Mental Exercise: Anti-Dragon Task Force, Government/Megacorp Forces taking on Dragons Options

[Fuchs]

Sure... and any spell so plopped down on spotters is another spirit occupied. And leaves more forces and spirits of the army to go after the dragon.

Not that anyone will take long to move 24 meters.

[mfb]

Sure... and any spell so plopped down on spotters is another spirit occupied. And leaves more forces and spirits of the army to go after the dragon.

Not that anyone will take long to move 24 meters.

only 12 meters, unless they head the wrong way out of the area of effect. which i guess isn't out of the question, given the limited visibility.

as for occupying a spirit, sustaining doesn't take an action. sustaining a spell will distract a spirit, yes--knocking a whole 2 dice off of any action they choose to take with their 2 IPs.

[Fortune]

if SM has the extended area option that MitS had, i can't find it.

It's there, but I believe it is only an option for Detection Spells.

[mfb]

sigh. no more kilometer-wide explosions of burning, glowing acid.

[kzt]

The task force would need to be something that can respond in an instant. Just go back and read the YotC Ghostwalker attacks. He walked in unannounced with a literal army of spirits and laid waste to very key targets. Once done, he flew off without a word, and there wasn't drek anyone was able to do to him. Hell, he shrugged off anti-aircraft missiles and destroyed an entire building with a single spell.

It's easy when you are a plot device that doesn't have to follow the rules and is opposed by idiots and the plot says "Dragon wins!". Using it as an example for anything else is silly.

[FrankTrollman]

Any dual or astral critter that the dragon can shut down with a Mana Static is one which it could kill outright with a Mana Bolt. You just need to have enough spotters so that they have at least one survive the entire combat round needed to send targeting information to the LAVs. And since bound spirits are in constant telepathic communication witht their conjurers, and the conjurers are in constant radiopathic communication with the gunships, the spotters themselves can be pure astral, totally expendable, and very very fast.

Mana Static is not a viable or meaningful defense for the Great Dragon. Hurting Magic across the board does not make his position any better. His only really interesting advantage is that his magic is much much more powerful than anyone else's. Technically the attackers could get some real mileage by dumping Mana Statics on the Great Dragon with bound Spirits of Man. I glossed over that point because the specific spirits the metahuman air force has will be dependent upon which group it happens to be.

Nahuallis for example, do not get Spirits of Man. So they would have to drop Mana Statics personally, which is a bad move because the magician does more good for his side acting as a telepathic relay in Tenochtitlán than they would running around at extreme magic range trading spell blows with a Great Dragon.

-Frank

[Lyonheart]

[*] Attack the Dragon from outside line of sight.

The first is, contrary to Draconic fanboyism, entirely possible. It's extremely difficult because it is logical to assume that it will come equipped with an Extended Detection spell at about Force 20. This gives it the ability to notice when your troops come within two and a half kilometers. Well outside the range of any weapon in the basic book. But in Arsenal they have weapons which can target enemies out to ten kilometers, which means that you can "sneak up" on the dragon just by camping out on a hill on the other side of the country.

IIRC the Gauss Cannon has a range of 10km, so now all you need are spotters to direct your coil gun fire.

[mfb]

Any dual or astral critter that the dragon can shut down with a Mana Static is one which it could kill outright with a Mana Bolt.

if the dragon has nothing better to do, manabolting the spotters would be a good option. but i figure he's got all those spirits; rather than risking themselves in direct combat with the spotters, a good option is to just hinder the spotters with astral static.

And since bound spirits are in constant telepathic communication witht their conjurers, and the conjurers are in constant radiopathic communication with the gunships, the spotters themselves can be pure astral, totally expendable, and very very fast.

i'm not sure constant telepathic communication translates into precise knowledge of the spirit's exact location, much less precise knowledge of the exact location of something the spirit is looking at. i'm also not sure that such knowledge, if it can be acquired, can be translated into something a machine can understand. what i am sure about is that any discussion of the interaction between spirit-conjurer communication and technology is going to be long, arduous, 99% conjecture, and ultimately inconclusive. so i think that if someone wants to have that discussion, they should start another thread. for the purposes of this thread, if possible, i think it might be best if we agree that it's a grey area.

Mana Static is not a viable or meaningful defense for the Great Dragon. Hurting Magic across the board does not make his position any better.

the nature of SR4's fixed TN system means that it actually does help his position. as it stands, a GD has 22 and 20 base dice pools for spellcasting and conjuring, respectively--more than enough to succeed at pretty much anything he really needs to succeed at, even in the face of truly formidable negative modifiers. enemy magicians, on the other hand, are going to have much smaller dice pools. with a 6-hit mana static spell, a GD can completely neutralize any non-initiated mage, while suffering no appreciable loss in ability himself--that is to say, the GD still has enough dice to overcome significant negative modifiers, just not quite as significant as before. granted that facing down a large military force designed specifically to kill you is going to end up imposing some pretty impressive modifiers, the possibility of neutralizing any non-initiated mage in that force might be well worth it.

[Cthulhudreams]

To make frank's plan address some of the other points

You are going to throw all those gauss cannons in movement powered SR4 verse spectre AC-130 gunship equivalents too, as they provide a fast ,fast (will be hypersonic with movement powers) and powerful (You could reasonably fit half a dozen gauss guns to each gun ship) force that can be rapidly deployed and even assist in conventional engagements as an anti armour flying thing. To keep costs down you are going to use a transport plane as the baseline for this sort of thing.

Most importantly it is faster than a spirit, and relatively cheap too.

it is unfortunate the Arsenal doesn't address the standoff capability of a hypothetical airforce, because if they did, you'd also use your entire air wing with stand off missles co-ordinated by an AWACS and fire them. Ranges are ~20 kms on some of the AA missles which would be ideally suited to this task. You could put thousands of missles into the air.

[Lyonheart]

To make frank's plan address some of the other points

You are going to throw all those gauss cannons in movement powered SR4 verse spectre AC-130 gunship equivalents too, as they provide a fast ,fast (will be hypersonic with movement powers) and powerful (You could reasonably fit half a dozen gauss guns to each gun ship) force that can be rapidly deployed and even assist in conventional engagements as an anti armour flying thing. To keep costs down you are going to use a transport plane as the baseline for this sort of thing.

Most importantly it is faster than a spirit, and relatively cheap too.

it is unfortunate the Arsenal doesn't address the standoff capability of a hypothetical airforce, because if they did, you'd also use your entire air wing with stand off missles co-ordinated by an AWACS and fire them. Ranges are ~20 kms on some of the AA missles which would be ideally suited to this task. You could put thousands of missles into the air.

Hmmm, I wonder if you could get one of these to hit slow airborne target.... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AS-6_Kingfish

[krakjen]

About Thor shooting a dragon:
That wouldn't work. Targeting and firing a kinetic weapons takes time. At least a few minutes...
And while it's not a issue when shooting down a building, it's simply a no-go for destroying a moving angry rampaging Great Dragon.
No to mention that in the topic Task Force hypothesis, you would most likely be trying to defend your city/country.
Thor-shooting it to smithereens would be kinda counter-productive I think.

Another problem that has not yet been noted is that killing the GD would most likely take time (yes again the time, too bad the magic can't alter it). No insta-kill solution available (well the Thor shot could but it's a no-go).
While your army is trying to weaken the Dragon and his defending spirits, something like half of those spirits would be send by the lizard to kill your key elements (spotters, heavy weapons, high initiate mages, whatever...).
And then, the task force is getting decimated, losing effectiveness very quickly, while the Dragon is most likely hardly wounded and replacing and/or summoning more spirits on the fly...

In my opinion, the only viable way to kill a Great Dragon would be to find a way to inflict him massive (and I mean MASSIVE) damages in a very short lapse of time. Something a emergency task force will have great difficulties doing.

...

Or else, elect him for UCAS presidency and tell him the horrors are coming, that should do the trick.

[krakjen]

Truth be told, many of the proposed Dragon defenses are unlikely to come together. There's a limit of some kind to how many spells he can actually sustain. And so while he may well have the Detect Life, and the Detect Weapons, and the Barrier, and the Armor, and the Combat Senses, and the Improved Reflexes, and the Trid Phantasm... chances are he actually won't have all of that because he's "just" a Grade 6 Initiate. So we really are dealing with a worst case scenario already - one in which he happens to have exactly the right spell defenses for the tactics we are employing. And looking at the math those defenses just aren't enough. They aren't near enough to defend themselves against what a single wing of Aztec Eagle Warrior Air Force is capable of scrambling against a sufficient threat within five minutes.

Although it's what the rules say, the fluff is saying that Magic is a natural thing for a Dragon, like walking and breathing.
There is good chance they have no problem sustaining many spells without much (if any) penalty, just like you needn't concentrate to breath or can talk while walking around...

[Cthulhudreams]

@Krakjen

Post one outlines that are are discussing rules legal methods, which is why a discussion of shooting it with cruise missiles is out of scope to say the least. Sustaining spells cost -2. Maybe it is easy for the dragon to do so because it has a really high magic score and the penalties are not a problem.

[krakjen]

Post one outlines that are are discussing rules legal methods, which is why a discussion of shooting it with cruise missiles is out of scope to say the least. Sustaining spells cost -2. Maybe it is easy for the dragon to do so because it has a really high magic score and the penalties are not a problem.

Yeah sorry, I only added this because I always felt the dragon was described like having a shitload of defensive spells actives at any time.

Well it can kinda be replaced by his shitload of high-force spirits who can sustain spells for him anyway...

[Jaid]

the dragon can only cast spells at targets it can see, and can only send spirits after targets that it knows the location of.

an observer using the cybereye tracking method mentioned earlier could be sitting in any one of hundreds of buildings, looking out through the windows or something like that. and as has been said, mana static doesn't do that much to stop astral perception. get yourself someone with assensing , initiate grade 2, and adept centering, throw in a good mentor for astral perception, and you are still very very likely to spot the dragon on the astral (particularly since, as i said, the dragon is not hiding, it is right in plain sight, and no test is required to perceive it) it really is not nearly as impossible as has been implied.

[Lyonheart]

@Krakjen

Post one outlines that are are discussing rules legal methods, which is why a discussion of shooting it with cruise missiles is out of scope to say the least. Sustaining spells cost -2. Maybe it is easy for the dragon to do so because it has a really high magic score and the penalties are not a problem.

See the problem here is that the game gives us stats for the magical equivalent of a B52 wing, with out giving us stats for the Technological equivalent, because 168mile Mach 3.5 cruse missiles are beyond the games "scope".

In Shadowrun any country of any size, UCAS for example, should have Mixed Fighter bomber wings that sit on constant alert SAC style, waiting for a GD to decide one of there Citys would be tasty. When Ghostwalker shows, they scramble and show him the smackdown, with large, long ranged, hypersonic, cruse missiles. Period. Anything else is negligence. The guidance issue is your only problem, your Forward Air Controllers are going to have to be very brave, very foolhardy men. Note that this would also stop Godzilla.

[mfb]

an observer using the cybereye tracking method mentioned earlier could be sitting in any one of hundreds of buildings, looking out through the windows or something like that. and as has been said, mana static doesn't do that much to stop astral perception. get yourself someone with assensing , initiate grade 2, and adept centering, throw in a good mentor for astral perception, and you are still very very likely to spot the dragon on the astral (particularly since, as i said, the dragon is not hiding, it is right in plain sight, and no test is required to perceive it) it really is not nearly as impossible as has been implied.

the thing is, you can only provide targeting data for as long as you can actually see the target. twenty guys peeking out of windows in downtown Seattle? sure, they'll all catch glimpses of the dragon now and then, but they won't be able to sit there and keep their eyes on him long enough for anybody to do anything. and as far as hiding goes, same deal--flying behind a building is all he really needs to do. whether he's actively trying to hide or not, if there's a physical obstruction between him and an astral perceiver, the perceiver will not be able to provide targeting data on the dragon.

[toturi]

In which edition is this battle taking place?

[mfb]

i've been referencing SR4 rules.

[Adarael]

Honestly, all fluff about Ghostwalker aside? If the GD isn't concealed, any appreciable air support force is going to turn him into so much goo.

I'm not gonna get into any kind of number crunch, but hypersonic shaped-charge bunker busting cruise missiles backed up by autorailguns, heavy lasers and drone swarms will turn damn near anything to total paste. I know Ghostwalker was perfectly capable of grabbing missiles out of the air and wrecking buildings with a single spell, but nothing in the rules supports any of that behavior. Behavior in kind on a smaller scale, maybe. But not with fighter wings attacking.

My opinion. Take it or leave it, I don't care too much.

[krakjen]

The problem, in fact, is Shadowrun system is not make to play large-scale conflicts.
And a fight between a Great Dragon with spells/spirits support and and a military specialized force with heavy support qualify as a large scale conflict...

[FrankTrollman]

if the dragon has nothing better to do, manabolting the spotters would be a good option. but i figure he's got all those spirits; rather than risking themselves in direct combat with the spotters, a good option is to just hinder the spotters with astral static.

The thing is that it's not a good way to hinder Astral Spotters. That's just not how Mana Static works. Sure, you can dump it on an area and disrupt every spirit in it by dropping their Force to zero. But so what? Even at Force 8 the 8S Drain it's handing out is non-trivial, and it's only an area a handful of meters across. The Spirit Spotters are coming in at the limits of line of sight in 3 dimensions. They are kilometers away from each other and no spell area is catching more than one at a time. Mana Static is no better than Mana Bolt, it just has higher drain.

And putting Mana Static on himself is doing the Metahuman's job for them, because then his Huge Concealment turns off and mundane observation can just find him and it is all over. Without the Force 12 Magic going, he is literally just a slow flying security vehicle and they shoot him down without issue.

You keep bringing up Mana Static as a valid tactic. It is not. The SR4 Rules for Background Count are universally bad for major magicians. You only use Mana Static when you have mundane superiority or your magical opponents are tightly grouped (and have counterspelling superiority). In the case of fighting open-air skirmishers where you have magical superiority and they have mundane superiority Mana Static is universally a bad idea. It's bad to cast it near, it's bad to cast it far. Anywhere you put it, it is entirely, unmitigatedly bad. It's an arrow in the quiver of the Metahumans, not the Dragon. And if the Dragon is going up against Ares or the PCC the metahumans will be spamming it like mad in order to pop the Great Dragon's spirits and defensive spells.

the nature of SR4's fixed TN system means that it actually does help his position. as it stands, a GD has 22 and 20 base dice pools for spellcasting and conjuring, respectively--more than enough to succeed at pretty much anything he really needs to succeed at, even in the face of truly formidable negative modifiers. enemy magicians, on the other hand, are going to have much smaller dice pools. with a 6-hit mana static spell, a GD can completely neutralize any non-initiated mage, while suffering no appreciable loss in ability himself--that is to say, the GD still has enough dice to overcome significant negative modifiers, just not quite as significant as before. granted that facing down a large military force designed specifically to kill you is going to end up imposing some pretty impressive modifiers, the possibility of neutralizing any non-initiated mage in that force might be well worth it.

This betrays your basic lack of understanding of how Mana Static works. You Can't neutralize the enemy spellcasters. It doesn't cover the entire battlefield, just a relatively small area. An area that is coincidentally smaller than that covered by a Manablast that he could safely cast. If the Great Dragon is physically in the area, his actual magic rating drops. The actual Force of his spells drops. The actual Force of any new spells he attempts to cast drops. And the Force of the enemy spirits outside the area changes not at all. They are still Force 8 and providing Force 8 help. They won't be able to go into the Static, but they don't care because they can do their thing from hundreds of meters away.

Background Count isn't just a dicepool penalty. It's a force penalty. It really bones any magician inside it. But it also doesn't cover the city, just a city block. And while you can hide in it from spells and spirit powers; you can't hide in it from people using mundane weaponry that benefits from spells and spirit powers. And while you're hiding in it, you personally won't be able to cast anything that interested parties outside the Background Count couldn't counter or dispel. Background Count doesn't make it harder for people outside the background count to use Counterspelling - very much the opposite.

Yes, a Great Dragon can cast a Force 18 Urban Renewal that will destroy an entire building with a single spell. And no, this does not mean that Mana Static will helpt them in any way, nor does it protect him from retributive Guass Cannons.

-Frank

[Fuchs]

Can multiple spirits use their movement power to slow a dragon down?

[FrankTrollman]

Can multiple spirits use their movement power to slow a dragon down?

Sort of. It doesn't stack. So you can drop a Force 8 Movement (Reduction) on him, and he'll have a Force 12 Movement (Increase), so he'll be travelling at decent but not military vehicle speeds. You can't just throw dozens of Movement (Reduction) hits on him until he is travelling at a flying snail's pace.

Yeah, it'll hurt him bad, and you'll do it. And he can hide from it by putting up a Mana Static. But he'd also be hiding from his own Movement by doing that, so it wouldn't be a net benefit.

-Frank

[KCKitsune]

You know guys. It is canon that orbital weapons exist. I for one would think that if anyone had space based laser weapons, it would be Ares. I mean, it is confirmed that they have "Thor Shots" in orbit (can't be used for this example because of WMD limitation), why not have nice 50 MW laser cannons in space (this is tech that existed in the 90's... hydrogen-floride lasers FTW (IMG:style_emoticons/default/grinbig.gif) ). Dragon comes flying in... ZAP ZAP ZAPZAPZAPZAPZAPZAPZAPZAP... one dragon BBQ coming up! (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)