I know absurd thread Necromancy is bad, but I'm just going to do it this once....

Why?

Because the one time FASA wrote up my home state of New Jersey, they mistook the northeastern quarter of the state around Jersey City, Newark, and Elizabeth for the entire state.

Makes me want to scream.

If I were to redo it, here's what it'd look like (and I can manage not to contradict canon, either!) as of 2072 in my opinion:

We'll even go county by county, in groups (A quick county map for the geography-impaired):

The Newark sprawl makes up Hudson, Essex, and Union counties, with Bergen and Morris serving as suburbia for the region. Passaic is not yet part of the Newark sprawl, but the sprawl's outer zones are growing in that direction.

Sussex, Warren, and Morris are largely rural, and so inconveniently placed that there's no likelihood of them joining any sprawl. I actually see this as greenspace, allowed to go back to nature after the Awakening. Biggest employer here is and would be the U(CA)S Army's Picatinny Arsenal, which would be a major spot for shadowruns - it's where the Army tests (or creates) basically everything conventional that goes boom, among other things.

Hunterdon and Somerset remain much like they are now - A to AAA suburbia, though barely suburbia. Very rural - there are working horse farms in this region, and development is fairly strictly regulated. An excellent place, that said, for corps or others to conduct non-toxic research out of the way of prying eyes.

Middlesex County gets lone mention as it forms the southern border of the Newark Sprawl - New Brunswick retains its place as a college town - indeed, it's largely OWNED by the land-grabby Rutgers, which expanded after the Ghost Dance War.

Mercer, Monmouth, and Ocean, being my stomping grounds, will be covered later.

Burlington is very odd. Much of the county is taken up by Fort Dix (Which would in my view be one of the major troop concentration posts in the Mid-Atlantic in Shadowrun, unless someone has better ideas), Lakehurst Naval Air Engineering Station (where a lot of technologies for carrier use are developed or tested - also the site of the Hindenburg disaster, for history buffs, and McGuire Air Force Base, which already is a major air logistics hub for the US military.

Camden county has Camden...A subsprawl for Philly, really. Its fate really depends on Philly.

Salem and Cumberland counties are rural, the source of things like Ocean Spray cranberries. I fully expect them to stay rural.

Cape May county: Actually technically SOUTH of the Mason-Dixon line, I see the major non-tourism employer here being....The Coast Guard.

Its main recruit training center is at Cape May, actually, and I only expect it to grow as the Coasties expand.

Other than that, it's summer homes for rich folks from Philly.

Heading back up the Atlantic coast of New Jersey, we come to Atlantic County, home of...Atlantic City. Not big enough to be its own sprawl, but notable as a hangout for the glitterati from Philly and NYC when those cities are too hot in the summer.

After the Treaty of Denver, I'm curious: What would people do with the Indian casinos at Foxwoods and the like? The fate of AC, any redevelopment of AC, hinges on the what happens with their main competition, the Indian casinos. If the Indian casinos stick around, AC is headed for D-zone status, except the boardwalk (which I expect will always be AAA) and the airport (now a major congestion reliever on Philadelphia and Newark), naturally AAA. Z is unlikely - the city is just too small for Z-zone conditions to develop.

If they don't...AC has a chance. It'd become even more corporate than it is today, a hotbed of lowlevel corruption, but it could (outside of the boardwalk) hold on to C-zone status by its fingernails.

And now we come to Mercer, Monmouth, and Ocean counties.

I'll go into more detail, but first I want to take author's privilege to take a stop at a sensitive topic for anyone from New Jersey:

The environment. Especially around the beaches.

Yes, the Atlantic is polluted in SR. Yes, there's not much any one town could do about that.

But here's the thing: Most of the pollution seen by NJ beaches doesn't come from corporate sources. It comes from municipal sources. Those can and likely will still be regulated...heavily.

NJ is a very, very expensive state to live in, something a lot of people don't get...And while some of that money gets sucked up by the omnipresent low-level corruption, I do figure the State, plus wealthier towns, plus wealthier corps would all have magicians (maybe just one or two each, but still) working to keep the coast clean.

Anyway...

Mercer county: Very wealthy, very much a place of a chasm between the haves and have nots.

The have nots live in Trenton - capital of the State and a C-zone on its good days. D on its bad days. The business and government part of Trenton I see as being B to AAA. Everywhere else, C and D, some places slide into E.

Everywhere else in Mercer County: The haves. Very, very rich. Princeton is an obvious center of this, but so is the rest of county, which splits between a bedroom community for Philly and a bedroom community for NYC.

And now, finally...Monmouth and Ocean counties.

I have no doubt they're still tourism-dependent in 2072. But not as much as they once were.

To get how I figure this area will look like:

IRL, it was first or second-line suburbia, developed in the 50s-70s. Up til about the 70s, it was very segregated by ethnicity (among residents, not so much tourists), but it's now a jumbled mix wherever you go. Locals joke amongst ourselves that we're a "second Brooklyn" because of the HUGE concentration of Orthodox Jews, of both Sephardic and Ashkenazic streams, something that's only been growing - we now have major yeshivot in Lakewood, in Ocean County - some of the largest outside Israel, if I recall. It creates some sticky tensions at school board meetings, zoning board meetings, etc., but nothing too bad. People around here are too laid back to be really grumpy.

I see much of the area as classic A and B-zones, going up to AAA in selected points. After the 2005 earthquake that hit Manhattan, I figure a lot of corps would have employee housing in developments that mostly-integrate into the local communities (as that's cheaper, and the PR benefits are many). Only for middle-to-high-ranking employees, though, the actual extraterritorial corp housing - everybody else fends for themselves on the real estate market.

Major industry here? Communications. The landing point for one of the major submarine cables is in Sea Bright, and Bell Labs (was?) in Holmdel. It'll not likely be the next Silicon Valley, but in the data-infused future of Shadowrun, I sense these companies (which do the design and development of the infrastructure of telecoms) will have bright futures, with the Crashes mostly hitting software firms.

The Awakening would bring weird impacts to the region. I suspect Hermetics would often gather in Red Bank, maybe the gentrifying parts of Asbury Park. You come from this area, you're likely to have grown up at least seeing magic used in coastal restoration projects. Which seem to be required after every single winter, given the freakiness of the weather.

Despite the BRAC's decision in 2005, I don't see Fort Monmouth remaining closed for very LONG...No, almost as soon as they close it, the Awakening happens....And then the Ghost Dance War and the Treaty of Denver.

Hence, Fort Monmouth is reopened, hosting various service schools for the Army, including the Defense Information Systems School (AKA the military school for hackers), the Chaplains' School, and the Signal School. It also hosts a number of research-and-development commands, making security tight...And shadowruns Frequent. I figure it also would have expanded - reopening the old Camp Evans, plus buying up any number of greenspace sites in Western Monmouth County, around Freehold, for training sites. I very nearly parked the Defense Thaumaturgical School here, too, but surely there must be better places to put it.
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Security contracts in this area are often strangely multilayered - where the Newark and Camden Sprawls consoldiated, suburban New Jersey often maintains many of the 566 municipalities that once made up the Garden State, as well as the 21 counties (even the sprawls are divided up, at least on the map, by county), and most of those have their own municipal police departments, or contract to other municipalities. Lone Star, Knight Errant, and other security corps often look at the hundreds of municipalities and just give up on trying to extract profit from municipal policing contracts in the region.

What this means: The cops are often outgunned. However, they are very well-paid, and cyber and bio are somewhat more frequent.

Meanwhile...the fact that these are municipal cops means that if it's just a traffic stop, outrunning them til you reach the next jurisdiction...works.

Sometimes.

If you're suspected of a felony, though, mutual-aid agreements come into play. Agreements in which, Monmouth and Ocean County runners be aware, the Fort Monmouth MPs participate.
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Runs in most of New Jersey would rely on subtlety. Guns are very heavily regulated for the old US, and if they could ban em, they would.

As far as types of runs: Datasteals and extractions are most prominent, but wetwork is...not unheard of, if you can make it look like an accident, and the swampy areas of the Pine Barrens in Southern NJ (from Ocean County south) make an excellent randezvous point for smugglers coming up the coasts.
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Thoughts, anyone?

I did my vision of Milwaukee 2070 a few months back and I hinted that Madision was a hotbed for left-wing and eco rads, so much so, that the Big 10 practically bought UW-Milwaukee and made it into a more corp-friendly institution. I sort of thopught that Madison would become the most politically liberal city in the UCAS so much so that "Madison Liberals" have become the new epithet amongst UCAS Republican and Archconservative politicos. (Much like "San Francisco Liberals" are dumped on by right-wing politicos in RL.)

My vision of Madison also had the airport being completley taken over by the military during the Ghost Dance War and and eventually becoming Truax Air Force Base, (They built a new civilian airport in McFarland) of course, Truax Air Force Base now draws protestors (and shadowrunners and covert intelligence operatives from the NAN) like flies to cowshit.

I'm from Rural Northeast Wisconsin.

In the 2070s, I'd say that this area has about the cleanest air and water in the whole UCAS. The eco-minded left-wing politicians in Madison, allied with large and small tourism interests up here see to it, as tourism is still a big part of the economy.

Largest city would be Foxsprawl down south of me. A large continuous metroplex stretching from Green Bay all the way south along the Fox River through Appleton and Oshkosh to Fond du Lac. It's an Ares town. They have lots of manufacturing plants through there, from the large AresMercury facitiliy in Fond du Lac which makes marine engines for pleasure boats and the small patrol boats Ares Defense manufactures up the River in Green Bay, to the Ares Defense truck plant in Oshkosh, to the aforementioned Ares Defense shipbuliding facility in Green Bay. S-K's got a few interests in Foxsprawl, but they are few and far between. Back in the day, Foxsprawl used to be a real corporate battleground, but after CATco bit the big one in the wake of Crash 2.0, Foxsprawl is strcitly an Ares town.

Speaking of Green Bay, the Packers are still around, and they are still community owned after all these years, and they're the only team left in the NFL that still plays in an open stadium. True, they haven't been as good as when they won Super Bowl C (Which we won fair and square, don't let those jealous Azzies tell you otherwise.) and Super Bowl CI a few years back, (in fact they haven't been the same after the mysterious dissapearance of Coach Bill Grinell in February 2070, but hey, at least we Cheeseheads still have the Brewers. Can you say Dynasty?)

One might think that all this industry means that the Fox River is polluted as all hell, but it isn't. It's actually very clean, and the whole system is part of the most stable Lake Sturgeon habitat in the world. And where' there's Sturgeon, there's caviar. Where there's caviar, there's the Vory. Yes, the Vory are very prevalent in the Foxsprawl, and they protect the sturgeon habitat like a jealous mohter hen. You so much as piss in Lake Winnebago or one its rivers, streams and tributatries, and the Vory will show you the error of your ways, usually in the form of cutting off parts of your body that you will miss and are a bitch to replace.

Speaking of organized crime, there are two major syndacates vying for power in Foxsprawl. The aforementioned Vory and a Hmong Syndacate that's pretty prevalent in Wisconsin and Minnesota, but nowhere else. They're organized alongs the same lines as your traditional Mafia, but they have the magical power of a Triad. Their shamans are a force to be reckoned with, and can sling some major mojo. They also run most of the talislegging in Foxsprawl (and most of Wisconsin itself).

Appleton's houses mostly Ares offices, and the entire city's pretty middle class. Some people may know Appletion as the birthplace of the UCAS Archconservative Party, and the location of the Houdini Institute, a thaumaturgical think tank that focuses on illusion magic. Appleton's not a place you want to be if you have tusks, pointy ears, horns, or if you are knee-high. Humanis operates quite openly here, and getting busted for "driving while meta" is commonplace in Appleton.

Oshkosh is the other big city in Foxsprawl. It's home to the big Ares Defense plant that manufactures heavy duty trucks used mostly by militaries throughout North America and the rest of the world. Oshkosh also is home to the Experimental Aircraft Association's annual convention. It's a week of family fun, airshows, and shadowrunning oprtunites glaore, as the megas use Oshkosh to unveil the latest in manned and unmanned aviation technology.

And then there's Fond du Lac. Home to Vory-Controlled sturgeon farms on Lake Winnebago and the large AresMercury plant.

That's all I got for now. Feel free to borrow from this.

Can I just once again laugh at the utter stupidity of some writeup I saw online that made the Boston Sprawl run from the coast all the way down to Connecticut and into part of New York? Uhh...

Boston's been pretty well writ-up, though they're missing some of that trademark Boston flavor. Gotta get my revision of it up and running one of these days. The town I was born in would be ate up by the sprawl and the town I live in now would probably be used for housing for corp citizens and other middle-class nobodies, with the exception of Gloucester to the northeast (big shipping / fishing port) and Newburyport would become Newbury Street for the youngsters and even more of a tourist trap than it is now.

Oh, and Salem would be the place to get magical stuff, and have two warring factions of Wicca fighting for control.

Our group is in Grand Rapids, MI. We are currently running as if an imaginary line were drawn from Muskegon over to the north side of Detroit. Everything north of there became awakened wilderness (damn near is now in 2009). South of this line, along the I-96 corridor, major urbanization has occured and turned the area into the Michigan Metropolitan Axis (the MMA).

After the 'fall' of Chicago, Muskegon, South Haven, and Grand Haven have picked up a large chunk of the lakeside industry and shipping services.

Grand Rapids has grown into a large biomedical research sector with some general materials manufacturing (one of which is largely Japanese owned, resulting in an increase of the Japanese/Yakuza population) The Russian immigrants present have built up and have drawn a big Vory presence as well. Grand Rapids also touts a good sized international airport that services straight flights to all of UCAS. In the early 2000s, it was already growing in capacity and when Chicago became a hot spot, it grew even more to accommodate some of the rerouted Chicago air traffic.

Lansing, the capital city, is still running things. Or at least the various factions of the state's organized crime families are...

Detroit is once again motor city. With the shakeup of the auto industry and advances in defense technology (AKA Ares and a few others), Detroit is once again a major player in UCAS industry. As expected, the Mafia has its hands in a good chunk of business in Detroit. There are also small pockets of Yakuza, Triad, Tong, and Vory.

In the awakened lands north of the MMA, the UCAS government has granted custodial ownership of the lands to UCAS-friendly tribes of Chippewa, Ottawa, and Potawatomi tribes. For the most part, they play nice with each other and share in the huge tourist industries they control in the awakened lands: massive casino resorts and wilderness excursions. Most signs of civilization in this awakened area have been reclaimed by the wilderness. The Native American settlements and resorts are saved from the reclamation by various forms of tribal magic and spirit use.

A high speed rail system (based on current proposals that exist today, though currently going nowhere) that services the Midwest is based out of Grand Rapids with lines that run into the south side of Chicago, Indianapolis, Lansing, Ann Arbor, Detroit, Windsor, Columbus, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh. This system is a major people and cargo mover between cities. The system is an electric maglev that operates via solar hydrogen stations built along its path.

Aside from the airport and high speed rail, there is also the old school train system that hubs in Grand Rapids as well as a quick drive out to the lake to hop on a boat for any transportation needs in or out of the MMA.

And of course, Knight Errant is a major player in security around the MMA. There are a couple smaller 'in house' police forces, but most of the major cities and corporations hire out to KE for their protection services.

As for the rest of rural Northest Wisconsin, It's pretty well much all farmland and awakened forests. There aree a couple of exceptions though.

There's Crandon up in Forest County, home of the Mole Lake Mine. It's been a controversial since it was first proposed back during the days of the Resource Rush. Despite all the reckless abandon at that time, the mine never did become operational until 2065. See, the company that owned the mineral rights at the time was owned by Noranda, a CATco subsidiary. Damien Knight didn't want a big CATco mining operation in the vicinity of a number of his company's executive retreats, so he had Ares lend under the table support to the forces opposed to the mine. The fight between Noranda and the opposition (mostly made up of tourism interests, the few local AmerInds, and pro-environment politicians from Madison) managed to prevent the mine from opening, despite the Seraphim's best efforts.

Then came the Crash 2.0, and with it the fall of Cross. Ares snpeed up pretty well much of CATco, but not Noranda. Saeder-Krupp got its scaly little claws on that little gem. S-K mangaed to convince a Wisconsin State legislature overburdened by the aftermath of The Crash 2.0 to push through authorization to begin mining operations.

The whole place is one big environemental disater. S-K's not exactly one of those companies that focuses on protecting the environment. As a result, shadowrunning opportunites abound, whether it's Eco-Rads looking for assistance with infiltration or sabatoge of the Mole Lake Mine, or S-K, who's always looking for deniable assets to help rein in the "troublemakers."

Then there's Menominee County. back in the day the entire county was one big AmerInd reservation. When the old U.S. Government started rounding up the AmerInds after the Lone Eagle Incident, they constructed a large processing facility in Keshena where Amerinds who lived East of the Mississippi were placed until they could be moved to the "Re-Education camps" out west. Nowadays, the place is just creepy. It has a significant background count, and both the UCAS Federal Government and NYPD, Inc have constructed special detention facilities for magically active prisoners. Those prisioners are about the only permanent residents in Menominee County, aside from a few survivalist types. Hell, I'm just your average mundane medic/part time wheelman, but even I get the creeps whenever we do runs up there. I can't imagine what it's like for my spellslinger buddies.

I live in Fayetteville NC, so I'd be in the CAS. Most likely looking to get the frag out head west, as it stands now I get a lot of "You ain't frum 'round here are ya boy," when I was born and raised in the South. In 2050+ I'd think that would get me shot.

I grew up in Redmond, about 2 minutes from the main Microsoft campus (which, for those who don't know, is DIRECTLY ACROSS THE STREET from Nintendo USA and Digipen School of Game Design. I worked for Nintendo for a short time). I spent a couple years in Kirkland, and now I live in Auburn. Good thing we moved out of Redmond, eh?

CT, I really like that write up for northern MI.

I'm from Elkhart, Indiana (North Central In) (and still am there), we probably got some refugee's from Chicago after the bugs. I imagine that the shadows in the area area little deeper than would be expected because of the almost equal distance from the remains of Chicago, Detroit, Columbus, & Indy. We already get some crime over-flow now.

Other than that I have no idea really, I have my current game based in Denver.

I wrote up a thirty page document before my current campaign started, in the same datahaven format as the real sourcebooks, on Minneapolis-St Paul, MN in 2070.

Major elements:
- The outstate is Awakened, either wilderness or farmland, and the city's thus contracted largely inside the 494-694 ring, and become more densely populated. Lots of magical forest adventure up north.
- Mafia dominance: The Mafia are by far the dominant syndicate here, to the point where they effectively are the law, the people who you go to if you have trouble with non-Mob crime, like the Yakuza are in parts of the JIS. Oddly, they're the more Awakened and culturally traditional syndicate, while the insurgent Triads, their main opponent right now, are high-tech like the Eighty Eights in Seattle, and fairly decentralized for their own protection. There are two Vory factions, one that's a longstanding part of the city and cooperates with the Mafia, while the other, tied to the Tolo Vory in HK, basically is more aggressive but can be only because they have Evo extraterritorial backing. The Mob focus on smuggling more than anything else. This was kind of inspired by the gangster activity in the 1930s up here.
- Irish cultural elements: St. Paul was the heavily Irish city in the state, and it continues with refugees from the Tirs in 2070. The Knights of the Red Branch operate fairly openly here, and Rinelle keTesrae has a presence.
- Hmong cultural elements - After China fell apart, even more Hmong refugees came to the Twin Cities, bringing the population to a point where it began to really affect the culture of the sprawl. Hmong is a major language of the sprawl, Hmong shamanism is the primary shamanic paradigm, and the Mafia brought the Hmong gangs of old under their wing, as they did the Irish before them, so the Mafia is actually influenced by all three cultures here. It's already a big culture in St. Paul and it's one I know fairly well, so I thought I'd add it in.
- Dueling Corps: Ares and Evo are the big players in town. Many runners align themselves more with one or the other; DocWagon, CrashCart, and InfoSante are all available in the area.
- Dueling PDs: Helpful for runners is the fact that while Knight Errant serves Minneapolis, St. Paul retains the public SPPD. Largely because the Don wants it that way.

Notable Neighborhoods:
Phillips is a packed z-zone in south Minneapolis, akin to Kowloon, while parts of north Minneapolis resemble the Barrens. Minnehaha Park, a nice area in real life, has had its astral all screwed up by some of the worst urban fighting of the Ghost Dance War, being positioned close to both Native American cultural sites and a military base (Air National Guard in our time) near Fort Snelling, and is maybe akin to Surulere in Lagos; mostly empty and very haunted. Much of South Minneapolis is very nice¸though. Uptown is still super-trendy and has a lot of anti-corp types, who also are involved with the Grand Avenue small business association in St. Paul.
In St. Paul, the East Side is the Don's personal turf. The older part of the city, mostly poorer but not z-zone. Remarkably quiet, since Mafia control is so pervasive. The West Side, which is paradoxically south of town, is the Hispanic area, and has Yucatec Maya immigrant gangs with Mafia or Ghost Cartel connections battling it out with Aztlaner gangs supported by Aztechnology. Near the West Side is the Lilydale refugee camp on the Mississippi flood plain, which is home to the Fire Girl razorgirl gangs, who are numerous but not terribly coordinated in the city. The western half of St. Paul is the more upscale part, and includes the small business controlled area along Grand Avenue, the wealthy college-town area of Macalester Groveland, the mixed-income, Crash-weathered Highland Park, which is a mostly Jewish area, and the industrial northwest of the city.

Oh,and Sconnie, just read yours, and your Hmong syndicate is eeeerily similar to what I have been doing for the Twin Cities mob.

I like what I've read. This is an inspiring thread. Only thing sucks I'm from Portland,OR so I'm screwed.

My area (southeast Kansas) will be dealt with in detail in the second issue of the Dumpshoxk Data Haven e-zine.

Yeah, I was about to say the same thing. Although the major difference between our two syndacates is that in your vision, the Hmong were taken under the wing of the Mafia, and in my vision, the Hmong syndacates (Can't think of a good name for them for the life of me) sort of just grew on their own.

I'd guess that Kansas would absorb the panhandle of Oklahoma as only a sliver of it is in UCAS territory. Sharing a boarder with the NAN residents would be agitated above normal citizen levels. This would be especially true against the Sioux since they share the actual boarder.

Smuggling runs would be prominent since there is also the boarder with the CAS to consider (though citizens formally of Oklahoma would feel the same way to the CAS).



I'd love to see a copy of this if you can post/link it. I live about sixty miles from Detroit and am planning on some runs or moving the campaign there. That'd be great if at all possible for you.

Sign--

Wacky

If you're in Kansas, all you need to know about the future of the Midwest in SR4 can be found when you combine these things:

Red Dawn + Lord of the Rings + Firefly

I've been thinking of running a game with the characters on a plane that goes down in the Ozarks so let me know (PM) if there is another movie that should be added to that list.

Well, Canada gets screwed if you actually like being a part of its Dominion. I think BC or Newfoundland would sooner leave Canada than Quebec if Canada were on the road to becoming a failed state, especially if you consider what British Columbia was like before it joined Canada - even then, took friggin forever for Ottawa to keep its promises that brought BC into the fold.

That whole thing about the population not being Salish-Shide is irritating. I am sitting beside a local right now and have a child with a beautiful, loving local native from the other side of Van Isle - and if there is anything my travels have shown me is that the farther east you go in Canada, the more "traditional" it gets. I for one just don't see how in the fictional world of SR as presented in what I read in my SR4/SR4A wouldn't totally prefer to live under Salish governance than the Canada+US crap that enslaved my friends, family, neigbors ... country men. Bring on the Shamans and the new distribution of wealth, I would whoop so much ass Devil Brigade style. Welcome to the Rockies and the Wild West Coast, time to die.

Also, I would see the Salish-Shide as having some serious power house resources in water, energy, raw materials and also a huge tech sector from Vancouver/Fraser Valley and probably Victoria too.

I live in Norman Oklahoma. I figure my town would become a CAS military controlled border holdout along with OKC, since it's so close to the NAN border and there are still probably a lot of 5th column anglos and Amerinds on either side of the border.

I'm from Virginia,

it's not mentioned much in SR. Its a border state with the UCAS. Actually Northern VA was absorbed into the UCAS(and the DC sprawl) as a buffer Zone. So I imagine smuggling and politics to be huge. And Ares would be a major presence since they bought NASA and they have some research and launch type stuff here. this probably means Lonestar as well.The govornment/military in the CAS would have a huge presence here, aside from the border issue, there's the ports and shipyards. Plus the ERLA(extraterritoriality Registry and Liaison Agency) that helps the CAS govornment spy on and control megacorp property in the CAS leads me to believe that the govornment is a little more heavy handed down there. Did I mention the CAS has the largest Army in North America?

anyway, thats all I got