You wanna remotely control a Star Destroyer?

Work up a fake order from the Destroyer's admiral, and send it through that official Imperial communicator you just commandeered.

*Spoiler for last season of 24*

Knasserll consider your posts on this topic stolen for my personal Star Wars encyclopedia.

You hit the issue right on the head. The players are familiar with the internet and the kind of networked electronic environment it implies, but most of the electronics in Star Wars are unconnected to each other. There is certainly a good deal of slicing in the movies, and it is often a very positive tool, but in each instance the characters had to get to a very specific place to access the information, or at least do anything productive with it.

EU should have developed an ancient cyber-war that explained this. Some evil entity that took control of machines and electronic devices, spreading through the Galaxy, and could only be defeated by destroying anything "connected". Governments, corporations, and people are now way too scared to add wireless connectivity to the devices they use and manufacture due to this cyber incident/war.

Battlestar Galactica (as mentioned above) and Dune have similar past incidents that help their plots.

It does have one. There is a Droid revolution arc in the Star Wars the Old Republic game.

The point is, what do you say to those who have grown up in an Information Society and don't understand that high technology does not have to mean Wikipedia and Facebook and an Internet that works how some smart arse IT monkey thinks it should work.

Hey, I resemble that remark... It's a bit of a weird argument to be so fervent about, especially when you have essentially zero evidence for your POV.

I don't have zero evidence. I know the principle of "Absence of Evidence is not Evidence of Absence", but take that to extremes and you get Russell's Teapot (there is a teapot orbiting Jupiter because we don't know there isn't). We see precious little of an Information Society in Star Wars when an Information Society is by its nature, pervasive and pretty much everywhere. We see many things done in pre-Information Society ways repeatedly. Obi Wan wants to know where a planet is - he goes to a library and looks it up. How do we see people communicate? With analogues of phone calls. How do we see people buy and sell? With street stalls and bazars. Everywhere that we would expect to see an Information Society fundamentally change things... it hasn't. The Star Wars setting is largely a mix of Old West milieu for the remote parts and Middle Eastern-flavoured urban depth for the populous part - souks and merchants and generally Space Cairo (albeit Anakin's driving is too tame for a Cairo resident's).

Short version: Not only do we see minimal evidence of what you talk about, we see minimal influence of it in ways that we would expect. There's the support for my point of view.

It's not something movies spent any time on, though TCW sure has plenty of hints that that "information society" is all there. If you don't want it to be for your own game then great, but insisting on a "one truth" here seems unnecessary.

I don't insist on it being the "One Truth". People can play how they like. But I say it is the natural and most fitting viewpoint for what we see on screen. Sure, maybe Boba Fett was fervently scanning Han Solo's HoloSpace page to learn who he has a Friend status and help track the guy down, but why add that when it is flowing from preconceptions about how high technology works, rather than from what is actually in front of us?

You have to keep in mind the context of this thread. My post is not going round everybody's games telling them "You shall play this way". It's addressing an invisible player who is sitting right in front of us and has just told the GM "I should be able to look up this Darth Vader person on the Holonet and find out about him". Or "I should be able to hack the Space Station through its webpage". Because they think high technology must equal Information Society. I even explicitly called out that my post was addressed to "smart arse IT monkeys". When a GM is faced with such a one, I'm attempting to provide a reply for them. Otherwise too many GMs get put on a back foot and find themselves running something that doesn't feel like Star Wars to them and their campaign shooting in unwanted directions all because they don't know how to say to some over-confident player that their understanding of technology in SW is wrong because X,Y and Z.

In that context, my post is more than acceptable - it's fulfilling its intended purpose.

The other thing worth mentioning is that the communications systems in Star Wars are NOT WiFi, nor electromagnetic radiation. They can't be - you have instantaneous communications between star systems or even between planets in the same system. You can't do that with radiowaves. They have something that is faster than light.

I think you missed the point about what wifi is and how people are using the term colloquially. All it means for most people is "without physical connection". I can tell you, if they rolled out new technology tomorrow that was faster than light and used quantum tunnelling or nano-wormholes to form dynamic quantum entanglement bonds between two receptors...people would *still* call it wifi.

Oh, you really have to meet a marketing person some day. I guarantee you that if I or anyone else invented FTL communications technology it wouldn't be called "Wi-Fi". We'd come up with some awesome new name for it. Or at least a new name for it. Seriously - what is a blog? A diary or journal that just happens to be online. What is Cloud Computing? Storing your documents or running your software on a server just like people have always done. What is... Well it goes on, really. We love putting new names on even tiny technological differences. You cannot convince me that "nano-wormholes" would be called "Wi-Fi". Anyway, my point is obvious - I'm talking about WiFi as we know it today and highlighting the differences we see in SW. R2-D2 doesn't connect to a wireless network to control the trash compactor, she plugs her gizmo into a terminal in the wall. That's SW tech.

Most people can barely use google. Sure, they can find stuff about celebrities and popular things, but digging any deeper takes some skill and work.

Skill and work? I don't think you would have survived in the age of library research!

I always have a theory about technology. The fact that a specie/civilization have discovered hyperspace or blasters doesn't mean that they discovered true AI and vicerversa.

So, even with all the technological advances, its possible that they choosen a different "way" to evolve in SW universe.

By the way, there is no mention in canon, but due that exists millions of systems, maybe one of them have discovered teleport but they are on a post-industrial era.

So, SW "technology level" is a "why not?". It can be ok to me Maybe if you have scientis on engineers on the group, their goal, instead kill a lot of things, have tons of credits, become a Jedi... can be just discover or improve a new techology or look for ancient races knowledge or get it from unknown and unexplored worlds.

SW is so retro. Love it

Think of Holonet as more of your big 'backhaul' links similar to a contemporary SDH/DWDM optical network- they get huge chunks of information, load them into a payload and shoot them down the line to a reciever.

From there, the payload gets broken down into packets of individual information.

A router of some sort determines which packet goes where from its header, some go down the line further, others get directed off to other trancievers and a couple get dropped off at the station.

Some info from that point might also be loaded into the payload from the current location.

They payload is put back together and shot off again to the next point down the line via the S-Thread tunnelling its way through hyperspace.

That doesn't mean its the be-all and end all of long range comms in Star Wars, there's plenty of other long range communications out there as well, most systems and larger ships will also have a Subspace Radio , which on a big ship can pop something out about 100 light years. While it is a FTL radio tunnelling through subspace, it will still have some delay. So its made use of by inter-system comms between planets, distress beacons and other space stations.

While its expensive, its also much more obtainable than Holonet.

Back in Realspace, radios still have their place in your local planets and near orbit transmissions, handheld comlinks and backpack radios. They're more than likely just your average radio signals we're all familiar with.

How much infrastructure there is at that point is pretty much subjective to the local area its in, you're not likely to have a Wifi on Gammoria, but they might have TV/Radio transmitting things.

So while your slicer might 'want' to hack the Holonet, its probably eminently easier to get the two types of communication intercepted off Subspace and Realspace transmissions.

I don't insist on it being the "One Truth".

Then you might want to have rephrased your sentences where you say, at the top of this page, that the communications system are "NOT WiFi" and Star Wars is "NOT an Information Society". Those are statements of supposed fact, not opinion.

I'll leave the rest about "evidence" as agree-to-disagree.

Oh, you really have to meet a marketing person some day. I guarantee you that if I or anyone else invented FTL communications technology it wouldn't be called "Wi-Fi". We'd come up with some awesome new name for it. Or at least a new name for it. Seriously - what is a blog? A diary or journal that just happens to be online. What is Cloud Computing? Storing your documents or running your software on a server just like people have always done. What is... Well it goes on, really. We love putting new names on even tiny technological differences. You cannot convince me that "nano-wormholes" would be called "Wi-Fi". Anyway, my point is obvious - I'm talking about WiFi as we know it today and highlighting the differences we see in SW. R2-D2 doesn't connect to a wireless network to control the trash compactor, she plugs her gizmo into a terminal in the wall. That's SW tech.

I must not be explaining this properly. I think you're hung up on a name, not a function. The function of communication that requires no physical medium can be effectively be lumped into the "wireless" category. Whatever you want to call it, wifi, comms, etc, it still performs the same function.

R2D2 can't connect wirelessly to control the trash compactor for the reason I gave above: because of security protocols, this is almost impossible to do anyway, almost all hacking requires being on the inside. It's not necessary to explain it as an artifact of the absence of wireless communications in the SW universe.

SW is a sword-and-planet space fantasy that pulls tropes from mid-to-late 20th century popular films. Though desktop computing certainly exists, what we would consider ubiquitous computing doesn't fit within that model. Like how an astral plane lore-net wouldn't fit within a Tolkien-inspired fantasy and Harry Potter with iPhones and no messenger owls wouldn't be as much fun to experience. Ubiquitous computing spoils the sense of myth and mystery that SW shoots for by making everything knowable with a few dice rolls.

Think about how an adventuring party in a sword and sorcery fantasy game goes about discovering knowledge - talking to people on the street and visiting librarians or 'wise elder'-types - and apply that to your SW game with some retro futuristic flair. Records are computerized but they're restricted to single locations and there is no way to share them without the SW equivalent of a 3 3/8" floppy disk (an astromech droid, for example). If a player wants to know what information the local government has on an individual that player has to actually physically go to the place where information is stored. Then flipping through those computer records would require a Computers roll. Or they can go to a Hutt-owned casino to dig up dirt through an Underworld roll.

As presented in the films and TCW, the Holonet is a glorified long-distance telephone and broadcast television analog. It's probably very expensive to run and broadcasting through it probably requires very expensive equipment (see Darth Vader's personal hologram pod on the Executor ). Local voice communication is handled through short-range commlinks which can't be controlled by the Empire, other than through jamming. I would imagine the wrist holo commlinks we see are restricted to the military and/or Core World high society.

Demanding realistic information networking in SW is like demanding realistic biology and... yeah. That's not going to happen.

R2D2 can't connect wirelessly to control the trash compactor for the reason I gave above: because of security protocols, this is almost impossible to do anyway, almost all hacking requires being on the inside. It's not necessary to explain it as an artifact of the absence of wireless communications in the SW universe.

Wireless scomp links could be a "prototype advanced tech" thing, where you might have a PC like R2-D2 have to plug in to access secure stuff, but here comes this snazzy new top-of-the-line NPC astromech with no external scomp link: its scomp capabilities are completely "wireless."

Astromech PC gets jealous and acts out, then discovers that the snazzy new NPC astromech is actually a spy working for a rival organization. But the PC astromech can't get anyone to believe this because of the way he's previously acted towards this new droid. And...so on.

With Star Wars tech, it's best IMO to assume the most basic of functionality and then upgrade from there as necessary or as warranted by the story.

[...] R2-D2 doesn't connect to a wireless network to control the trash compactor, she plugs her gizmo into a terminal in the wall. That's SW tech.

My take-away from all this is Artoo is female

Ships have an engine signature. So while they are moving the engine gives off something that identifies it.

THAT'S straight from a Star Trek movie (Star Trek IV?). It's the one with the cloaked, rogue Klingon ship and they alter a torpedo to home in on the exhaust from the cloaked ship's engines. Wrong genre, sorry.

Oh, you really have to meet a marketing person some day. I guarantee you that if I or anyone else invented FTL communications technology it wouldn't be called "Wi-Fi". We'd come up with some awesome new name for it. Or at least a new name for it. Seriously - what is a blog? A diary or journal that just happens to be online. What is Cloud Computing? Storing your documents or running your software on a server just like people have always done. What is... Well it goes on, really. We love putting new names on even tiny technological differences. You cannot convince me that "nano-wormholes" would be called "Wi-Fi". Anyway, my point is obvious - I'm talking about WiFi as we know it today and highlighting the differences we see in SW. R2-D2 doesn't connect to a wireless network to control the trash compactor, she plugs her gizmo into a terminal in the wall. That's SW tech.

You missed his point here. You know what the NFL has been using on the sidelines this year? Microsoft Surface Pros. You know what everyone has been calling them? IPads. That HP tablet my mom bought? She calls it an iPad all the time. That off-brand tissue your wife got? Can you hand me the Kleenex? The point is that arguing about the feasibility of actual WiFi in Star Wars is pointless if you are going to allow some other form of no-wires connections. People will still call it WiFi because WiFi as a term has become ubiquitous with non-wired connections.

I can't say whether this addressed any of your points, but I know that is what he was trying to say.

Everyone seems to think that everything has wifi. We see R2-D2 plug into computers to do stuff, yet we can slice a starships systems remotely. Seems a kind of double standard.

That's EXACTLY why the distinction is needed. People see Jack Bauer & crew (from 24) use a smart phone, a paper clip, and some tin foil to hack into the FBI computer database in under 13 seconds and then we find that our players want to do similar things in the SW Universe and it just isn't possible in either one.

Why did no one try to establish some kind of rebel holonet to avoid the Empire's naughtiness?

I wonder if the trend of expecting to find things electronically is generational? Myself and my players grew up in the eighties and nineties during the Internet's infancy, back when it was considered less reliable than analog sources. None of us think to Google anything when we're playing a game, let alone a Star Wars game. Are your players younger than that, or are they just caught up by the advances in technology?

Oh, we're all Gen-X'ers, not Millennials. We have the same '80's & '90's experiences, but we're pretty astute when it comes to the influences technology has on us as players. I even find myself thinking that finding the Empire's secret base can be as simple as rolling a great computer check. .....then I slap myself. Some things just aren't out there to be had.

Millennials definitely have grown up their whole lives with wifi and internet access everywhere they go. Heaven forbid they ever needed to use a dictionary or a phone book! (Sorry Millennials!) They also have no idea what it's like to live in a dictatorship or Cold War scenario because the schools just don't teach that stuff anymore. A previous post made that point, as well. Our group can relate some Empire activities to living behind the Berlin Wall, the Iron Curtain, or living in Cuba. No problem there.

All of this may be a mute point anyways when Star Wars VII, VIII, & IX come out and Disney and terrible writers & directors decide to add in things like hacking Empire systems from a smart-watch, finding the Sith Lord's home address on the internet, and teenage computer hackers running the universe.

Not sure who said it, but as someone here said, 'the HoloNet is only good for Imperial propaganda and pictures of cats'.

I describe it as being like the internet of the early 90's, on a very slow dial-up connection...

This from someone who has never owned an I-phone and who finds using a computery thing instead of rolling physical dice to be an anathema. All that nonsense is banned from my table - I want my players' attention fixed on me.

I don't insist on it being the "One Truth".

Then you might want to have rephrased your sentences where you say, at the top of this page, that the communications system are "NOT WiFi" and Star Wars is "NOT an Information Society". Those are statements of supposed fact, not opinion.

They are indeed statements of fact. And as twice stated explicitly, I am writing a reply from GM to our player who is trying to impose their assumptions about technology onto the Star Wars setting. The post you quote above about "NOT an Information Society" begins at the very first line with:

"I explain things to players who expect it to be as follows:"

I have twice clarified that I am providing an answer to players who want to bring their assumptions about technology into the Star Wars setting. The OP posed exactly this case as a problem they sought help with. Why and how you have developed this immunity to context I do not know, but your attempting to interpose yourself between my statement from GM to player makes no difference to what I say. The other line you quote about how the communications technology we see in Star Wars can't be "electromagnetic radiation and is not WiFi", I have backed up. Firstly, it cannot be EM (radio waves, et al.) because it goes faster than light. Secondly, "WiFi" does not just mean wireless. If I had written "wireless communications" you might have a beef, but I did not. Feel free to check my posts. WiFi brings a context with it and doesn't just mean "wireless" as you say.

Have you ever heard anyone use "WiFi" to refer to CB radio? But it's "wireless", isn't it? Have you ever heard anyone refer to their satellite television as "WiFi". What about ship to ship semaphore (about as close to the technology of your home router as the router is to faster than light communication)? No? But it's "wireless", right? Point to point laser communications? Walkie-talkies? Morse code via flashlights? You've just argued that WiFi covers all of these things because you're hung up on etymology but I know you're generally honest in debates so you will admit that no-one takes WiFi to mean these things. It does not encompass any wireless form of communication as you argued.

As to R2-D2 did not connect because of "security protocols", well that's possible. But the same security protocols could as easily apply to wired connections. And why shouldn't they? A modern computer network (IP addresses and all that) are basically the same whether they are running over Ethernet or WiFi, are they not? They have the same servers, same passwords, same way of handing out IP addresses, no? It's all basically the same stuff but the underlying network part is radio waves, not wires, right? Well that's what I meant when I said it doesn't have WiFi. We see little sign of pervasive wireless networking. On something like the Death Star with probably a billion unguarded network ports like R2-D2 accesses, I see no reason why you wouldn't ask the same authentication questions of some random thing requesting connection to the network as you would if it connected wirelessly. Can you see any good reason why you wouldn't? In which case, we have more evidence for a lack of WiFi in the Star Wars setting. If anything, connecting wired gives the enemy a more definite feel for where you are than connecting wirelessly so you'd be LESS inclined to use it without good reason.

None of this says that a GM has to run Star Wars this way, but it's consistent with what we see on screen and doesn't raise awkward questions the way bringing in assumptions about WiFi and Information Society does. I've now stated very clearly three times that I am writing a response to players who want to bring their own assumptions in to a setting that never originally had them. In inserting yourself this way, you're taking on the role of that argumentative player who wont let go of the idea that their real world knowledge doesn't let them do things in the game. And so you are getting the replies that such a player would. When you tell me that yes, SW has this or that because of whatever reason, I'm giving the exact replies I would give to such players (who are plentiful and frequently have some IT profession and consider themselves more knowledgeable than the GM).

I believe my replies are pretty solid ones to such a player, to be honest.

I'll leave the rest about "evidence" as agree-to-disagree.

Up to you, but if you had found anything incorrect in what I said, you would have been welcome to point it out.

Oh, you really have to meet a marketing person some day. I guarantee you that if I or anyone else invented FTL communications technology it wouldn't be called "Wi-Fi". We'd come up with some awesome new name for it. Or at least a new name for it. Seriously - what is a blog? A diary or journal that just happens to be online. What is Cloud Computing? Storing your documents or running your software on a server just like people have always done. What is... Well it goes on, really. We love putting new names on even tiny technological differences. You cannot convince me that "nano-wormholes" would be called "Wi-Fi". Anyway, my point is obvious - I'm talking about WiFi as we know it today and highlighting the differences we see in SW. R2-D2 doesn't connect to a wireless network to control the trash compactor, she plugs her gizmo into a terminal in the wall. That's SW tech.

I must not be explaining this properly. I think you're hung up on a name, not a function. The function of communication that requires no physical medium can be effectively be lumped into the "wireless" category. Whatever you want to call it, wifi, comms, etc, it still performs the same function.

As I wrote earlier, I wrote "WiFi" deliberately. No, it's not the same thing as simply meaning "wireless" as I explained. I understood perfectly well what you meant. I was pointing out how false it was to say any similar technology would be called the same because you were trying to use such equivalence to prove I was wrong to say it wasn't there. WiFi isn't "comms", it's wireless networking, broadly speaking. And when I say SW doesn't seem to have much in the way of wireless networking, I mean that. Radio signals are not wireless networking. It becomes a network when you have multiple computer devices talking to each other on some kind of established wireless network infrastructure. I've never seen much evidence of such and if there were such pervasive wireless networking we would expect to see it used. You would NOT expect R2-D2 to be connecting physically to Cloud City to find out legitimate information such as whether their vessel had finished fuelling. And other incidences. You would, in short, expect to see it get used at some point. Only instance I can think of easily is Lobot receiving signals to his big cranial implant. A pretty exceptional case because pretty much every other example of high technology shows wired communications and wired network infrastructure.

R2D2 can't connect wirelessly to control the trash compactor for the reason I gave above: because of security protocols, this is almost impossible to do anyway, almost all hacking requires being on the inside. It's not necessary to explain it as an artifact of the absence of wireless communications in the SW universe.

Now who is saying what is and isn't? The argument above is a logical fallacy, namely absence of evidence being taken as evidence of absence. Ironic given the imprecation of such being the main charge you are levelling at me.

All of this may be a mute point anyways when Star Wars VII, VIII, & IX come out and Disney and terrible writers & directors decide to add in things like hacking Empire systems from a smart-watch, finding the Sith Lord's home address on the internet, and teenage computer hackers running the universe.

This is very much my fear and what has been at the back of my mind throughout this thread. I suspect with the release of the new movies, whafrog will become right in everything they say. I have little to no faith that the writers of the new Star Wars movies have the mental capacity to think things through as has been done here. I expect (and dread) their attempts to "modernize" Star Wars and make the technology more "plausible".

Quote marks because it is only to limited minds that these changes will be required to make it sensible to them.

This whole thing reminds me of when Shadowrun 4th Edition came out and I had countless arguments with people over accessing things wirelessly, why company data would be available on the Matrix instead of everything offline, and so on... Ten years later, it's panning out almost exactly how all the SR4 Matrix critics argued it didn't make sense. And most of those were people with a little IT knowledge trying to misapply it. Old wine, new skins.

Ships have an engine signature. So while they are moving the engine gives off something that identifies it.

THAT'S straight from a Star Trek movie (Star Trek IV?). It's the one with the cloaked, rogue Klingon ship and they alter a torpedo to home in on the exhaust from the cloaked ship's engines. Wrong genre, sorry.

Nope! Right genre Transponder codes were used to identify a ship. I would recommend reading up on the Bearau of Ships & Services (BoSS)—lots of great adventure hooks therein.

All of this may be a mute point anyways when Star Wars VII, VIII, & IX come out and Disney and terrible writers & directors decide to add in things like hacking Empire systems from a smart-watch, finding the Sith Lord's home address on the internet, and teenage computer hackers running the universe.

Shhh....shhh. It'll be okay. Shhhhh.

(Also...it's " moot ," not "mute.")

Why did no one try to establish some kind of rebel holonet to avoid the Empire's naughtiness?

That's an interesting question. I also especially like referring to all the evils and crimes of Palpatine and his state as "naughtiness".

A rebel "holonet" would need to remain secret and secure and be portable / flexible. I think those would be the critical design goals. None of those things lend themselves well to centralized management and control. Instead you want decentralization and the ability to quickly add or remove parts of the net as new groups join or existing ones are compromised. Trust is also a major issue.

Maybe they run it more like a "sneaker net". I.e. they're passing information around physically - either on some sort of disc / memory block, or loading it into droids (which seems to be a preferred method). Such an approach would be much slower in spreading information than the Holonet. But also much more secure and safe. People would get captured, and some information would be lost, but the channel of communication would end with their capture - it wouldn't remain open.

[...] R2-D2 doesn't connect to a wireless network to control the trash compactor, she plugs her gizmo into a terminal in the wall. That's SW tech.

My take-away from all this is Artoo is female

It's the hips.

_{Whatever the actual problem is, I am glad I play with folks who are able to think in "Star Wars" terms and have yet to even consider some of these more information-age options.}

Why did no one try to establish some kind of rebel holonet to avoid the Empire's naughtiness?

Who says they didn't? They did still manage to coordinate interstellar forces, and you can't exactly do that with shuttles. Any organization operating across star systems would have a vested interest in ensuring their own lines of communication weren't compromised...any of the Hutts, Pykes, Black Sun, Corporate Sector, Corellia, etc might have financed a network of some kind and leased bandwidth. And

The media simply doesn't go into it...it's not important to the stories. It's only important to us when we want to flesh out the minutia of living in that world.

Hey, here's a good question: do you think the Star Wars universe has BitCoin? *ducks and runs away...*