Hacker Combat Tricks, Sharing Ideas Options

[Cheops]

Inspired by the recent threads that are trying to make hackers more useful in overt physical combat than they currently are I thought I'd start a thread where people can share their ideas and actual after-action reports of stuff that hackers do in combat.

Monorail Station -- here in Vancouver before we had Transit Police several stations used to pipe classical and/or elevator music into the station. It was meant to be inoffensive to normal people but bug the hell out of the crackheads and drug dealers (it also keeps the pigeons from crapping on everything). I imagine that these would be par for the course in a world of AR(cost <350). Spoof it to cause it to blare out at sonic boom levels since Virtual Surround Music can do that. Same effects as a Sonic type Elemental Attack (SM 165).

Park -- again relatively cheap to install Virtual Park Rangers in every park in the city. With some spoofing and an edit you can make it look like the Star or just about anyone you want has shown up. Good for a momentary distraction.

Streets -- OMFG! Hackers don't have to hack GridGuide to spoof traffic patterns anymore. I think that the ideas in this category should be almost self-explanatory.

Mall/Shop -- hmmm...Virutal Surround Music, some sort of Virtual Scent program that can lead to nausea effects (scent is considered to be a part of shop design in current Marketing strategy), in a big box store or warehouse there'd be industrial moving drones.

These are just a few of the things I can think of. I'm sure you all have more.

[eidolon]

If you aren't running a game of Lockdown: The Unhackable™, then there's a lot that you can do directly to the opposition.

- Drop their mags
- Turn on their safety
- Fire rounds at random and come up with where the gun was pointing when it happened (random die roll maybe? unless they were previously targetting something; or the round could just go into the ground or air or whatever, good for a distraction
- mess with their vision by spamming their AR
- shut off vision and hearing mods if they're in use
- turn on vision and hearing mods if they aren't
- shut down cyber
- turn on/activate cyber
- mess with commlinks, give fake orders, call in fake reports, etc.

All kinds of fun, unless you insist that every person in the world is skinlinked and hyper-paranoid to the point of boring.

[Blade]

Hacking-centered tricks:

- Hacking the opposition's commlinks can be interesting for low tech opponents, such as gangers, but quickly becomes useless. In the heat of combat, hacking secure commlinks takes too long. It only becomes interesting when facing an enemy relying on team tactics in which case listening or distrupting the communications can be a real advantage, or when the battle is long (for exemple when you're stuck somewhere and surrounded by enemies who'd rather wait for you to come out than risk stupid losses).

- For battles in poor areas, it can be interesting to hack the hotsim modded commlinks the junkies use for slotting their BTL. You just have to hope they have a good enough signal so that you can hack them and have fun with personafix or some other kind of BTL.

But for most combat situations, it's most better to hack the surronding devices to adapt the environment to your needs. Turn the lights on or off, start the loudspeakers, send the vacuum cleaner drone in the feet of the enemies, open or close doors. You can use these to help you (turn off the light to hide), to distract (turn off the light in another room) or just to show the enemy he isn't in control of the situation (lights are switching on and off everywhere!)

Hacker "configurations":

Tactical hacker: Transform the team's commlinks into a real BattleTac network! Pinpoint cover and hostiles locations, have them drawn on your teammates AR overlay (for example if they are behind a whole, show them where exactly), scan for nodes to find the location of hidden enemies, leave an opening into a fake system for the enemy hacker to keep him busy while you kill him and his teammates. Hack the cams to get a better view of the situation, use your sensors to extend your perception (program a microphone with a sound filter and spatial recognizer to ignore gunshots and listen for footsteps, for example, or another one to listen to gunshots and keep track of the ammo left in all guns around the battlefield).

Rigging hacker: You don't need steel lynx and autosofts to wreak havoc with drones. Bring all the non combat (ie easy to hack) drones of the surrounding. Use them to recon, to block the enemy, to distract... Bring in your own micro/small drones to use as moving flashpacks, speakers ("a gunshot over there!") smoke screens. Equip them with small poisoned blades or coat them with hermetic gel then cover them with DMSO mixed with your favorite poison and guide them towards their victims. In the middle of combat nobody will pay attention to something as small as a can lid.

Trap specialist: Claymore mines have never been funnier! Use all your tech to design clever traps, and drones to deploy them quickly all around the battlefield. Lay down explosives or monowires, lure enemies in a room and lock them here.

And finally don't forget that you probably had enough BP left to let your hacker do something else than hack. Grab a gun and join the fun!

[Ryu]

The tactical hacker is "the way to go". Depending on the "realism" of your charakters behaviour, someone spending several IP per round on "observe in detail" actions can come in handy, too. Even without that, spy drones can get positional information on enemies, which is in turn send per AR to the team members. Cover modifiers are no more, your gunbunnies will love it. As the enemy can do this, too, there will at least be some wireless targets.

[noonesshowmonkey]

Oh man... the hackers life is a good one.

Hack the enemies command and control units - ie their commlink network to get up to date GPS and comm info from them. Want to know if they are flanking or when the backup arrives? Now you can find out!

Having drones giving precision fire support or tactical map overlays is intense. Finding floor plans and then creating a live tactical overlay for in door missions can also turn the table.

Providing a secure commlink network for your own team is pretty imperative as well.

All kinds of insane stuff can be done with hacking. Change the target destination for a package by one character, shift a patrol schedule by a few minutes... Change a part number by one digit... One small change can create some pretty cool ripple effects.

Never you mind the intense amount of legwork that can be done via the matrix.

I love hackers in SR4.

- der menkey

"Certainly there is no hunting like the hunting of man and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never really care for anything else thereafter."
~ Ernest Hemingway

[Moon-Hawk]

Video-game style radar. My group's hacker loves this. He'll take security camera info, scan all the locations of the enemy guards, take the building blueprints, surveillance data from overhead drones, and make video-game style radar on everyone's vision. They can target enemies through thin walls and rarely get themselves cornered. And if he's hacked the enemy's host well, then the enemy thinks all their intel is still working, despite being edited by the hacker.
Can't get away with this crap all the time, but when it works it's great.

[Fortune]

[Moon-Hawk]