This has been a really useful thread for me: it's settled, an upcoming mission will be to thoroughly discredit Teemo through a campaign of misinformation, record corruption, etc.

My players have avoided further interactions with Teemo by being captured by Zyggerian slavers. Imagine Trex making a selfie with a big thumbs up in the foreground, with the PCs kneeling in chains behind him, and Teemo's booming laughter at the picture. You can bet that the players are sure to want to make amends for this indignity.

After the Zyggerians are dealt with, ideally one of the friends/contacts they make will also have a beef with Teemo and will suggest reprisals. I'm still fleshing out the idea, but I figure this could involve 3-4 sessions:

- identify a few spice shipments and a likely stopovers, film the "crew" swapping out spice crates for frozen nerf steaks, and hack the ship logs to make them look like they've been poorly hacked to cover up other destinations where the real spice was delivered. Involves Stealth, Streetwise, Deception, Athletics, Skulduggery, Computers, and perhaps many other skills as the crew and captain are "diverted", gotten drunk, etc.

- show a crude video of "Teemo" laughing as he intends to screw over one of his customers (or a rival Hutt). I'm sure the players will have fights over who gets to wear the Hutt suit. Deception, Charm, Coercion, Coordination, Leadership, Knowledge (Xenology, Streetwise, Underworld)

- hack into a BOSS node* to plant the corrupted ship logs and sync things up. Involves a physical insertion onto the site, ideally undetected. Stun guns and masks are a must. Computers and combat seem likely, along with Stealth and Skulduggery, etc

- hack the holonet* so the video looks like it was posted from inside Teemo's palace. Maybe make it look like Trex is double-dealing. Also involves physical insertion, so ditto on the skills.

Ideally every stage will have broad enough requirements to involve every PC.

* I use RL analogues for a general sense of how the holonet works and how prevalent it is. WEG's work and views of the holonet were fine for their day, before anyone heard of the internet and understood how ubiquitous it would become, but TCW blows it apart.

That sounds like a brilliant campaign story arc... But what I really want to know is, who gets to keep the Hutt suit after they're done.

As far as the Holonet goes, I don't think WEG's vision and TCW's are incompatible. WEG's views of the holonet are less antiquated per se and more in line with an era when the internet existed primarily for government use. It's not out of line at all for the New Order to have clamped down on it with a vengeance. I think this is definitely an area where each table will agree on their own view, but ours leans towards a controlled or at least unreliable Holonet simply because it introduces elements like the importance of couriers and galactic news traveling slowly, which fits the game we're playing a bit better than the instantaneous communication and easily accessible and complete information repositories we've gotten used to in the modern era do.

I never got the impression that Star Wars was an Information Society. Yes, they had the technology but not the pervasive communication and information. They just didn't develop in that direction. Communicators are more akin to military radios than smartphones, there are news bulletins and press stations rather than YouTube.

I think going in the direction of making it an analogue of the real world creates a lot of problems as well as potentially introduces a lot of 'why didn't they just...' plot loops. Why even transport the Death Star plans to Alderran in R2-D2? Send them in an email! Who is this mysterious person? Let's Facebook them. Sure, everyone reading this who disagrees with me is itching to type some rationalizations to my specific examples but before you do, let me say that once the Genie is out of the bottle for real world extrapolation, it's possible to sit here all day pointing out things that don't make sense or just feel strained credibility and play whack-a-mole. You rapidly end up with something that just doesn't feel like Star Wars anymore once you have YouTube, Facebook, Twitter analogues. And if there's an "Internet" that people have access to, people will expect these things.

Then what would you propose the HoloNet be knasserll? I completely agree that the HoloNet is not like the Internet at all. I see the HoloNet as being similar to air traffic control stations. They only relay specific data. News and Information as well as communication. There is no Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube because that's not how the society works. Unfortunately when you are dealing with a universe, relating it to those who don't know much about the universe (and sometimes even those who do) require you to make a real life comparison. I can't spend 30 minutes going into how the HoloNet is not like the internet and its blah blah blah. I have to keep things moving so it becomes a quick and simple "It's loosely similar to the Internet."

I plan to stick with the idea that the HoloNet is shut down by the Empire, so accessing it would require a check, then to change said information would require another check depending on how you are changing the information. So in terms of discrediting Teemo, you'd be making something up so that would be a deception check. Plus also there's the increasing difficulty...he wants to do it wirelessly from the Datapad...uh oh, that's two setback added in to start with. He wants to access the HoloNet and not he planets LocalNet. Well that will be an increased AND upgraded difficulty because it's restricted access and COMPNOR have their own people keeping tabs on the HoloNet. So that's a check to get on and then another check (and an easier check) to do what you need to do.

A problem I did have last session is that one of the NPCs mentioned how Alderaan had been destroyed (my game right now takes place parallel to the events of the films) and as soon as I mentioned it, the Slicer player out of character just said. "Uh...how come I'm only just finding this...hello! I'm on the HoloNet nearly all the time." I simply rationalised it as the Empire covering up all mention of it on the HoloNet which is not far from the truth given how the HoloNet is technically restricted. So really if she would have checked on it, she would have got info on how a 'freak accident' destroyed Alderaan.

I never got the impression that Star Wars was an Information Society. Yes, they had the technology but not the pervasive communication and information. They just didn't develop in that direction.

Just MHO of course, but an Information Society of some kind is inevitable, there's no choice about "direction". Evolution is an efficiency engine, and there is little more efficient than instant long distance communication where no physical media is involved. All advanced economies will evolve towards it.

I appreciate the whack-a-mole point, but I simply find it easier to assume the SW universe has everything we have and more. Certainly any planet with a decent economy is going to have an internet-equivalent. You can limit interplanetary communications by assuming costs are higher and nodes are fewer for FTL communications...this makes them easier to control and harder to bypass...but the Empire can't have an economy without it being somewhat open, but monitored (ala China). Besides, again just for me and my table, I don't relish getting into these details specific to the SW universe, and I know my players don't. So it's going to be real-world analogues all the way.

Also, just because we didn't see it in SW doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It's just not a focus of the SW story. The heroes aren't on Facebook, because if they were, they wouldn't be heroes....BOOM! Facebook slam!

Anyway, there are a few TCW episodes that show cheap interplanetary communications...Castus makes a call from Florum to Coruscant, and it's pretty seamless. Imperial times will be slightly different, but not impossibly so.

Why even transport the Death Star plans to Alderran in R2-D2? Send them in an email!

Just to address this specifically, there is still nothing that beats the security of physical transport, people still do it for all kinds of reasons. I don't really think there is anything in the SW movies or TCW that precludes the existence of an information society. The story just isn't about that, and doesn't go into that level of detail.

The reason why Facebook and YouTube don't exist in Star Wars? That galaxy didn't have Sir Tim Berners Lee to invent the World Wide Web so they had to stick with Gopher instead.

Then what would you propose the HoloNet be knasserll? I completely agree that the HoloNet is not like the Internet at all. I see the HoloNet as being similar to air traffic control stations. They only relay specific data. News and Information as well as communication. There is no Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube because that's not how the society works. Unfortunately when you are dealing with a universe, relating it to those who don't know much about the universe (and sometimes even those who do) require you to make a real life comparison. I can't spend 30 minutes going into how the HoloNet is not like the internet and its blah blah blah. I have to keep things moving so it becomes a quick and simple "It's loosely similar to the Internet."

I plan to stick with the idea that the HoloNet is shut down by the Empire, so accessing it would require a check, then to change said information would require another check depending on how you are changing the information. So in terms of discrediting Teemo, you'd be making something up so that would be a deception check. Plus also there's the increasing difficulty...he wants to do it wirelessly from the Datapad...uh oh, that's two setback added in to start with. He wants to access the HoloNet and not he planets LocalNet. Well that will be an increased AND upgraded difficulty because it's restricted access and COMPNOR have their own people keeping tabs on the HoloNet. So that's a check to get on and then another check (and an easier check) to do what you need to do.

A problem I did have last session is that one of the NPCs mentioned how Alderaan had been destroyed (my game right now takes place parallel to the events of the films) and as soon as I mentioned it, the Slicer player out of character just said. "Uh...how come I'm only just finding this...hello! I'm on the HoloNet nearly all the time." I simply rationalised it as the Empire covering up all mention of it on the HoloNet which is not far from the truth given how the HoloNet is technically restricted. So really if she would have checked on it, she would have got info on how a 'freak accident' destroyed Alderaan.

Well, obviously there'd be no Youtube videos of Alderaan blowing up because... they were all blown up. :-P

In all seriousness, it sounds like there's a generation/world view gap at your table. Your slicer player wants information to be as prolific and readily available as it is today and that's *directly* at odds with how the Star Wars universe is portrayed. Like Knasseril said, it opens a *huge* can of worms to try and retroactively apply what we're used to today to that. I'd even go so far as to say he wants Western-style internet access, which is incredibly different from what you can get in the developing world.

Star Wars probably has planetary nets with greater and lesser amounts of Imperial control in the Core, then coverage is going to get spottier and spottier as you move towards the Outer Rim. Tattooine barely looks like it supports comlink/cell phone coverage let alone an internet. The HoloNet itself probably operates more like the internet did in the 70s and 80s (no surprise), but since the Empire is very decidedly not particularly interested in freedom of information, access is limited to specific terminals under direct Imperial supervision or just outside of it. A major military contractor like TaggeCo for example might have a secure room in a major facility. This would govern most FTL communications, making them unreliable or unsafe at best for Rebel Alliance or personal use. Even then, the amount of content/information would be fairly narrow in scope by today's standards, because you don't have lots of free content and players feeding off itself and spinning off more and more ideas.

If I remember correctly WEG hypothesized a system of information dissemination that took advantage of not just private couriers, but standard traffic itself. News broadcasts and updates were loaded passively onto ships when they docked and when they traveled to systems with out of date information, that information was updated by being uploaded to whatever the new planet's information system was set up to do, whether that meant it was open access or routed directly to a state-controlled news facility. If that idea wasn't from WEG, I wish I could remember where I came across it. :-P

Then what would you propose the HoloNet be knasserll? I completely agree that the HoloNet is not like the Internet at all. I see the HoloNet as being similar to air traffic control stations. They only relay specific data. News and Information as well as communication. There is no Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube because that's not how the society works. Unfortunately when you are dealing with a universe, relating it to those who don't know much about the universe (and sometimes even those who do) require you to make a real life comparison. I can't spend 30 minutes going into how the HoloNet is not like the internet and its blah blah blah. I have to keep things moving so it becomes a quick and simple "It's loosely similar to the Internet."

I would say the key difference is that it is centralized, not decentralized. That is the differentiator that enables Star Wars to have the technology for an Information Society, but not be an Information Society. Air Traffic Control that you mention is a handy example. It's a net set up by a specific organization for a specific purpose.

Email sends your message from server to server till it gets to the right place. The DNS system looks up any URL and sends you to the right place and if you pay a few quid a month for a domain name, that "right place" could be yours. These are all decentralized things.

My feel for Star Wars is that this is not the case. You want to set up a "website"? Well nobody does. They set up specific services for which they apply for licences from the authorities, who arrange the particular frequencies it runs on (or however FTL communication works), etc. You don't send an "email" bouncing across a massive headerless network till it gets to the right place, you either send it directly to someone's Communicator using the matched frequency or you upload it to the planet's central messaging system or what have you. Not systems, system.

So you asked "what I'd propose it to be" and said you need to tell your players "something". Well there it is, I think. It's a bit like the Internet, but without the decentralization. Everything is top-down. Or more or less.

I never got the impression that Star Wars was an Information Society. Yes, they had the technology but not the pervasive communication and information. They just didn't develop in that direction.

Just MHO of course, but an Information Society of some kind is inevitable, there's no choice about "direction". Evolution is an efficiency engine, and there is little more efficient than instant long distance communication where no physical media is involved. All advanced economies will evolve towards it.

Perhaps so. But if you watched the movie Flash (Aaaa-ahhh) Gordon and filled it with all the logical consequences of that level of technology, or Buck Rogers had Tweaky solve every episode because of the obvious Singularity level of AI they had reached, would it still feel the same?

In this instance, my point is that the OP's player (and by the sounds of it Ebak's as well) are thinking things must be like the real world whereas actually this doesn't fit Star Wars very well. And in fact, is damaging to it, I think.

Why even transport the Death Star plans to Alderran in R2-D2? Send them in an email!

Just to address this specifically, there is still nothing that beats the security of physical transport, people still do it for all kinds of reasons. I don't really think there is anything in the SW movies or TCW that precludes the existence of an information society. The story just isn't about that, and doesn't go into that level of detail.

Well going with your interpretation who are they keeping the plans safe from? "Oh no! The Empire has got hold of the blueprints for their own battlestation! What a disaster!" Clearly the point is not the "security of physical transport" as you reference. What they're trying to achieve is the rebels on Alderran getting hold of a copy. And concealing that Princess Leia has them, though that latter part has clearly failed before the movie even starts. When I said "why not just email the plans" that's because it's a fast way to transport information. It doesn't matter if the Empire gets a copy. And all else being equal, email is a lot more anonymous (or easily can be) than getting into a spaceship and flying a disc of physical evidence all the way to another star system.

See - not only are there many moles to whack, not all of them are easy to whack, either.

A problem I did have last session is that one of the NPCs mentioned how Alderaan had been destroyed (my game right now takes place parallel to the events of the films) and as soon as I mentioned it, the Slicer player out of character just said. "Uh...how come I'm only just finding this...hello! I'm on the HoloNet nearly all the time." I simply rationalised it as the Empire covering up all mention of it on the HoloNet which is not far from the truth given how the HoloNet is technically restricted. So really if she would have checked on it, she would have got info on how a 'freak accident' destroyed Alderaan.

I would have just said that none of the news stations on the Holonet had carried the story. Your player is bringing in assumptions to the game that aren't necessarily warranted. But ignoring that, why does the Empire want to cover it up? The whole point of the "technological terror" that was the Death Star, was to scare the planets into obedience after the Emperor dissolved the Senate:

Alderan was being made an example of. Secret examples are of no use.

Let's see if I can correct the seriously funky quoting...

I'm not sure what Flash Gordon has to do with it all, so I'm ignoring it.

Well going with your interpretation who are they keeping the plans safe from? "Oh no! The Empire has got hold of the blueprints for their own battlestation! What a disaster!" Clearly the point is not the "security of physical transport" as you reference.

Choke back your sarcasm, you missed a few things. If you can intercept the email, you know it was transmitted. You might be able to follow the headers back to some source. And you either stop the email, or you could let the email go through to follow it. You could even alter it so that the plans the Rebels receive are inaccurate, and any attack they devise will be flawed. Physical transport is still more reliable and tamper-proof.

Of course, it's not completely reliable: you can try to intercept the physical carrier too, which is exactly what the Empire was trying to do.

None of this precludes SW being an information society.

Let's see if I can correct the seriously funky quoting...

I'm not sure what Flash Gordon has to do with it all, so I'm ignoring it.

Well going with your interpretation who are they keeping the plans safe from? "Oh no! The Empire has got hold of the blueprints for their own battlestation! What a disaster!" Clearly the point is not the "security of physical transport" as you reference.

Choke back your sarcasm, you missed a few things. If you can intercept the email, you know it was transmitted. You might be able to follow the headers back to some source. And you either stop the email, or you could let the email go through to follow it. You could even alter it so that the plans the Rebels receive are inaccurate, and any attack they devise will be flawed. Physical transport is still more reliable and tamper-proof.

Tamper proof is immaterial, the Empire wanted to stop transmission, not fake up some false plans. Could they have? Yes. Did they? Clearly not. Remember the whole point of what I said was specifically showing how modern paradigms interfere with what we see on screen, not that you could come up with other scenarios in which those paradigms wouldn't be a problem - anyone can do that and it remains irrelevant. Remember we're showing that X doesn't make sense in a given context, not that if you changed X to Y it might.

As to physical transport is "more reliable". I find that absurd. If I want to send a picture to someone in Russia, especially if I know some agency is trying to stop me, do I send a shipload of people half-way around the world, through all their physical security, visible bodies ready to be intercepted, questioned, etc.? Or do I send a bunch of emails from different accounts? The latter is obviously faster (allowing drastically less time for the enemy to become aware there is a security breach), more anonymous (both sender and receiver can have as many accounts as we choose and with pervasive access to the Internet we can pick up or send those from any café, home or passing stranger's laptop we steal with trivial effort), more concealable (what stands out more? People passing through customs or one bit of data amongst billions of downloads, emails, online videos, etc.) and uses less resource (click 'send' or find a ship full of people willing to risk their lives for every attempt) meaning I can take a dozen or a hundred or a thousand attempts at this in the space of the time it takes people to load the ship for travel. And not only all that, but it's easy to know that it got there and when.

Of course you can come up with reasons why Internet-bourne data can be intercepted but what I wrote (and which you cut off your quote from me) is:

"all else being equal, email is a lot more anonymous (or easily can be) than getting into a spaceship and flying a disc of physical evidence all the way to another star system."

And I stand by that.

None of this precludes SW being an information society.

Precludes absolutely? No. Forms one more piece of a tapestry of circumstantial evidence that these these things aren't present or this way in Star Wars? Yes. There are tonne of things that we would expect to see or to be different, were the Star Wars universe to be an Information Society.

I'm not sure what Flash Gordon has to do with it all, so I'm ignoring it.

Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers and all that other retro-sci fi (such as Star Wars) has technological capabilities within it that should alter society and humanity in all sorts of ways that we don't see on screen and which would feel jarring if it did. Are you telling me if Han asked Leia to add him as a Friend on HoloBookFace, it wouldn't feel odd? I say it would.

As to physical transport is "more reliable". I find that absurd.

Certainly your prerogative, but it ignores current practice of those who want to stay under the radar. The rest of your arguments can basically be cut off at this point.

Are you telling me if Han asked Leia to add him as a Friend on HoloBookFace, it wouldn't feel odd? I say it would.

I'm not sure why we're arguing about this, it's far too specific. Even if they didn't have "facebook" it doesn't preclude an information society <-- dead horse flogging

a lot of advice in this thread, and I havent read all of it, but consider this.

Just because a character CAN do something, doesn't mean it will have the intended outcome. Sure, he can post whatever he wants about Teemo to the Holonet. The technological expertise required would be Slicing. But WHAT is he posting? Is the information convincing enough? If falsified, is it traceable? Is it slanderous? If so, is it convincing? If it's evidence, is it believable? That requires a lot more than "Slicing" to pull off. Maybe if he was successful, you could say whatever he intended to post was successful, but he wouldn't know whether or not it had the intended effect...well, ever.

If he wants a mechanical outcome, maybe throw some free advantage his way if, some time later, he wants to do something with said information.

Just because you can crack a lock doesn't mean you know what to do once you're inside.

As to physical transport is "more reliable". I find that absurd.

Certainly your prerogative, but it ignores current practice of those who want to stay under the radar. The rest of your arguments can basically be cut off at this point.

I'm reasonably sure that in the modern world there are huge numbers of confidential messages and data being sent between myriads of parties - business information, intelligence agencies, law enforcement, military, diplomatic. Huge amounts of very sensitive information every hour of every day. And I'm also reasonably certain that all but a tiny minority of it is NOT transferred between the correspondents via transportation of physical media. So no, I don't think it "ignores current practice". If this is different in the Star Wars universe, which it appears to be, then the environment must be different in order to make it so. I.e. they are not an Information Society with pervasive, decentralized communication.

Are you telling me if Han asked Leia to add him as a Friend on HoloBookFace, it wouldn't feel odd? I say it would.

I'm not sure why we're arguing about this, it's far too specific. Even if they didn't have "facebook" it doesn't preclude an information society <-- dead horse flogging

You said you didn't understand my point about "Flash Gordon". My point (explained twice now) is that even if a logical extrapolation of technology we know they have makes something seem likely, it would still clash with our expectations and atmosphere of the setting. Buck Rogers doesn't have singularity computers despite obvious self-improving AI, Flash Gordon doesn't have iPads and smartphones, even though these things are way down the "tech-tree" of what we do see them having. Watch "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" for an explicit take on "retro Sci-Fi". Retro Sci-Fi captures the visions of the future that were held by the past. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with reinventing it with modern analogues, but it is wrong to suggest that this can be done without altering the atmosphere.

That's why I gave a specific example. First I made a general statement which you said you didn't understand and so were ignoring ("Flash Gordon"). So I gave a single example of what I meant and now you complain "it's far too specific".

You're conflating two separate points. I've given reasons why Star Wars is not an Information Society. And of course it isn't, because it was conceived and the groundwork laid in the 1970s when people could envision some of the tech, but almost no-one realized the social and political implications of that tech.

The "Flash Gordon" parallel is not support for saying Star Wars isn't an Information Society. It's a separate highlighting of how the flavour of retro Sci-Fi radically changes when you update it to account for modern views on things or to parallel our current world.

EDIT: Also, just because you don't agree with me on something, doesn't make it "flogging a dead horse". You after all responded to my post with objections. It's entirely reasonable and expected for me to reply in defense of what I wrote.

I'm reasonably sure that in the modern world there are huge numbers of confidential messages and data being sent between myriads of parties - business information, intelligence agencies, law enforcement, military, diplomatic. Huge amounts of very sensitive information every hour of every day. And I'm also reasonably certain that all but a tiny minority of it is NOT transferred between the correspondents via transportation of physical media.

Agreed, but it does happen (and we still have couriers), so I'm happy to explain away the usage of R2 as a carrier for that reason.

If this is different in the Star Wars universe, which it appears to be, then the environment must be different in order to make it so. I.e. they are not an Information Society with pervasive, decentralized communication.

It does not "appear to be", it's just not addressed. It's an "absence of evidence" thing.

I've given reasons why Star Wars is not an Information Society. And of course it isn't, because it was conceived and the groundwork laid in the 1970s when people could envision some of the tech, but almost no-one realized the social and political implications of that tech.

I know from other posts that you've been enjoying TCW. If you time these episodes with current technology you'll notice a couple of things: first, from E1 through the first couple of seasons of TCW, if a character wants to interact with technology they push exactly one button. Contact General Yularin? Push one button. Need a three-way chat with Yularin and Ahsoka? Push one button. Or my favorite (and most obvious), in E2: need to find Geonosis? Push one button. Need to fire up the engines? Push that same button, using the exact same hand footage, but paint the CGI background differently. I'm sure it was a in-joke, because they used it everywhere, almost the Wilhelm Scream of visuals.

I think the iPhone was released around TCW season 2, and by season 4, the character-computer interactions had gestures. The Pantoran episode has one of the characters requesting, like you'd talk to Siri, "information retrieval" from his device.

My point is that the SW is constantly in a state of being retrofitted. I'm pretty sure if you asked Lucas if SW had the internet, he'd laugh. I'd bet a lot on his response, which I imagine would be something along the lines of: of course they do, the stories just haven't bothered to spend time on that yet.

EDIT: Also, just because you don't agree with me on something, doesn't make it "flogging a dead horse". You after all responded to my post with objections. It's entirely reasonable and expected for me to reply in defense of what I wrote.

I didn't mean you were flogging, I meant *I* was flogging. Sorry, I was unclear. My point was I don't have much else to say about it. You haven't convinced me they *aren't*, and apparently you can't be convinced that they "could be".

So ultimately, in all honesty, I don't really care about the argument. As I said so far above, I'm going to do what works for my table. My players barely know what a Hutt is, I'm not going to bog them down with Holonet details. I'm quite content to retrofit a late 70s envisioning of "transmission beaming" and "data tapes" and "code cylinders" to a more modern framework, and frankly it's not much of a retrofit. A few archaic phrases aside, everything still works just fine.

I'm quite content to retrofit a late 70s envisioning of "transmission beaming" and "data tapes" and "code cylinders" to a more modern framework, and frankly it's not much of a retrofit. A few archaic phrases aside, everything still works just fine.

Ah... Discopunk. It's what happens when everything new seems old again.

Huh I always assumed the Holonet was the best and most expensive form of communication and unless you were Imperial any such use would be thoroughly supervised so Tycho calling home only to have the call interrupted because someone blew up the planet he was talking to someone on is not that much of a surprise.

Most local internets aren't the Holonet so they don't have the same level of access you'd need for the HoloNet.

Guess I'm still a little Traveller hardbound!

So communication is limited if beyond the system unless you have the means, wealth or power to make use of it.

Carrying the Death Star plans makes more sense if you don't want them traced which is what would happen had they the means to transfer them via some electronic Internet variant.

Security and secrecy probably makes using the Internet for that purpose very insecure or maybe I've been watching Johnny Mnemonic too much!

Maybe I'm straying a little too far from the original question?

One of the most classic tactics in guerilla warfar or any war is to cut off lines of communication. The Holonet is just another one of those lines and you have Hutts, Black Sun, Zann Consortium, Rebellion, and any number of people who wish to commit illegal activity who will hack, interrupt, or simply blow up holonet relays to keep their current enterprise under wraps. So there will be times where you can look at the guy and be like, "What Holonet you are in the Outer Rim or Wild Space especially." Also as you get closer to the core the more densely populated the galaxy becomes so you could have signal interruptions just cause Chandrilla is passing right between the two relays between Coruscant and Kuat at that point and time try back in an hour. Just some suggestions for keeping the Holonet just out of reach.

Also remember that slicing can leave traces especially if there is threat or despair rolled. So give the guy a nemesis from COMPNOR if he messes with the Holonet a lot. As for the droid ship I came up with a good idea. See most droid ships at the height of the clone wars had ray shields, blast doors, and droids all over the place. One idea which I really like is to make ship controls isolated to the bridge. If he tries to take control of the defenses on the ship (by that point it should be on active kill the bad thingy mode) have those isolated to one part of the ship or multiple parts of the ship that he will have to make his way to and disable one at a time. I also recommend a rival at each location in the way of a dedicated droid. For example the door knocker droid on Jabba's palace comes to mind. He tries to access a console the orb pops out and yells at him then goes back inside and makes his slicing opposed now and not just a straight up roll. Or the orb just pops out and smacks him across the face to signify the challenge. Give him a little strain to go with his pain of dealing with a defensive droid. If things get too bad and he is just cutting through like no one's business make it harder. Let the ship 'learn' from his techniques and develop strategies to counter him. "Oh so you want to access this console. Here have lots of blast doors or ray shields you will have to slice individually to get there." "Oh wait you guys are life forms haha no active techno union or Neimoidians on my ship. Why do I need oxygen then or atmosphere in general?" And if push comes to shove I mean really shove (like you don't want them to have the ship) as soon as it goes online it pings the whole area looking for enemy vessels and lights up a Star Destroyer or something's radar like the 4th of July. Now you have rival groups, rival gangs, and a pissed off Empire bearing down on this area like a rampaging rancor.