Holonet access

[PastorofMuppets]

The short version is this, I am running a SWD20 game for a group of one droid and several force sensitives trying to stay alive during the dark times between movie trilogies. it is currently 7 years after movie 3. the most recent idea they have com up with to try and help themselves and jedi as a whole is to find and steal holonet relay beacons in order to hack them and set up their own closed black market holonet in the fringe regions that they and some other forces users and symapthizers are currently hiding within. This should provide safe communications and help them to coordinate efforts to hide sensitives from the empire and to more effectively train new jedi hopefuls as they can basically do an online college for students in areas without masters as a better than nothing move.

While it sounds plausible to me what I cannot figure out is what level of difficulty this should be to pull off. they are level 5s right now and as I see it this will mean heading to the corporate sector and trying to infiltrate companies to either find records of where these relays are set up, or to try and fake a damage report from one or more beacons in order to try and tail or track repair drones/crews to find out where they went for the diagnostics to then retrace the steps and steal one later.
Assuming they pull that off whats the difficulty of rewiring them to use a new network gonna look like, might it involve more missions to find special tools or some kind of special programming equipment to even interface with the relays?

Any advice at all on this would be appreciated as the books themselves seem rather light on relevant info for this undertaking.

[Mando Knight]

Notes:

1.) 7 years after RotS is the middle of the Dark Times. The Empire's grip is at its height and Rebel support networks are nowhere near as developed as afterward.
2.) The HoloNet in the Dark Times is rigidly controlled by the Empire, and later on the Rebel Alliance makes some use of a privately-installed alternative HoloNet installed at great expense by the prodigious polymath and merchant mogul Ebenn Baobab, but it's not as extensive as the Imperial HoloNet.

So, while it might be possible to buy or steal parts to help install such an alternate HoloNet, hijacking an existing Imperial relay satellite should be a suicide mission, guarded by at least a Victory-class Star Destroyer, and the Empire, ruthless as it is, would likely destroy the station rather than allow it to fall to Rebel hands. On top of that, it'll take specialists to install the network and security systems to defend it... the Empire will not suffer a Jedi-harboring darknet to survive if it catches wind of it.

Also, the #1 most dangerous thing for Force Sensitives to do in the Dark Times is to try to use the Force against the Empire, directly or indirectly. Normal people fighting the Empire get stopped by Stormtroopers, shrewd politicians have the resources to disguise their activities for years until Palpatine decides to trap them and their followers... would-be Jedi get Inquisitors (or worse, Vader) thrown at them until they die or go deeper into hiding. Level 5 is not high enough for these under-trained upstarts to disrupt the Galaxy and survive the Empire's wrath.

[LibraryOgre]

Given that Mando is fairly accurate, I think it's a neat idea... but pulling it off would be difficult. What if you have them try to find a back door... some way of programing the Undernet in by remote, but it requires going to a distant planet, where the original inventors of Holonet technology have fallen into barbarism? They have to navigate this alien planet full of barbaric splendor, living in the ruins of their great cities, so they can find the Rosetta Stone that will let them slip a new protocol into the Holonet network that will let them operate "under the radar."

All is going well... until the Empire arrives to secure the planet against just such an attempt. Now they have to fight hostile natives, the encroaching empire, and ancient droids to unlock the Holonet's secrets, and create the basis for the new Rebel Alliance's communications network... inside the Empire's own Holonet.

[Mando Knight]

Piggybacking signals off of the Imperial network is something that I think is done on occasion (and in SW: Rebels, hijacking local signals for Rebel use is fairly common but unreliable), though it's not suitable for a Force-usenet unless the players are willing to risk increased Imperial attention.
In the Lothal cell's case, they'd already attracted one Inquisitor, and then Tarkin checked in as to why he wasn't able to finish the job swiftly. The raid ended with Kanan, the cell's resident Jedi, getting captured. They break Kanan out of Tarkin's Star Destroyer, he finally defeats the Inquisitor in a lightsaber duel... and Season 2 starts with Tarkin calling in Vader to clean house, so they're forced to run. And the trailer promises to have more Inquisitors to fill in for Vader when he's busy doing other Vader-y things.

...Come to think of it, Star Wars: Rebels fits the feel of a late-Dark Times campaign pretty well... a fairly standard party makeup (a now-30-something former Padawan trying to teach the new kid the ways of the Force, a Mandalorian who's an Imperial Academy dropout with an artistic side, a big alien bruiser with a heart of gold, a Twi'lek ace pilot who's the real leader of the team, a grumpy astro-droid with a mind of his own, and a street rat who's "taken his first steps into a larger world") bouncing from freelance job to freelance job between pre-Alliance patrons and underworld contacts, and an Empire that slowly gears up to the big guns as they prove to be a nuisance.

[PastorofMuppets]

First thanks for correcting me on how the relays are set up. I had been under the impression that when not on a planet they were in areas of space out completely void of any notable features or at hyperspace dead ends and protected mostly by that secrecy of being near to nothing of note and thus basically impossible to stumble on in the vastness of the galaxy.

Perhaps then such a mission could be to hit multiple locations that can carry out the repairs on these stations in order to try and piece together enough of a schematic to build their own versions of the devices. They would be a lower power and thus lower range of coverage version but they have so far met enough people of influence and dislike of the empire to at least start that kind of project. Gathering the materials to finish it could be fuel for a few more adventures and I like the idea of finding the original builders to try to start from square one as well.

This could be a great idea for a more long term arc too, each of the players has their own personal mini-arc but so far they have not investigated the hints about the Big Picture idea i originally planned of stopping a superweapon project.

[Mando Knight]

First thanks for correcting me on how the relays are set up. I had been under the impression that when not on a planet they were in areas of space out completely void of any notable features or at hyperspace dead ends and protected mostly by that secrecy of being near to nothing of note and thus basically impossible to stumble on in the vastness of the galaxy.
The Death Stars were constructed in secrecy, and even then they were protected by fleets of Star Destroyers while under construction. The navicomputers are probably highly encrypted to keep the locations secret, but there's no way that the Empire would leave something so vital as a HoloNet relay completely unprotected. Even the terminal on a backwater planet like Lothal is protected by weapon emplacements on top of its Imperial garrison, a relay is more vital to the network.

[Sith_Happens]

Isn't most of the Holonet's infrastructure permanently in hyperspace? That's sort of how it works.

[PastorofMuppets]

I looked into it more and it seems you are both correct, the planetside installations one uses to access the holonet are either closed and dismantled now or under imperial lock and key. Many of those transmitter installations are still able to be accessed by the public but they are watched closely by empire security forces. The actual relays are in a network that are "anchored in hyperspace" according to the wiki and i have no clue how the hero group could sort of park in hyperspace and access one of them. I also have no idea how they could set up home built relays in the same fashion out in the fringes and unknowns short of a dangerous hijacking of some corporate sector ships/crews and forcing them to do it.

Starting to think this idea might not be an option, setting up bootleg transmitters seems simple enough to me but the relay part seems near impossible unless someone has some advice for me.


On another note one idea I was toying with for my group to deal with is the Vornskyr, a force sensitive critter that goes berserk when noticing a force sensitive being and tries it's hardest to devour any it finds. It says they are hard to train and even when that happens the anti-force rage can't be stopped. My thought was to have the group run into cyborg variants, the prime goal of which is to hunt jedi down but they can be shut down by a remote handler in case the target is wanted alive, or it stumbles into a sensitve random citizen. It was an idea for an evolving program that the group shuts down to become big heroes. I had also liked the cyborging idea as it gives me a way to scale down a rather monstrous enemy to something lvl5s could conceivably handle, its a barely tested prototype thats only real purpose is to show its handlers where the jedi are.

Whats stopped me so far is that a lot of imperial jedi hunting agents are at least sensitives themselves and I don't know if they would allow such a program to exist, and maybe I should just have one of these exist as a companion to a jedi focused bounty hunter as a unique tool?

[Sith_Happens]

Starting to think this idea might not be an option, setting up bootleg transmitters seems simple enough to me but the relay part seems near impossible unless someone has some advice for me.

1. Build transmitter.
2. Spoof signal.
3. ???
4. Profit.

[PastorofMuppets]

yeah... I have to figure out a better step than ??? for the plan to actually be accomplishable

[LibraryOgre]

Infiltrate the supply train and provide computer parts with an exploitable back door? Suborn the computer brains that run the holonet?