Vehicle/Drone Noise Options

[vitus979]

How would one go about muffling the noise of a drone or vehicle within the rules?

For example if your game is going to revolve around lakes/oceans it might be good to muffle the noise of the engine on your boat so that it would be harder for people to notice.

If the team buys a helicopter, not having it heard when it's on an approach for insertion or extraction would obviously be nice.

A Rigger's spy drones would obviously not want to be heard.

Unless I missed something there also doesn't seem to be any differences between power types, aka a car with an internal combustion engine makes the same noise as one that's using an electric motor.

There isn't anything explicit that I can find that handles sound dampening on this scale, which is surprising in a game that revolves around stealth so much. The "Signature Masking" Modification provides Thermal and Radar masking. It does not state that it also muffles sound, but if there's anything in the game that comes closest, this would be it.

[Yerameyahu]

The signature rules in general are fairly ugly; ideally, you'd have to check everyone's senses individually against each kind of noise/smell/etc. that something was producing (because people have different DPs for each sense, and a vehicle could be small but noisy, or large but quiet).

I would work with the GM to create a new mod ('Acoustic Masking') that has a fair slot/nuyen cost (maybe just base it on Thermal). Failing that, you'll have to get a mage to Stealth it?

[Sengir]

Unless I missed something there also doesn't seem to be any differences between power types, aka a car with an internal combustion engine makes the same noise as one that's using an electric motor.

My rationalization for that has always been that the average vehicle is electrically powered, combustion engines are only used for recharging the batteries (like Diesel subs and locomotives do it today). So a vehicle with ICE has the same signature as an electric-only one unless it needs recharging. And you can justify how all cars can profit from solar cells and GridLink, which was the main reason I came up with that (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)