From:	Marc Renouf renouf@********.com
Subject:	Decking (request for clarification)
Date:	Tue, 23 Feb 1999 15:58:30 -0500 (EST)

On Tue, 23 Feb 1999, AlSeyMer wrote:

> Originally, this idea was put forward by one of my players willing to
> put some safe distance between his character and his deck. Discussing
> the subject, we concluded that, as you implied, it is much safer to
> let a drone physically establish a matrix connection, and, as it is at
> the jackpoint, to use its simsense transmission capability to convey
> the signals needed to do the job.

Well, there's more to a decker's transmissions than just the
simsense feed. There's also the bandwidth associated with running the
various programs, issuing commands, etc. In game terms, it's the
difference between icon bandwidth and total bandwidth. I would imagine
that something like the simsense feed off a drone might not necessarily
have the same bandwith to be able to handle the signal traffic associated
with decking.
Now if the drone installed a separate piece of equipment on site
that *did* have adequate signal capabilities, then yes, it's certainly
possible. Not only is it possible, it has the potential to be quite
useful.

> Additional considerations:
> IIRC it's not possible to use a cellular phone to convey simsense
> signal (not enough bandwidth), and, even if the signal is to be
> divided between a certain number of cellular phones, the conversions
> of the signal should induce some lag, if it's even possible.
> In my understanding, the radio and the cellular phone depicted in SR3
> are used for the same purposes, being voice and maybe image
> communication. If cell phones are no options, I don't see how radios
> could be. Of course, the key words are "high bandwidth" radios, and I
> don't know enough about the subject to render a radio capable of such
> feat in game terms.

"High bandwidth" is indeed the key. The bigger your bandwidth,
the more information you can transmit in the same amount of time.
Cellular phones and basic transistor radios use a pretty limited
bandwidth, if for no other reason than to minimize signal overlap.
Simsense, which one would imagine is pretty data intensive, is going to
require a lot more bandwidth than simple audio-video transmission. When
you tack on the extra bandwidth associated with decking, isw becomes
pretty easy to see why cellular phones and standard radios won't work.
But the point remains that there must be *some* kind of radio
signal that can carry simsense. How else would decking through satellites
work, neh? So if you have a beefy enough radio, you can't crank out
enough signal to be able to deck over it.
As a rough rule of thumb (or more appropriately, an off-the-cuff,
wild-assed guess), I'd say that the rating of the radio needs to be at
least as high as the MPCP of the deck running across the link. That way,
beefier decks with better throughput require beefier radios to get the
bandwidth they need to transmit without signal degradation. And that's
how house rules are born. :)

Marc