Talinz and Crime 1: Structure and equipment of the Police Force

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.