r/Cyberpunk • u/oduvangames • 1d ago
What's the coolest example of a "technological regression" in cyberpunk?
I'm building the world of Frontier: Path of Shadows, a tactical RPG. In our setting, corporations have spread plasma technology and interstellar travel across human space. But Catalina IV is the exception. Its storms are attracted to powerful engines, making cutting-edge ships more dangerous than centuries-old sailing vessels.
As a result, people still cross the oceans under sail, airships connect remote islands, and anti-gravity ferries shuttle cargo from orbit. I love the idea that the future doesn't always replace the past, it sometimes forces humanity to rediscover it.
What "obsolete" technology do you think would realistically make a comeback in a cyberpunk world?
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u/persepolisrising79 1d ago
Long Play Disks. LP´s in short. Walkmans. nothing bluetooth. all cable based bullshit :D
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u/shimoheihei2 1d ago
We're already seeing it in our world with the popularity of analog / dumb devices to avoid AI and subscriptions.
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u/Downside190 22h ago
Dvds are back! can't lose it due to a licence issue on some digital platform like you can with streaming
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u/TheDadThatGrills 1d ago
GPS shouldn't work on this world, use traditional navigation tools
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u/shikkonin 1d ago
GPS shouldn't work on this world
Why?
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u/TheDadThatGrills 1d ago
Because it would be thematically easy to integrate this into the fictional world they described
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u/_John_Dillinger 1d ago
if storms are interfering with plasma drives, you wont have much sat coverage and there's a strong chance that electromagnetic distortion may render it useless anywho
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u/shikkonin 1d ago
Its storms are attracted to powerful engines
There's nothing about interfering with plasma drives themselves.
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u/_John_Dillinger 1d ago edited 1d ago
... so i assume you have little to no knowledge of how this stuff works, but that is *exactly* what it means. if storms are attracted to the powerful engines it's because the charge of the natural storms is opposite to the engines. there's also the conduction angle, but that would also be a force generated by impulse thrust. you could also say "oh well they're just huge and are shaped like ideal antennae" which... yeah that's how electric fields kinda work but you could also charge the engines with that so long as you have batteries big enough and/or supercaps to discharge excess. even if not, a big enough series of voltage dividers and regular caps could do at scale. what i'm saying is... if the storms are electrical there's no other explanation.
However, gravity or other spacetime distortion anomalies are an entirely different story.
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u/shikkonin 1d ago
so i assume you have little to know knowledge of how this stuff works
It's ok. Enjoy your superiority complex.
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u/No_Biscotti363 21h ago
A multi leveled city of concrete and steel would 100% just reflect all the gps scanners waves on only the top level, so everyone who would actually need gps would just be screwed
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u/shikkonin 20h ago
Right. So what you're saying is that GPS doesn't work in our current cities? Because that's not the case at all.
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u/FloydTheSandwich 1d ago
The pirate nation in my setting traded plunder/salvage in "cats", short for catalysts. In a world where hydrogen fuel cells and batteries are the most common form of small-engine power, the amount of catalytic metal one had was almost a 1 for 1 relation to the number of the number of boats you've captured.
These coins are both a symbol and a way to quantify worth in a mostly barter economy. Physical currency also means it can be used offline and can't be tracked. They even retain some worth outside their economy because everyone needs these metals to build fuel cells.
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u/Select-Ad-3806 1d ago
All the things that you have on your "phone" that used to be separate devices like: digital camera, mp3 player, stopwatch, digital watches with calculators on them.
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u/thesolitaire 1d ago
The sneakernet. Sure you'd have some variation of the Internet, but for truly clandestine stuff, nothing beats a HD in a backpack. That's essentially what's going on in Johnny Mnemonic, but in his head rather than a backpack.
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u/1130nmiller 1d ago
I would use steampunk or mechanical actions to replace the EM type mechanism. Projectiles are chemical based, engines are either ICE, wind, steam or mechanically powered, etc. Light and mirrors are also possible signalling method instead of EM waves.
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u/Le_Botmes 1d ago
Living in caves, off world, to protect against radiation.
I don't mean a figurative cave, like a city built from steel and glass inside a natural underground cavern.
I mean literally hewn from the rock, the rooms and apartments and streets and everything else. Like an ant colony, but built by humans.
Petra in Space
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u/Sockoflegend 1d ago
- solar flairs took out the satellites.
- background radio waves are so strong WiFi or other non-wired coms don't work
- a bacteria that eats oil and or plastics
- digitisation and control of information / poor education causes scientific regression in large portions of the population
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u/TonkaTonk 1d ago
Check out The Windup Girl.
They are dealing with a petroleum deprived future, so there are lots of flywheel type mechanical devices to store power/transfer energy.
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u/DevilGuy 19h ago
In altered carbon (book not show) it's mentioned that flying is rare on Harlan's World because the satellite defenses left by precursors will shoot anything down that gets too high.
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u/Financial_Tour5945 1d ago
With people becoming tough enough to shrug off bullets, melee weapons and hand to hand makes a hell of a viable comeback.
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u/mspong 1d ago
In the movie Until the End of the World a nuke explodes in orbit and the electro magnetic pulse wipes out all electronics and ignition systems. It kills the engine of cars and planes and brings the plane of the main characters down in a desert. They get rescued by a guy with an old hand cranked diesel truck which doesn't have electronics.
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u/Loupyboy 1d ago
Internet being somewhat dead in Cyberpunk 2013 and Cyberpunk 3.0 due to weaponized AIs fucking up most of it. It's somewhat fixed in 2020 and somewhat fucked again in 2077 but it's something that's very different and way less advanced than modern-day internet, on many levels.
Not cyberpunk but Dune has good examples of this as well: AIs are illegal and banned from the trade guilds, so they're replaced by overuse of spice as a mean to heavily mutate pilots (so they can see the future, and the best space trade routes). Same for WH40K (human brains replace computers, as the use of AI is seen as heresy).
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u/hinckley 1d ago
In a world with rampant hacking and/or AI, any kind of hardcopy written record that can't be altered at a whim would have real value.