Dang. Didn't think of that. Good points. Well, as long as there's still a corps, I guess I don't have a problem with them all being in the CAS.

Who guards the nukes in UCAS?

Hey... at least the Corps lives on...

Keep the Faith

Loss is not necessarily dictated by vocal individuals refusing to accept what you identify as logcal. I would regard your position in that argument as winning because it makes coherent sense, rather than listening to a different section of the rules which would have unacceptable after-effects upon the rest of the world. Such as cheap, unstoppable magical SAM attacks. Or low-level mages being able to more effectively demolish old buildings than a demolitions team.

Why, Ares, of course (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

I think I remember reading somewhere that Ares had more WMD capability INTERNALLY than the UCAS. So I imagine that they probably market KE and Firewatch teams for such a purpose.

Of Course... (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wobble.gif)

Keep the Faith

Creech, not Nellis. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif) Nellis has the Raptors/Falcon/Eagle/Thunderbird/etc., Creech has all the drones.

And a sweet vantage point when the 52's decide to expend their countermeasures all at once.

Ares is freakign scary and along with Aztech looks to be one of the biggest millitary powers in the 6th world. Firewatch is insane in its top level opertives. Their anti-bug teams train in space and are heavy initiated. We can only guess at possible rotation in the role. We also know they have a large number of THOR sats and a large nuke stockpile. As well as the abillity to depoly any where due to exterteritoral bases and sub-orbital tech.

Aztech has an entire country under it's self and as such in involved in alot of wars as of now. They will have lower perunit cost troops but they also have the jaguar guard a unit on the same lines as firewatch.

Ah, my mistake. I knew it was near Vegas. Thanks!

::Bitter under breath grumble about Air Force nerds getting paid to play video games and taking libbo in Vegas::

I see the forces a bit more stratified than they are now:

Grunts - little to no cyberware, basic gear (amor jacket/vest; Assault rifles, etc like I mentioned earlier)
Lifetimers - cyberware, bioware with at least 8years in service and career soldiers (same kit, maybe military/security armor in home guard or specialist units [aka the special threats units like in the book set in DC])
Specials - special forces, firewatch, etc (sky is the bottom, go from there on gear and augmentation)

I don't see the military spending the time and resources to implant a grunt that isn't going to be in long term with even secondhand ware. The medical costs for implantation and possible removal are high in time and nuyen (in a 4 year new enlistment, you already spend 3-5 months in boot and mos training on average add in surgery recovery and that's going to be about 5-8 months of a 4 year term where the new guy isn't busting hoop. Add in removal on the 1 term ones and then you basically have 3 years of service from them)

Skillwires and the like are not really cost effective (fluff not withstanding) due to costs (sure you can buy them in bulk, but think about the cost per soldier in terms of : 2 skill softs @ 30,000 and the wires themselves @ 6000 + implant costs and recovery costs) vs just teaching them how to shoot a gun and their mos basic skills.

-- On the contrary, I assume it has. And that means dropping modern ideas about command and control and ubiqitous communications. Technomancers are also a big monkey-wrench that could concievably reduce many military units to semaphore and morse code.

-- Blowing up capital (in the economic sense of the term) is not necessarily profitable. Most of the Shadowrun "wars" have been small-scale affairs that aim to preserve infrastructure and keep down costs. Developing weapon systems without buyers around with no sense of scale or money sense like the modern DoD seems to have kept a serious damper on weapons development. Pretty much everything you see in Arsenal existed by 2053 (with the exception of the "see we're still relevant!" add-ons like the HEMP gun).


-- Good encryption simply doesn't exist in Shadowrun. They go out of their way to tell you this, hence the sidebar in Unwired (p. 67).

-- Keep in mind how Shadowrun arranges things. A military commlink may use a nonstandard wireless link (Unwired, p. 196) and stuff like that, but making up special rules just for "milspec" stuff strikes me as a waste of time. If the military of the rump national governments were using special stuff, the corps that actually run the show certainly would as well. If anything, national militaries in Shadowrun are left using cast-offs, old technology, scrounged gear 40 years old, and yesterdays off-the-shelf software.

-- I'm not sure what you mean by slaving commlinks. Sounds like a real bad idea in Shadowrun as it just gives lots of potential access nodes for a hacker. LOS comms are probably more doable but a GM fiat saying "can't touch this stuff" might not pass the player smell test if not explained logically.

-- The hacker threat and AIs are precisely the reason people would take a dim view of too-extensive drone deployment.

-- The "military' as a boogyman opponent has been a Shadowrun tradition, but it's NEVER been borne out by anything quantifiable. There's also a rather huge problem where if you replace "military" with "corporation" the entire raison d'etre of shadowrunners goes out the window.

-- Indeed, the way I've played it there is no difference between UCAS Special Forces Command and Firewatch -- they are the same people and just swap billets around to take advantage of extraterritoriality and national laws as necessary. You "retire" from special forces right into Ares, and get "recalled" back to the UCAS as necessary. Think of it as a even cozier relationship than currently exists with the special forces and private military contractors.

All well argued points, but by that logic, the only unit that could survive in 2072 would be a unit of Cyborgs with their commlinks turned off.

The military, like Firewatch, Jaguars, Wildcats, etc. should be boogeymen.

Of course, if you are in a conflict with a CORPORATE military force, you have screwed the pooch royally already... What holds for National Militaries also holds for Corporate Militaries...

Now, Shadowrunners are more likely to run/operate against the Special Operations Groups of Corporates/Nations far more often than they will ever face the actual Militaries of such entities.

Militaries = Bad for Shadowrunners...
SOG's no so much, as they will often be on the same or similar levels of competence when they encounter such groups (or might at least have numbers on their side)...

Keep the Faith

And the Jaguars aren't even the really scary Azzies.

A slaved node is out of Unwired. Its basically a node that maintains a single open connection to a master node, and will only accept commands from an admin user on the master node. You can only hack a slaved node directly if you have a hardwired connection to it, otherwise you have to either hack the master and create your own admin account, or spoof the master to send a spoofed command to the slave.

There's also this (relatively) cost effective option.

There are various factors at work when you consider national and corporate militaries. Often there is a point where certain options become less cost effective than their counterparts, thus you would have a spread of options presumably at the levels of cost effectiveness that is acceptable to the decision makers.

The biggest benefit Military troops have is instant access to backup, support, information. If a squad radios in that they're under attack, help -will- be on the way. And that help can manifest in several ways. Information, people monitoring tactical feeds and offering advice. Off-site hackers using the team as relays to mess with the opposition. The platoon mage showing up in astral with a gank-squad of spirits in tow. Even calling for an airstrike, or diverting drone units to help with the area. A runner team usually can't call for that kind of support, on the spot.

That kind of organization comes with its perks, too. A deployed security team looking for trouble may not have a mage - but you can bet there's a decent force bound spirit with Magical guard watching their backs. Its a -very- cheap investment, and a force 6 spirit goes a long way towards keeping your team alive. It also means they can customize loadouts to the task at hand. Armories exist for a reason - if a milspec team expects heavy resistance and lots of vehicles, they are going to take gear to compensate.

I kind of don't care about the Crimson Samurai entry in the core book. It was written without taking the expansion books into account. I'm looking at their skills now - nothing below a 3, stats or skills. 5-7's in their attributes and skills for kicking ass. Not bad at all. And that's before you account for Metatype adjustments(Contacts and Adventures has a small table to adjusting contacts and npc's on the fly)

So, let's talk Gear.. The first big advantage to military opposition is access to gear. Restricted, forbidden, and high-availability gear are their bread and butter. That means explosives, rockets, missiles. Heavy weapons, nonstandard ammunition. Grenades, airbursting links, smartguns, high-rating tacnets. The kind of toys that might be a pain to get.

The next is standardization. Each member of the team is going to have a bare minimum of equipment and training - and more to suit their role. So each dude has access to those things. Compared to a runner team, only a few runners may have alphas or LMGs. On a milspec team, each member likely has alphas, on gyromounts, with airbursting links. Likely one heavy weapon.
If they're seriously expecting trouble, each member of that team has the potential to take an LMG on an articulated weapon arm as part of their armor very easily. In game terms, imagine the havoc you can wreak by having each member of a four+ man team Suppressive Fire in addition to their regular actions. Pilot upgrade or an agent is very affordable, and... its a military team. They -are- going to be running a tacnet

In arsenal, the lightest military armor available is 12/10 ballistic/impact. Its helmet starts at rating device rating 4, and goes up to 6 for a real cheap price, and comes with free encryption, and the whole thing has a biomonitor on top of that. It also has capacity, and access to things other armor can't get stock - gyromounts, no-encumbrance mobility upgrades, strength enhancements that ignore augmented maximums. It flat out ignores DV 0 injection attacks That's in addition to the usual stuff - chemical protection, nonconductivity, chemseals. When your entire team is immune to chemical weapons, it opens up a lot of options for dealing with your opponents - like neurostun grenades, everywhere.

Vehicles and drones. Per the Device Ratings table, Milspec gear(and vehicles) are device rating 5, which makes a significant difference when drones come into play. Response is used for initiative, as well as shooting people, and also defense tests. This also means each drone can run up to rating 5 software stock, with no mods. And you can bet a milspec vehicle will have top-rating defensive tools. That means firewalls, Analyzers, ECCM, likely Stealth. Ditto for Pilots/Clearsight/Targeting/Defense/ Autosofts.

Ware is something to consider, too. Augmentation sheds some light on military-grade augmentation. The standard military Cyberlogician rocks out with a Commlink, 3 datajacks, a datalock, an encephalon 2, attention coprocessor 3, hotsim module, simsense booster, and an orientation system. Its alphaware, so rating 4 to start - a betaware version's(device rating 5!) also available. Which means a competent, offsite hacker using the team as a relay , is going to be running that all as a cluster.
Using the Lonestar suite as a guide - they have Flare/Thermographic/Smartlink, bone lacing, and wired reflexes 1. Not bad, but military gear's going to be better.
Red sammy rock out with Cybereye, muscle aug and toner 2, synthcardium 3's, and wired reflexes 2. Thats more like it.

So, you have a group of people with heavy weapons, the discretion not to use them if its not called for. 3 passes, access to good ammo types(like ex-ex, apds, and grenades). They put out about 12-14 dice each for important tests - shooting, dodging, perception. Matrix stats of 5+, and -everything- encrypted.

That being said, I can see a group of runners taking out a generic military team.
What I can't see, is them getting away with it. The moment their biomonitor twinges, offsite people are going to start looking into -why-.
Once the hammer starts coming down on the runners for it, -then- they're screwed.


Iunno. I see a lot of optimized characters on this board. Anyone care to take a shot at making an Optimized Military Grunt? You know, with all the toys the runners -wish- they could play with?

IIRC: if they stay in the guard or reserves or individual ready reserves, then they keep it. And good luck getting to them an taking it out after that term expires if they don't want it ripped out.

You have got to love Marines. My asthma and eyesight kept me out of the armed services - so I got to play with the toys in DARPA and NSA (IMG:style_emoticons/default/grinbig.gif)

-M&P

This. In my game, the Military is the big green (or blue, or whatever color) machine that chews up whatever it runs into - usually (IMG:style_emoticons/default/vegm.gif)

-M&P

What I seem to be hearing is that military forces would split into three major types depending on investment. Primarily you would get grunts, likely Orks and Trolls trained to the level of, say, a National Guard, who would do most of the crap work of holding places and humping stuff everywhere. Then you have the professional soldiers who are mostly lifers, who are the primary force projectors, are a much smaller group, and are kitted out quite heavily. Spec Ops like SEALs and whatnot would come from this group. The third group are the piles and piles of specialists who run everywhere from logistics to command and control, to astral scouting (astral is likely the best recon type, given the speed they can be deployed from the comfort of home), to the crack-troop General's Own Coffee Makers.

Basically with this set up you could have your decently large group of badass soldiers (probably the size of the USMC), and a big pile of more squishy troopers (about the size of one of the other service units), and the bazillion voices on the other end of the commlink (probably a decent chunk privatized, too).

Does this seem realistic from a military point of view?

They are deffently a rung below friewatch but as i can tell number more.

I just wanted to stop by and say that I'm really enjoying this thread. A lot. It's something I've thought about, but most of you guys have already said was I was thinking.

I had just one thought to add:
Great Dragons have fought off whole armies. Yes, they had small armies of their own, but mostly, they were just clever and strong. Its not even THAT hard to damage a Great Dragon with military grade hardware, heavy autocannons and vehicle laser systems, etc. So it obviously wasn't just a matter of soaking the damage. It's Just something to keep in mind.

Psh, that's Plot Device power, so you can't go by that. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif) Either their stats are wrongly low, or something wonky happened. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)