You're quite right that in the hostage scenario you describe, the hostages in the building with you (and you yourselves) are not the prime concern -- losing the contract to KE due to a citywide screwup with bioweapons is something they will work to mitigate. (Or, they could just blame it on You Terrorists and kill you anyways.) However, I think this is still an extremely risky plan. However, as you've pointed out, once the Star is there, you're already screwed, so it's not like things can get much worse for you.

I find it hard to believe that a well-equipped and funded Runner team will have better EW/Comm equipment than the elite HRT team of a company who regularly has to face teams just like yours. They are going to have SOTA communications gear, because the company can afford to spend that. When one HRT agent's wired III, eyewear, and other fun toys are several hundred thousand nuyen, do you really think the accountants will blink at an extra 15 or 30 thousand? I don't. As soon as the local cops find out that they have a situation like this on their hands, you BET they are calling in the extremely well-equipped HRT team. I would expect these guys to be kitted out like Red Samurai or any other corporate hit-squad, or else they wouldn't be able to field resources to meet the needs of their customers.

Most of the preparatory things you've mentioned involve a lot of pre-planning and pre-run setup:
- hacked commlinks/sensors
- explosive drones at key locations
- bait team
- explosives/etc at key locations in the city, as well as fake ones (also with working signal-handling comlinks, so that they look the same from the Matrix).

All of these require you to already be expecting to need to hold off the Star. Some degree of this is wise (I'd say the first two), but again -- you'd already have to know that this was an especially high-profile run and that you would NEED the bait team in place. These don't seem suitable for the runs-that-went-south-before-you-wanted-them-to. Rather, these are the "you're already screwed, so try to avoid getting capped/caught" scenarios.

It really seems like the best practice is really to Do Not Get Noticed. Like the TIE pilot's mantra ("don't get hit"), you really want to avoid attracting the Star's attention in the first place. They're at least as well (if not better) equipped as you are (especially for newer characters), and have a legion of off-scene resources they can throw at you.


/edit:

To keep from seeming like I'm spamming this thread (sorry!), I'll add this as an edit:

Any team that is planning enough ahead to plant ONE micro-drone with explosives in the wheel-well surely has the resources to plant multiple ones. Losing a tire is nonfatal, but what's the penalty for losing a wheel? What about losing two wheels? If you know ahead of time which cars you want to disable, it should be quite easy to set up measures to:
- cut brake cables
- remove the wheel from the axle with thermite

Neither of these are all that complex (if you're already able to navigate a drone to a wheel well of the parked car ...), and pretty much just scale linearly with the amount and type of explosives. If you need to disable two wheels, multiply the cost by two.

The intresting thing though is none of the matrix is really defined, and to me setting up two walkie talkies and connecting them is the same as setting up two high signal low response/firewall etc nodes, and logically someone in the middle can indeed sniff the traffic with their sniffer program or jam it with a jammer.

But YMMV - it does make sense that you could sniff or jam that traffic, and then by extension you could intercept/edit the traffic.

It's a puzzling thing. I might go start a new thread about it.

So, 4 million citizens, half a million... tourists, an untold number of SINless, and other non-UCAS citizen (which would be part of, but not entirely included in the half a million figure).

For ease of math, we'll say it's seven million people. Seven million, to a quarter of a million. That's one cop for every 28 people, assuming they are all working the streets, which they are not.

We'll say a typical 'Star patrol works a 12 hour day, like most modern cops do.

That gives us 125,000 LSPD personnel. (1 per 56)

Now, they only work 4, maybe five days a week. So, we'll reduce the number by 4.5, for the occasional over-achiever. That give us about 80,357 LS peronnel working at any given time.(1 per 87.1)

And that's if no one calls in sick/injured. We'll say.... 8% are sick or injured. No reason, just picked the number off the top of my head.

That leves us with a total force of 73928.57 cops on the job at anytime. One Lone Star worker for every 94.6 people.

And that doesn't even include taking personnel out of the pool for special forces, SWAT, and the like.

High profile crisis, you may as well break out the big guns.

Remember as Lone star will have IT support, rating 6 agents are actually free after the first once which they developed in house. They could have hundreds of them for less than it costs to pay a bunch of deckers. So they will.

As for the rest of it, just one way you could do it is:

The 30-40 deckers are just some of the guys responsible for lonestar's security *globally*. With the ease of hacking in SRverse they are going to have to have a security response team for when they find someone trying to break into one of Lone stars offices nationally or internationally, probably employed on some shift basis. You'd certainly call them up for a high profile terrorism case. You want to make sure KE doesn't get your contract. Imagine what resources would be called up today if a terrorist announced he had planted multiple bombs all over Seattle.

They are probably actually all Indians/Mexicans/whatever from an outsourced security consultancy that is a sub division of Tata.

Mages are probably shamanistic, recruited from a consulting firm the same way and astrally projecting from india. A magical consulting firm could have trained staff look for magically active people in remote and regional areas of afganistan, pakistan and india, then offer them long term contracts on high salaries to lure them into the consulting firm, which then pimps them out to other companies as an on call resource.

So you pay the company a modest retainer, then you can requisition astrally projecting mages from them based on an hourly rate.

Everyone would be making a killing. Labour arbitrage.

But lonestar are likely to have a huge number of IT contractors sitting around. You could totally use them.

I feel a point I made earlier bears repeating. Someone is threatening multiple bombings. This is a terrorist attack. Look at what would happen today. The place would be crawling with police in 10 seconds flat.