Sure... and any spell so plopped down on spotters is another spirit occupied. And leaves more forces and spirits of the army to go after the dragon.

Not that anyone will take long to move 24 meters.

only 12 meters, unless they head the wrong way out of the area of effect. which i guess isn't out of the question, given the limited visibility.

as for occupying a spirit, sustaining doesn't take an action. sustaining a spell will distract a spirit, yes--knocking a whole 2 dice off of any action they choose to take with their 2 IPs.

It's there, but I believe it is only an option for Detection Spells.

sigh. no more kilometer-wide explosions of burning, glowing acid.

It's easy when you are a plot device that doesn't have to follow the rules and is opposed by idiots and the plot says "Dragon wins!". Using it as an example for anything else is silly.

Any dual or astral critter that the dragon can shut down with a Mana Static is one which it could kill outright with a Mana Bolt. You just need to have enough spotters so that they have at least one survive the entire combat round needed to send targeting information to the LAVs. And since bound spirits are in constant telepathic communication witht their conjurers, and the conjurers are in constant radiopathic communication with the gunships, the spotters themselves can be pure astral, totally expendable, and very very fast.

Mana Static is not a viable or meaningful defense for the Great Dragon. Hurting Magic across the board does not make his position any better. His only really interesting advantage is that his magic is much much more powerful than anyone else's. Technically the attackers could get some real mileage by dumping Mana Statics on the Great Dragon with bound Spirits of Man. I glossed over that point because the specific spirits the metahuman air force has will be dependent upon which group it happens to be.

Nahuallis for example, do not get Spirits of Man. So they would have to drop Mana Statics personally, which is a bad move because the magician does more good for his side acting as a telepathic relay in Tenochtitlán than they would running around at extreme magic range trading spell blows with a Great Dragon.

-Frank

IIRC the Gauss Cannon has a range of 10km, so now all you need are spotters to direct your coil gun fire.

if the dragon has nothing better to do, manabolting the spotters would be a good option. but i figure he's got all those spirits; rather than risking themselves in direct combat with the spotters, a good option is to just hinder the spotters with astral static.


i'm not sure constant telepathic communication translates into precise knowledge of the spirit's exact location, much less precise knowledge of the exact location of something the spirit is looking at. i'm also not sure that such knowledge, if it can be acquired, can be translated into something a machine can understand. what i am sure about is that any discussion of the interaction between spirit-conjurer communication and technology is going to be long, arduous, 99% conjecture, and ultimately inconclusive. so i think that if someone wants to have that discussion, they should start another thread. for the purposes of this thread, if possible, i think it might be best if we agree that it's a grey area.


the nature of SR4's fixed TN system means that it actually does help his position. as it stands, a GD has 22 and 20 base dice pools for spellcasting and conjuring, respectively--more than enough to succeed at pretty much anything he really needs to succeed at, even in the face of truly formidable negative modifiers. enemy magicians, on the other hand, are going to have much smaller dice pools. with a 6-hit mana static spell, a GD can completely neutralize any non-initiated mage, while suffering no appreciable loss in ability himself--that is to say, the GD still has enough dice to overcome significant negative modifiers, just not quite as significant as before. granted that facing down a large military force designed specifically to kill you is going to end up imposing some pretty impressive modifiers, the possibility of neutralizing any non-initiated mage in that force might be well worth it.

To make frank's plan address some of the other points

You are going to throw all those gauss cannons in movement powered SR4 verse spectre AC-130 gunship equivalents too, as they provide a fast ,fast (will be hypersonic with movement powers) and powerful (You could reasonably fit half a dozen gauss guns to each gun ship) force that can be rapidly deployed and even assist in conventional engagements as an anti armour flying thing. To keep costs down you are going to use a transport plane as the baseline for this sort of thing.

Most importantly it is faster than a spirit, and relatively cheap too.

it is unfortunate the Arsenal doesn't address the standoff capability of a hypothetical airforce, because if they did, you'd also use your entire air wing with stand off missles co-ordinated by an AWACS and fire them. Ranges are ~20 kms on some of the AA missles which would be ideally suited to this task. You could put thousands of missles into the air.

Hmmm, I wonder if you could get one of these to hit slow airborne target.... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AS-6_Kingfish

About Thor shooting a dragon:
That wouldn't work. Targeting and firing a kinetic weapons takes time. At least a few minutes...
And while it's not a issue when shooting down a building, it's simply a no-go for destroying a moving angry rampaging Great Dragon.
No to mention that in the topic Task Force hypothesis, you would most likely be trying to defend your city/country.
Thor-shooting it to smithereens would be kinda counter-productive I think.

Another problem that has not yet been noted is that killing the GD would most likely take time (yes again the time, too bad the magic can't alter it). No insta-kill solution available (well the Thor shot could but it's a no-go).
While your army is trying to weaken the Dragon and his defending spirits, something like half of those spirits would be send by the lizard to kill your key elements (spotters, heavy weapons, high initiate mages, whatever...).
And then, the task force is getting decimated, losing effectiveness very quickly, while the Dragon is most likely hardly wounded and replacing and/or summoning more spirits on the fly...

In my opinion, the only viable way to kill a Great Dragon would be to find a way to inflict him massive (and I mean MASSIVE) damages in a very short lapse of time. Something a emergency task force will have great difficulties doing.

...

Or else, elect him for UCAS presidency and tell him the horrors are coming, that should do the trick.

Although it's what the rules say, the fluff is saying that Magic is a natural thing for a Dragon, like walking and breathing.
There is good chance they have no problem sustaining many spells without much (if any) penalty, just like you needn't concentrate to breath or can talk while walking around...

@Krakjen

Post one outlines that are are discussing rules legal methods, which is why a discussion of shooting it with cruise missiles is out of scope to say the least. Sustaining spells cost -2. Maybe it is easy for the dragon to do so because it has a really high magic score and the penalties are not a problem.

Yeah sorry, I only added this because I always felt the dragon was described like having a shitload of defensive spells actives at any time.

Well it can kinda be replaced by his shitload of high-force spirits who can sustain spells for him anyway...

the dragon can only cast spells at targets it can see, and can only send spirits after targets that it knows the location of.

an observer using the cybereye tracking method mentioned earlier could be sitting in any one of hundreds of buildings, looking out through the windows or something like that. and as has been said, mana static doesn't do that much to stop astral perception. get yourself someone with assensing , initiate grade 2, and adept centering, throw in a good mentor for astral perception, and you are still very very likely to spot the dragon on the astral (particularly since, as i said, the dragon is not hiding, it is right in plain sight, and no test is required to perceive it) it really is not nearly as impossible as has been implied.

See the problem here is that the game gives us stats for the magical equivalent of a B52 wing, with out giving us stats for the Technological equivalent, because 168mile Mach 3.5 cruse missiles are beyond the games "scope".

In Shadowrun any country of any size, UCAS for example, should have Mixed Fighter bomber wings that sit on constant alert SAC style, waiting for a GD to decide one of there Citys would be tasty. When Ghostwalker shows, they scramble and show him the smackdown, with large, long ranged, hypersonic, cruse missiles. Period. Anything else is negligence. The guidance issue is your only problem, your Forward Air Controllers are going to have to be very brave, very foolhardy men. Note that this would also stop Godzilla.

the thing is, you can only provide targeting data for as long as you can actually see the target. twenty guys peeking out of windows in downtown Seattle? sure, they'll all catch glimpses of the dragon now and then, but they won't be able to sit there and keep their eyes on him long enough for anybody to do anything. and as far as hiding goes, same deal--flying behind a building is all he really needs to do. whether he's actively trying to hide or not, if there's a physical obstruction between him and an astral perceiver, the perceiver will not be able to provide targeting data on the dragon.

In which edition is this battle taking place?

i've been referencing SR4 rules.

Honestly, all fluff about Ghostwalker aside? If the GD isn't concealed, any appreciable air support force is going to turn him into so much goo.

I'm not gonna get into any kind of number crunch, but hypersonic shaped-charge bunker busting cruise missiles backed up by autorailguns, heavy lasers and drone swarms will turn damn near anything to total paste. I know Ghostwalker was perfectly capable of grabbing missiles out of the air and wrecking buildings with a single spell, but nothing in the rules supports any of that behavior. Behavior in kind on a smaller scale, maybe. But not with fighter wings attacking.

My opinion. Take it or leave it, I don't care too much.

The problem, in fact, is Shadowrun system is not make to play large-scale conflicts.
And a fight between a Great Dragon with spells/spirits support and and a military specialized force with heavy support qualify as a large scale conflict...

The thing is that it's not a good way to hinder Astral Spotters. That's just not how Mana Static works. Sure, you can dump it on an area and disrupt every spirit in it by dropping their Force to zero. But so what? Even at Force 8 the 8S Drain it's handing out is non-trivial, and it's only an area a handful of meters across. The Spirit Spotters are coming in at the limits of line of sight in 3 dimensions. They are kilometers away from each other and no spell area is catching more than one at a time. Mana Static is no better than Mana Bolt, it just has higher drain.

And putting Mana Static on himself is doing the Metahuman's job for them, because then his Huge Concealment turns off and mundane observation can just find him and it is all over. Without the Force 12 Magic going, he is literally just a slow flying security vehicle and they shoot him down without issue.

You keep bringing up Mana Static as a valid tactic. It is not. The SR4 Rules for Background Count are universally bad for major magicians. You only use Mana Static when you have mundane superiority or your magical opponents are tightly grouped (and have counterspelling superiority). In the case of fighting open-air skirmishers where you have magical superiority and they have mundane superiority Mana Static is universally a bad idea. It's bad to cast it near, it's bad to cast it far. Anywhere you put it, it is entirely, unmitigatedly bad. It's an arrow in the quiver of the Metahumans, not the Dragon. And if the Dragon is going up against Ares or the PCC the metahumans will be spamming it like mad in order to pop the Great Dragon's spirits and defensive spells.



This betrays your basic lack of understanding of how Mana Static works. You Can't neutralize the enemy spellcasters. It doesn't cover the entire battlefield, just a relatively small area. An area that is coincidentally smaller than that covered by a Manablast that he could safely cast. If the Great Dragon is physically in the area, his actual magic rating drops. The actual Force of his spells drops. The actual Force of any new spells he attempts to cast drops. And the Force of the enemy spirits outside the area changes not at all. They are still Force 8 and providing Force 8 help. They won't be able to go into the Static, but they don't care because they can do their thing from hundreds of meters away.

Background Count isn't just a dicepool penalty. It's a force penalty. It really bones any magician inside it. But it also doesn't cover the city, just a city block. And while you can hide in it from spells and spirit powers; you can't hide in it from people using mundane weaponry that benefits from spells and spirit powers. And while you're hiding in it, you personally won't be able to cast anything that interested parties outside the Background Count couldn't counter or dispel. Background Count doesn't make it harder for people outside the background count to use Counterspelling - very much the opposite.

Yes, a Great Dragon can cast a Force 18 Urban Renewal that will destroy an entire building with a single spell. And no, this does not mean that Mana Static will helpt them in any way, nor does it protect him from retributive Guass Cannons.

-Frank

Can multiple spirits use their movement power to slow a dragon down?

Sort of. It doesn't stack. So you can drop a Force 8 Movement (Reduction) on him, and he'll have a Force 12 Movement (Increase), so he'll be travelling at decent but not military vehicle speeds. You can't just throw dozens of Movement (Reduction) hits on him until he is travelling at a flying snail's pace.

Yeah, it'll hurt him bad, and you'll do it. And he can hide from it by putting up a Mana Static. But he'd also be hiding from his own Movement by doing that, so it wouldn't be a net benefit.

-Frank

You know guys. It is canon that orbital weapons exist. I for one would think that if anyone had space based laser weapons, it would be Ares. I mean, it is confirmed that they have "Thor Shots" in orbit (can't be used for this example because of WMD limitation), why not have nice 50 MW laser cannons in space (this is tech that existed in the 90's... hydrogen-floride lasers FTW ). Dragon comes flying in... ZAP ZAP ZAPZAPZAPZAPZAPZAPZAPZAP... one dragon BBQ coming up!

But we do not have stats for such lasers. So, it'd come down to the old - and useless for discussion - "I think lasers would work" "No they won't. Dragon's special spells would work though" "No they would not" exchanges.

Isn't the point of this thread to determine a task force to defeat or at least drive off a rampaging Great Dragon from destroying a city or a headquarter anyway?
So no superweapons who will leave uber-collateral damage...

But we don't have the stats for a battle tank's gun either... unless you have a 4th edition book that says a tank gun does ?P damage. If that is so then point it out to me. If not then this whole topic is a non-starter because an anti-dragon taskforce would be ALL heavy weapons.



Any weapons used to take down a dragon WILL cause collateral damage if they miss. A laser cannon has the advantage of being very hard to dodge.

Now if you are just saying what's in the available books then your best bet would be Ares Heavy MP Lasers. With a strength 1 below a Panther XXL, better AP (when used on a dragon), same range, and faster firing. The AP of the laser as compared to a missile makes it that much nicer than a missile launcher.

Arsenal has heavy vehicle weapons.

I stand corrected. I apologize.

OK looking at Arsenal... the best weapon is the S-K Taurus Light Gauss Cannon. It halves the armor, then applies an addition AP, and then hits you with something that's 1.4 times stronger than a Panther XXL.

Yes. Frank mentioned them before. And at 200K a pop they seem to be something every MBT, and probably most IFVs or light tanks can and do mount.

i was talking about dual spotters, because i don't think astral spotters would work. if astral spotters do work, then i agree--mana static is a terrible tactic to use against them. as a quick way to hinder dual spotters--not necessarily shut them down, not completely neutralize them for the entire rest of the battle, but slap them with enough modifiers that they're unable to significantly contribute for the next round or two--it works okay in conjunction with Concealment.


i'm aware of the limited range of mana static. i was responding to your statement that "Hurting Magic across the board does not make his position any better". if he can hit a chunk of his magical opposition with a mana static spell, it's defintely worth doing even if it means ending up in the effect himself. though at the rate he can move, even without spirit assistance, he probably doesn't actually need to stay in it longer than it takes to duck out of sight behind an obstruction.


i don't see how that's true. my assumption is that the dragon is going to have Concealment and Invisibility up at a high enough rating that they still work pretty well even if their force is reduced by ~5-6. that means that if the dragon is inside the area of a mana static spell, he is hard to see on both the physical and the astral, meaning that it will be difficult to lase him (or whatever spotting technique is being used) long enough to matter.

though the SR4 rules really favor the task force, here. i mean, a whopping -3 dice pool for a shot that takes 5-10 seconds to travel from barrel to target? really.

But then, SR4 also lets you dodge lasers.

Technically, with the firepower of a tank platoon, a Dragon hiding inside a mana static area is as good as spotted anyway.

Probably atmospheric attenuation is the reason "why not" -- the same reason we don' t have such things currently. (If you said "treaty" you missed the whole ballistic missile shield pork project that was explicitly against treaty.)

Thor would work quite nicely... there are guidance fins on the crowbars... yes the de-orbit will take a bit of time, but you let the dragon do whatever the dragon wants and don't go after it until the thors are nearby... Or hell... put RFID tags on bullets so they can home in on those.

at any range where you have a clear enough view of the shooter for dodging to matter, i don't think that lasers would be particularly harder to dodge than bullets.


sitting stationary inside the area of a single mana static effect, sure. but that's not what i'm describing.

Thor is not a WMD unless you decide to use it as such... one of the planned uses for it was in an anti-armor role.

a thor shot, uh, certainly would be effective against armor. much in the way a wrecking ball is an effective way to open doors.

And then the city/facility you wanted to protect from said dragon will be a nice smoking crater :>

Alternative dragon tactic: feint at the capital/target, get defenders to launch orbital bombardment, then invest all resources in the getaway. Result: target destroyed with minimal risk to dragon. Alternate result: city destroyed with dragon in it - both sides lose. "The only way to win is not to play."

Some versions of the Thor concept *are* scaled for targets such as individual tanks. SR emphasizes the larger ones.

It looks like the adage "if you can see it, you can kill it" is coming into play. Gaussguns as listed have the DV and AP to wound a GD. However, they'd need to be mounted on aircraft, or on high ground, to get good field of fire against a fast target that's using Invisibility and Concealment. Gaussguns on tanks may have problems getting line of fire.

Could any spirit within canon rules serve as a decoy, appearing like the GD on the astral?

How long does the GD have to spend at what range from its target, to accomplish its mission? Can it circle the target at its maximum effective range? Could it hit its target and disengage, in less time than it takes to scramble and deploy a conventional team of combat aircraft with weapons that will hurt a GD? Can its spirits do all the damage necessary, if they're not stopped?

Nope! The reason we don't have a functional SDI sat network is that we don't have the targeting computer to hit a ICBM. Once the targeting problem is fixed we got the guns to put up a AMS. I think that this problem would be fixed (and then some in SR)



The US withdrew from the ABM treaty. That is a good thing as we are getting the tech to actually defend ourselves from a nuke missile. Question: who does an ABM treaty protect anyways? I don't care that China is pissed off about the US trying to protect itself from psychos in the Middle East. They will one day get nuclear weapons (because the US is playing "Patty Cake" with them) and they will use them.




Aircraft... most certainly ANY effective defense against a dragon would be have to come from aircraft (LAV or full out fighter/bombers) They are the only units that can keep up with a dragon.

Not with 3 foot titanium crowbars... We're not talking telephone poles from orbit.. that's overkill for a dragon. We're talking about 3 foot long about 1 inch diameter javalins... Even if you deorbit 1000 of them... you're not going to do half as much damage as the dragon rampaging will.

Everyone. Nuclear weapons can be delivered McVeigh style no matter what kind of crazy airplanes, missile shields, or geodesic domes you think you have. As long as there are nuclear submarines, shipping containers, and fucking czar bombs, you can't really defend your cities from a hostile major power. A ballistic missile shield is a hoax, but a convincing enough one that it might convince a sufficiently stupid Chief Executive on one side or another to start a nuclear war. And that would be an extinction event. A ballistic missile shield is a danger to the planet. Even if it works. Especially if it works.

---

In any case, mfb: what possible situation can you envision in which a Great Dragon could benefit from a Mana Static and wouldn't be better off dumping an attack spell on the same area? Remember that you explicitly don't even have to make an Assensing test to spot the Great Dragon because it is an "obvious astral form." You wouldn't be able to get deep Assensing information, but that really honestly doesn't matter when you're talking about "Great Dragon" vs. "Not."

If you insist on using dual observers you'd just put astrally perceiving magicians into the LAVs and have them looking out the window. They could have trode nets on and triangulate an exact location for the guns to target in on.

-Frank

Ho indeed, I forgot about the scaled-down crowbar.
But then again, a smaller projectile need to be even more precise, it still takes a few minutes from deorbiting to impact and your target is a Great Dragon which, as big as it seems to a human scale, is still a damn small flying target from orbital position, with invisibilitu and concealment, and would have to stay completely still to be efficiently hit.
Now, how are we gonna immobilize a Great Dragon ?

well, the dragon himself would be casting combat spells, yeah. i'm mainly envisioning his spirit retinue handling the mana static castings. one of his spirits spots a spotter and pops out a quick mana static spell centered ont he spotter's location. mana static has several advantages over combat spells: first and foremost, as far as i know, it can't be resisted, only avoided. second, it's an ongoing effect, so LOS is less of a concern; if a spotter is hiding out of LOS below a window, you can cast mana static into his room and it will affect him any time he pops up to try and peek at you. physical AOE combat spells can actually hit him even if you can't see him, but they have higher drain and can be resisted. combat spells and the like have their place as well, but using mana static as an astral flashbang can be handy.

as for making assensing tests, that's one of the points i keep making--no, you don't need to make an assensing test if the dragon is visible to you in the astral. but if the dragon doesn't remain visible to you for more than a second at a time--due to mana static and the way the dragon keeps flying out of sight behind buildings and coming back from a different angle--you're going to have a hard time providing solid targeting data.

it's getting to the point where it's hard to continue making reasonable conjecture without a more solid scenario. for instance, i'm really envisioning an urban battleground, mainly because that's where GW did his thang.

I'm finding it hard to envision any of this being choreographed in the face of a surprise attack by an opponent that very few, if any, of the personnel on the army's side has ever fought against.

Under what circumstances is this supposed to be a surprise attack? I don't think the OP had anything about surprise attacks. It specifically stated that this would be an open, pitched battle.

And to be fair? I don't think GDs have ever fought against an interdiction wing of LAVs before, either, or had to contend with cruise missiles. I can accept that in 10,000 years of experience, a Dragon's going to have seen a lot of stuff. But I don't think Earthdawn had anything that quite mimicked a coordinated air & ground attack that used modern military hardware.

Mana Static can't be hidden in. It's a completely invalid tactic. If you're in the Mana Static they can still see you because it doesn't block line of sight.

-Frank

Under what other circumstances does a Dragon ever attack a City? Do you figure he would send a message ahead saying 'Here I come!'? Even given an already-existing task force built solely for this purpose, I maintain that there is still surprise to think of.



While this is true, mankind loves to brag, and there are plenty of venues for information and data on this type of thing. The databases and videos of a Great Dragon in full attack mode are few and far between.

Under what circumstances would a media-hungry populace not notice the giant famous flying lizard that is a media icon heading towards a city and spread the word accordingly? All great dragons are media icons to some degree. The matrix is faster than dragon flight. Whil I agree that a GD wouldn't announce his attack plans, it's just plain not in the scope of the OP to deal with that. Maybe government hackers found out his plans. Maybe another GD ratted him out. Maybe some intrepid shadowrunners spread the word. Who knows? This is a thought experiement in what can kill a GD, not in what circumstances would occur before such a battle occurred.

Or to put it another way... How do you know they haven't surprised the dragon?



This argument holds no water whatsoever. There's a big freaking difference between "I have seen a cruise missile on the TV wasting a tank" and knowing how to fight against them. That's like saying I have an advantage in a street fight over the other guy because I watch hong kong martial arts movies. Or I know how to effectively deal with a gunfight because I know how many fps a .223 round goes and what it's MOA is with an M-16 at 100 yards.