hello,

Gm-ing since the first SRed hit the collective consciousness i've always been fond of the big A (Aztzechnology) and their shadowy master(s). BUT....SR4 came through the backdoor and BANG shoot the timeline dead !!!

here's my problem /

What happened to the big A after the failure ( was it really à failure) of the Rancho Obrero operation in the Yucatan ?

How did the Aztechnology manage the Yucatan crisis and its aftermath ? you know all the rambling about polluting the earth, toxix spirit war vs nature spirits, crazy ACS shaman....etc.

There is a time warp (2063_2070) absolutely blank about Aztlan, Yucatan and the south/central americas and i need info to fill it.

Does anybody knows something?

yes i know.....wait and sees everything will be revealed in SoLA !! no way i wait until there !!

thanks

And so begins another series of posts demanding SoLA and bashing Holostreets for not releasing it.

There's some discreet references in Runner Havens, and more in upcoming products, but we don't want to give too much away.

Why not?

hahahahaha

There's some references in the German-only Sixth World Almanac (since it incorporates some timeline events from SoLA) such as the info on the Yucatan peace talks, Juan Atzcapotzalco's (yes, that's from memory) assassination during said talks, and the secession of the Yucatan.

I misunderstood. I thought you were saying that "we" -the writers- didn't want to give too much away in the books, and I was thinking, "Why leave your readers frustrated because they can't get the background info?" I see now that you meant "we" -those of us dumpshockers who are in the loop- don't want to give away what's in the books. Fair enough.

great !!!!!:(

so have got no choice but wait until it hit the market!!

so the Yucatan secceded and cool Juan was murdered (how long ago ?) !!! ha bits an pieces....truth is slowly crawling out of its hole !!

Anything relevant to the subject matter will be addressed, like the Nicaragua Canal in Runner Havens.

"will be" ?
i just take a look inside "runner havens" and the only info i found about Aztlan is the Dzibalchen execution by Aztlan gov. The Carracas section is really interesting and offers very good insight on this spot !! cool place!!
No background buzz concerning the panama canal and so forth...

Somehow an EMP bomb damaged a mechanical lock system that would have been about 150 years old when SF occurred.

OMG, Synner!! What´s that thick, black liquid dropping off your chin?!

thank to you for being so usefull !!

Not to speak for SL, who is perfectly capable of defending himself (or herself, as we are not personally acquainted, don't want to make a groundless assumption regarding a fellow forum poster), but the EMP putting the canal out of business idea is a bit on the weak side. This is analogous to responding to the EMP destruction of the control center for a rail network by laying new track. The cost/effort to replace whatever it is in the lock system that could possibly be damaged, even if the canal authorities used it as an opportunity to completely replace the locks from scraich, would be orders of magnitude cheaper than digging a new canal some where else. The only real justification for the expense would be either power (AZT wants it's own canal and is willing to just loose the money for the strategic gain), or size (building a new canal capable of handling the size of modern super-cargo and super-tanker ships). The other rather odd assumption that this makes is that even though the other corps took the Panama Canal away from AZT, and it is clearly described as well fortified and protected by troops from the other Mega's, that in that process they did not make any effort to protect canal's matrix and mechanical systems from attack-even though EMP attacks are a standard part of Warfare in the Sixth World (and the dangers presented by the various means of disabling the canal have been present since it was opened).

AFE

could you post here a sumarised timeline of the event concerning the canal or give me the reference (chapter, page numb. ) in System Failure ? assuming that the info is coming from SL

Page 101 & 102.

I think that one could creatively justify an EMP damaging the canal's infrastructure. I'm no engineer, (actually, I'm an engineering school dropout,) but couldn't you just say that the EMP made the the controls of the transferring mechanism die at a particular point, vents stuck open, pumps running while dry, pressure building up behind some barricade while the pressure relief valves won't open, something like that? I always figured these giant structures designed to move around unimaginable quanitities of heavy stuff would have to be monitored and adjusted constantly. Didn't Chernobyl go up because one guage wasn't reading consistently? What about the human factor? Panic, miscalculation, combined with a lack of computer backup. "I'm pretty sure we set this dial to 350. No need to look it up, I'm sure. Really."

I mean, the gates or whatever they're called are designed to withstand massive forces, but like most large structures, I'd guess they only work under specific parameters. Exceed an operating limit and wham. Wall o' water....

Chernobyl was the result of an ill conceived and unauthorized experiment gone tragically wrong. The plant managers wanted to see how much energy they could pull out of the system while it was shuting down, to see if electricity could still be generated as they were gearing down for routine system maintainance. safeguards that normally would have shut the reactor down when pressure in the system dropped were thus disabled.

As far as the canal, I could foresee catastrophic damage to the mechanical systems, sure. My point is that those are all systems that are engineered to be both replaced and repaired, as natural ware and tare on the system will necessitate both substantial maintainance as well as emergency repairs. A worst case scenario like you mention could cause a major repair headache, however, it could never be anything compared to the effort necessary to build a new canal, which would be one of the great engineering undertakings of all time. Keep in mind that despite the fact that the largest cargo ships, as well as the super oil tankers, are way to big to fit through the canal, the cost of building a larger canal along side the Panama canal is to great to undertake (and that would be cheaper by a large margin than any of the other proposed routes), even though it would mean, literally, billions in revenew for the government of Panama.

AFE

I hear you guys. I guess what I'm saying is that the EMP wouldn't do the primary damage, it'd just allow the forces of nature the edge they need (I'm sure I'm not the only person to see first hand the damage of flooding. In a lot of those cases, it is easier to start over than to try to rebuild on weakened foundations and displaced soil.) I'll admit though that I don't know a lot about the canals themselves. Isn't one ocean a lot higher than the other? What if one lock didn't close when it was supposed to? Could the water build up high enough or heavy enough to overcome the next lock downstream?

Likely? Hell no. Possible? I dunno. As possible as move-by-wire cyberware and growing wheat on the ocean floor? That's what I'm trying to figure out.

... Uh, yeah. And if something like that did happen, then wouldn't SF mention... Ah, to hell with it. God, that whole plotline (and most of SF) was retarded.

ok thanks everybody for the infos.

What about the aftermath of the yucatan conflict?

neh???

The resolution of the Yucatan conflict has the Yucatan as a semi-autonomous state within Aztlan, governed by a provincial governor. The initial and current provincial governor is the feathered serpent Pobre.

Revolutionary elements do still exist in the Yucatan, but they were heavily decimated in the war with Aztlan. And with Pobre pulling the rug out from under them by signing on as provincial governor, they've lost a lot of their power.

Bwah...

No one really knows what pushed Pobre to take his new posting over his revolutionary pride. It could be that he knew he was fighting a losing battle and chose survival. It could be that he was driven a bit nuts by the toxic impact of the Yucatan warfare. It could be that he simply came to the realization that Aztlan was going to be the winning side and he wanted to be on the winning side. Or there might be a layer of feathered serpent politics involved that isn't clearly understood (Pobre did, afterall, hand over Dzitbalchen to Aztlan for the latter dragon's execution).

Who Wants to Be A Great Dragon.

Where can I read more about this?

The Vapor Sourcebook. AKA, SoLA.

Runner Havens has a small paragraph about it in the Caracas-chapter.

*shrug*
Maybe the EMPs didn't wreck the locks? Maybe somebody just used that as an excuse or cover story for the result of a shadowrun?
Admittedly I've not gone and looked up the actual phrasing concerning this event, but isn't the whole point about sourcebooks that they are generally written from the point of view of somebody in the SR universe, precisely to introduce fallability that GMs can exploit to customize things a bit more to their liking?

I know you love it

Yes. That's the verb I was looking for. "Love."

In your very own way, you love it.

The way that some men "love" their Realdolls.

Actually, I skipped over the Hong Kong chapter. But I like Jay's writing, so I expect that will be appealing.

So Juan was killed... what's more interesting was that he was part of a peace delegation....

If both sides have fought themselves to a standstill and there's no real sight of either of them getting the upper hand, I could see Aztechnology granting a degree of autonomy in return for cacking the dragon to salvage some reputation from the whole affair. It's not as though a massively toxic jungle would be all that attractive and the resources they'd of had to have been ploughing into the war effort must have been screwing with their economy as well. Money won out over pride in the end.

On the whole assassination front, I figure Aztechnology offered to step in as a 'neutral arbitrator' to help negotiate a settlement beteen the two sides. Translation, stepped in officially to keep things firmly under their control.

And then you've got all the myriad different factions that could have been behind the hit on Atzcapotzalco - Pobre to get a rival out the way and establish a personal power base, angry rebels that didn't want a settlement because it didn't go far enough and wanted to restart the war, government forces that didn't want to stop fighting until they won and refused to countenance a 'surrender' like that, internal Aztechnology shenanigans that had nothing to do with the Yucatan except a handy suspect to frame. And those are the ones just straight off the top of my head.

Or it could have been because he was no longer obeying his master's voice after picking up his gift from Dunk.

James said what I was thinking. O'course, the now-dead "peace delegation" could've been something else, too. Blood mages? Possible....

And speaking of blood magic... ceremoniously executed dragon, huh?

Ceremonially sacrificed, even.

Gee, I wonder what they did with the energy released from that.