Heads up: After next Operations report I'll very likely be doing away with the expense roll. Expense otherwise will remain untouched, just that the Expense of new items will depend on GM decision in addition to their Effectiveness and Bug Rolls. Global League's control bonus will be changed as well - likely to a reassignable expense credit. But until then, the expense roll stays.
Tech Design: Walkie Talkie[3, 5, 4]The
Walkie Talkie is a refinement of existing military radio communications technology into something a bit more suitable for use in the Espionage sector. It was quite a bit of work to do this and while we may not have accomplished all the original goals, we have made significant progress towards something useful.
As we were unable to miniaturize it to the point of fitting in a shoe sole, the
Walkie Talkie fits in a relatively large briefcase - just barely able to be held by one hand. A wire extends outward from the handle to connect to a modified headset. Whereas the military used a headset similar to modern telephones, we have refined it to be less obvious. A wire-like metal frame rests on the head, reaching down to one ear where the audio comes out. The microphone extends outward from here to be a bit closer to the mouth where it can be heard. A simple button on the earpiece enables the microphone for talking into it.
The headset assembly isn't
hidden, but isn't immediately obvious. As long as our agents wear hats. Which we feel is practically a given: hats will never go out of fashion, after all.
An agent simply carries the briefcase around with them and feeds the wire from the handle through their clothing to the headset, allowing them to communicate with nearby agents and assets. Command would
love if we could increase the range enough and establish a control room for communication between Command and Agents in the field, but that's for later. Not now.
Though at the moment the Walkie Talkie isn't particularly useful - our agents have been trained to work without non-proximity communication. Some modification to our Skill doctrines will be needed to make full use of this design.
Due to power constraints, the Walkie Talkie has a decent amount of trouble communicating through walls.
Thick walls practically prevent communication entirely, with the more typical walls simply making our lives a bit harder. Civilian buildings should mostly be fine as long as our agents don't somehow find the way to have the most walls between two communicating agents, but with more secure military buildings like those occasionally found on Government and Global League sites, we may have a problem.
Finally, it turns out that the military's radios never fell under the jurisdiction of the Disarmament Law. Meaning that the military still has large stores of them just lying around! We can skip a
lot of effort by simply modifying existing radio sets into Walkie Talkies rather than making our own from scratch.
Cheap.Walkie Talkie: A fairly short-range briefcase-disguised radio with a small wire leading from the handle to a subtle-yet-present headset mounted on one side of the head, preferably disguised by a hat. Can likely be seen if specifically looked for, even when disguised. Poor communication through walls, especially thick military/secure walls. Cheap.
It is still the Design Phase. Vote on a single Tech or Skill design proposal fulfilling the "subtle & non-lethal" Design Credit requirements.