So while thinking about and looking endless crap for the madness that is that AR debate I thought of something that piqued my interest.

Hot sim allows you to process information by pumping your brain full of high-tech energy stuff. It makes you faster. The data becomes one with you. What if that data was input from real life, though? What if I'm recieving my five senses through other sources than my organs (screw OR-gans). A camera is recording trid. Microphone is recording sound. My olfactory sensor is smelling. My touch link is even sensing the world around me, turning things like the temperature to raw data. Now, in VR I take all of those feeds and "sense" them. In Hot-sim I could even notice things among the recorded data my pathertic organs wouldn't.

That's great and all, but not very practical, right? There's still a -6 mod for acting on any of that info with my body. BUT, could I control my skillwires while doing this Hot-sim Perception, couldn't I?

Now add all the enhanced sensory information, AR overlays like building schematics and signal locations, and crossreference this into my skillwires couldn't my skillswires take actions according to that information?

Here's the setup: I'm receiving sensory information via peripherals, enhanced by my hot-sim. Overlays further clairfy this info. All that is processed and my skillwires act accordingly. They override my motor functions to take action. I have already disabled the Hot-Sim limiter on RL actions, BTW.

It would be like riding in a big fleshy robot while being on brain-boosting drugs. Rigging yourself via Hot-sim. The periphrals would be neccesary to act, of course.

Why wouldn't something like this work?
Would I receive all three Hot Sim passes?
Would I need a control rig and rigger adaptations?
Could I just rig my own skillwires and use my normal att+skill?

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Completely different thought:

OOO, could I fix my cyber arm with a drone sensor and use that to Acitve target things? Can people use drone radar? Would the sensor/radar even have to be on the arm? Couldn't the drone and arm communicate and coordinate: The drone giving the arm/me radar feef and guiding my hand?

Oh, I was thinking of using Knowsoft and stuff too to be all Grammaton Cleric-like. You know, Equilibrium. Christian Bale rocks everything he is in.

I see a potential for a particular nasty (and possible moral issue) baddie!

With the SR4 rules you can somewhat get closer to an actual full on cyborg than in past versions. What if a guy with a whole lot of 'ware (arms, legs, organs, sim sense rig, eyes, vox, etc) had a virus, spontaneous phenomenon, or even his "evil" sub-conscious decided to take over his body via this implants and strove to further the full cyborg transformation and thus becomes an antagonist of sorts in its quest for better parts and new cyber replacements for its remaining "flesh". (The morale issue is the either destroy the cybernetic monster or try to save the deteriorating human trapped inside).

What you need is a touch link. Thats what it does. helps monitor your functions and body state while in the matrix or elsewhere (rigging)

I have touch link in the description.

More importantly, can I use skillwires without directly controlling them?
Can I rig them?

Whoa, should have finished reading. Thats insane, technically it wouldn't work unless the body could move that fast using wired reflexes.

But the question you brought up is madness, can you VR into an adapted/modified person with a touch link, skillwires, wired reflexes, and a cranial bomb for good measure.

Can it be done? I dunno but alot of the background stuff (deus and what have you) seems to imply you can, hell its how he survived the Renraku Arcology

Hell, I'd imagine you could program em with agents and give people pilot ratings

theoretically, a power assisted suit could do that.... rig into it to get the full passes... but I'm the type of mean person that would allow it, but have it chance stressing out your meatbod inside. though hey, just make a humanoid robot and rig through that the whole time =D

Yep, I thought about that. That would probably cost a decent amount of cred to make a believeable one, though.

Hmm...Can drones use Activesofts? Correction, Can drones with similar, human-like anatomy use activesofts? Would it require a special drone-friendly Activesoft that couldn't be used by humans?

Believeable as in Human-like, synthetic.

I do remember that book on cybermancy that took what you could do with a human body and cyberware beyond essence to a new extreme.

I don't see why you couldn't "try" to do any of it. "Try" only because it'd make a good plot whether you managed to succeed or died/dismembered trying

Also, with eyes, ears, skillwires and a sim rig, connected to the commlink, you could rig your buddies.

While Skillwires are no doubt hackable, they're not riggable. For the thousanth time, let me explain.

Skillwires don't control the body. You don't mentally command your skillwires to shoot a guy, and it moves your arm and you shoot a guy. Skillwires provide varying levels of simulated personal experience with the skill in question. I'd imagine that the "wires" involved are more along the lines of very flexible nerve and muscle augmentations that change shape when a new soft is accessed. This change better facilitates simulating the "muscle memory" created by the vast repetitions involved in developing a physical skill. Coupled with a storehouse of data in the program itself, it allows the entire system to reasonably simulate a skill in a competent, but uninspired way.

Consequently, you can't rig a man's Skillwire system to make him dance or shoot himself in the face. You can't swap out a man's ActiveSoft and make him uncontrollably start singing Broadway hits when he intended to throttle the life out of you, which is probably a common occurrence. At best, you can rig his Skillwire to stop accepting data from the ActiveSoft.

Someone chisel this shit in stone or make a goddamned plaque or something, so we don't have to keep going over it.

Ouch. If you're that tired of the question (which I did search for answers for before posting) there's no need to answer. Just igonre it, please. It's much better than getting snapped at, jeez.

hmm... sounds like an interesting idea. Since a skillwire provides a muscle memory, which for those of you who might not be familiar with the term, is what happens when you've practiced something so much that your body reacts without you thinking to consider it. its like going on autopilot.

An over dramatic example would be the person in a fight who "just won't go down" despite being beaten senseless or even unconcious because "they've trained so much, its their body moving without thought".

So, with something as invasive as skillwires to send false data to your arms and legs to help you do everything from running faster to shooting more accurately, and all from a storage device, i'd say Yes, this could be done. However, i'd put a limiter on the skills the erm... pilot could use of the rating of the skillwire. And possibly, for balance purposes, require a special skillsoft (perhaps called Puppeteer). meaning you'd have to first upload it to someone.

its a scary world where someone can buy a program to be able to do things better with their hands, its scarier when that conveiniece turns into a security issue. I think that a concious person should be allowed to resist perhaps using willpower or logic

I'm more interested in using Hot-sim's level of brain activity in the real world for myself. NO, i don't just want cheap IPs. I want to think faster. Think Advanced AR.

i'll freely admit i'm an evil bastard, so sure, if i was running, i'd allow you to do that.

But i'd point out that when you're "jumped into" a drone, you take damage when they take damage, so in effect, you'd take double damage from each successful attack against you.

I'd also say that you couldn't use those extra passes unless you had wired reflexes without risking serious damage, as your neural system can't naturally process signals that fast.

think seizure

How do Hot-simmers do it then?

man that guy was mad.

I didn't know their were skillwire rules gangers in these parts. Lets keep our heads down.

seriously though, I thought it was an exercise of imagination to think about what'd it take to make someone a puppet (the tech is there). yup, nothing in RAW says you can do that stuff.

So game wise, Renraku is at it again with their new Matrix/Human interface known as Puppet wires! Only used in experiments with canines thus far, these wires fire neuro pulses that actually & totally control the users muscles by direct stimulation.

Might be your chance to realize your dream...Can he take on Renraku's elite security, will these Puppet Wires be the answer or just some buggy cutting edge tech, will he risk installing them?

Sounds like a hell of a lot of fun to me.

maybe Renraku leaked him the information to have their first willing human test subject and secretly maintained a "backdoor" access code so to speak.

Geekake the "skillwire rules ganger"? What an absurd gang. That more weird than the "crips".

This is not doable as SR4 has no model that unifies:
vehicles -> drones -> cyborgs -> cyberware -> humans
brain -> vr -> reflexes -> body -> ar
brain -> vr -> vehicle reaction-> vehicle reflexes

SR4 uses different mdoels that produce different results depending from what original state you are approaching another state (for example: building a cyborg from a human produces other results than building an anthroform starting from a drone).

SR5 should have such a unified model, where everything is the extreme case of some other approach and everything is compatible and comparable.

A unified reflex/reaction speed model should for example:

define a maxmium "brain speed":
- reduce real world refelxes because of nervous system limitations limitation
-reduce real world speed because of muscle/body limitations
- make the nervous system limitations smaller to a certain limit using reflex enhancers
- allow jumped in riggers to act by maximum brain speed reduced by the "body" of the drone
-define AR by using the reduced body speed and reduce it further depending on input method (keyboard, gloves . ..)

and so forth.

Okay, that's cool. I had read enough here to glean that people were very opposed to the hacking and remote controlling of cyberware so I wanted to ask whether I could enable my skillwires to be accessed "remotely" by me. But that's totally okay that I can't.

"-define AR by using the reduced body speed and reduce it further depending on input method (keyboard, gloves . ..)"

I like that idea, but a whole other edition for that kind of rule to come out? I sure hope not. There should be distinctions made before then I hope. I think "the speed of thought" and what exactly enhances it should be defined as soon as possible.

Wait 7 years for SR5 to come out (and pray that RPG designers learn a thing or two, hopefully some maths and statistics). No way to do this in SR4. Such kind of thing has to be designed from start.

Bummer

IIRC, the major difference between simple reflexes and learend one was that the latter were stored in the brain, not the spine.
The positioning recogniton system of the body would be another thing, but it's is transmitted to the brain anyway?

A reflex is a short circuit with pre-defined reaction. While that signal goes back from the spine to the muscle, the signal from the body sensors isn't stopped and is brought to the brain where it is integrated, and another response can be send. That second response need of course more time to make the muscle move, so that reaction will arrive after the muscular reflex begin it is more adapted than the reflex (which is a pre-defined move).

Anyway learning the reflexes is part of the training ! This is very important in fact to get optimised quick pre-defined reaction.

The spatial recognition use different sensor (ligament, tendon, skin ... )
It may induce reflex like anytime one articulation is is in it extreme position, the antagonist muscle react to avoid being injured.

Not very sure I am clear and ok with english ... hope that help

Just wait till move-by-wire comes back

that's cool, sam.
I think it wouldn't work because of the skillwires reason given above, which means that since you can't "rig yourself" via your skillwires, you'd have to "rig yourself" via your brain, but since that's also what you're using to do the rigging, I don't see it working. If you had another brain, maybe you could use that to rig the first one connected to the body. Sooo... I guess what I'm saying is grow another brain, or have someone else ride you.
If it were possible, though, I'd say Hot Sim would give you 2 extra IP's but the body you're jumped into would need WR2 to take advantage of your extra IP's. If not, you could jump out into 'captain's chair' mode and play minesweeper with your extra IP's.

I really thought the short time (and circuit) response is (slowy) changed by training (but I may be wrong on that) -
EDIT : thanks for the clarification Moon Hawk !

The spinal cord can definitely "learn". Spinalized cats have been taught to walk by training the leg movement combined with stimulation on their feet. (Spinalized means their spinal cords were cut, completely, so absolutely no information gets from the brain to the lower spinal cord or back) We're talking about adult animals, here. Similar research is being done with humans. Of course, it's just a very complex learned reflex, but the example Taki gave is also extremely appropriate. When your body takes a fall it's your spinal cord that does all the administration. It's usually over before your brain catches up to what's happening. People can learn to fall more efficiently. Sure, part of that is in the brain, which is why a martial artist can take a fall better when they see it coming than when they can't. But the reason they can STILL take an unexpected fall better than an untrained person is because of the training in their spinal cord. The brain and the spinal cord make up the CNS, not just the brain.

You are oversimplifying. There are simple reflexes that can't change. Things like stretch receptors and the "knee jerk" reflex. There are reactions that are governed by the brain, as well. But there is also a level of reaction/reflex (it gets a little fuzzy which it is, depending on how you want to define them) in betwee, that is controlled by the spine, not the brain, and can be trained. Research is still unclear on exactly how much the spine can handle, but it is unambiguous that the spine can be trained to some degree. Also, in normal cases, the spine is also receiving information from the brain at the time it received information from the body that modulates its' response, so that messes with the results and makes it hard to attribute each's contribution, but the spine's contribution is definitely not 0.0% You can argue that it is not significant to the problem of skillwires, but not that it doesn't exist.

Indeed. Nature tends not to remove those lower control levels. It simply adds new, more complex levels on top of them that supercede them in most cases. But the primitive behaviors and controls are still in there, if you manage to surpress the newer ones. The burning question is how much those old controls still operate and are modulated by the higher-level functions vs. how much they are completely surpressed and superceded.