First off, this is mostly speculation and will hopefully be answered in th matrix sourcebook in 6months-2years.

How does the matrix work for militaries, military engagements and the like?

I assume if it's black ops/off the book then like normal since the military decker won't be sanctioned, but what about if there is an engagement between two militaries (corp or national)? Do the military deckers build up OS as they carry out actions defending or engaging? Or would they be sanctioned personas operating agaisnt sanctioned persona/legitimate hosts/devices?

Example: Salish and Tshimish go to war again. A Salish military decker is attempting to shutdown the security grid of a Tshimish military base. They are legally at war so what would happen? Would the decker eventually get dumped and reported?

As well, how would remote installations work? I would assume they would have their own grid, but not be a host (and therefore findable on the whole matrix). Would it be a private grid with a series of private and secured nodes, or would it be a private grid with a private host only on the one grid? If the grid connected to the rest I the matrix could you then not use the public (free but drek) grid to then access it?

I anint touching this with a 10' pole.

except to say 'Check out this thread http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?showtopic=40269

It gets derailed with military decking at some point.

In short, there is no defined way this works because Shadowrun is written from the perspective of a very selective niche.

his first question, at least, is fairly new.

my personal opinion:

GOD is a corporate-run organization. if the military organizations in question have paid their bills and are in good standing with the corporate court, the corporate court doesn't care if they're trying to shoot each other. neither side has to deal with OS.

but if you're talking about, say, aztlan vs the assorted rebels in the yucatan peninsula (not that the situation is quite the same over there), you'd have the corporate-sponsored forces free of OS, but not the rebels.

GOD doesn't exist to enforce the law or peace or anything like that. it exists to make sure the matrix favours their corporate masters. so long as you're giving them enough money and not harming their ability to make money, they don't much care what you're doing.

edit: to the second question, the matrix pretty much reaches everywhere there isn't jamming. they probably have their own grid, such as it is (and it's probably the only one), but it wouldn't be impossible to find since it would (so far as we know presently) still be a part of the regular matrix. also, hosts in hidden mode are pretty hard to find, so there's no reason such a facility couldn't use a host.

Given the rules as written, no sane military has any real need for a decker in the field because using wireless-active gear is suicide for ground troops if the opposing electronic warfare unit is any good at all. Even a milspec host is compromised the very moment a single piece of gear connected to it is in enemy hands.

Military usage (or field usage in general) was poorly thought out in the rules as published and may possibly be filled in with devices and rules that will be released in later books.

Yet the preview #4 is up and they are talking about decking for small unit tactics, so the fluff is still being pushed for this. Will have to see what the rest of the chapter offers for this in the game info section.

With the ability to turn off wireless connectivity and the fact that wired interaction is a useable security measure, I would think military deckers would be both relevant, often required, and relatively able to remain silent.

I imagine that militaries are governed by the same Matrix Rules as anyone else. After all the GOD are there to ensure the sanctity of their creation and any ways for militaries to bypass their kingdom would be pretty quickly diseminated into the shadows a la Bradley (Angela?) Manning style.

That said the military forces would definitely have their own proprietary hosts or even minor grids to run off of, depending on relative wealth or influence. I also imagine that established Corp forces may be able to grease the wheels a bit when it comes to Overwatch scores:

"Sergeant, the GODs have seen fit to grant us a Six-Zero minute opening. Get your boys moving and make the most of it before it expires."

I don't understand why they wouldn't have deckers on the frontlines? Clearly the person that controls the frontline's Matrix gets access to seemingly instantaneous communications and your units get to use their wireless boni with impunity.

You have illustrated a pretty good reason to not use hosts, which makes sense. But if you compromise a master device, it does not get you access to all of a unit's gear. Thus decks would probably be prefered. Like the book says, hosts are usually limited to the number of devices that can securely be slaved to it. So probably a military base, not every persons gear on the frontline, since they can't guarantee protection fort every person's gear on the frontline.

the problem with assuming decks all over the place is that it is ridiculously cheaper to jam everything so that even if you lose the matrix battle, the other side won't get their matrix bonuses.

so even if one side has a ridiculously superior matrix presence (which is going to cost enough money that you could probably outfit another two regular soldiers with a lot of cyberware, at the very least), the other side can relatively easily negate the wireless bonuses obtained through it.

i mean, it's 345,000 just for the cyberdeck. and then the other side just pulls out a 1200 nuyen rating 6 directional jammer (assuming military organizations don't have access to stronger ones) and there goes all your stupid wireless bonuses. won't shut down riggers, but just about anything else is gonna get wrecked. if we presume they stack (RAW they would, RAI is about as clear as mud on this), it's impossible to defend against it (if it doesn't stack it's just really hard to defend against) once you're in range. not to mention they could just lob area jammers at you if they want, which greatly extends the range.

Umm...how would a Rating 6 directional, broad spectrum jammer screw up all decking but still allow Riggers using wireless links to work with impunity?

Lets pretend we're Aztlan, and we're fighting the dangerous Amazonian rebels. Presumably Amazonia will have a lot of area jammers on the frontline to deny us our wireless boni. But assuming they want to keep their wireless boni, they run the jammers with their wireless on. So our Aztlan deckers will have to fight the jammers with a -6 from the noise, but assuming that the decker is half decently skilled say 10dp, that's still 4 DP to brute force and data spike the jammers. Of course, the Amazonian decker won't have any of that, so will attempt to brick the Aztlan decker's deck. So of course, Aztlan deploys its own jammers to even the odds and now they're both on even footing and both taking a -6.

So lets say, that the Aztlan decker wins in this annoyingly noisy frontline combat. The Amazonian Decker turns off all wireless on the jammers, so they're still jamming, but are now jamming all signals, which does hurt the Amazonian forces, but it also hurts the Aztlan forces.

I thought, there might be an ECCM action like in SR4...but nope. that's kind of annoying. But an interesting symbiosis is that RCCs have noise reduction. So if Aztlan has a rigger, they can have the unit's gear slaved to the RCC and get their wireless boni that way, since the RCC should be able to cut through the noise. And since the Aztlan decker won the decker duel, Aztlan now controls the Matrix on the frontline, so the RCC can cut through that noise with no problem.

I think I like the idea of giving RCCs and Decks their own niche in Matrix defense/offense. You slave to the RCC, when someone is jamming you. You slave to the deck when you want to run your gear silent. And you slave to a commlink, when you're a Technomancer or have no Matrix defense otherwise. I don't like that last one as much.

why would the rebels even bother having their own cyberdecks?

if they know they're going to get pwned in the matrix, they just opt out of the matrix, and spend the much smaller amount of resources required to force aztlan out of the matrix as well. particularly since devices out in the jungle are already going to be suffering noise, in that particular conflict it's quite possible even an RCC won't get you a clear connection (and in any event, you couldn't wirelessly connect to the RCC for it; you'd need each soldier to be carrying around high rating RCCs with cables to each and every one of their devices).

seriously. the rebels have the choice of spending hundreds of thousands of nuyen for every few soldiers to lose in the matrix, or they can just decide to opt out themselves, spend a tiny fraction of that amount, and take away aztlan's advantage entirely. well, take away their wireless bonuses anyways. there's always the "we have a truly obscene amount of resources" advantage, which is not so easily countered, unless aztlan is foolish enough to actually outfit their military with hundreds of thousands of nuyen worth of hardware (probably 1 deck per 2-3 soldiers, which adds up really fast when the per unit cost is crazy high) instead of spending that money on more effective ways to win the fight.

More dakka?

I fail to see why the RCC noise reduction isn't 2 way. That'd make the RCC's noise reduction pointless because any jammer would make it so that an RCC cannot connect to its drones. Since drones will have as much noise filtering as a smartgun.

For some reason, I was thinking the frontline was actually going to be in a city. Though, I do have to admit, that in the jungle, there would be so much noise do to plant life that any Matrix warfare wouldn't be effective there. Though, I do think it is worth wild to have wireless on when assaulting a city, because its not guarantied that you will lose in the Matrix. And if you can win, then your side has the advantage on the battlefield.

The bonuc supposedly only applies to the link between the rigger and his RCC, not between teh RCC and its slaved drones.

Mutally assured destruction and cost. If you're not using a host, due to the even more restrictive slaving limits of a 'deck you need a trained decker and his massively expensive cyberdeck in each squad to do ECM/ECCM and keep their gear running. Since the general assumption of the setting right now is that people don't just do the smart thing and turn off all their wireless.

So on one hand, you have very expensive hosts that are easily compromised as soon as you start taking casualties, if the opponents have any Matrix assets in the field. On the other, you have an even more expensive problem of fielding enough deckers and tech to secure a force. This leads to a situation where a low-tech insurgent force like the rebels are actually at a fairly strong advantage, as they don't have to worry about any of that in exchange for a minor decrease in effectiveness... and a lesser investment in deckers of their own will have a much higher return on investment as they can get strong benefits out of much less expenditure.

In short, the way it's written leads to a very counter-intuitive result when extrapolated from the squad size the game is usually played on to the game world at large.

That's bullshit though. Without communication the rebels would be at a complete tactical disadvantage and would never win, and only hope for a war of attrition with gorilla tactics. While the opposition has complete, if slightly noisy, Matrix control. They'll be able to have coordinated attacks, drones, sensors, maybe a tac-net assuming we get rules for that, wireless boni on their gear, and other things that wireless communications can help with.

And thinking it over, even if an RCC couldn't help cut a teams noise down (which I say it can), the highest rating commlink is rating 7. Meaning the highest rating 6 jammer can't jam it.

those rating 7 commlinks are bleeding edge tech. outfitting an entire army with it is improbable.

also, you're presuming that noise doesn't stack. that may or may not be the case.

also, oddly enough no amount of jamming prevents a microtransceiver from working. you can limit the range (which is what the wireless bonus increases - dramatically, i might add), but you can't make it not work. so the rebels will still have communication available to them.

If you're going to spend a few hundred thousand nuyen to cyber up your commandoes, why would you not spend 8,000 nuyen to give them a commlink that can't be jammed, and also allows them to have better Matrix defense if something happens to the team's decker.

Noise stacks, just not noise generators. There is only so many bands of communications you can fill before you've filled the entire electromagnetic spectrum.

The micro transceiver has a sub vocal mic, which is device rating 3, so a noise of 3 would shut it down. But since there are no specific rules that say a micro transceiver's sub vocal mic is immune to jamming, the general rule still applies.

Yes, but the rules for what that jamming does aren't what you seem to think - jamming only denies wireless bonuses (one of Aaron's FAQ thread answers); the non-wireless function of the transceiver would still work.

Until its in Errata (or the Matrix book), I don't agree with Aaron's ruling being RAW.

True, why not spend 8,000¥ a pop for a Fairlight Caliban now? Before 2075/01/01 a device rating 7 commlink ran at least 67,500¥ and was at least at availability 32F, and that didn't include any software.

Well, the book says "loses it's wireless functionality". Aaron's ruling, obviously, is that "wireless functionality" refers to the "wireless" entry on an item's description. What is it you think is the RAW meaning of that undefined phrase?

It's a weird ruling, certainly, but it's at least internally consistent.

I guess that I have to concede, that does make "sense."

But I don't think I like the idea of jammers not being able to jam some types of wireless communication while others are not effected. Like in this case.

You also got to remember that the rt7 is bleeding edge for the private/corp sector.

It's always been a staple of shadowrun that govt military forces and some elite corp forces (less so for corp forces for the same reason corp militaries are usually lesser quality, corps are about cost/benefit more than govts) had access to programs, decks/commlinks, gear, weapons etc at a much higher rating/quality. They wouldn't b running around with te fairlight, but the specialized version made in small batches and custom ordered for a higher cost and with a much higher rating.