[X] My Assistant

[hyzmarca]

Iron Eagle is one of the greatest movies of the 1980s. It clearly states what we all know in our hearts. A single teenage American could cripple Lybia and kill its President in a dogfight if only he had the guts to steal an F-16, which isn't terribly difficult to do.

The same, I think, applied to Shadowrun. The existence of military equipment guarantees an epic escalation simply because it is guaranteed that the PCs will steal some of it. Any hacker/rigger of high skill could forge himself an ID and a set of orders in a military database, walk onto an airbase, and fly off with a SOTA fighter accompanied by a wing of drones. He could then bomb the drek out of any third-world country that he doesn't like.

The only way to prevent this, other than by GM fiat or table agreement, is to just not have any military hardware at all. Which isn't a bad idea, but also isn't a good one or a realistic one.

Also, I propose that Queen and Twisted Sister should give a +2 dice bonus to any rigger in earshot for all aerial combat actions.

[Stahlseele]

scratch that aerial combat out . . it gives +2 to any rigging, especially if not jumped in but driving by hand with AR . . if i wanna get home quick after work i sit down as close to the bus driver as possible and up the volume on queen and they floor it!

[Riley37]

Stahseele, is that because Queen music gets them all pumped up and aggro, or because they want to get as quickly as possible to the station at which you and your music leave the bus?

The characters in a video/movie hearing the same background music as the audience is a recurrrent gag, perhaps best performed in "High Anxiety". Darth Vader has -5 to all Infiltration rolls against anyone who hears and recognizes the "Here Comes Darth Vader" theme music.

Mathias Rust FTW! <en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathias_Rust>

[Stahlseele]

because queen fucking rocks! . . and everybody . . (ok, not those pests they call the youth of today) likes to rock some time *g*
i actually made it a little experiment with the same 5 drivers and different styles of music . . i had the best reaction to Temple of Love of the Sisters of Mercy and a close Second to Manowar - Warriors of the World . . followed directly on third place by about every Queen song i tried *g*

[Kyoto Kid]

...hey even Wayne & Garth rocked out to Bohemian Rhapsody while in the Mirth-Mobile.

...Excellent! :grinbig:

[Fortune]

Queen is well on its way to being voted Best Rock Band of All Time. Deservedly So! :)

[Kyoto Kid]

...dude, I think this is one of the fastest thread derails I've seen. :grinbig:

[hyzmarca]

[Jaid]

well, in an effort to re-rail things, i don't think it's so much a matter of not being able to steal military tech that's stopping people (although it shouldn't be easy, let's face it: difficult stuff is what the runners are hired for. if it was easy, no one would pay their prices, they'd pay a bunch of gangers 10% the amount in experimental drugs and get free field-testing or something)

the thing keeping this from happening is that after you steal the military's toys, they send out their repo men to come take it back. so sure, you might get off the base with a tank or something, but in 10 minutes there will be 10 force 12 spirits inside it, at least one of which will likely possess the tank and/or the people inside. resulting in the military ultimately getting their tank back after the team kills each other off and/or is possessed and then dismantled for spare parts.

[martindv]

This is what I love about SR. IRL, even if you could steal an F/A-22 (F-16s are so 80s), trying to figure out how to turn it on for most people would be like trying to read Sanskrit. Even pilots, depending on their level of training and familiarity would be at some level of a loss.

Thanks to the simplification of such things as, oh, flight operations--and especially in SR4 where one skill for flying means if you can fly an ultralight, you can fly a F-B Eagle--this isn't actually beyond the realm of possibility so much as something that should happen all the time.

This does explain the little peculiarities such as t-bird riggers and gangers carrying milgrade weaponry.

[kzt]

The part that people like to forget about is the cost and effort of keeping one of these puppies running. Typically 10-30:1 maint to flight hours, and large birds cost many thousands per flight hour.

[Nikoli]

[Crusher Bob]

In addition, it depends on who designed the thing. Western stuff tends to be sexier, so it gets mention more often. You can probably be illiterate and do basic maintenance on a T-55 or T-72 but the Abrams is a whole nother beast.

As for stealing an airplane, due to its fly-by-wire system, the F-16 is a pretty good choice. You can be pretty ham fisted with the F-16 and still not run into the ground. You don't have to worry about pulling to hard on the stick and generating excessive Gs or AoA. you don't have to trim. You can't set the engines on fire by moving the throttle around too fast. You don't have to worry about the aircraft reacting differently to the same control inputs depending on what its speed is. You don't have to worry about draining the fuel tanks in a certain order to keep the airplane balanced...

[Clyde]

The group I play in once escaped a Lone Star SWAT team by stealing a Doc Wagon HRT's helicopter. We crashed it, though :(

[Ed_209a]

[Crusher Bob]

All the blood, it come out of my ear...

Being a good pilot is much more than just wrestling the airplane around the sky.

[martindv]

[Wounded Ronin]

Clearly flying jet aircraft in the 80s was trivial because I rocked out to MicroProse's "F-15 Strike Eagle" as a fourth grader. Hell, even a fourth grader can do it, so of course a teenager, with his youthful reflexes, can pwn the crotchety president of a country who attempts to dogfight him.

I believe that's why I play inverted in FPS games, by the way, and have a hard time when the game doesn't support inverted controls, like System Shock 1 didn't. Because when I was a little kid one of my formative first-person gaming experiences was a flight simulator.

[Jhaiisiin]

Agreement with Bob on that. It takes a lot more than just knowing how to push the stick to become a good pilot. Dogfighting in particular requires a huge amount of awareness and intuition into your environment, and how another pilot not only will, but MIGHT react to what you do. On wrong decision and you go splat.

[hobgoblin]

yep, every good fighter not only knows his own next move, but his opponents reaction to that move and his own reaction to the opponents reaction.

[Kyoto Kid]

...if you've never flown a plane before, all the fancy control systems in the world won't necessarily help you even be a mediocre pilot.

In my first "real" lesson my instructor demonstrated what 9 out of 10 students did when they come to a turn in a taxiway with rather humurous effect. He yanked the control wheel to the right and the plane kept going straight ahead onto the grass. You steer with either toe brakes or if the plane has one (like a jetliner) a separate tiller. We spent a good portion of that session just doing taxi exercises before even getting off the ground. Basically, a plane does not turn like a car on the ground

In the air it requires a deft touch and one of the first manoeuvres I learned was a clean coordinated bank and turn while keeping the plane level. It is not as easy as it sounds trust me. There was practising stall and spin recoveries & I'll say these were rather frightening the first few times even though we were at a high enough altitude for recovery and I had a trained instructor there who could take control if I felt I was in over my head.

My first landing was a white knuckle affair and that was in a plodding old Cessna 150. Basically a landing is a controlled fall, and there are a lot of factors to be concerned with including airspeed, flap percentages, winds, turbulence, visibility, and other aircraft. It isn't like playing a videogame because there's no reset if you screw up.

The most exciting and frightening time of all is that first solo. It is a big step. You are up there all alone with nobody to guide you, nobody to take the controls if you freeze up. That day I remember getting in the plane with the instructor after preflight and he said he forgot something. After getting out and closing the door he stepped back past the wingtip and motioned for me to start the engine. This was it I was on my own. All those hours came down to this. I was so bloody nervous, I almost forgot to set the mixture properly. for startup.

I have also "flown" a 757/767 simulator (the kind like airline pilots train with) and while my mind told me I was safe on the ground, my senses told me different. Instead of the cool calm approach most professional pilots would have, my reaction was more like: "oh shit! stick shaker (a device linked to the control yoke that forewarns of an impending stall), better get that power level up or I'm going to prang this one bad!". Following the session the instructor actually said I handled things better than most "Sunday pilots" and was one of only a couple who were actually able to "make" the landing (if you could call all that bouncing I did a landing). A big jet, even simulated, is a whole different bird than a two seat Cessna.

Now on to manoeuvres. Even doing aerobatics in a slow moving biplane I experienced serious tunnel vision during pullouts. I can say it is rather disorienting. Riding in a twin seat P-51 (the real thing with the big 12 cyl. Merlin) I had to wear a basic G Suit and still nearly hit blackout several times. At the time I was in prettty good shape as I was cycling some 100+ miles per week including sprint laps.

Military and Professional Aerobatic pilots have to go through a rigourous programme of conditioning so they can withstand the forces of extreme flight. The average Joe off the street would have a rough ride at best in an F-16 or FA-18 going though combat manoeuvres even with a G suit. I have seen stories of news reporters who rode with the Blue Angels or T-Birds. Many said they nearly lost their lunch on the first manoeuvre, and that was doing pretty tame stuff compared to what a real fighter pilot in a dogfight would undergo.

So before you set down your copy of F-22 Raptor and think about "crossing into the blue", I'd stay in that armchair with your Thrustmaster™ control system and bottle of Coke. The Real Thing is a lot tougher than you think. :grinbig:

[knasser]

KK: That was fascinating. The wealth of knowledge in this place never stops amazing me.

Cheers,

-Khadim.

[Jhaiisiin]

[Kyoto Kid]

[Jhaiisiin]

Glad I wasn't the only one then. :-)