I made a mistake in my numbers, forgot to include the cyber and nano ware. Revised numbers edited in.

Just a quick sidenote: Comparing gear prices in SR and prices of comparable gear today I'd say that your assumption of 1 Dollar being equal to 2 Nuyen is a bit difficult to hold up.

EDIT: In the Neo-Anarchist’s Guide to North America there is a table that shows value the UCAS $ to vary between 6.25$ and 4$ per Nuyen. It was always my impression that the UCAS $ exchanges into US $ 1 to 1.

Why? The following is from the Military Weapons thread



It seems reasonable and I did halve the value of the (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nuyen.gif) (1/1 instead of 1/2)

Yes but those are 2050+ UCAS dollars. As in after the dollar stopped being the benchmark currency, after the US ceased to exist, after the UCAS lost most everything west of the Mississippi (like California), after the mega's came in and messed with the economy, etc.

Buying power is a much better way to judge a currency.

And if you look at the food prices they are almost exactly like current prices. As are a surprising amount of the other common costs. And the ones that aren't can be mostly explained away with increased use of automation (hotels where they use a drone for maid service instead of a person for example).

An 18 year lead time is just stupid. 12 is perfectly reasonable and you can get it down to 8 with a little bit of effort. With certain unethical training methods you can get that down to 6 without any drop in quality. With skillwires, p-fixes, and muscle augmentation you can get it down to 4, perhaps even 3. If you use orks or trolls you don't even need the muscle augmentation.

You think a 12 year old is ready for combat? Or a 3 year old?

That lead time has nothing to do with the training, it has to do with waiting for the clone to physically grow from a baby into an adult. If you force grown a clone then the mind doesn't advance. I want competent soldiers, not idiots.

As for Trolls, lower max agility. 7 vs. 9. And I would rather have the dice in offense than in defense, 31 dice to soak before AP already.

Orks are actually better in a pure numbers sense and they have a 6 month vs. 9 month gestation period which means that they could be produced quicker (2 brigades per year vs. 1.3).

Hmm, I may switch to Orks. The increased numbers combined with the reduced BP cost for attributes does make it worth it. Pump the 30 net points into body and I roll 12 dice to soak (excluding armor). If I pump body the same as I did on the human version then I get 15 dice to soak (excluding armor).

Yeah, I think its time to switch the base meta type to Orc. Although I do loose that 1 point of edge, which was quite nice. Perhaps buy it back and lower body by 1 for 14 dice.

12 year olds are certainly ready for combat. In fact, there are 12-year olds in combat as we speak and they kick a surprising amount of ass. 10 is also reasonable. 8 is more difficult to train in some ways, but easier to train in others.
Kids around that those ages have the advantage of being psychologically divorced from the consequences of their actions to a certain degree, which allows them to commit some horrific atrocities without developing PTSD. This is a rather huge advantage on the battlefield. The fact that many child soldiers are able to reintegrate into society without any psychological damage in spite of having done some really brutal crap like cutting open pregnant women after taking bets on the gender of the fetus is a testament to this.

If you're training them to kill from birth, then 6 isn't at all unreasonable. 3 is absurdly young but can be done with the technology available in the Sixth World. The trick to using three-year-olds is to make them meat-puppets. Of course, if you're going with meat puppets you can pick up anyone off the streets.

It's not the training thats the problem. It is them physically reaching maturity. Even if you assume that Orks grow 33% faster than humans (based only on their gestation period) thats still 12 years to physically mature.

But they don't need to be physically mature. There is no law that says your soldiers have to be physically mature. All they needs to be is strong enough wield an assault rifle and carry spare ammo, and a canteen. Given the light weight of modern assault rifles, an 8 year old human can do that. Add some agility augmentation and level 3 reflex enhancements to that kid and give her some training and you've got a cute little supersoldier. Strength augmentation can give extra carrying capacity as necessary. And they can do double duty as "companions" for the adult commanders.

that works fine out in countries where nobody cares, but in most of those places they don't really have the money to invest in huge clone armies.

and it still doesn't get past the fact that you don't really want a full-sized army of massively augmented supersoldiers anyways (it's substantially cheaper to have a small number of supersoldiers and a bunch of regular soldiers).

incidentally, i really have my doubts about the supposed cost of training a single marine. there's something really screwy about that number, because that is a stupidly large amount of money.

certainly, with the advent of simsense, tutorsofts, etc, it won't take anywhere near that much money to train a single soldier, imo.

Ot that one of them will turn against you. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

I still figure its cheeper to clone and train the brains using VR and sim sense, and then plug them into cloned bodies. Then you only have to care for the brain during this period of time (cheaper), and then Use cloned/augmented Orc bodies. With a little work on its genome, you could have the cloned bodies growing and making much if not all of their own bioware internally as part of the natural development cycle. Then you'd just ahve to add any cyber you wanted, which because of the cloning process is mass produced delta grade goodies.

It's probably cheaper just to use warforms.

when your brain is inside your body, it requires very little to keep alive. indeed, the body does an excellent job of keeping your brain alive, even if you treat your body like crap and don't feed it properly, keep it clean, exercise regularly, etc.

on the other hand, storing a brain outside of a body apparently costs an awful lot of money (250,000 (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nuyen.gif) plus another 2k (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nuyen.gif) a week to be precise). if they're going to go that route, they may as well just make cyborgs. (to be fair, probably 150k or thereabouts of the cost of storing the brain comes from the 'ware they install as part of the CCU. of course, on the other hand, there's that tiny little drawback of your entire army being insane in 4 years because of being only a brain without a body.)

in short, your body is an extremely cheap storage unit for your internal organs. technology has not yet come up with anything cheaper, to my knowledge, in either RL or in shadowrun.

Ok. I think I've finished Mr. Super Solider

Infrastructure: 2,000 Cloning Facilities (can clone 16,000 clones at a time) - 400,000,000 (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nuyen.gif) 1 time expense

Cost Per Solider less Lifestyle and Cloning cost: 1,910,000 (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nuyen.gif)
Lifestyle Cost per Solider: 65,000 (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nuyen.gif) for permanent medium lifestyle
Cloning Cost: 25,000 (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nuyen.gif)
Total Cost per solider: 1,500,000 (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nuyen.gif)

Total Cost per Batch: 24,000,000,000 (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nuyen.gif)

ToE is as follows:
Division: 4 Regiments (16,000 Combat Soldiers)
Regiment: 4 Battalions (4,000 Combat Soldiers)
Battalion: 8 Companies (1,000 Combat Soldiers)
Company: 10 Platoons (500 Combat Soldiers)
Platoon: 5 Squads (50 Combat Soldiers)
Squad: 2 Fire Teams and the Command Team (10 Combat soldiers)
Fire Team: 2 Wings ( 4 Combat Soldiers)
Command Team: Squad leader + Wing (2 Combat Soldiers)

The smallest tactical deployment is the Squad. Wing's never split up.

Clone Divisions take after the Mobile Infantry in that every solider is a combat solider, most logistics support is fully automated and handled by the soldiers Agents.

I'm working on transportation and will add that in when I finish with it.

Oh can an LAV aircraft (the MiG-67) do VTOL or does it need a runway?

EDIT: Saved 500,000 per solider, edited numbers to reflect it.

I think the whole thing would be cooler if you went for batches of between 50 and 500, rather than 16,000.
You want these guys to be your ultimate special-forces badasses who go in in small teams, do the impossible, and get out. Sending them out into a general battlefield, so as to require 16,000 per batch, is just getting them killed and wasting money when you could be doing just as well with drones and cheaper soldiers.
If you want to make Spartan II's I'm all for it, but part of the coolness of having elite megabadasses is that they're rare, not standard.
YMMV, of course.

Actually Moon-Hawk, senor Tippy's whole argument revolves around having the entire army be clones, 'wared up to the gill at low cost thanks to the Type O background each of them has. Legions and legions of super-soldiers (although I'm sceptical about the compatibility of Type O with extensive gene tweaking). Frankly, as they're all clones, and you're mass producing the 'ware in house anyway, you don't need to make any of them Type O. The way I see it, the Type O System quality lets runners buy off the peg bioware, and treat it as specially cultured for them, since they share Owen Whitting's MHCs, and all the rest.

Of course, I still don't see what the point of all this effort is, especially the statting. It's not the model used by any cannon armed force in SR, and it's hardly useful to players or GMs to stat up a Division of super clone soldiers. How would you run against them? Who would run against them? Why would anyone run against them?

Still, if this is how El Imperator wishes to spend his time, then more power to him.

It's not Type 0, its just that as every single solider is genetically identical the government can run off 16,000 copies of a piece of bioware and have it be a perfect genetic match for each of them. Same end effect as Type 0, just actively getting the quality and using it vs. random chance.

As for why I'm doing it, I don't happen to have anything better to do at the moment and its kinda fun. As for it being useful, who knows. Even if it was being done in SR 4 right now they would have had to have started around 2060 or so (that being when the tech really became available), in which case they wouldn't have any of these soldiers until 2078.

So this actually could come up ingame. Some corp/nation finds out about some other corp/nation having this project going on and wants to derail/steal/extract the project so they higher the runners to do somethign about it. At 8 million a copy without clones they really are elite soldiers. SO the players might end up facing 1 or 2 potentially. Cyborgs without all the nasty negatives.

And it does fit the setting. Clone army bred to be soldiers, trained from birth, massive enhancements programs. Kinda dark angel like actually.

That could actually be a kind of fun high power run, some of the kids escape and they are trying to survive. They have millions worth of enhancements in themselves but no gear.

Could you tell me what country do you see having the needed money/infracture to do something like this, it not like the countries of SR are swimming in money, most of them are pretty poor.
And the corporations do not have the need for this kind of an army.

Um, it's not that bad actually.

World Wide you have to go down 12 spots to find the nation that couldn't create 1 division out of its 2008 military budget.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_count...ry_expenditures

And remember, most of the clone division is 1 time cost per division. As for the corps, a Regiment of these guys is fairly easy to see (that being the size of the biggest corp armies according to Corporate Shadowfiles). A 1 time expense of 6 billion (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nuyen.gif) ?

Those countries really and i mean really don't have as much money in 2070 then they have now, so that is not a good place to start.

Even if the UCAS military budget is 1/10th the size of the current US budget they still have enough money for 2 divisions per year.

Exsept that your calculating this based on rules not ment to be used for thinks like this and make huge assumptions like thinking that a permament lifestyle would cover for raising those troops for 18 years including thinks like food, a place to stay and all the training and indoctorination.

I think you should look at those number you wave around for training one marine right now and multiply that for atleast by 10 to cover for that 18 years of training and other stuff.

Mäx is right. You can't compare real life training cost of a soldier to something as abstract as a permanent lifestyle in SR, which just exists for the sake of simplicity.

Did anyone already point out, how difficult it could be to sell clone warriors to the public? After all the clones are fully developed humans. Which are deprieved of all rights. Human rights still exist in 2070. In most cases corporations don't pay more than lip service to them. But governments want to be reelected. And so they need to keep a strong eye on public opinion.

*Shrug* It's the only rules I have. Show me a better one and I will use that.