Goonhub
01-01-2019, 05:21 AM
Since everyone's thinking about telephones, I figured this might be time to bring up the one advantage that I feel Goon doesn't have over its sister code bases: a telecommunications system. I've mentioned a couple times that something along these lines would be nice, and finally the other day Wonk told me to post about it, so hey, why not.
So, bit of note, my day job is as a telecommunications technician, both in the fields of telephony and traditional networking. As such, talking about this sort of thing makes me a little giddy, and the potential opportunity to understand and work with (sabotage) telecom in SS13 seems fantastic.
Doesn't have to be anything too complicated, like /tg/'s rather thorough telecomm system (https://tgstation13.org/wiki/Guide_to_Te...unications), but something to work with, at least. In real life, telephones have central switches, which can range in size from roughly a circuit breaker to taking up entire rooms. Perhaps something like this can work for the telephones on the station, or perhaps even the radio system running throughout. This system could sit in the computer core, a room that I feel like currently exists mainly to have a separate place to store the AI Reset. We could have, say, a handful of radio transceivers placed around various points of the station with overlapping coverage, such that should one fail, you don't lose comms in a whole quarter of the station. Wired networks could stay up, so the AI could continue to insult people over the intercoms, and folks could turn the microphones on and in turn insult the clown. Perhaps encryption devices (NT-250X in-line encryptor) exist between the transceivers and the switch, hardening the telecomms system since it otherwise would ride over the plaintext station powernet. Maybe there's a syndicate wiretap which automatically decrypts the line and comes with a headset that can be tuned to any freq, allowing you to listen into any frequency at the obvious cost of a handful of telecrystals. Maybe a proactive engineer could install a filter in the switch which stops people from vaping over the phone.
At this point, I'm just throwing ideas out, and I understand that this would be a pretty fundamental change for the code used by the current radio system, but every time I see a station bounced radio, I can't help but wonder: Why does this exist if the only time our comms go down is during events?
So, bit of note, my day job is as a telecommunications technician, both in the fields of telephony and traditional networking. As such, talking about this sort of thing makes me a little giddy, and the potential opportunity to understand and work with (sabotage) telecom in SS13 seems fantastic.
Doesn't have to be anything too complicated, like /tg/'s rather thorough telecomm system (https://tgstation13.org/wiki/Guide_to_Te...unications), but something to work with, at least. In real life, telephones have central switches, which can range in size from roughly a circuit breaker to taking up entire rooms. Perhaps something like this can work for the telephones on the station, or perhaps even the radio system running throughout. This system could sit in the computer core, a room that I feel like currently exists mainly to have a separate place to store the AI Reset. We could have, say, a handful of radio transceivers placed around various points of the station with overlapping coverage, such that should one fail, you don't lose comms in a whole quarter of the station. Wired networks could stay up, so the AI could continue to insult people over the intercoms, and folks could turn the microphones on and in turn insult the clown. Perhaps encryption devices (NT-250X in-line encryptor) exist between the transceivers and the switch, hardening the telecomms system since it otherwise would ride over the plaintext station powernet. Maybe there's a syndicate wiretap which automatically decrypts the line and comes with a headset that can be tuned to any freq, allowing you to listen into any frequency at the obvious cost of a handful of telecrystals. Maybe a proactive engineer could install a filter in the switch which stops people from vaping over the phone.
At this point, I'm just throwing ideas out, and I understand that this would be a pretty fundamental change for the code used by the current radio system, but every time I see a station bounced radio, I can't help but wonder: Why does this exist if the only time our comms go down is during events?