Telecommunications System

[GrandmaTaco]

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?

[Wisecrack34]

I understood none of that and I want it now

[cyberTripping]

I feel like this would be a really interesting, dynamic system. The radio system being more fully integrated into the current mechanics system would be really fun to fuck around with. While I can't remember too many specifics, I do think the mainframe has directories corresponding to radio frequencies that can be used to communicate along those frequencies, so maybe that could be looked into as something to hook this to. Although, I might be misremembering crucial details...

[kyle2143]

I really like this idea. It reminds me of an interesting new job idea I saw on the forums a long time ago. It was like a "Communications Officer" job or something, where it mostly dealt with station wide announcements and random event declarations. That seems like it would fit perfectly with this, managing radio signals and such.

Recently I heard an idea about using the mainframe for keeping a log of all the station radio chatter and people being able to view that by searching the mainframe. Sounds like TG has that, which would be pretty cool.

I'm not so sure about their whole thing with radio repeaters and signal bouncer objects that all radio's need to be able to reach. But l keeping a record in the mainframe sounds interesting, especially if you can change it to incriminate people and such.

[GrandmaTaco]

I feel like this would be a really interesting, dynamic system. The radio system being more fully integrated into the current mechanics system would be really fun to fuck around with. While I can't remember too many specifics, I do think the mainframe has directories corresponding to radio frequencies that can be used to communicate along those frequencies, so maybe that could be looked into as something to hook this to. Although,  I might be misremembering crucial details...

No, you're spot on. With a little bit of DWAINE knowledge you can send PDA messages from the DWAINE mainframe radio. Problem is, so far as I can tell, normal radio chatter doesn't exist in packet format, and just kind of works by magic.

[MrMagolor]

This is all a plot by BIG CODE to turn Goon into tg

[Wisecrack34]

Wonk likes, that means it's in. Your move coders.

[Berrik]

I've wanted to be able to sabotage the station radio systems as a traitor for a long time. Let's make it happen!

[Superlagg]

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.

[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.

[Recusor]

very cool ideas still. I love that station bounced radios could become a necessity in some situations.

[Superlagg]

Okay I like it now, what with station bounced radiae being a mostly un-fuckable way to telecommunicate.

[ZeWaka]

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.

Butt buuutt butt butt!