So what, hypothetically, might happen if 6th world Boston got hit with a ballistic missile? I ask because an, erm, friend of mine might have had this come up in a game session the other day and he's not quite sure what the global fallout (no pun intended (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif) ) should be.

I.. suppose that would depend a lot on why.

Long story short, an AI got its mitts on a Saeder-Krupp ballistic missile submarine prototype in the Arctic Ocean and fired off several missiles. Runners managed to stop all of them except the one bound for Boston. They reasoned at the time that since nukes have a bad rep for not detonating in SR that it was a paper tiger. Turns out not so much.

The submarine got taken out by Thor shot almost immediately after launching the missiles, but the AI escaped. The only things I can think of so far are a bunch of pissed-off MiTT alums and probably a stern message from Pulsar. The runners should feel affected by all this, but not too much, since they're all a bunch of paranoid sociopath Russians.

The dwarf gunbunny was from Boston though. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/frown.gif)

Well I hope that AI can find a hole to jump in and pull the hole in behind itself, because the world is going to go apeshit.

Saeder-Krupp is going to have the Corp Court asking why they allowed something like this to happen. They will also have to pay UCAS a whole boat load of money.

The 'Runners... well, if they were hired by Saeder-Krupp to stop the sub, then they better not go to UCAS for while ever again. People may not be happy that they allowed a nuke to hit UCAS.

SK just committed an act of war against the UCAS AND against every AA or better that had a facility in Boston. So SK has just gone to war with (at the very least) the UCAS, Ares, Lone Star, DocWagon, Aztechnology, Renraku, Shiawase, Mitsuhama, and whatever Yamatesu is called these days.

Committing an act of war against several of the major military powers (Ares and Aztechnology) AND getting a super-majority of the CC angry at you is going to be VERY expensive.

It wouldn't do anything good for Boston either.

Donn't forget that Boston is a MAJOR Surface shipping port on the east coast and maybe one of if not the biggest one in the UCAS. I think they moved the stockmarket there too didn't they? Or am I connfusing my sci-fi's?

But yes. Kzt has it right. They just declared nuclear war on a number of superpowers. They'd be in deep trouble.

Thing is the golden dragon wouldn't let it happen. He's smarter than that. He'd have a redundant abort code in the missle so deep that it couldn't be dug out and would have blown it before it hit boston.

The money he'd have to spend in the resulting wars would nnot be good.

If you want this to happenn you gotta use acorp that doesn't have possibly the smartest and most devious great dragon alive at the helm.

if nothing else, SK would have launched a FLEET of drones to get in the way and ram the missile taking it out or off course. Millions and millions of Yen in Drones if not manned craft would get in the way before it got to Boston. Destroying the missle is alot easier, and wouldn't set off the nuke. Arctic ocean to Boston is a long flight. SK would know instantly what happened and that thing would have 1000s of miles through a shooting gallery before it could even get there.

You have a lot of orbital platforms armed with very large lasers up there. Ares, Japan, and a few others would have assets in place.

But if it hit it would be exceedingly bad. You'd kill several million people, do trillions in damage and end up at war with essentially the entire world. And nobody is buying "but it wasn't our fault, it was a rouge AI!" And even if some did, it doesn't matter. It was an SK weapon, launched from an SK ship. Obviously SK didn't prevent it from being used and who else is going to pay?

It's 2070. Doesn't the UCAS have some sort of SDI-esque missile shield yet?

Wow. This is straight out of my first story arc. I nuked Boston. Well, sub-nuked. Done by an AI.

The AI was a drone pilot that gained self awareness and became an AI, as it was a pilot that was designed on learning and improving it's performance from mistakes. The runners were hired to fight it in a potentially lethal prototype testing, to test the self learning ability. They beat it and left the drone a slag heap. The pilot program was of course secure in a "black box". The whole thing was on the up and up, no double crosses or anything.

Anyhow, once the test was completed the programmers feared that deleting the runners from the target list might create problems with the pilot, it could "forget" what it learned, have logic problems, etc. So instead they planned to edit the list later on, replacing the runners with stationary targets that it could destroy easily and therefor count as "eliminated". Well, this budding AI didn't like that, it detected the ruse. It played along but made a copy of the original target list. It then decided the best course of action to kill those runners would be to eliminate the researchers that held it in the facility. It started to branch out into the matrix and .... yeah. It didn't start with the nuke, it built up to that. It learned from failure, so everytime it failed a few rolls it got better. So after a few days it learned how to hack its way into a UCAS military node and tried to take out all the runners at once.

My players haven't been back to Boston since. It wasn't a nuke, per say, it was just a large missile strike putting the hurt on a portion of the city, destroying a couple districts, but the majority of the city was intact.


The main difference is that in my plot the launch was from the UCAS to the UCAS, not SK to the UCAS and the damage is far more severe. There is going to be some major conflict. Also, NeoNet's World HQ and Wuxing's North American HQ is on Boston I think, they'll likely go after SK as well.

Remember that this is Lofwyr we're talking about. He might have planned it all from the start. In System Failure, he seems to know in advance about the Crash, too.

He'll "do everything possible" and "cooperate fully" to save Boston, but "alas" it was impossible.

At which point the corporate court issues an omega order on SK. Then, after every military asset they have gets obliterated at most 15 seconds after the gavel falls, the Ares nail-driving operation against his HQ starts, Aztechnology kicks off their ritual assassination teams, and the Regional HQs get an ultimatum.

It's not required that they wait for the CC, being under a nuclear attack is a pretty damn good justification to immediately attack every SK asset world-wide to preempt the follow-up attacks.

One point that rubs me the wrong way : WTF sort of use could Saeder-Krupp have for a nuke-armed missile boat ? And it's odd for them to be stupid enough to have the missile launch controled by an hackable, rather than standalone, computer system, without even the rather obvious safety feature of a physical key...

I also wonder why a prototype would be field-tested with active nukes.

Oh and one last thing : the sub can only be hacked when it's close to the surface - when it's running deep, the ELF transmissions are painfully slow (as in a handful of characters by minute - one hour to transmit a tweet...), which makes hacking flat impossible.

I'm guessing Red Sox fans are going to be VERY upset.

Not to mention the Land based requirements of actually having an ELF transmitter. They are not a dime a dozen after all... Not too many of them even nowadays throughout the world.

That last bit would be the easiest one to bypass : even if you can't hack the sub on the recieving end, you can at least hack the ELF station on ground. An can even see some AAA having such stations if they're using a lot of cargo subs to protect themselves against piracy.

But boomers aren't something I see a corporation investing in - if they really need to toss a nuke at someone, hiding it in a shipping container or using some sort of truck-carriable launcher makes far more sense. SSBMs are extremely pricey toys and no corp worth it's nuyen is going to pour that sort of cash without a pressing need.

Possibly...

And I heartily agree...

The ROI on military hardware is pretty low, it's not the kind of thing that stockholders like. However, SK has no stockholders. Mostly due to mystical power of plot, but it says there are no stockholders.

It has a StockholdER. And you can bet those stocks are safe under his scaly belly.

All this is assuming the nuke goes off properly at all.

Since the Awakening, nukes often have this odd habit of just not working as intended.




-k

I believe that it was stated in by the OP that it 1) hit Boston, and 2) detonated high-yield.

Yeah, all three or four of 'em that weren't in the blast zone. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/grinbig.gif)

Why build up a small nuclear arsenal when you have no means to deliver your nukes to potential targets?
SK is probably the only corp besides Ares that has more than a token few nuclear weapons, if any mega has subs with nukes, it's them.

Bugs.... In case the bugs come back and take over a city or two. That's why the triple A's would have boomers. ESPECIALLY the Golden Dragon.

Also SK would be ready to move against other Great Dragons if old gold snout wants to. Much easier to nuke um if you have to than risk your life fighting them one on one.

Maybe he just has them because he bought up a company that happened to have nukes? Lofwyr owns so many companies, he's actually likely to own nukes by accident.

He doesn't really strike me as the sort to do things by Accident. Nor are Nukes the sorts of things that are often lost in the shuffle. They're sort of a big deal. Even in SR.