So, I'm getting ready to blow up my own little world to usher in SR4. I'm planning several "scenes" to show just how bad the crash of the entire matrix would be.

In my St. Louis, an aging Lambert Intl. Airport was taken over by Fed-Boeing who revitalized the old MacDonald Douglas plant. Now know as MacDonald-Douglas Internatioanl airport (or "the Mac" to the locals) the vastly improved facility was home to the first Semi-ballistic launch and landing. (only in my world, I have no idea where the first was according to cannon.)

As part of the Matrix crash, I was planning on having a out-of-control semiballisitic slam into the Mac. I asked a friend much smarter than I am what kind of devestation this would cause and he said I'm looking at nuclear blast-level shockwaves from the impact of something that large moving that fast.

What say you, oh Dumpshockers? How much damage would an falling semiballistic slamming into the ground at near full speed cause?

I'd put it in the same ballpark as the Tunguska impact event.

i really don't think a semiballistic is going to put out as much of a shockwave as a nuke.

Blood in the Boardroom has a semiballistic crash in it (Flight 118, IIRC). I'll look it up to see what kind of damage it caused.

EDIT: Looked it up. I'd probably compare it to a SCUD blast, or some other type of industrial explosion (refinary or chemical plant). BitB mentions that the wreckage of the crashed semiballistic was scattered over a large area, so you'd have a primary impact point with secondary damage occuring as the plane kept going after impact.

Depends largely on the wieight of the object, but yeah, you'd be looking at a fairly large blast.

In quite a few novels one side or another have what are basically 'rocks droped from orbit'. Hard to hit a stationary target with, but great if you need to take out a hardened fortification without the messiness of nuclear fallout. The Rich Man's Nuke, as its been put.

Sounds about like a Thor Shot hitting.

Lessee, it's coming in at Mach 19 per R3R. The smaller one has a cargo capacity of 8000kg + 126 Passengers (@ say 70kg each) = 16820kg that's more than 18 US tons, and it doesn't allow for the mass of the Vehicle itself.

On the plus side, it probably didn't have much fuel.

Yeah, nuclear blast impact seems reasonable.

In Blood in the Boardroom, the Semiballistic landed in Redmond, so no one really cared about the damage it did on the ground (or the people living there).

Wasn't that a suborbital trying to land and 'just' missing the airport?

I'm really not sure why anyone would make a semiballistic. In the world of Shadowrun, a regular plane that flies within the atmosphere can be accelerated with the movement power and protected with the guard power. A semi-ballistic leaves the atmosphere and can't benefit from either one.

A 747 has an economical cruising speed of 907 km/hr. So if each airport sends them off with a Force 4 unbound spirit on remote service, they are traveling at 3628 km/hr. That means that you can easily make it from Seattle to New York in an hour. With a 747 and a Force 4 spirit. You could also invest real money and power and get much better speeds.

-Frank

that's a lot of mages working at airports. also, in SR3, the movement power is not nearly as handy for vehicles as it is for living beings. don't know about SR4.

In Target:Wastelands, there was a section on space travel,

of which there is a lot of corp-owned space stations, with regular transfer of CEOs and other important peeps up and down the gravity well. (Zurich Orbital is one example)

having a semiballistic that can make ground to ground transfers, as well as space-ground and ground-space would be immensley usefull, as well as the fact that you could go from beijing to NYC in a matter of an hour or two.

Actually, no semiballistics are used for space travel:
They really are only able of semiballistic flight - no big maneuvering, no circling, nothing.

For those occasions, suborbitals are equipped with additional booster rockets.

don't magicians have a limit on the number of unbound spirits they can have at one time? and are you sure there aren't any special rules for using the movement power on vehicles in SR4? i ask because there are in SR3, but few people realized it.

No special rules.

unbound spirits on remote service no longer count towards the magician's maximum.

of course, should that ever get abused by a player, i feel confident the GM will start having the spirits spend edge, but as Frank said, it mostly needs a fairly hefty medical team to work at it's full potential. and a wizard with lots of drain resistance, i guess, but mainly the medical team.

oh, plus i personally would probably add a spirit with the Guard power protecting the conjuring magician from glitches.

egad. i think the worst part about SR4 is the horrible things i could accomplish with it.

As GM, I´d say, the resistance of the air would lead to movement being less effective at very high speeds. I´m aware of this problem since realizing that a very powerful NPC Mage of mine could make over Mach 1 with a high powerd Levitationspell in SR3, even without Movement. So I outlawed these Manga´esqu speeds throu spells and spirits.

Besids, in SR (since SR 1 or 2, NAGRL) even normal long range passenger airplains are hypersonic making Mach 3 or 5 or something. They do the Seattle-Tokio in under 2 hours, semibalistics & suborbitals get you there in under an hour!

I´d allso say a wagemage summoning what, 48 (counting very low) spirits a day won´t live very long! Even If he manages it with little drain, attended to by medics, it would have a horrible impact on his organism over the months and years (surely don´t need to reccon in decades). Being a to the edge doped pro athlet is a cakewalk in comperrison to getting 10 medcit-applications a day!

Edit: Aztech in the haydays of sacrificemagic may consider this rout, but IMO it shoud not work.

Edit 2: Ah, the crash zone in the redmond barrens is described in some detail in the New Seattle sb.

so you only have movement on a few planes. this is just to replace the suborbitals and semiballistics remember, not all the planes.

and you have a few different magicians doing it. the airport probably already has several on their payroll. why not have them rotate between security duty and boosting the planes?

You guys rock, thanks for the input and the interesting conversation.

You guys really think a force 4 spirit could accelerate with the movement power a target of a 747 size ??? ???
Is this a joke ?
I don't think it works in the SR world. (otherwise there should seriously have been such example in the sr4 book presentation of magic).
the power movement works on a SUBJECT - which is a living thing (to my mind), and this seems quite evident when you compare with other power scale (such as concealment).

- if you want a big shock, have a military plane fulled with "normal" and tactical nuclear bomb to crash ...

Or maybe one of the corps loses a thor shot or two during the crash

The easiest way to get the biggest boom for the buck is to have the SB detonate on the launch pad. If the SB is using cryogenic fuels (meaning "have to be below 0c just to be liquid") a rupture in the tanks will turn the SB into an fuel/air explosive (FAE) as the fuel rapidly (and possibly explosively) turns to vapor, one of the few weapons that can rival a nuke for destructive power.

Assuming the SB doesn't experience forces beyond 3Gs (same as the space shuttle) and that air resistance is negligible this would be 6.6E13J or 600T of TNT.

Air resistance is so very much not negligible at those velocities nor does this quick calculation factor in the energy required to accelerate the fuel but we can assume that excess energy is wasted in simple heat as the SB is not a very efficient bomb.

I would imagine that SBs are launched from underground vaults so that a launch failure results in a spectacular vertical burst but there's not much they can do if the SB detonates at 100' from the ground.

SB´s in SR start just like ordinary planes, leaving the populated area (though barrens don´t count, maybe) ant than begins to ascend rocketlike. Allso, when a SB or SO arrives at its destination there is no fuel left! It cant even make a second trial on landing. 1st landing attempt bothed = SB/SO crashes!

So why are they called HyperSonicCivilianTransporters than? I may look it up.

The crash pics are realy impressive, though the devastation described in BitB & NS was more dramatic if I remember correctly (then again, maybe they hit an industrial chemical plant or something, instead of a hotel).

[Edit]: Ignore me, just a misposting[/edit]

The PROPER formula for figuring out how big the Explosion of the Semi-Ballistic impacting into the airport would be is: D+I-R+P(A)= EX, where D equals Your Desired Size, plus your Imagined Scene, minus your desire for Reality, plus your Players Desires, Multiplied by the Sheer Awesomeness of the Scene - this equals the size of the Explosion.

Seriously. make it as big as you think would be awesomely badass, and then maybe make it a little bigger to really kick home the message of: "Oh...Shit!"

said like that ?
747 = 1 object = 1 subject (even if it is a far bigger subject than what a spirit can accelerate).
IN the 747 : passanger n°1 = one personne = one subject
passanger n°2 = one personne = one subject and so on ...
So the whole would count for a lot of subjects !!!

Either you do use stricly the rules (only one subject), either you interprate them, and the GM could consider what a spirit can target using the power movement, depending on its force.

Just think why all the very costy hudge vehicles (eg: plane carrier, submarines) have never been said to be ALWAYS accelarated by a poor force 3 spirit (no cost - or 0.00001% of the maintenance to have 2 mage at each time who keep the spirit) ....

Just because they are not.

Any GM can change that. But it surely induice a lot of change in the SR world.

Taken to the utmost, 1 Earth = 1 object = 1 subject.

Suffice to say, use the in-game logic: is movement generally described as being used on aircraft? Do you wish to use it on aircraft? Do you wish to accept the increase in speed worldwide this will cause?

Similarly, assuming a sports car can do 120-150 mph with a rigging driver, and a mage can summon a force 5 spirit... are you willing to accept, as a GM or a player, a Shadowrun world in which criminals (and police officers) have vehicles which can break the sound barrier on the surface of a street and never, ever crash, due to the guard power.

As an easy rule of thumb, my rule for SR4 is the maximum weight a spirit can affect with powers is the force of the spirit x 100 kg. That leaves plenty of leeway for low-force personal movement increases, but sorta realistically caps out for anything above motorcycle or sports car.

But I liked SR3's accelleration-based rules better.

I just thought of a new one. I'm not sure what I think of it yet.

Use movement on a projectile for more damage.

Ouch.

Edit: Never mind, I just realized that at the speeds such a projectile was moving, the materialized spirit couldn't POSSIBLY keep it in line of sight for longer than a microsecond, and therefore it's a pretty worthless application.

If the projectile is already punching through the target, I don't see the extra velocity helping. It will simply go through faster.

Now have the Troll throw a cinder block and have that accelerated by 4 and you are on to something.

The SR3 rules ended up doing the same thing, they just took a while to "ramp up." The spirit rolled its Essence every round against a TN of half the vehicles body, with successes each round being multiplied by the vehicle's acceleration and added to the vehicle's speed - the maximum modifier was still max speed x Essence. This is very similar to just multiplying the speed by Force.

Let's consider a Force 3 Spirit using Movement on an Ares Dragon (a massive transport helicopter - Body 7). On average, the spirit gets 2 hits each round (rolling 3 dice against a TN of 3), so the vehicle accelerates at 2 times its Acceleration in addition to its acceleration each round (see SR3, p. 265). So each round, it moves 10 meters/turn faster for its normal acceleration, and 20 meters/turn faster for the movement. In SR4, we now use the completely different setup where the spirit moves 30 meters/turn faster (acceleration x Force). Oh horrors!

Seriously, the SR3 rules were complicated, and quite different if you were using them to accelerate a vehicle that was already moving at maximum speed, but they had the same basic effect when used on a vehicle from the beginning. It's always worked this way, just sometimes the rules have been written in a fashion that was really confusing.

-Frank

I've always figured that the movement power didn't actually increase the speed of the thing in question so much as made the distance it traveled smaller.

For one, this is magic, not physics. Even for hermetics thinking of it too much like physics can cause problems. The Idea of the movement power (In my mind) is to decrese travel times, not to increase velocity. So you get there faster. Anyone who observes you sees you going at your non-increased speed, even you. You just miss all the uninteresting parts of the trip. You kinda "Skip" that space.

For example, you are speeding down a dark, twisting road in the mountains. There are a few incredible views, and lots of essentially similar landscape. You skip over most of that landscape, catch the views, and when you hit a deer (b/c you didn't use the guard power) you hit it at your normal velocity.

Or, you are speeding away from the cops, only 1 block ahead of the lead car. You turn a corner and are briefly out of sight. When the cops turn the corner you are 10 blocks ahead of them.

Or, You are a plane. A mage uses movement on you (magic is symbolic. If the thing in question is thought of as a distinct object, you can affect it). You take off as normal, with no increased speed. You arrive at your destination 4 times faster than you normally would, but come in with no increase of velocity. The plane has used the normal amount of feul for the trip, it just made it to the end sooner.

And yes, I do suppose you could try to target the earth with this power. The only effect i could see is changing the season as you increase the speed at which she orbits the sun, or maybe increasing her rotation to brign day sooner (Which would free a spirit sooner as well.) First, you'd have to be able to see the earth as an object, which probably requires you to be in orbit. otherwise you don't see the earth, you see the ground. Second, You'd have to overcome her spell resistance. What, you thought the earth was an inanimate object? Fool. She's chucking more dice at resisting that spell than they have in your local game store.

The rules are quite clear that the power increases velocity, though.

F=mv^2

What is the mass?
What is the angle of entry?
What is the angle of impact?
What is the terminal velocity?

As a semi-ballistic is hollow, when it hits it's airframe will crush and disintegrate on impact. It'll make a crater, but it won't do as much damage as a nuke or Thor shot. It'll likely spread a lot of debris around.