4-019: Aboard Snark 416 – Oliver’s Cabin
Frustrated by the length of time brute-forcing is likely to take, Oliver takes an alternate option and attacks the drive with all his sneaky cyber-terrorist knowledge; about a Task later he has it up and running in an emulator on his laptop. From here he can both access the system as if he were Argyle and read all the data on the storage module directly.
The security system is quite sophisticated; far more sophisticated, in fact, than the small hunting lodge warrants and only a fraction of its capacity was being used.
Oliver determines in passing that:
- There were four more turrets on the property, part of the external gate group, that he didn’t encounter
- The turrets are programmed to only fire at hot or fast-moving objects once they pass inside the wall and are more than 100m from the lodge
- There was another mine somewhere he didn’t encounter
- The two fire traps are built such that once they drop their flammable liquid, some sort of ignition system is supposed to set them off 2 seconds later
- Of course, when Oliver tripped the first one, it hit the flare and ignited immediately
- All the windows had sensors fitted and they are wired to a loud alarm that also flashes the lights on and off
The storage module contains an extensive library of video entertainments and a fairly large stock of music.
There is also a reference library of electronic engineering and cryptographic items, plus some of DIY items similar to what was on the bedroom bookshelf.
Software for running the chip emulators in the Electronics Lab is installed, but there doesn’t seem to be any data files for them.
Oliver also finds what seems to be a large archive of scanned exercise books.
There are also a number of heavily encrypted data blobs that he can’t see into.
The above will take him most of a Job to figure out. What now?
Stars
I think that yes, you can spend stars to fix a bad roll after the fact, but you won’t generally be able to get a critical success that way (that might require a bucket-load of stars). Spending stars up front is more likely to have impressive results.
There are optional rules for using character points in this way [see B347] but I’m not sure if I will use them precisely as written. I’m thinking it will take from 5-10 stars to do things, given the stated conversion rate of 10 Stars = 1 Character Point. We can negotiate lower numbers of stars for trivial effects, perhaps. Does that work for you as a mechanic?
Stars – Sounds good to me.
Based on my curiosity rolls, Oliver is most interested in the Encrypted Data and would like to attempt to get into it.
He rolls 10 – 8 – 14 as applicable.