After the Baku treaty ended the war, decommissioned military
Talinz flooded the black market. Military units that had avoided deactivation and
repurposing were a major problem to the police service. The immediate reaction
of most world governments was to fight fire with fire: creating new Talinz
units optimised to being physically robust investigators and disaster
management robots, allowing them to be used in place of stretched police
forces, and without the potential mortality of human officers at robotic hands.
The Avogadro incident changed all that. Avogadro Industries
was a large Talinz manufacturing corporation that had acquired defence
contracts to supply units to the Russian, Uzbek, Azerbaijani and Turkmen police
forces. Armenian police forces, which had invested little in Talinz policing,
found vast quantities of illegal weaponry being shipped across the Azerbaijan-Armenia
border and the surrounding regions from storehouses in the Caspian Sea, apparently right under the noses of the security forces there. Avogadro
was making profits from black market dealings, having installed modules into
their Talinz units that prevented them, or their pilots, from perceiving any suspicious dealings, and invoked sub-routines that destroyed related evidence if ever
police came too close to uncovering the conspiracy. Since then, police forces
have abandoned the idea of using Talinz units in law enforcement, and all
currently produced models were decommissioned.
This, however, hasn’t stopped criminals from employing
Talinz units. Talinz model weaponry is still produced for the sporting market,
and military plans from before the Baku treaty still exist, many of which have been
widely disseminated among organised criminal elements. Such units are useful
for a number of functions, as heavies and bodyguards, to proxies for dealing in
illicit substances. Human police officers frequently find themselves
confronting robust Talinz units piloted by the real culprits from remote
locations.
This has presented a considerable challenge to the armed
response services of modern police forces, though police force structure varies
from country to country. Some countries, such as the UK, where stringent legislation
in the use of weaponry in amateur Talinz matches has stymied any possible trade
in Talinz projectile weaponry, for example, still utilise specific armed
response teams. Meanwhile, in the United States, the average beat cop is likely
to be armed in the same fashion as a British Armed Response Officer. The lowest
tier of armament for a police officer in the modern day, which is seen in the
average member of the British police force, Irish Garda, or a similarly
structured force, is a truncheon and a shock glove. A shock glove is special issue
equipment that has the ability to deliver a sharp, non-lethal electric shock on
contact to apprehend Talinz units if necessary.
Armed response services tend to be armed with a combination
of traditional slug projectile weaponry and specific anti-Talinz devices. These
range from strong EMP grenades and spike-like pulse emitters to shock guns that
launch small needles to discharge a high voltage to the target on contact.
All these can easily disable Talinz units for a short amount of time by
triggering surge protection protocols that stop the unit from being rendered
completely useless. These EM pulses work at a great cost however, breaking a
number of the important fragile components within the Talinz unit, sometimes
wiping data, and potentially evidence, from their disks. There is a chance, if
the weapon was particularly successful, that the subroutine in which they were
engaging is wiped from their memory, rendering the unit dazed and incapable of
interacting with the rest of the firefight even after the soft reboot that
occurs as part of the surge protection framework of a Talinz unit. However,
many Talinz units will fight on until completely incapacitated by slug throwing
weaponry otherwise. This is a balanced judgement often left up to the call of
the leader of the response team. For this reason, also, the slug throwing
weaponry born by these teams lacks any of the electrical registration or targeting
technology used more frequently by more typical armed forces within the world,
as it would be disabled by the usage of anti-Talinz weaponry. Similarly, it
prevents a number of individuals from joining these armed response services.
Those with robotic prosthetics or pacemakers might find their devices rendered
incapable by these pulse weapons.
Anti Talinz Equipment
in your games
Playing a police game might require your players to utilise
many of the pieces of Anti-Talinz equipment spoken about today. When it comes
to adding these to a PC’s character sheet, they are quite simple. Anti-Talinz
equipment can be divided into ‘Shock’ equipment and ‘EMP’ equipment. Shock
equipment is also useful on organic targets, whereas EMP equipment is not. If a
player has one of these equipment pieces as a Gear Aspect, they can spend a
Fate point to invoke the benefits, but they must also abide by the restrictions
of the gear type. Shock weaponry tends to also be capable of inflicting damage,
either by solid penetration, or by electrical surges, whereas EMP weaponry
tends to only affect internal systems and electrical components.
Shock: When
invoked, Shock equipment will apply the temporary ‘Disabled’ tag to any electrical
equipment (Including Talinz) in the target area, with a free invoke. A Talinz
inflicted with the ‘Disabled’ tag in this manner also loses one piece of information
that was useful to the PCs (GM’s discretion). If you succeed with style on the
attack roll, you may inflict an additional, appropriate mild consequence on the
target.
EMP: EMP
equipment has no effect on organic beings unless they possess inorganic aids. When
invoked, an EMP will apply the temporary ‘Disabled’ tag to any electrical
equipment (Including Talinz) in the target area, with a free invoke. A Talinz
inflicted with the ‘Disabled’ tag in this manner also loses one piece of information
that was useful to the PCs (GM’s discretion). If you succeed with style on the
attack roll, the target’s surge protocol executed in time, and no important
information was lost.
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