All it does is lessen the time it takes to enchant the foci, it costs 50,000 as opposed to 25,000 per force point for a power focus, and does nothing to decrease your karma costs.

What should we do to make it cheaper and more useful?

A free Mustardball with every Orichalcum purchase?

Of the swordfish or gas variety? The first looks funnier, but the second has funnier results.

Extended tests in general are too easy if you've got time to burn and more than minimal skill. Assuming you're running some house rule to make there be some prospect of actual failure rather than just wasted time, you'll need orichalcum or similar to make a high force focus enchantable at all. With (Force) negative dice modifier added to your -4 for a mundane telesma that any respectable covert mage will insist upon for anything he needs to sneak through a visual inspection, you're sucking hind tit for any dice left to actually do anything. For anyone with fairly normal skills/attributes (say Magic 5/Enchanting 5) that's going to make a force 6 commlink focus impossible to enchant without some bonus help; even someone with another point in Enchanting and a few more in Magic might fail unde the normal extended test rules.

I don't know what the thresholds and modifiers are, and won't until I break down and get the pdf (probably tomorrow), but if they're set up so that using the limit of extended tests to your skill rating can shut you down, then orichalcum may be necessary for some foci.

In other words if the threshold is 6 and you have 4 dice after modifiers (and a 4 skill) then you probably should get some orichalcum in there to ensure you don't get unlucky and waste a lot of time and materials.

The threshold is very high, that comlink example would be a 20. Negative modifiers to the dice pool are one per force and -4 for using a mundane (not virgin or handmade) telesma. Bonuses are for the same target number bonuses you got in previous editions, including +2 per orichalcum unit with no cap on how much you can use.

Example: You're an experienced shadowrunner initiate, but you've got better places to burn karma than on Enchanting skill you rarely use. Let's say you've got Enchanting 3, Magic 9, so base dice pool of 12. Your threshold for enchanting a comlink is 20. That's a mundane telesma, so you're already down to 8 dice in your pool and 8 attempts. Are you going to get 20 successes on 64 rolls? Probably, but that's for a zero Force focus! Let's take a mediocre Force 3. Now you've only got 5 dice and 5 attempts. Are you going to roll 20 success with 25 attempts? Er, no. You can keep trying and, sure, someday you'll get there, but... And maybe your GM says you ruin your telesma by trying and failing. Comlinks ain't cheap, either.

So you need to either pick a miniscule Force, a telesma that is obviously a focus or magical tool, or get some bonuses. For medium work radicals will work fine and be cheaper than orichalcum. But there's a limit to how many units you can find for high Force foci, how many categories you can find, and there's a cap if you can find enough that will hurt you when you're trying the real hard stuff.

And more realistically, you've only got 8-10 dice to use in the first place, not 12. Orichalcum is absolutely helpful, and often necessary, for all powerful or subtle foci.

Hmm... What if you were to allow it to save karma on second bonding costs?

You'd spend less karma. But of course there are no "second" bonding costs anymore. It only costs 1 point of karma to finish the enchantment; you then have a finished but unbonded focus that is bonded via the BBB rules. It's hard to see why (metaphysically) burning/eating/whatever orichalcum to reduce karma for bonding an existing focus should work. Why can you use it on that but not to make permanent a ward or extend a spirit binding to a year and a day?

Couldn't you do it in 3rd edition? And did it work for all binding costs? And it does make sense; it's an artificing component, so it should work for only artificing.

It worked that way in SR#, and was presumably changed because that rule was crazy in allowing high force foci with next to nothing bonding costs.

But the only way you'd ever get much orichalcum is if you made it yourself; buying that amount would bankrupt a board member at a megacorp.

It's pretty easy stuff to make, and mages don't generally have a lot of other places to dump their money if they're making their own foci.

No, but you can use robotics engineering to design a robot to fill your car. Artificing isn't "I own a robot" it's "I create things that relate to robotics." Or at least that's how it's been in the past.

Yes, but bonding is not really creation. As I've said, I always considered orichalcum for reducing secondary bonding questions metaphysically suspect.