Gas grenades are tricky to deal with because the gas tends to stick around. Riot police have easy access to gas masks, guys in the field tend to pitch them.

The other thing is that drones only work with a mechanised infantry force. You only send them where you send the tanks and APCs. I'm not really expecting that drones would have to deal with a swamp, because my APCs cannot deal with a swamp. For the rest of the circumstances the Nissian Doberman has tracks and may be prefered to a steel lynx. It is even smaller so much easier to carry.

Onto my favourite jousting match!



To be fair, as you point out more than 70% of those 'drones' are flying hand grenades that a rigger is never going to jump into anyway, and they are just going to have orders like 'fly next to any bad guys, particularly snipers and dudes with heavy weapons and blow them up' and the squad isn't going to give a toss about them most of the time. The only real time I see them being directed is when they are given orders to flush out a bunker or a strongpoint by crawling in the gaps and exploding. (I see most of them as being the 'flying HE grenade' variant, which would be very powerful in a military context for this sort of thing).

The other key difference I see is that you keep mentioning riggers. I don't see my team as 'riggers' Getting them to jump into drones is a waste of time. That just focuses our limited human decision making and tactical resources onto 1 drone. As you very rightly point out, I have plenty of drones to manage, and I want my guys to be focused on that and functioning as squad members.

If we look at actual drones that someone, in some conceivable world someone might want to issue a direct order to, we have 3 dudes, 8 steel lynxes, an AFV with a light cannon, 1 hunterkiller swarm and a UAV with a rocket launcher. I think it's a 50/50 mix because the cost is equally allocated between the two 'cost centres'

Now, we both seem to have different understandings of what how much control is going to be required to herd those drones around, and/or how much I think should be used

I'm looking at a relatively light touch system. The steel lynxes will be assigned to support the two riflemen in sections of 4, and their pilot will have a series of standing orders about particular infantry movements in response to given orders from the soldiers. So if they say 'combat screen, 10 meter spacing, advance!' the drones know enough about being in the military to actually understand what the dude wants them to do. Also, the guys will have a specific series of orders and handsignals that taps into these 'standing orders' to queue the right movements.

In addition they'll have standing orders about firing at anything they see that is hostile unless an override is issued blahblahblah.

With a series of standing orders, a R4 pilot, and be relied on to conduct those standing orders with some degree of independance, and the squad will *never* jump in. The guy in the AFV *may* if he really has to, but again he has a R4 pilot thats not a bad shot really running the show for him 95% of the time.

Particularly the two riflemen. Jumping in for foot soldiers is clearly bot going to work for them because they would be unable to act.




Okay, my military terminology is rusty and inconsistently applied, so I'll define something for this

I guess we have 'fire teams' and an 'APC' that comprise a 'squad' We'll have three 'squads' to a platoon, and three 'platoons' to a 'company' and three companies to a battalion.

A fireteam is one rifleman and 4 steel lynxes, Nissan Dobermans or other armed drone thing.

An APC is 1 rifleman, 1 AFV, 1 Droneswarm, and 1 Rocket launcher armed UAV.

Due to the number of drones, you're probably going to need a repair and maintenance section at the company level.

If you feel that 4 steel lynxes to 1 infantryman is an unproductive ratio, and this is probably the sticking point, I don't feel that any of the other ratios is at all unreasonable, this is also the easiest place to change it. You could easily go for 1:2 or 1:3 ratio. I'm fairly confident that the optimal ratio of riflemen:steel lynxes is in the 1:2 -> 1:4 space. 1:1 seems a bit low, a wired II soldier can quite easily command two 'stupid' lynxes and still fight effectively. As they get 'smarter' you can manage more. 1:3 is also compelling ratio, because thats the number of a drones a wired II trooper can issue orders to a turn.

Yes the hunterkillers are flying hand grenades. they don;t need a particularly high amount of management.

Another possible squad looks like this


A fireteam is one rifleman and 2 steel lynxes, Nissan Dobermans or other armed drone thing, with three teams to a squad

An APC is 1 rifleman, 1 AFV, 1 Droneswarm, and 1 Rocket launcher armed UAV.

This gives us 4 dudes, 6 lynxes, 1 AFV, 1 swarm and 1 UAV.




Yeah, it would be. But I really don't think that it would be advisable to rig them. Instead I'm looking at drones with some degree of independence who the 'rifleman' tell to do things in the same way they manage private shmuck. Except that this private will never question orders or complain, and will still have some capability to act independently (unfortunately not at a tactical level though which is the biggest weakness here).

Recruitment and retention is a tricky issue, and I feel that you'd need to offer high pay, structured training, good conditions, and a variety of other incentives like 'you can actually quit your job' to make yourself more attractive than the corps.



Yeah.. I'd just use the drones to run watches for example. The hunterkillers alone add 20 eyes to the squad, the UAV can actually fly, and the steel lynxes are great at this sort of thing. Soldiers get to sleep more.

Sticking in my 2 ¥:

First of all - for a sorta sci-fi, sorta cyberpunk view of a near-future heavily roboticized force, check out the Warbots series by G Harry Stine (if you can find it - quite out of print). Premise is that the US military went almost entirely drone-heavy; and then got bit in the ass by a couple of situations that required real boots on the ground infantry; main characters of the series are those boots on the ground infantry...

And the other 1 ¥: I've been kicking around what the UCAS military might put in an infantryman of 2070. Figure you do boot camp as Mark 1 Mod 0 metahuman. After boot, before AIT or other MOS school (for the Army; dunno the path or terminology for other branches), you hit the body shop and get: implanted commlink with sim module, image link, audio link, smartlink, and 3 datajacks (one conventional in the temple, 2x induction, one per hand).

Commlink and associated senselinks are obvious - they cannot be lost. For OpSec reasons, you don't want your soldiers being able to lose their commlinks, you really don't. Image link and audio link should be obvious. Simlink lets you do full VR; always useful. Having a smartgun link you can't lose means you can set your guns to only work with authorized smartlinks.

Three datajacks is pushing it, but, consider this: We know that skinlink tech is only a couple of years old (offhand shadowtalk in Emergence, IIRC). Plus, skinlink could conceivably be tapped by anything that can touch the soldier. Datajack in temple i easy - that's where you jack into your sensor gear and anything else you carry on your bod. The ones in the hands are primarily for the smarklink, but can also be used for person-to-person comms without emitting, and also as ID that doesn't require transmitting.

This is the base package (IIRC when I specced this out as a "package" per Augmentation it came in right around 1 E, though I may have had to use alphaware for that); everyone gets it; from the guys heading out for infantry training, to the few logistics weenies that aren't contractors or drones. After ocmpleting your advanced training, you get specialized cyberware (if appropriate). As you advance in grade and responsibility, you get more stuff. Infantry probably adds sleep regulators, leaders start getting more IPs and mental-stat boosting, etc.

I would separate the awakened from everyone else in terms of equipment and I was also point out that implanted commlinks is a total pain the arse. You need constantly pull people in for surgery every couple of years to give them new hardware, and you cannot realistically take it away from people when they leave. Which you have to do as joe on the street cannot get 6/6/6/6 commlinks, which G.I. Joe is going to need.

Finally, as I don't reckon the military is going to cut people open when they resign, there is going to be a hard 12R availability limited, maybe F if you think all ex military guys are in the reserves - not an unrealistic idea.

Given that, I'd expect a datajack, eyes, ears, sleep regulator and wired II to be standard equipment, with future upgrades being all bioware due to the high essence loss from that stuff.

I'm got a bunch of stuff IRL to take care (yeah for an actual call! Yay that the patient didn't die! boo for paperwork) so I'll have to hit your other points later.

But I think you lose a lot of the allure of drones if you ditch the riggers. I don't expect them to be jumping in and out of their drones all day and night (although it might be tempting) but I do see them rigging the APC's and using their control rigs and boosted simesense doohickies to be able to issue and correct orders 4 times ever 6 seconds. So are they control rig less riggers or are they simply not hot simming?

Also the fluff seems to indicate putting in and taking out a commlink is pretty straight forward and can be performed on an outpatient basis. And I don't think it'd be that hard to rip out a few choice circuts and leave someone wiht an inoperative commlink or one that doesn't have a box of 6's when it comes to dealing with the matrix.

Well, I'm clearly planning on wired II to give me the right number of IP passes. Using VR for boots on the ground in a combat zone seems to be likely to lead to the life expectancy of a gnat, which means that you cannot jump in (except for the APC commander who may well be able to), which eliminates any benift from control rigs and boosted simsense and pretty much everything else for your guys unless you plan on them sitting in the APC.

And thanks to the communications issues and strengths in shadowrun if the guys in the APC can jump in, so can guys in CONUS, and if they cannot, then no-one can. if you see jumping in and VR as a big part of it, you'd opt for a completely different force from what I'm thinking which would involve lots of people at home in pens ready to instantly jack in en-mass to whatever unit is under attack/in combat as directed by cyberlogisticans.

That has the potential to be hugely effective as suddenly all the drones go from 8 dice to 10+ dice, and you can deploy as many drones as yo feel like, but has other problems.

A steel lynx with device rating 4 still rolls as many or more dice than a grunt at firearms tasks though without anyone helping.

I guess I don't follow. Can't you hot sim in "Captain Chair" mode using you're significantly cheaper control rig to get all the kick ass of wires 2? Plus don't get negative modifiers for not using AR when remotely controlling drones?

For pure fluff I'd demand that you're APC riggers have a control rig simply so they could integrate all that command and control into something that doesn't give them information overload. Those extra 2 dice you get from using AR are a not insignificant bonus.

Doc, the Navy Potshot was purely for my amusement. In the last couple years I've worked and lived with navy, marines and ex navy quite a bit, its always fun to remind them they aren't on a ship anymore....

Not so much Marines usually...

I'm keeping this very short, however as I don't have time for more: Why does everyone expect that the Military (or any other large organization...) will be running nothing less than rating 6 anything? I mean: we are talking a group that bought 5000lb self-recovery winches for the FMTV trucks, when 10000 lb winches are better suited to the job, simply to save 86 dollars a truck. I'm not sure how many trucks are in the army offhand, but I do know that maybe one in five actually have winches.

I've had a commo guy in Spec Ops tell me they use civilian radios that can't get approval for military use because NSA can't crack the encryption on them...

Its not best of the best its: Good enough for Government Work. Betcha drones in the army are running rating 2 (or maybe 3 if brand spanky new) autosofts.. cheap, disposable... yeah.

Because the old KY-57 had 128 bit encryption when everyone else in the world used 56 bit, and weighted 10 pounds with the battery, and everyone got to carry them anyhow. There are areas the military will compromise on and those they will not.