Nuclear Era Gadgets

Audio Compass

Pocket, Slick

This is an electronic compass which indicates north with a beep. It is useful in the dark. A variant uses vibration, and is silent, though more difficult to read.

Infrared Goggles

Jacket

A bulky apparatus which straps over the head. It allows characters to see by the light of an infrared projector, negating penalties for darkness up to 30 meters away. The limited arc of vision and bulky apparatus gives one point of impairment while worn. It is easily spotted up to 300 meters away by infrared sensors, but they are rare at this time.

At higher levels of technology, the goggles give no impairment, or even look like regular sunglasses.

Laser Microphone

Jacket Slick

A laser microphone turns any window into a bug. These devices work by reflecting an invisible laser beam off the glass, picking up vibrations caused by speech. Normal bug detectors cannot sense a laser mike. However, such precautions as playing loud music and running the faucets drown out conversations, as usual. A laser microphone has a range of 50 meters.

Long-Range Microphone

Unconcealable

This device uses a parabolic dish to concentrate sound. It can pick up speech at a range of 1,500 meters. This device can intercept even whispered speech at 100 meters. Halve these ranges under noisy conditions, and halve again if there is a breeze.

Nitefinder Goggles

Jacket

Nitefinders are lightweight night-vision goggles. They are an optic/electronic light amplification system which weighs less than most motorcycle helmets weigh. During the darkest night, the Nitefinder will give the impression of twilight, extending the range of vision to 150 meters.

Because of the narrow field of vision and general clumsiness, anyone wearing these suffer one point of impairment, but it eliminates penalties for poor light. It is painfully obvious when worn.

At higher levels of technology, the goggles give no impairment, or even look like regular sunglasses.

Optic Fiber Decoder

Pocket

A clever device the size and shape of a jeweler's glass. The lens of the decoder consists of over 500, 000 optic fibers bent in a unique fashion. Q Branch has several devices, each of which corresponds with one and only one decoder; these are the encoders.

To encode a message, a technician selects an intense color (a bright red-orange, for example) which is to be used for the coded message. A short message of less than 100 words is written in this color. The encoder, which itself has hundreds of thousands of fibers, photographs the message through the fibers, thereby scrambling the message into a series of apparently random orange dots. These dots are then spaced further apart, but the relative space between the dots is retained. The dots are printed on white paper to form a portion of a peach colored piece of stationery. The rest of the stationery's coloring is a collection of the same sort of dots. A message of the most innocuous sort is written on the stationery, being careful that the written message does not cover the encoded message. An agent in the field merely scans the stationery with the decoder until the encoded message is found.

Umbrella Radio

Trenchcoat Slick

The umbrella radio has an additional component — an ear piece which is necessary to amplify the volume of the received transmissions. The ear piece is quite small. The transmission microphone is located at the top of the umbrella handle. The transmission range is like that of a backpack-sized radio. The equipment is powered by small batteries which have sufficient charge for six hours of operation.