Lord of the Flies, Snake eyes & microdrones Options

[Kagetenshi]

Once created, a standard Shadowrun rigger-generated image can be magnified up to 10x without significantly degrading it. Since it's so consistent, it makes more sense IMO for it to just be higher-quality than one would think they'd need. There are currently no rules for stripping that out, so you'd have to toss another houserule into the batch.

~J

[Edward]

The whole thing is one big house rule anyway.

If the image were bitmapped then removing the zoom capability would reduce the file size to 1%. Raster would be less efficient but I don’t think they ever got raster images to work well for pictures of actual environments. Of cause SR may use something better than ether with a loss less compression that makes image detail irrelevant and the zoom limit is a factor of the camera resolution and not the file format.

Personally I would have each bug strip its view down to contrast lines witch are easily combined to produce a tactical view for general use and when you need to actually watch something you activate 1 bug to give you a full detail video feed witch you can watch or record but is not used directly by the system. You could even have multiple bugs watching different points but combining the images to produce a full colour 3 dimensional representation of an aria is the work of a supercomputer or time scales of 10/1+

Edward

[Botch]

[Birdy]

There was a Michael Cryton(sp?) [The guy from TimeLine and Jurassic Park) novel about a Nanite project that planned to build "Recon Nano Swarms". The novel itself is relatively "cheesy" and long winded but the inital 50 pages where they explain the Nano is interesting.

Okay, the rest of the novel is also pretty "10 little afro-americans" and "ooops, that went wrong" (To be human ist to be....obsolete)

Birdy

[Moon-Hawk]

Michael Crichton, and the novel is called Prey.

[Method]

Well first things first- we all agree that by 206X the technology to build this system is there, right?

We don't need to sit around debaiting how it might be done with today's technology- we could do the same for any number of cannon tech gadgets but nobody really cares how something works so long as cannon says it does.

So, given that assumption (i.e. the technology is there- it works - live with it) all we really need to do is figure out a balanced game mechanic that allows this guy to do what you're envisioning.

Personally I would go with something less cumbersome, like the multi-sensor array with one Rating. You could say that each rating point on the Lord's RCD supports one sensor point worth of the little buggers (how ever many that is- for fluff you could say 1000).

For power, I like Edward's crystal radio concept- the electromagnetic feild that controls the buggers also powers them somehow.

As far as range goes, you could say that more centrally-located flies double as a short range repeaters for the peripheral "sensing" flies, so again its not the effective range an individual bug, but the density of the swarm (and how far they can spread out) thats important. So FLUX = Rating/5 or something like that (you'd have to determine what equation makes sense).

One thing this lacks is some kind of mechanic for determining how many flies a given attack destroys (and thus the reduction in the systems rating). That could be pretty variable when you consider all the different types of damage the PCs might dish out...

[Method]

More thoughts-

- Since the flies could essentially go anywhere (baring wind tunnels), the system would not be limited by obsticles, sensor blind spots, buildings, etc. The Lord would effectively sense everything within the swarm's range.

- The flies themselves don't need full motion digital video. They might have a simple sensor that "sees" only a limited feild in IR or Ultrasound. The tiny amount of data each fly collects could be transmitted back to a computer that builds a composit and translates it into simsense for the Lord's modified snakeyes. Instead of jumping into individual flies, the lord could "jump" into any location within the swarm's range an "see" everything thats happening as if he were there.

[Kagetenshi]

[Method]

[Botch]

Thanks for the input so far guys. :)

Damage wise, I thinking that only broad area effects would work. Spraying acid, setting the room on fire very quickly, EMP, ECM, blast effects only in a confined area, etc. Individual shots would be near useless.

I realise that statement needs a bit of rules-fu, but I'm a bit unsure about combat magic. Would the LoF system as a whole be treated as 1 target or each sub-set of flies, or each fly?

For those who wish know how the idea came about.

About 6 months ago a small swarm of house-flies invaded by lounge/kitchen. Don't know where they came from, the first day I shoo'd hundreds out of the window. The next day there were hundreds more, maybe they snuck back? Day 3 an idea came to me, why not get the high-power Walther P99 BB gun out of the shed an get a little "live" practise in. After a while, I could definately say, "I can hit a fly at 20' with a 6mm BB.". Course, that's only true after practising on several hundred flies and covering my lounge with about 2,000 plastic BBs during the course of 2 1/2 days.