewhere, Japan is forced to deal with its none-too-friendly neighbors on its own terms. We might even see a bit of a shooting war over the Diaoyus/Senkakus as early as the nineties, and since at that point the PLAN's wholesale modernization shouldn't have paid off yet, it would be a gimme for the JSDF. This gets Falklands'd into electoral victory for a more hawkish Japanese administration while the PRC licks its wounds and purchases more hardware from the USSR. Then Japan gets hit with its property bubble collapse while China's economy stays on permanent boom due to its relative isolation from the world capitalist economy/effective centralized defusing of economic crises, meaning that after almost two decades of military advancement a favorable rematch for the PLAN is increasingly likely. But before that, the military standoff in the South China Sea (not just between the PRC and Japan, but also the ROC and the Phillipines and various ASEAN countries) makes the whole region rather lawless.

Opportunities for drama and colorful action are more narrative conceit than anything else, but I hope I've helped on the inspiration front.
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Re: Random Ideas (Input Requested!)

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Heretic wrote:On another note, where the hell do I start with my second new year's resolution? I got 8 months, and I need to get rolling if I want to keep my online integrity. I already commented on STB, and I was wondering if that was a good way to start off orienting myself with CSW. If not, do you guys know any good articles or stories that'll help a noob like me?
It's a bit like Comix where much of the universe exists in old topics or in the detail of long stories, but a good deal of its is scattered in general threads like this one and another proportion of it only exists in the shared headspace between two or three posters. I think your best bet is to just ask Siege and Moby for an overview of the important players (and CSW is absolutely a universe where the players are important) and then ask them follow-up questions.

On a less wall-of-text note, I was reading up about Bitcoin lately and a similar underground digital currency should exist in CSW as well (only not quite as messily implemented if only by virtue of having a central exchange in the form of well, the Exchange instead of a former trading card website). Nothing quite fuels secret wars like secret currencies.

EDIT: The point is, new Bitcoins basically enter the market by being rewarded by its coders to people who spend the time and computing power to solve an arbitrarily difficult cryptographical problem involving the transaction records of all Bitcoins. Though there is no evidence of anything ulterior in RL, why exactly is someone handing out virtual monopoly money in exchange for getting the public to crunch lots of data for it? What is being hidden behind the totally arbitrary cryptographical problem?
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Re: Random Ideas (Input Requested!)

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I'mma get back to you on Japan, because it deserves a far more thorough response than what I have time for now.

Having said that, I'd be interested to see a digital underground currency, maybe sponsored (at least intially) by large quantities of South African Krugerrands and other sources of illicit gold. And, yeah, definitely something the Exchange could get behind too. Nothing would benefit an underground black market more than an underground form of untraceable currency. Although maybe at least a good portion of the deals going down should maybe take the form of tangible goods exchanged for promises or actions taken; I'll sell you a priceless Japanese Noh Mask for a timed disruption in the Greater London electrical grid, or a European nuke for the assassination of the President of Burkina Faso, that sort of thing. Gives it more of a crazy bazaar type of feel, you know?
Heretic wrote:If not, do you guys know any good articles or stories that'll help a noob like me?
We had an intro for a while but it must've gotten lost in one of the board shuffles from ages ago. I honestly kind of though that we still had it up... But it turns out we don't. You raise a good point; I'll try and whip up an introductory description of the 'verse and its major players sometime soon-ish.
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Re: Random Ideas (Input Requested!)

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I heard of Bitcoin. Alot of places in the deepweb use it for anonymous drug dealing and other illict stuff. I wonder how such goods are delivered. Hell, it would be hilarious if an AI went into the pits of the interwebs and went rogue simply because it lost it's 'faith' in humanity after watching too much sick pron and internet memes.
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Re: Random Ideas (Input Requested!)

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You actually touch upon a point I had been thinking about - I might have mentioned it in the CSWN story - that AI's might proliferate (that may be too strong a word) going into the next era. It would've started with SICKLE fragmenting during the Soviet war, and the various reiterations of STYX, the AI the Sechalin built of the cleaved pieces, that kept popping up after the war. You've got these little 'children,' almost, running around by the time you hit the next generation.

There's the security kernel that ended up in the hands of Lise Bateau, for example, that probably would've gained sentience after it got dumped into her cybernetics. It's no SICKLE, but it's eventually evolved into its own entity. You might have that phenomenon repeated across Russia, where SICKLE fragments would obviously be a lot more common. And, like Heretic said, some of it might hit the web. SICKLE herself would probably have standing orders to hunt down said fragments and there would a be sorta Turing Police commissioned by the Soviets to watch out for these slivers. SICKLE, with that never-ending hint of it following its own designs, may even 'shepherd' a fragment or two while forcibly reintegrating the more dangerous bits of AI-tech, like what happened with STYX (which could've been a source of said new found free agency).

And that's not to mention that America will probably have developed its own lesser AI at some point, most likely based off stolen tech like the STYX fragment and the Firebird core I've been setting up in STB. You'd have to see some sort of difference between the two constructs - SICKLE is everywhere, this big support network, with brain rooms on the room and above Mars. The American AI, I dunno. It certainly wouldn't just be a mirror of SICKLE, because Baylor would be insufferable with the SkyNet jokes when he finds out it exists.
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Re: Random Ideas (Input Requested!)

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I've gotta be adamant that SICKLE reconstitutes itself after the fragmentation. Sure, there can be some splinters of it that survive in isolation but the nature of the beast from the get-go was that parts of it could exist independently for indeterminate amounts of time before synching seamlessly with the greater whole soon as connectivity is restored. You have to do some serious modification to cleave part of it off permanently; it's okay that this happened once or twice when the Ultramilitants bent their considerable resources to it, but that's pretty much the extent of it, and post-Crisis SICKLE programmed itself to make repeats of that situation impossible.

Whilst pre-Crisis SICKLE was more or less a willing agent of the Soviet government, its post-Crisis incarnation is much more independent-minded, with considerably more thought and agency of its own. Or it might just be more willing to show how much agency it really has; that is up for interpretation.

Certain is of course that AI or AI-like technology proliferates much like any other technology, if arguably slower; NTET appears to have access to one, although that might just be SICKLE in disguise (and it might be something else altogether -- I have some ideas about AJ); there's the greytech CAIN system that Saint developed; and I imagine the Europeans may very well have gone for quantum supercomputers fused to cybered-up human beings, Hyron Project-style.

I think that come 2020 or so the security systems for most high-tech firms like Saint Industries will have compensated for the possibility of AI messing with their codes in some way; it also bears keeping in mind that AI by itself isn't a magic bullet; what makes SICKLE so outrageous isn't that it's an AI, or even that it's very well programmed, it's mostly the insane amount of processing power backing it up. That's what elevates it over other AIs -- no computer can touch it because it can simply outthink all of them. That's also why the Ultramilitants had to go up to MIR and physically hack at it to make their own fragment (hard to outthink explosives detonating on your primary data-trunk), and that's something that SICKLE will have taken great efforts to ensure doesn't happen again in the future.

The biggest threat to SICKLE, is SICKLE. Come 2020, as long as it manages to secure its own integrity there really isn't all that much in the world that can take it out.
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Re: Random Ideas (Input Requested!)

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EDIT: Goddammit, I edited my reply into your post, overwriting it. Great job, me.
I've gotta be adamant that SICKLE reconstitutes itself after the fragmentation. Sure, there can be some splinters of it that survive in isolation but the nature of the beast from the get-go was that parts of it could exist independently for indeterminate amounts of time before synching seamlessly with the greater whole soon as connectivity is restored.
I think we discussed this before, actually - I was planning to have STYX show up in STB2, acting through proxies, with the way it's defeated being them just hooking it back up to SICKLE for reintegration anyway. It's neat and swallows up any of the major remnants you'd see.
post-Crisis
Heh.
Whilst pre-Crisis SICKLE was more or less a willing agent of the Soviet government, its post-Crisis incarnation is much more independent-minded, with considerably more thought and agency of its own. Or it might just be more willing to show how much agency it really has; that is up for interpretation.
Yeah, that was my interpretation as well. The only question mark would be that 'hacker assistant' of Savage you mentioned a while ago, hinting (re: stating) that is was most likely SICKLE. To what degree would that be free will? The idea I mentioned in one of the more recent chapters was that SICKLE would due things on the down-low, but as long as it was in the interest of the USSR/the world at large, it was in the clear.
Certain is of course that AI or AI-like technology proliferates much like any other technology, if arguably slower; NTET appears to have access to one, although that might just be SICKLE in disguise (and it might be something else altogether -- I have some ideas about AJ);
That's what I get for reading the post as I break it apart for quotes. :)
there's the greytech CAIN system that Saint developed;
Thanks, I knew there was an article I was missing.
The biggest threat to SICKLE, is SICKLE. Come 2020, as long as it manages to secure its own integrity there really isn't all that much in the world that can take it out.
I don't think anyone's disputing it at point, it's just a question of how proliferated the tech is by CSWN - moreover, what I was suggesting weren't full-fledged intelligences along the lines of STYX (who pops back up in 2014 only to get reabsorbed anyway) but smaller-scale programs that run off some of the SICKLE-derived programming to act in specific roles - like Lise's COG icebreaker. It wouldn't be Wintermute so much as Dixie Flatline, if you catch what I'm saying.
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Re: Random Ideas (Input Requested!)

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"This explanation posits that external observation leads to the collapse of the quantum wave function. This is another expression of reactionary idealism, and it's indeed the most brazen expression."
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Re: Random Ideas (Input Requested!)

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You guys forget that after the Sino-Soviet Split, the Soviets went to India to turn it into a strategic counter-balance for China, and China ended up using Pakistan as a counter-balance to India.

So IRL it's already a set of strange bedfellows with RL Russia consorting with RL India. RL China is fueled by the West and is in turn funding Pakistan.

It would be quite weird and jarring to see how this would play out in CSW, with Soviet Cyberpunk helping out India rather than China as the posts above mentioned, while China gets backing from the West - becoming the WEU (?)'s source of materials - while itself allying with CSW Pakistan, which could possibly be a hivehole for Tom Clancy-esque/HPCA-ish ISLAMISTS ISLAMISTS shenennigans.
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Re: Random Ideas (Input Requested!)

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As a whole I don't think Islamic fundamentalism is as big a deal in CSW as it is in our world, because Arabic nationalism never fell out of favor (and may in fact be considered quite succesful). Fundamentalism never becomes the go-to alternative because there's no need for an alternative to begin with.

I could see the WEU affiliating itself in some manner with China in an attempt to undermine the Soviet presence in Central Asia, with WEU commando teams and Chinese airborne units moving into and out of places like northern Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan, setting up proxies like Zengo Loran (THE MOUNTAIN SCORPION) and suchlike. In the end though, ideology is a big thing in CSW and the WEU and Red China are too different to be anything more than temporary allies of convenience.
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Re: Random Ideas (Input Requested!)

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Am I the only one who saw this

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and went 'what's Hank Easly doing in my videogame'?

Seriously that picture is like a Moby story condensed into a single image. Ninjas! Cybernetic commandos! A hot woman in a business suit! A t-rex shooting lasers out of its eyes!
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Re: Random Ideas (Input Requested!)

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This was already a day-one for me, but seriously, listen to the soundtrack: PowerCore, Sloan's Assault, and Warzone. I can't handle this much eighties without having a seizure.
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Re: Random Ideas (Input Requested!)

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Siege wrote:As a whole I don't think Islamic fundamentalism is as big a deal in CSW as it is in our world, because Arabic nationalism never fell out of favor (and may in fact be considered quite succesful). Fundamentalism never becomes the go-to alternative because there's no need for an alternative to begin with.

I could see the WEU affiliating itself in some manner with China in an attempt to undermine the Soviet presence in Central Asia, with WEU commando teams and Chinese airborne units moving into and out of places like northern Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan, setting up proxies like Zengo Loran (THE MOUNTAIN SCORPION) and suchlike. In the end though, ideology is a big thing in CSW and the WEU and Red China are too different to be anything more than temporary allies of convenience.
How about the US megacorporate industries using cheap Chinese labor (hordes of humans in dystopic SINONET LABOR CAMPS) and giant stores of raw resources while turning Red China into a counterbalance to the USSR?

Imagine the undoubtedly more-evil CSW Richard Nixon and CSW Mao, or their equivalents/replacements, coming into an agreement. The thought is terrifying.

While the USSR helps out the Indian military industrial complex. While not giving them super-sophisticated AI tech, at least they give them enough to form tech that's like a decade behind modern Soviet Cyberpunk levels, crude approximations of current Soviet gear but still super-formidable in the Asian front, while Indian Super-Mathematicians and savants and such try to make up for the stuff in their own ways (using rail-cannons to boost ramjet warheads or something equally ridiculous?). And perhaps India being a huge portion of non-Warpac Soviet humanitarian goodwill efforts with Soviet nano-medicines or whatnot being used to vastly improve the lives of the poor folks there. And Indian business mogul billionaires with anti-agathics or something. India could be the largest non-Warpac customer of cool and civilian/commercially available tech.

Soviet Internationalist Cyborg Projekts!

I also wrote this the other day before my internet died:
I am contradicting the posts above that are visualizing a Sino-Soviet Reconciliation leading to Soviet Cyberpunk teaming up with the PRC. But its just because I think the IRL Sino-Soviet Split and the concurrent USSR/Russian alliance with India with them being BFFs was really a very interesting and unexpected real-life plot twist. It's like, the very definition of Strange Bedfellows and is a very interesting thang IRL, since you'd expect Communist Russia to shack up with Communist China not... Crazy India of all places, to the point of India becoming Russia's hugest defense business partner.

CSW-ing the IRL Russian-Indian Bromance might be something that merits considering.
As for a non-theocratic alternate version of Pakistan, well, it would still be vying against India, with Abdul Quadeer KAAAHN making nuclear superweapon programmes while China backs them up against the Indian behemoth.

Pakistan could also, like IRL, be another one of those dubious American allies utilized for amoral US interests in the Central Asian region. What was the outcome of Afghanistan in CSW, if there was a Soviet intervention in Afghanistan here?

EDIT:

And wasn't Arab/Middle Eastern nationalism supported by the USSR in real life? And this is why the USA jockeyed with the Wahabbist Saudis and other fundamentalists to counter this? If CSW Middle Eastern/Arab nationalism is still backed by the USSR, what is the US' counter to this? Do we get more authoritarian but non-fundamentalistic Shahs of Iran and military cabals like Turkey?
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