Telecommunications System

[GrandmaTaco]

You know how fun solar flare events are? I hope it'd take a bit of effort to make communication next to impossible.

That said, I am 100% down with crafty dorks turning everyone's headsets into buttbots.

I completely agree, and I've certainly put an amount of thought into how to make the system hardened enough to make this not stupid. Having said that, these are still all just ideas.

So, I picture the CO (central office switch, the primary communications switch) being something like a DMS-100 (Google it), and maybe having two, redundant locations. One in the computer core, for certain, which is one of like three rooms on the station with a turret, and the other placed near the station nerds, maybe the CE or RD office. This is a good start to physically hardening the system, as it would take two well placed bombs, and a half decent AI would notice what's up after the first.

Logically hardening the system takes a bit more thought. For starters, CO access from TermOS should require equivalent access to DWAINE Superuser. Having said that, I believe that despite the wiki stating all heads have SU on DWAINE, I don't think CE does, and that would be a nice little change. Perhaps we then have encryption devices with randomly generated short keys placed between the telephone switches, acting as both a bridge and a tunnel to the rest of the network. A term_ping will return the two encryptors but not the CO switches themselves, and in order to connect you would need your own encryptor or encryption peripheral tuned to the correct key. Finding this key would be accomplished most easily by gaining physical access to the computer core, where the spare keys are kept, but might be possible otherwise through syndicate magic.

Last of all, to assuage your concerns about making the game less fun without comms, a few things can be remembered. Should wireless comms be disabled, you can still communicate through wired means such as intercoms and telephones, a rather under utilised feature currently. And should comms go down completely, literally every single one of those red toolboxes around the station has a station bounced radio in it, which works without any sort of central communications switch. So, if comms goes completely dark, grab the station bounced radio and use it to communicate with the rest of the crew. Or, you could scream at the Borg to use machine talk to tell the AI he's stupid.

Anyways, hopefully this might clarify some things. I do want this to not be un-fun, and I think it has a lot of potential to spice up both traitors plans as well as loyalists.

EDIT: Typed this up on mobile, so apologies for any weird autocorrect stuff. Trying to fix typos and the like.