# The empty slot is the whole drawing > A cyberdeck exploded view fans six cartridge slots above the body, one left conspicuously empty — the discipline of choosing what not to carry. August 19, 2026 · https://justog.club/stories/netrunner-deck-loadout A cyberdeck, shell lifted off, drawn as a technical exploded view. Six cartridge slots fan out above the body along one diagonal. Five are filled. The cable coil sits below. No leader lines, no labels, no text anywhere on the shirt. Count the slots and the drawing tells you everything it's going to tell you: this is a kit, and one choice in it was to leave a bay open. ## What is an exploded view actually showing? Every part of an object pulled apart along the axis it comes apart on, spaced out so each piece is visible on its own before it goes back together. It's not a picture of the deck. It's a picture of how the deck is built, which is a different and more useful thing to someone who has to open it. A photograph shows the object; an exploded view shows the decisions inside it — which parts are removable, which are fixed, and in what order they'd have to come off to get at any one of them. ## Why leave a slot empty rather than filling it? Because a loadout chosen before a job is a bet, and an empty slot is the part of the bet that admits you don't know everything yet. Five slots committed to specific tools means five decisions already made about what this job needs. The sixth, left open, isn't an oversight — it's capacity held in reserve for whatever the first five choices turn out not to cover. Filling every slot looks more prepared and is actually less flexible; it spends the one resource, free space, that a run without an open bay doesn't have. ### That's a specific kind of discipline, not an accident An artist drawing a "loaded" deck would fill every slot — a full loadout reads as more impressive at a glance. Leaving one open on purpose is the harder call to draw and the harder one to make in the world the drawing depicts: it says the empty bay cost something to keep empty, the same way [an unused way through a fuse panel is deliberately left disconnected](/stories/fuse-box-diagram) rather than wired up just because the space is there. ## What makes a good loadout drawing? Enough variety among the filled slots that they read as different tools, not five copies of the same cartridge redrawn. Six slots along one diagonal is close to the right density — few enough that each one is individually legible at chest size, many enough that the empty one reads as a gap rather than as the edge of the drawing running out. The cable coil beneath earns its place by doing the opposite job: it's the one component that isn't modular, the tether that stays attached no matter what's plugged into the slots above it. ## Does an exploded view need labels to make sense? No — the geometry does the explaining that a leader line would otherwise do. A repair manual's exploded diagram uses leader lines because it has to match a part to a part number in a table elsewhere on the page. A shirt has no accompanying table, and doesn't need one: the shell lifted clear of the body, the slots fanned in sequence, the coil sitting where it physically sits — the arrangement itself is the information. Adding text here would be explaining a picture that already explained itself, the same restraint that keeps [a rack of channels legible as a rack rather than a spreadsheet](/stories/dimmer-rack-channels). ## Does this work for a loadout that isn't a deck? Any kit assembled before knowing exactly what it's for draws the same way. A field engineer's toolroll with one loop left empty for whatever the site turns out to need. A mechanic's socket set missing the one size nobody's swapped out yet. The exploded view is really a drawing about preparation under uncertainty, and a cyberdeck is simply where this genre puts that question — the loadout is one of the ways somebody makes a living inside a network with no physical form to speak of. ## Isn't an empty slot just an unfinished loadout? It reads that way if you assume the deck is still being built. Read it as finished, and the empty slot is the most deliberate thing on it. A kit somebody hasn't finished assembling looks incomplete because everything about it is still in motion — no fixed cable routing, tools half-seated, nothing committed. This drawing has committed cable routing and five fully seated cartridges. The sixth slot isn't unfinished business. It's the one piece of the loadout that was decided on purpose to stay open. ## Does it print well? Yes, with the fan of slots kept as flat geometric shapes rather than rendered with shading. Cream for the deck body and cable, one orange reserved for the filled slots, leaves the empty slot doing its job by contrast — it's simply the absence of the accent colour, which reads clearly at any size without needing an outline to mark it. [Hard-edged flat shapes are what this kind of technical drawing wants on fabric](/stories/signal-box-lever-frame); soft gradient shading on the shell would blur exactly the line-work that makes it read as a diagram instead of an illustration. ## How do I get one made? Describe your loadout at [JustOG](/) — how many slots, what's in them, and which one stays open. Pick a direction, drag the crop frame, see it composited on the real garment, and it's made to order and shipped. Designs other people have published are in the [shop](/shop). Five slots committed, one held back, and a cable coil that was never going anywhere.