Talk:Ghostwriter System/@comment-5982125-20131212194644

No, the not being able to see the keys bit wouldn't be a problem at all. The shorthand code system is well, short-hand; it's derived from one of the common methodologies still used today in the real world by U.S. courtroom stenographers. When you're doing stenography like that, you HAVE to be able to type by muscle memory - if you can't, you'll never be able to keep up. So the machines would require training for the operators in the sense that they would have to learn to type extemely quickly using a non-standard abbreviated keyboard layout without being able to look at the keys. I suppose the extremely rapid words-per-minute typing part of it isn't really necessary to operating the machine, but it's part of the qualifications and the training they go through to operate the machines anyway, because of the advantages it would impart.

As for the machine itself, it's based partly on the Enigma machines and partly on other cypher machines which are less well-known ... all of them, if I remember right, being based on the Enigma. I took most of the design from a Swiss improvement on the Enigma, the name of which I can't remember ... but a lot of those improved Enigma machines other countries developed were relatively small self-contained machines; just the cypher and the radio. The Ghostwriter machines, like the Enigmas, have more components to them than just the actual cyphers (actually a lot more than the Enigmas even): there's the computer that tells the operator how to configure his drive wheels to decode an incoming message, the radio for sending/receiving messages, a punch card machine so that, if you have access to the piece of information or writing you want encrypted in punch card format, you can just feed it through the punch card machine and it will route the message straight through the cypher without you having to type it in. But in most cases it wouldn't be practical to take orally-dictated messages from a unit commander and convert them into punch cards - just having one of the operators take it down on the cypher keyboard as he speaks is faster - so the punch cards would only be used when there was sufficient time beforehand to prepare them, or with facilities large enough to be able to handle operating with punched cards quickly / efficiently - like a permanent base or somesuch. There's also, of course, a printer connected to the cyphers so that messages received can be printed out quickly rather than having someone take the message down with pen and paper. It will spint the decoded message out in shorthand on a narrow strip of paper from a big roll. The Enigma machines had printers that were designed for them if I remember right, but they were expensive and not used with a lot of Enigma sets because there weren't enough to go around. Having the printer also improved security because the actual operator of the cypher doesn't see the decrypted message (without the printer, the message would be flashed on a little display board.

The Ghostwriter machines also come with a plugboard that allows the operators to 'swap' letters by rerouting the electrical connections (since the machine just works very simply - every time a key is pressed it completes a circuit, causing an electric current to pass through the cypher. The internal mechanics - the rotors and such - send the current down a bunch of randomized pathways and it comes out again as another letter. With the plugboard, you've got cables with jacks at both ends and a set of plugs labeled with all the different characters - letters, numbers, symbols - in your alphabet (if normal English were used to transcribe messages, it'd just be the 26 letters of the alphabet, but they use a special shorthand alphabet as mentioned prior). So like, if I plug one end of a cable into the 'A' socket and the other into the 'D' socket, every 'A' I type in is going to get converted to a 'D' before it even passes through the rotors; every 'D' I input is converted to an 'A', too. Then the input goes through the encyphering process and the same thing happens again, except now all the letters have been scrambled by the rotors... the more cables in the switch-board, the harder it'll be to crack. In real life, it wasn't the Enigmas themselves that gave us so much trouble, the Poles had those cracked by 1932 with no foreign help. It was the plugboards, because it added such an arbitrary level of randomization. And while the Ghostwriter machines have a lot of other features that improve their encyphering compared to the Enigmas, the plugboard is still a very abritrary and random way to add additional levels of encryption; even if, for these cyphers, it's not nearly as necessary as with the Enigmas.

Still, beyond being electromechanical rotary cyphers, the Enigma and the Ghostwriter don't have that much in common. The Ghostwriter is a lot more complicated, more technologically advanced and, more importantly, isn't just a mechanical randomization algorithm. It actually has the capability to send messages via radio as you type them. All the Enigma machines did was spit the letters you put in back out but scrambled, you had to then write them down and send the message manually.

Granted, the Ghostwriter cyphers are able to do those things because of all the other accessories and machines and components they attach to them - which makes the whole system a lot less portable. But even if you stripped it down to just the basic machine with the printer, it would still be vastly more secure than the Enigma. Also, the regulations for using the things and communicating back and forth and whatnot are very, very complex, and to really really take full advantage of the system's capability you need multiple plugboards. Because each 'channel' they operate is proscribed a table of plugboard combinations, but since the regular field cyphers only have one or two plugboards, they can only start switching between these plugboard combinations when sending out multiple successive messages to the same recipient (since the plugboard combination tables also proscribe the order in which said combinations should be rotated when sending successive messages). However, you always have to go back to the original plugboard arrangement when you're communicating with another post. In some cases, when A wants to send a message to B, they will route it through C (where C is another Ghostwriter system / operator better configured to talk to B) and inform B of how they should configure their machine to get the message. Mind you, most posts that are using these machines have more than one --- and as long as the particular system includes the computer that can identify the "drive wheel" combination being used for an incoming message, the operators of the individual systems can screw with the drive wheels as much as they like. Everything else, though, has to be exactly the same. The only exception to that would be when a given system includes multiple plugboard since, in that case, there would just be one plugboard configured for every combination assigned to the channel and a received message would just be sent through the machine multiple times but through different plugboards until the printer spat out a decryption of the message that wasn't gibberish.