Trope-a-Day: Virtual Danger Denial

Virtual Danger Denial: Very strongly averted just about everywhere advanced, because this attitude coupled with ubiquitous computing and mind-machine interfacing, as well as when Everything is Online, is not survival-oriented, shall we say. (Yes, you can catch a fatal STI from cybersex.) In the modern world, you can safely assume that you are completely surrounded by computers which control just about everything going on in your vicinity, and anything that affects them will most definitely affect you.

And don’t even think about what an EMP would mean.

2 thoughts on “Trope-a-Day: Virtual Danger Denial

  1. I’ll venture to guess, therefore, that given how dangerous an EMP would be, and the Empire’s attitude toward restricting personal access to weapons, that almost everything that can be EMP-hardened or shielded to a reasonable degree probably is. And likely overhardened to whatever degree of overengineering can be economically fit into its other design constraints.

    Meaning, by extension, that actually attacking with EMPs isn’t terribly effective unless they’re accompanied by some way to defeat the shielding – but everyone knows just how bad it could get if someone did exactly that.

    • To a certain degree – although modified by the Empire’s tendency to solve that particular problem by building saner people rather than by restrictions, which makes no-one worry about it all that much. Most of the EMP hardening is actually there either by coincidence (“we use optronics these days”) or to make hardware work in a variety of planetary and space environments with different electromagnetic and radiation levels without having to build a bunch of different models, which covers a lot of territory.

      It’s still possible to build a pinch that will do a lot of damage locally, inverse-square-wise – https://eldraeverse.com/2012/05/12/triage/ , for example – but even aside from the building saner people, doing so is also discouraged by the Fourth Directorate’s excellent record of hunting down idiot would-be terrorists and stuffing them into the lethal chambers. So not exactly a significant issue.

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