Radio Range
It's Too Damn Low

I think every single radio should broadcast city-wide at a minimum, and installed radios (room, vehicle, cyberware) should broadcast to the Badlands or even to space in the bargain. The extreme level of stratification on these devices was really not necessary for the very limited utility they actually provide, especially considering now there is no other communication methods outside the city at all.

It's possible I dreamt this, I will test it.

NPCs in the Badlands and space carrying radios tuned to a common frequency is pretty gamey but it did seem to me like radios was meant to take over for progias since the latter was curtailed when the former was introduced, which never really ended up happening.

While there's not exactly a lot of reason to be in the Badlands for protracted periods of time, it does somewhat notionally seem to be the 'vehicle combat is on without restrictions' zone, which makes it somewhat ironic that vehicles and radios intermix so poorly right now.

I really want radios to be cool, it just feels like the stars have to align for them to be useful. That said, perhaps the desired outcome is players avoiding space and the Badlands since it does take them out of the primary roleplaying arena, in which case I can see the argument for the comms to be bad... but I still think they all should broadcast city-wide by default even so.

What are the current factors discouraging people from using radios today, and how can we get more people to use them? I feel like they have so much potential, but only if there's at least a good amount of people listening to the radio waves at one time. For me, the reason why I don't use radios that much is because you have to have them turned on all the time if you don't want to miss any impromptu radio conversations, and I don't want to waste the battery on them for no reason.

Also, in the heyday of radio usage you were able to get units at pretty aggressive prices second-hand. I don't know if these are all sitting around in a landfill or something somewhere, but the retail prices of radios could also be looked at. The crappiest model of radio seems to be many times more expensive than say, a progia, which arguably is much, much more useful than a radio is. Food for thought.

But I think if the static was a little less and at least some words were able to come in, it might trigger interest in people trying to listen in from a distance away to find other means/find out information about what's being talked about.

I've probably had way more want for the idea of radios, on paper, than most players because I've had a real need at various times to talk to PCs and NPCs in the Badlands and in space, but there's not really any combination of equipment that makes that feasible the way things are structured.

Even if every radio could just talk to every other radio, at any range, they'd probably still be a niche tool because SIC is already a universal communication tool for 99% of situations.

10 different radios split across 3 bands out of the gate was kind of like if Progia models could only call models of the same type, and also if Progia-7s had a 10 block range and drained batteries and had to be left on all the time to get calls.

The basic function of radio amounts to a lo-fi SIC network, something otherwise provided to every character automatically for free. The function that radio can provide just doesn't feel strong enough to me to necessitate it gets split up with various downsides and complications, no matter how many higher-band models get added.

That effort was let down by how crippled the system was at launch and long afterwards, and I think now leaving low-band behind as a lost cause and selling new mid-band gear in replacement does away with all the time and effort and chyen that went into that initial effort.

There's no reason to again put in the effort to replicate that again knowing it was a waste the first time, especially not now with equipment that's even more expensive and has more hurdles to access it. If starting a radio ecosystem means buying even more new equipment again, I don't think it's going to happen.

What equipment is present and invested in that can get this kind of system started, if it was improved, is all on the low-band. That is where, in my opinion, the improvements focus will have to be if it's going to become a big system with lots of player support and content.

This system as it was implemented is not good. I'm sure it's very tidy and organized on the drawing board with the different bands and segments, but the central provision itself is not strong enough to support that design.

It doesn't have real world advantages over SIC and gridphones. It's not cheap. It's not fun, or functional. The syntax to use them is awkward. They screw up in any mixture with vehicles. They lag enormously at random, or fail silently with no indication. Everyone's batteries are always dead.

The advantages that people posture about it, or the scenarios they come up with, are largely imaginary situations. The reality is we spent two or three years now trying to make it work and it never did, because there was always some better option or the radios just didn't work at all. The very rare situations it could've worked, it broke for some other reason or no one else had any equipment, because no one ever needed it.

I want radios to be good more than anyone probably, but I see the same mistakes here that were made on the initial launch, which are again saddling a feature with downsides and stipulations even before it has even a chance to take off. Even if there was a single cheap universal radio that did everything in one mobile package, I'm still not sure it would see common use.

If the staff feel like the tech is just too powerful not to have all these downsides, then fair enough. But if it's a question of what I would use and promote the use of, then I don't see myself trying to make this whole thing work again without changes to the fundamentals of the design.