Air Assault Go-Gangs of Seattle, I'm not making this up... Options

[HappyDaze]

According to page 9 of the Seattle Sourcebook,

Traveling the highways at night is not advisable, for the criminal element is out in full force. When not fighting among themselves, go-gangs -- whether on bikes, in cars, or in aircraft -- often terrorize and even kill anyone foolish enough to travel the roads at night.

I have no problem visualizing bike gangs, and the Fast and Furious line made car gangs easy to imagine, but aircraft... ?

So, what kinds of aircraft do they use? Which go-gangs are likely to use aircraft? Has anyone done anything with this option before?

[Stahlseele]

high carry capacity drones?
ultra lights?
magically lifted gliders?

[Chrysalis]

Maybe they are riding Puff the Magic Dragon followed by Garry Owen and the valkyries?

[AngelisStorm]

Lockheed Sparrow + Vashon Island Steampunk Line, of course.

[hobgoblin]

Lockheed Sparrow + Vashon Island Steampunk Line, of course.

and maybe the odd stolen autogyro?

ok, now i have the mental image of a a dwarf (or gnome metatype) flying a yellowjacket, wearing full steampunk regalia...

or maybe goblins (hmhvv infected dwarfs) in a jackrabbit fitted with a lighter then air mod?

[Chrysalis]

Red goes fasta?

[GreyBrother]

There is no Word in goblin language for "flying". The only ones that are near enough just mean "falling down slowly"

[Snow_Fox]

Good catch on the writing that i think can otherwise be responded to by: "What the frak?"

[Method]

Maybe something like THIS and small planes with WWI style hand-dropped bombs.

[WyldKnight]

Personal helicopters would allow them more control. Modify for a passenger and then you have the gunner/bomber and the navigator. They would probably attack in small squadrons of 3-5 and with ground support in the forms of cycles and other fast vehicles to keep up with them.

[Ed_209a]

in all seriousness, check this out.

dominator gyroplane

Sure it will be almost 70 years more advanced, but gyroplanes are almost ideal for urban gang aerial warfare.

- short takeoff/vertical landing
- very maneuverable
- the two-seat version gives you roughly 200 lbs of payload.
- as aircraft go, they are CHEAP!

YouTube has lots of videos showing what gyros can do.

[kzt]

It's always been a stupid idea that in SR world you have large organized attacks on traffic running on major highways in Urban and suburban area. Hell, on major roadways at all. One of the devs watched Mad Max too many times. Sorry, Seattle isn't the Australian outback. It's SMALL, it's under constant video surveillance (and open areas like expressways are under constant aerial surveillance), and the response time is short when your responding vehicles are moving at 300 km/hr. The Seattle cops patrol with drone aircraft carrying stabilized machine guns and equipped with NODs. Go Gangs that get into a fight with 4 strato drones armed with MMGs are not going to do it again, because they are are going to be mostly dead in 6 seconds.

[Method]

If their goal were just to stop their target from the air, they wouldn't necessarily need ground support. Take out the engine or blow a bridge and you can land at your leisure to collect your shwag. I could see this being an interesting addition to a Mad Max/Cal Free style smuggler game.

[Method]

Double Post

[Chrysalis]

The cab left you off at the pre-arranged location. The path that winds its way to the memorial well illumined. The trees on one side large and thick, and on the other the expanse of open ground. Showing the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument. Above, the night sky was shrouded in dark clouds and in strong AR reminders that for at least tonight the skies around the area were a no-fly zone. Unlike in Seattle where this meant that anyone with proper money could move, this in D.C. meant exactly what it said. Those drones that were in the air were large, angry, heavily armed and had no moral predilections on not carrying out their task with ruthless efficiency.

The Black-breasted Buzzard (3BA-102) drone used by the UCAS has the wingspan of a two lane highway. It runs on both solar power and two General Electric TF34-GE-100 turbofans allowing it to maintain itself in the air for 2 weeks at a time.

Its strong airframe can survive direct hits from armor-piercing and high-explosive projectiles up to 23 mm. The aircraft has triple redundancy in its flight systems, with mechanical systems to back up double-redundant hydraulic systems. This permits riggers to fly and land when hydraulic power or part of a wing is lost. Flight without hydraulic power uses the manual reversion flight control system; this engages automatically for pitch and yaw control, and under rigger control (manual reversion switch) for roll control. In manual reversion mode, the drone is sufficiently controllable under favorable conditions to return to base and land, though control forces are much higher than normal. The aircraft is designed to fly with one engine, one tail, one elevator and half a wing torn off.

Its standard weapon payload is the 30 mm GAU-8/A Avenger Gatling gun. The 3B usually carries on urban deployments cluster 2 bomb canisters, 2 air-to-surface missiles, 2 air-to-air missiles, ECM and sniper pod. The Gatling is loaded 1,174 rounds of depleted uranium rounds (tracer)

The 3B operate in squadrons of three lending each other through a smart system mesh support.

The price is 17 million nuyen for the airframe and gatling gun. Its availability rating is 30F.

[GreyBrother]

Sounds like an overpriced Nimrod to me.

[Chrysalis]

Designed as on-demand air support for forward
operating troops, the usual payload is a single internal LMG loaded
with armor piercing rounds intended to kill enemy drones, along
other lightly armored opposition that ground units may face.
The Nimrod’s setup also allows it to be used in dog fighting,

I don't think the Nimrod can carry 11,000 kg of ordinance, fly at over 21,000 meters, and carry out ELINT functions as part of its role.

The Nimrod would try getting close for aerial combat, utilising natural contours as protection. The 3B would puil back to 10,000-20,000 feet would use its combat software to negotiate with its squadron and friendly forces, mark the enemy and destroy it. The 3B's wide wingspan is not meant for close aerial dog fighting.

Alternatively it could launch drones similar to the nimrod as parts of its weapon package.

[G.NOME]

You can of course ignore any fluff text in your own games, and the "aerial go gang" might be cover for some nefarious corp activity, but check this out:

• Tamil Tiger Air Attacks
• Again
• Navy, too

Smallish rebel groups have support arms, too. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

[FlakJacket]

High carry capacity drones? Ultra lights? Magically lifted gliders?

How about the Russian Ka-56 "Wasp"? Considering it was designed and built back in the early 1970s modern advances nowadays never mind by the 2070s could make it a much more viable option.

Smallish rebel groups have support arms, too. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

Well at least until they start to lose badly and then start screaming for the opportunity to lay down arms and be taken into custody by a third party. Such a shame. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/sarcastic.gif)

[Snow_Fox]

is no one else pointing out how crazy the logistics of this is?

bikes or cars are one thing but copters take a lot more to maintain, esecpially when you start talking about the msaller ones that allow less room for a jury rig than older bigger ones. This means psecial parts special fuel special facilities to take off from. way easy to track down and frag off.

[Jaid]

is no one else pointing out how crazy the logistics of this is?

bikes or cars are one thing but copters take a lot more to maintain, esecpially when you start talking about the msaller ones that allow less room for a jury rig than older bigger ones. This means psecial parts special fuel special facilities to take off from. way easy to track down and frag off.

i expect it takes a lot less to maintain it to a level where it works fine 99% of the time, rather than 99.9999% or whatever airline companies have to maintain. i recall once watching a junkyard wars episode where they had 4 man teams working for 2 days to build an airplane. one team was able to make an airplane that flew up to several hundred feet above ground, looked absolutely fine. if 4 people with 20 hours and scrap parts can make an airplane that works, why don't we have super-cheap commercial airplanes? because there's all kinds of regulatory agencies that restrict how you build aircraft, what kinds of safety margin you need, etc. a go-gang isn't going to be dealing with all that stuff; they don't get bad publicity when the rival airline's parent company's news station tells a huge story about your airline's crash that caused death/injuries to dozens of people. delta airlines doesn't put a 100 passenger jet in the air if it thinks there's something less than ideal about it's jet. it costs them a lot to replace, and the bad PR would be immeasurable. for a bunch of go-gangers, these concerns are drastically reduced.

in other words, just because a huge airline flying massive aircraft with extremely large stress factors on said aircraft require a great deal of maintenance to obtain an extremely low rate of vehicular failure while dealing with dozens of regulating agencies, doesn't mean that the same applies for a small 1-2 man craft being flown around by a bunch of adrenaline junkies in a go-gang in the redmond barrens. would their aircraft pass an inspection by the appropriate government agencies? probably not. are they as safe as a commercial airliner? probably not. are they going to explode after 1 week without maintenance? probably not.

[Snow_Fox]

sure you could strap the odd aircraft together but the maintenance, stuff like AV gas or stable enough to actually work as a platform for weapons. Is going to be off. Even an ultralight right from the factory is not going ot be able to manouver and shoot. The first combat planes used in WW1 had like a 60 hp engine and to keep these up took a lot of mantenance. I know the gear heads love that sort of thing but the other side is that the parts get harder to find. If you have somethnig the size of a hughy you've got more space to frak around in to jury rig to make sure stuff works. When it's the size of a lawn mover engine you really don't have the space to trade out part 2365/45z-89-g with some chewing gum and duct tape.

My other ponit is that for law/corps to track this stuff down a plan needs a lot more space for storage to store it's parts and to store it's fuel than does a Harley.
Although for savagry a go gang on the ground might be ale to give a corp sec team trouble. but in the air, a squadron of SOTA corp gun ships are going to eat for lunch a go ganger's jury rigged utralight.

[Critias]

It's always been a stupid idea that in SR world you have large organized attacks on traffic running on major highways in Urban and suburban area. Hell, on major roadways at all. One of the devs watched Mad Max too many times. Sorry, Seattle isn't the Australian outback. It's SMALL, it's under constant video surveillance (and open areas like expressways are under constant aerial surveillance), and the response time is short when your responding vehicles are moving at 300 km/hr. The Seattle cops patrol with drone aircraft carrying stabilized machine guns and equipped with NODs. Go Gangs that get into a fight with 4 strato drones armed with MMGs are not going to do it again, because they are are going to be mostly dead in 6 seconds.

My personal favorite was always Torgo and his Spikes, who not only did the whole "grr, we own this stretch of interstate" nonsense, but also attacked Tir military patrols for kicks.

By "personal favorite," I mean "I retconned in my personal games that the Tir occasionally allowed this sort of thing to happen as a way to reinforce their anti-elven paranoia, leak patrol information to sic Torgo's boys on patrols full of political dissidents, and to occasionally send out Ghost teams to mark the sight of one of their own black ops with Spikes graffiti in order to point the finger at those filthy trogs and cover their tracks, because I can think of no other way that some two-bit fucking gang can regularly assault Tir military forces given the elven paranoia and reputation for the strength of their border."

[Snow_Fox]

I think it was a grab for the 'mad max' type world but yeah, we kind of 'forgot' that part. street gangs powerful enough to drive off police would elicit a massive response to exterminate them.
Team one- 5 go gangers on their bikes with smgs, shot guns and an LT Mg.
Team two- 5 lone star troopers in a Banshee.

[Lindt]

I just have to wonder... I mean sure if you crash your car into a guardrail you can salvage a good amount of parts. You crash your autogyro into the ground? Not much going to be left of it to salvage to fix your other ones.