I never said watching TV was the only source of information. Humans go to school to learn warfare. They write books on tactics and strategy. These (and I'm sure many other resources) are all available for use as a learning aid.

My point is that there is an awful lot of handwaving in regard to coordination. There are a lot of assumptions being made, and as with every other thread of this kind, it will eventually degenerate into 'Army wins!', 'Does not!', 'Does too!' without a solid scenario adjudicated by a impartial referee.

I'm not sure why a DNI doesn't allow you to rip the knowledge of a mage right out of his brain, especially with his consent. This would make it easy to identify the dragons position.

IN other news, no, watching it on the TV won't tell you. But there are plenty of ex military strategic, operational and tactical personnel who will, for money, provide consulting services on exactly that sort of thing. There are even more of them in shadowrun verse. I'll give you a clue. They are called mercenaries.

but it does affect astral visibility. and if visibility on the astral is bad enough, spotting things on the astral stops being automatic. you can spot a person in an orange jumpsuit automatically, unless it's dark and foggy out.

You all seem to be forgetting about air defense assests. PATRIOT, if you want, can detect a softball size object a few hundred miles away. The missles travel faster than a dragon ever dreamed about. I'm not even going to get into THAAD or any of the other crazy stuff they are coming out with. Sure the dragon can use concealment but you also have shorter range air defense which can feed info to other units. Even them just sending up the astral sightings you can still hit the dragon no problem.

Shoot, I think Puff the Magic Dragon here and here would take out a GD. Not to mention the newer AC-130 shown here.

i'm not sure i see how shorter-range sensors would work better than longer-range sensors against magical concealment.

Not sensors the actual people on the ground as it were. Shorad (stinger) is mostly aim by eye so they can say "Hey, it's by (insert landmark or cordinates here) hit it." and the longer range air defense can. They could also patch the astral perciever's targetting to us and we could work with that.

Concealment works against eyes, too. not to mention invisibility spells. as for astral perception, there's some debate on what measures the dragon could take against that, and how well such measures would work.

Essayons. In a word, VBIED.

If my math is right, overcoming the magic, edge, dodge, soak, and condition monitor of a great western dragon would take a 107 damage explosion, or about 234 kg of rating 6 foam explosives by a novice bomber. Pack it into a rigged Honda Spirit and teach the lizard that it's the 6th world now, and humanity isn't going to put up with this 4th world hissy-fit.

OK, Frank, who other than the Russians and the US have nuclear subs. As for shipping in Nukes... face facts, this is NOT the Shadowrun universe. An operation of the scale needed to SERIOUSLY hurt the US, Russia, or China would be found out. You can NOT hide that many people with those kinds of weapons.



OK, I'll bite, how does a FUNCTIONAL missile intercept system cause the world to get CLOSER to nuclear war rather than further away?

While Spooky/Spectre have impressive firepower, they are made to attack ground target, not flying heavily armored magic platform.
You'd better look into anti-aerial suport...


Easy. If you have a way to effectively counter nuclear weapons, there is no longer fear of reciprocity/MAD.
The military are no longer afraid to use it just like a standard, way more powerful (read efficient) bomb.
And then you don't need much to make it happen...

(well you still need two nuclear-powered superpowers hating their guts and that didn't happen since Cold War, but hey the shadowrun world is kinda messed up and they most likely must be more country having access to mushroom toys than now. Think batshit crazy aztechnology and stuffs...)

No, it's because it is extremely hard and expensive. Same reason why, after 50 years of work, we are still "a few years" from a fusion reactor, like we were in 1965. However there has been a lot more effective progress done in creating working laser weapons than in creating working fusion reactors.

And nice shiny railguns start popping on battleships

actually, the only gun on a AC-130 that might hurt a GD is the 105 mm. The 25 mm gats would sting (I think they would translate as the GE Vanquisher Heavy Autocannon in SR), but would not be a threat.



Except you still have to deal with the fallout (radiation and political/social) from using those types of weapons. I think that a nuke would still only be last resort weapon (they are expensive you know).

Dude, the Astral Perception threshold to spot this fucker is negative six. He is literally off the charts on the visibility spectrum. Even a critical glitch wouldn't stop you from knowing exactly where he is.

The Great Dragon cannot hide from an astrally perceiving magician sitting in the window seat of a Banshee. Not "it would be difficult for him to obscure himself" - it simply cannot be done. There is no conceivable dice pool penalty or distraction which could possibly stop an astral observer from knowing exactly where he is.

-Frank

So is war in general. And so what?

If a 5,000 bomb will work just as well as a 5,000,000 bomb... which one would you use?

No need. The deorbiting Crowbars are not meteors, they have guidance fins. Either shoot the bullets with RFID tags in them and have them home in that way or use a laser/ultrasonic/screwywatsis designator of your choice and have them home in on that.

And you think something moving at orbital velocity is really maneuverable? We are talking 9 km/s here.
The fins are designed for stabilizing purpose and maybe some minor flight corrections, not aiming a moving target.
Not even considering the fact that the atmosphere reentry makes the sensors blind...

Are you sure about that?

The crowbar sized Thor weapons platform was designed as an Anti-armor weapon. Main Battle Tanks today can exceed 60 mph. They are definately able to do some mid flight correction. FWIW, if the dragon is flying around I doubt he's flying at 9km/s either.

Concealment (p. 287 SR4) is a physical (P) power. p. 286, sr4: "Physical powers cannot be used in astral space, or affect astral forms".

I somehow doubt the Thor weapon platform is designed to target moving armor, though Abrams can and do fire on the move. In likelyhood if firing at a moving armor group will require calculation as to firing where they will be with small corrections in flight not where they are with large corrects to try and follow their movements.

And a swooping twirling dragon would likely not be a predictable target to track.

Thors would not be used because if they miss they would cause more disruption than the dragon could create. Those mobile railguns on Thunderbirds are what you need. Since we don't know about any orbital energy cannons (and don't have stats for them), we have to go with the next best thing.

due to his size? i'm not familiar with astral perception threshold modifiers.

even without mana static, i still think that the dragon could use proper terrain (urban, jungle, extremely mountainous, maybe even open ocean, especially in the tropics) to break up the spotters' ability to keep track of his location. he doesn't have to get out of sight for more than a few seconds at a time--as long as he also only remains in sight for similarly short periods--in order to keep them from providing usable targeting data.

i'm also trying really hard not to pitch a hissy fit about SR's handling of extremely long-range shots. ten seconds... -3 dice... anger rising...

Why not? Thor has seakers in the crowbars. Think of them as equivalent to the laser guided concrete bombs (http://www.fas.org/news/iraq/1999/10/991007-iraq.htm) ... no they won't turn corners... but I did mention deorbiting about 1000 of them... yah raining steel crowbars is going to suck, but so is letting the dragon rampage around.

there are no official orbital laser platform stats, but we do have lasers for ships that have a maximum range of 200,000 m (or 200 km). that should be sufficient for (very?) low orbit, shouldn't it?

That's the big problem with threads like this. As we have a fairly good idea of what dragons can do, but almost none about what a military can.

You know, that's a hilarious yet true reply.

i believe that Thor shots may be significantly larger than you're imagining. certainly their destructive potential is a lot greater than what you're describing--a single shot was enough to completely obliterate a dug-in underground bunker complex, in System Failure. it seems to be a step below nukes, but a large step above conventional explosives. each one is quite a bit larger than a crowbar, and if you dropped a thousand of them in a given area, 999 of them would be overkill.


haha, that is so damn true.

except the orbital laser would have more power as you don't need to supply power for propulsion. Also, the atmosphere ends right at about 96 km. So you're shooting through 37,504 km of vacuum and then 96 km of atmosphere. I think that those laser cannons would do wonders... and eat a dragon for lunch.

i'm not sure they'd necessarily have more power. a ship-mounted laser, on a big enough ship, can draw on the ship's nuclear power plant. that's not the kind of thing that's going to end up on a satellite, simply because the satellite is going to need to be relatively maneuverable in order to be effective--it's going to have to change its orbit if it's going to have global reach. shifting that much mass that far that frequently... i wouldn't call that cost-effective. and definitely hard to hide. solar power won't provide quite as much juice, but it'll be a lot easier to move quickly, and it won't be constantly putting out the heat of a thousand suns.

i know that no price is too much if the right executive wants a big enough epeen, and i know that anything can be hidden, i just don't think it's likely that the right combination of epeen-lacking and money have yet come together in SR that a full-sized nuclear power plant will hae been lifted into space to power an orbital laser.

My guess is that you could probably mount one of them lasers on a satellite and you'd rely on high-power capacitors, and just end up with a very limited shot-per-time ratio. I think there was a lot of discussion about this in Greg Bear's "EON", but I'm not sure I'm remembering it right. So you might end up with the same "30P -10AP" or whatever that you would from a big-ass ship laser, but you'd have a shot limitation of "one every 48 hours."

At least that's how I understand the discussion was going during the latter days of SDI's kill sats.

No, you take a 4 GW SPS that's a KM wide and mount the laser on that. Or a maser. Either way, it's kind of dead. IIRC, you could produce a 10 meter wide spot that would apply something on the order of 2.5 Kj per cm^2. That will raise the temp of a cm thick steel plate by about 750C per second. You essentially have an oxy-acetylene cutting torch applied to its entire body.

Well relax then, we are talking about Coil Guns, Lasers, and Masers here. These weapons cover 10 kilometers in less than half a second, and less than a hundredth of a second respectively. It takes less time for a laser to cross a 10 kilometer gulf than it takes a bullet to cross the room, so if anything you should be offended that the Dragon still gets a defense pool despite the fact that the attackers are little dots on the horizon and the incoming attacks are traveling literally faster than the eye can see.

Even the comparatively slow round from the coil gun is traveling faster than the electric impulses in the retina could deliver that information to the brain, let alone the amount of time that it would take to make a decision or take an action.

The military wins here, and this despite the fact that the game rules repeatedly fall against the military in the realism vs. playability question.

-Frank

i'm talking specifically about the gauss cannon, actually. ten seconds is actually a bit slow for a weapon powerd by sci-fitonium; i'll go with five seconds, maybe even three. with that long a flight time, you don't need to know that the projectile is coming. i find it highly unlikely that a dragon who's been recently attacked by masers is going to remain stationary, or even fly in a straight line, for three seconds.

i agree that the military wins if a) they get the jump on the dragon, or b) the dragon stays and fights for more than a few minutes, with the second conditional being heavily impacted by the type of terrain the fight takes place on.

Thors shots scale from 3 foot long, crowbard diameter javelins for anti-armor to the orbiting telephone poles you're thinking of. I don't envision shooting a dragon with a telephone pole.

Why don't you believe in the orbital laser? Between solar-collector mircrowave transmission satellites, existing fission reactors for satellites, and Shadowrun having fusion reactors I can't believe that it's somehow cost-prohibitive.

This makes me think of The Hammer of Dawn, from Gears of War.

Do you have a specific page reference for that?

the orbital laser would actually have quite a bit of power. the standard laser from arsenal has 1,000 power built-in and expends 25 per shot (takes 6 combat turns to recharge 1 power from a vehicle iirc). if the orbital laser hasn't taken out the dragon by the time it runs out, it's not likely going to do it ever

also, i would argue that coming from 200 km away, at the speed of light, the dragon shouldn't get any sort of active defense on the first shot. even on subsequent shots, it's gonna be hard to do much of anything defensively imo... it can't really see where the blast is coming from, when it's going to come, or anything like that.

I believe technically that would be a mid-combat surprise test from an unseen attacker.
Or at least that's how I'd roll with it. Cuz it's awful hard to dodge an attack if you don't know it's coming or where it's coming from, even if you're already in a fight.

Hey, the LAVs that the coil guns are mounted on take 3 seconds to cover 8 kilometers, I'm sure the electrically accelerated sabots are traveling a bit faster than that.

-Frank

what? no they don't. the fastest LAV in the book, the Banshee, has a 'top' speed of 1 klick every three seconds. am i missing something that will allow an LAV to travel twenty-four times faster than that? for that matter, Arsenal's fast fighter-bomber only tops out at 1200 mpt.

Movement power.

ahhh, right. i knew i was missing something.

still, the fact that magic is involved doesn't really convince me that railguns are more than four times as badass in SR as in RL, especially since gauss cannon didn't exist as a marketable technology until 2065 at the earliest.

I take the budget that they would have used on the dragon killing squad, invest it in a bank, and bribe the dragon to stop attacking the city with a min/maxed social adept and nine accountants for the group pool bonus.

Kanada Ten wins, flawless victoly.

how were you to know Frank expected you to read his mind and infer that he meant "when you add Movement"?

What if you just hired another great dragon?

Frank ALWAYS uses movement power in any sort of encounter like this.

well, it makes sense. a group of smart players who got together and tried something like this would do the same thing (obviously, since the group of players brainstorming here suggested it), so it's reasonable to me that military planners would do it.