I second fifty guys with AKs. Seriously, the rules on buying hits pretty much rule out using it for defense tests as I can think of few more stressful situations than being shot at, there are most certainly negative effects for failure and the level of success is both highly variable and important. I wouldn't allow it at my table but YMMV.

Lets say we have a body exceptional and genetic op'ed human with body 8 in the suit rolling 29 to soak a minimum of 7. Any more than the base of 1 net hit or burst fire and you can't buy hits anyway, and with that many guys your suit of armor is more than feasibly going down in less than a pass. I doubt he has more 10 stun boxes so any unsaved boxes addup quickly.

Really any kind of narrow burst will do the trick if you have 30 people shooting or even near that many, and hits will happen because our super soldiers dodge pool will disappear. Assuming that they use smartguns, weapons skills with specialization and recoil compensation and the odds will be better still. Aiming the shots is a possibility too.


I'm not denying a super soldier could be effective, but he isn't impevious to small arms fire by any means.

And that figure right there is exactly why your typical grunt will not be using this stuff. You could train and equip at least ten guys with pretty solid gear for just the price of Mr. Uber-Soldier's toys.

Most likely your ordinary soldier will have something like a tailored Armor Jacket and FFBA with a Helmet with some decent sensory enhancements and a built-in commlink, a good rifle like an Alpha or XM30 and an assortment of hand grenades. Specialists would carry other guns like LMGs or semi-auto Sniper Rifles, combat engineers would carry sensor and Electronic Warfare packages. Missing cyberware could be compensated for with autoinjectors and combat drugs.

The kinds of people that might get equipment like this are special forces units like the Seals or SAS: departments with their own seperate budgets that don't have to worry about either standardizing equipment with the rest of the military or equipping hundreds of thousands of men.

I could see a large significant number getting wired reflexes and muscle replacement/muscle toner+augmentation and reaction enhancers too. Depending on what value you attach to a soldiers life and what training him costs spending 20-100.000 on enhancing them might easily be worth the cost. You could even give them move-by-wire. At least for soldiers that were in for the long term. 20 million though would not be affordable as standard.

ETA: Though cyberware or not I think that you could add a rating 6 medkit to the standard equipment.

For special purpose troops like the Airbore they would most likely spend more. I doubt that basic infantry would have more than 30K in cyberware, though. Maybe Wired 1, Muscle Replacement 1-2, Skillwires would be helpful and move-by-wire would cover most of this.

What it really boils down to is cost effectiveness, and three unaugmented (or nearly so) guys can do more work than one than one who is cybered to the gills. That is what large scale stuff is built around and any military should think just like the Corps (Mega, not Marine) in this case. Basic infantry gets a set of relatively inexpensive gear that is flexible and reasonably powerful, and the individual infantryman depends on armored and air support to deal with the problems he can't handle. Units that get more dangerous, demanding and arguably important assignments (like hunting terrorists ) would get much more expensive gear.

And yes, omitting the medkit was pretty stupid of me. Medkits for everybody.

I think this descussion is often overlooking a simple tenet of real-world military spending: the lives of individual soldiers just aren't worth that much money. The militaries of 2070 would be more likely to spend all that money on R&D for more effective combat drones, or on more missiles / bigger guns. There's no shortage of human meat in overpopulated 2070, so I think most wars would be fought by lots of guys with lots of guns but very little armor, backed up by lots of drones with even more guns.

A million-nuyen soldier is too many eggs in one basket, especially when a tacnuke or a nice napalm carpet-bombing is likely to do as much damage in less time.

EDIT: the exception would be Special Operations Forces, which the military would equip extensively and expensively; remember though that SpecOps are NOT super-soldiers; they travel fast and light and strike like a scalpel. Lots of cyberware, lots of different ammo types, plenty of grenades and guns (SMG's, Assault Rifles, Sniper Rifles and a sidearm, grenade launchers under-barrel style)... but MillSpec armor that makes them look like Space Marines or RoboCop? No. Giant guns that fire ammunition that requires a truck to transport? No.

I don't think we're really disagreeing here, except possibly in the margins. I think that most soldier would be cybered though not to heavily.

It really depends on how much training a soldier costs. if it cost say 300.000 just to train a guy then 3 people with augmentation for 100.000 would certainly trumps 4 with no augmentation (and likely 3 and a half with slightly lighter augmentation). If training a guy cost only 50.000 then it might make sense to have most soldiers just rely on combat drugs when needed. The more expensive training is, the more cyber you would use.

Even Space Marine armor that doesn't negatively affect their speed or sneakyness because of the high degree of articulation? Weapons that used to be vehicle mounted can be carted around and fired pretty easily by someone in powered armor. SpecOps would have two coat hangers in their closets: one has a chameleon suit, one has powered armor.

Come to think of it, I wonder if my GM would let me put rheumium polymer paint on some Milspec armor?
After all, the military has plenty of toys that aren't public knowledge.

I still think that the most viable method to stop such a walking tank is magic. Magic users aren't really that rare. 1% of the population is magically active. That's quite a lot. In fact medical doctors are more uncommon. And we have enough evidence in SR sourcebooks and fluff, that not every magic user is recruited by a corporation. I remember reading, that the UCAS military has magical support available at company level, but I'm not sure about it. The militarys of other nations will have much more magic at their hands. Human tanks are not common. Military mages are not common. Countering heavily armored cybersoldiers with mages does not seem like a bad a idea.

But as already has been pointed out: You don't even need a mage. A determined force of 20 guys with rifles is more than enough.

Yes, enough guys being able to attack him at the same time can take him down (I actually forgot to account for multiple attackers last time I worked the numbers). But the solider would have to be a fool to allow himself to be surrounded by 50 guys. And the solider is operating as part of a team, at least in pairs and most likely in 8 or 10 man units. With drones out in support, the chameleon coating on their armor, and 14 dice on their infiltration test it should be very hard to set up a 50 man ambush.


Actually body 9 for 30 dice assuming normal ammo and an AK. And the Trauma Dampers and Platelet Factory take off another 2.


Yeah, its possible. But the solider really has to walk into an ambush to end up facing 30+ guys at a time and on his own.


Yeah, I messed up the numbers when doing my calculations (never had to deal with so many opponents at once before)


Well if you can do some stuff with cloning then the cost per solider drops into the under 5 million a piece range. But even at 20 million a copy they are still worth it, especially in an urban environment.

Combat drugs aren't really that great an idea. Jazz is ok, Kamikaze is meh, and K-10 will kill your soldiers pretty much any time its used. K-10 gives your soldiers a chance but it really isn't worth it. Maybe Betameth for the increased reaction. Oxygenated Fluorocarbons are great but they cost 2K per week. Snuff is ok. Cram is alright as well.

So if your willing to addict your soldiers to Jazz, Cram, Betameth, and Snuff you get: +2 IP, +5 Reaction, +1 Intuition, and High Pain Resistance 1. If you really wanted to you could add in K and pick up the third IP and a few other nice things but when you crash it will be 12s unresisted, or enough to drop anyone with combat damage.

And none of that matters when Mr. Super Solider fires a Seven-7 grenade at your group.


Yes, well according to Corporate Shadowfiles the corps have at most 4,000 soldiers each. It's not hundreds of thousands of men. And if you assume cloning you can get it down to about 5 million a solider for all equipment and assuming a bought lifestyle.



Massed troops in a 21st century war are the stupidest idea of all time. Bio weapons, Chemical Weapons, Nano weapons. All of them make anyone out of full on chem gear worthless.


It costs 1.25 million to train and equip a US Marine.


...
Mr. Supersolider travels faster, can operate in the field longer, and is generally a lot better than any Special Forces solider. Read the entry on Mil Spec armor, it is the standard for soldiers. As for weapons, the HK XM30 (Mr. Super Soldiers weapon of choice) can be switched to any one of those types with about 5 minutes work. But generally different people on the team fill different roles. As for different ammo types, half is ExEx and the other half is APDS. The gun holds a hundred rounds of each before reloading.


And yes, Mr. Super Solider can wear assault armor without any encumbrance.



Your better off with Skillwires and a data jack for most of the stuff. You load a copy of all the Activesofts into the datajack and then the solider justs picks which ones to use at any given time.

Assuming we are in fact using absolutely uncybered only somewhat skilled people. You say your super soldier costs perhaps 5 Million. Rather than compare him to 30 mooks we could compare him to 10 500.000 nuyen cyber samurais, or 20 250.000 people. You guy would certainly still win a one on one, with my guys, but could he take out 2? or 3? or 5? I doubt that.


That's dollars, not nuyen, what is the exchange rate between 2008 dollars and 2070 nuyen?



Yes, but what is his edge against a 500.000 nuyen supersoldier?



Sure skillwires are great, but real skills would still be preferable for core skills like the core firearm skill and dodge I would say. Besides Activesofts are expensive so that is a cost too, even if it's not technically training.

I don't know. It depends on the cyber sam. And 1 on 1 isn't a good metric for measuring soldiers, small units are much better (there is a limit to hwo many people one can reasonable expect to engage any given target without some very strange circumstances).

Not sure. 5 to 1 I think.


See above.


Yeah, but 4 is veteran level. It will take a fair bit of training to get higher than that. As for the expense? It's software. The military buys 1 copy, breaks the copy protection, and gives it to all their soldiers.

It gives it to all their soldiers, only to be sued by the developing company, which happens to be a subsidiary of Mitsuhama. Governments can't afford to mess around with corporations in 2070. It is much more likely for them to buy the equivalent to todays corporate licenses.

Besides natural skills have some advantages compared to skillsofts. For example it is not possible to mess around with them through hacking, emp and other electronic measures.

Fine, the government makes 1 copy and gives it to all their soldiers.

even if we go for small unit against small unit that doesn't change the fact that I can afford 10-20 times as many small units as you can. so while your unit engages one of mine, I can send 2 more units to reinforce, 2 more units to lap around your flanks. 1 unit to cut of you retreat (which I think you will need under those circumstances) 2 units in reserve and 2 units to to something completely different that you can't defend against because you don't have a fraction of my manpower. Also if I can pin you down I can call in an airstrike. So can you of cause but if your air strike wipes out one of my units I still have 9 left. I really don't see how it's economical to spend 5-20 million on one soldier. As standard of cause, having a small number of super elite special forces might be worth it.



4 is veteran level, but level 2 plus specialization gives you the same number of dice and the ability to use edge. As for copying you could argue that makes sense, but you could also argue it doesn't. That is really a case where the crunch doesn't match the fluff. The crunch says copying is easy, but if it was why don't all corperate goons have every conceivable skillsoft? That's not really a question, because the answer is clearly that the SHadowrun world doesn't make perfect sense. Just pointing out that it's a subjective matter whether you want to treat active softs as essentially free.

First, if your forces aren't being ambushed by my guys then my guys messed up. Second, combat will be over in under 2 rounds - 1 way or the other. Assuming near equal dice pools (at least for everything except soaking damage) and 4 IP on both sides each person can fire 16 narrow, full bursts per turn (Articulated Weapon Arm's are nice). So whoever gets the drop on the other side will most likely survive (this is assuming the same armor and guns for both sides).


*Shrug* The book says that corps just put skill wires in and add in an active soft for a lot of wageslaves. It doesn't actually say that they pay for said active softs or that they don't switch people around.

And I do think that the soldiers would end up more skilled over time (training isn't done with the activesoft on after all), but it gives 4 as a good base line.

EDIT: If you want cheap, mass producible soldiers you just give your guy an AK, skill wires rating 4, a data jack, a person fix chip, goggles with all the vision enhancements, and a dose of K-10. Under 10K a pop and everything except the K-10 can be recovered. The only problem is that your solider is a 1 time use deal (K-10 deals 18s damage when it wears off). Just empty out the prisons of ganger's and deploy them as soldiers. Most of them are SINless in the first place.

The exchange rate is actually not nearly that bad.

Median household income in the US is 48k. So assuming a two adults + 2 kids family, the 'lifestyle cost' is 6.5k yens per month (Middle lifestyle with 3 dependents), or 78k a year. add 20% for retirement or useless bling not in lifestyle (which if they get a car on finance is really everything) The SR4 equivelent is 93.5k

Therefore

48k US Dollars (2007) = 93.5k Nuyens (2070)

1 US Dollar (2007) = 2 Nuyens (2070).

So the cost of training a US Marine is 2.5 million Nuyen.

People who think the US military doesn't care about its soldiers are idjiots for that simple reason alone. (Also, you can buy Five Hundred! Steel Lynx for that much cash)

So team supersoldier is actually pretty cheap compared to the other dudes

But realistically unless you as a GM would veto 'Former military guy who decided he was sick of it after the crash' you cannot give everyone on Team US Military R4 skillwires because that would violate availability limits. If every guy in the military in 2065 had them, starting characters could have them by walking out post crash. Except they cannot. So anything with R12 cannot be implanted in line soldiers, because otherwise starting characters could have it.

Edit: Also, like everyone in the military is going to be an ork. The US military already targets poor people for recruitment, and while orks are not going to be officer material the entire GI is going to wall to wall orks because orks are AWESOME, can wear heavy armour easily and are quite hardcore compared to everyone else.

I don't think you can calculate it like that. On what possible basis are you assuming that a middle lifestyle of 2070=a middle lifestyle of 2008? Also from how I recall it most people in SR actually live on a low lifestyle, not a medium one.

Sweet. So 1 super solider for 2 Marnie's. Thats a bargain.


Yeah, even if they didn't care about them as people its just a bad investment to not care about their cost. 100 Marnie's costs the same as a Raptor.

So team supersoldier is actually pretty cheap compared to the other dudes


For some reason I don't think the military has to pay much attention to availability limits.

Sure, but the game world has to hold in some way. Lots of guys appearntly did walk out post 2065 - why didn't any of them become shadowrunners?

Clearly the military doesn't implant stuff over R12 (because it's rare/exotic/some shit) in line soldiers (they might implant it in delta force uber mensch, but thats a different ball game), otherwise people could just, you know, walk out with it.

Gear is a different question - people will notice the guy wandering around in powered combat armour.

Finally note that a marine in 2070 does not cost 2.5 million nuyen to train, because even R3 skillwires and VR training power you across the line in terms of training for low cost. I'd expect to be looking at sort of 200k in general employment overheads (a pretty standard HR rule of thumb is an employee costs you twice whatever his salary is, roughly) + implants and surgery downtime + equipment + maybe 100k for training specific costs Tops. So a marine costs 300k + equipment, realistically for R4 skills in key areas, and skillwires for everything else.

So it's probably sort of 5 to one for modest equipped marines.

But really, those marines would be chumps if they did that. What they are going to do is bring 20 hunter killer drones, the flying things that can have a rocket launcher, 4 gun drones, an APC, and their own sweet bling in terms of heavy combat armour. Hilariously I think they would be packing sniper rifles (?!?!) and using those to shoot down armoured targets while the 5 x gun drones with 3IPs lay down blazing streams of hot lead everywhere. The APC could really have anything in terms of guns so thats another open question, but I'd guess it would be taking one of the autocannons.

And those guys would be god damn bad ass, and kick the super soldier AND the 50 dude with AK solutions right in the face every single time.

I think the point is that if anything over availability was implanted in grunts then it wouldn't be availability 12 as there are too many grunts who reach the end of their enlistment and leave (and if you take the line they remove it when they leave then there would be those who became SINless in the crash and just left etc).

Anything that people can easily have a reason for shouldn't be above availability 12 for this fact (though of course they can still be F or R).

It is reasonable to say higher availability equipemnt is implanted to special forces as a matter of course - such people represent a much smaller pool thus would be tracked more rigourously. Also such people due to training etc would be a greater than 400bp character (e.g. I would expect stats for a special forces soldier to be 4s or 5s across the board and its 240 bp for straight 4s).

Kithran

Hmm.. it occurs to me that your supersoldier is effectively a tank.

Yes.. The military has tanks. Whoda thunk it?

But equipping all the soldiers that way is the same as putting each soldier in his own individual tank. Today, even without all the soldiers in tanks, the armed forces are stretched pretty thin. If they were each equipped with tanks they'd either cost a hell of a lot more, or there wouldn't be enough to go around.

As has been suggested again and again, this level of equipping and implantation will be reserved for the missions that need it. There comes a point when it's just not economical to ramp up military spending when you have so many other non-military uses for it. If there were an arms escalation that led toward the creation of this man-tank as the standard infantryman, the countries involved would be bankrupted.

Yeah, if I'm putting 5 million worth of gear into your ass then you aren't getting out in 4 years. If the corps can expect to employ people for life I don't see why the military couldn't as well.

Seeing as the availability limits don't make much sense in the first place (the day after the game starts I can go and get Skill Wires 4 easily) I'm not too worried about it.


I'm sure some of them did. And a month afterwards all the active softs went bye bye. The military isn't going to be handing out a whole bag of tricks without some insurance, and seeing as they are coding it themselves its very easy to add in a few dead man switches. Like if the proper code isn't given then the softs erase themselves at the end of the month. When your in the military they just get reloaded every 15 days or so and before you go on extended combat duty (where you may not have the luxury of being able to reload them every month) the military can input a code that makes them good for however long they say.


Not really, availability 16 isn't that bad at all. And kink bombs are always a possibility for extra fun.


5/1 is still in the Super Soldiers favor.


You mean the military chopper at 122K a copy. Or the military chopper at 1.8 mil a copy. Or the air combat drone at 75K a piece. etc. Drones aren't cheap, they can be hacked, they have an operational time of 6 hours (30 if you cram all of their modification slots with additional capacity), and they can be targeted by numerous cheaper systems.


That depends on who goes first and if the drones can even spot the super solider. Drones roll Sensor + Clearsight Autosoft and get -2 against methumans. Thats 10 dice right from the start with another -6 from Chameleon Coating for 4 dice. Against an Infiltration of 14.

Yes they are like a tank but they aren't a tank (tank's can clear buildings for example). As for the cost. Just to train an equip 1 brigades worth of marines (4,000 guys) costs the US government 5 billion USD (and that was pre 9/11 so the dollar hadn't weakened yet). If you can go with clone soldiers then 4,000 of these super soliders only costs 3.262 billion . And that 3.26 billion includes food, clothing, shelter, and salary for life.

Your soldiers started out costing 20 million, then went down to around 5 million and now cost less than 1 million per soldier. How do you calculate the cost and what exactly can they do?



You can't depend on always getting an ambush, a force that need to ambush has very limited utility, especially if I cheat and use scouts. As for the length of the the battle you're assuming that people don't duck behind cover. Also you can only fire 8 full bursts, if you want 16 you'll have to go with a 2 shorts busts or a short and a long,


No, but neither does it say they have every skill in the world and know everything about anything, which, it seems to me, would have been worth mentioning.

Edit: nwm.

10 million a copy was a rough guess.
7,814,000 a copy is the cost if you can't use clones.
1,709,500 a copy if you can use clones (plus a 1 time 100,000,000 fee for the whole brigade)

I made a mistake in my numbers, forgot to include the super soldiers cyber ware (stupid 600K nano hive). Final cost per 4,000 is 6,578,000,000 (plus a 100,000 infrastructure cost for the cloning facilities). Meaning that each clone costs as much as 1.6445 US Marines.

As for what they can do, I haven't finished them yet. Here's the sheet. Weapons, armor, and drones are in the notes section. I allocated 200K for gear and have some left over (the armor and drones come to like 120K and the guns come to 43,400).

I'll willing to go up too 2 million per solider when all's said and done. 1.75 million would be a nice number to hit, thats 140% of the cost of a US marine.

EDIT: cost changed because I added in some more ware.

Thanks for the sheet, but I'm still a bit confused. When you say cloned do you mean that you assume that the clone gets all the delta-bioware for free? Is there a rule that says you can do that, because it doesn't make much sense to me since the augmentations are (for the most part) not genetic.

ETA: You seem to have made a minor mistake BTW. You have trauma dampers costing 0.4 essence, they only cost 0,2 or 0.1 if they're deltaware like the rest of the equibment.

You're still comparing dollars to nuyen, which we really can't.

Type 0 system. The logic for why it works is that your genetic material is cultured as the base for standard bioware and hence it is a genetically perfect match and thus you get Standard Ware as delta grade. It doesn't apply to cultured ware because there it is always gene tailored, hence no mass production discount. Seeing as how all my clones are genetically identical to one another it seems quite reasonable to assume that said ware can be mass produced and works like Type 0 except that you can also mass produce cultured ware.


Thanks. The extra essense will be nice (if I didn't already include it in the final essence number)


Actually you can. You compare buying power.

A fast food meal at McDonald's costs anywhere from 5-10 bucks a person depending on what you get, SR lists the same price. It has the cost of a movie ticket at 15 , again similar to RL. Club fees are also similar. As are the Hotel rooms. In fact most of the common costs are on a 1-1 exchange rate.

Guys, they invented the desert wars for this kind of stuff. Now prep your own air mobile infantry force. In the red corner we have a 4x 5,000,000 /dog (airborne) heavy infantry unit on a kill and destroy mission versus the blue corner a one hundred 5,000 /dog with the primary objective to stay alive...

Talk tactics, equipment, whatelset and get on with this (otherwise try the Imperial Guard versus Space Marines in Warhammer 40k).

Cheers

And the 4 guy's use their Fly-Spy drones for scouting, and once they find large concentrations of enemies they break out the Seven-7.

I'm 99% sure that clones in shadowrun are stricly for spare parts and don't have any kind of real brain functions, so you can't clone an army for yourself.



I can't for a live of me remember were i got this but i think nuyen is 5 dollars.

Those are force grown clones, I'm not force growing them. I'm waiting the 9 months for them to gestate and then raising them just like you do normal kids (well not just like but you get the idea).


So McDonald's costs 25-50 bucks per person? A nice restaurant costs 500 per person? Etc. I can easily believe that the 2070 UCAS dollar is 5/1 on the what I can't believe is that the 2000 dollar is at the same place. And if you look at buying power of the 2008 dollar it equals what is shown on the common costs table in the beginning of the Street Gear section and even holds up in the weapons section (I haven't looked at vehicles yet).

25 or so years ago, you'd get change from a buck! It was even in their advertisements at the time. Hell, I remember regularly buying McDonald's cheeseburgers for 15 cents. I can easily envision prices continuing to rise at around the present rate.

The 2070 CAS dollar is 5:1 with the 2070 Nuyen.

The 2007 US dollar is 1:2 or so with the 2070 nuyen. That analysis is a bit crap because I haven't done an in depth comparsion with my purchasing power parity (PPP) analysis, so it could really be anywhere between parity and 1:3 or 4. Use whatever is least advantageous for you.

Inflation, which fortune is commenting about is what you address via purchasing power parity analysis. His 15 cent cheese burger in 1970 can be compared to a 3 dollar cheese burger today, and with a really poxy PPP analysis, I can conclude that a 1970 dollar is worth 13.5 dollars today. (It's a poxy analysis because that is not anything close to the real PPP levels, but you can see how this works.)

My 2007 dollars to 2070 nuyen analysis is a bit poxy too, so you need to think about that. Also: Emperor tippy is underestimating costs for the dollar:nuyen ratio he is choosing to use, unless you feel that some things are hugely cheaper.

In that case the price you quoted for the clone body would be increased ten-fold, if not more. The military would have to feed, clothe, shelter and train their soldiers for at least sixteen years instead of the standard one. If a Marine is worth over a million after one year in the Corps's care, how much would someone who spent nearly two decades be worth? They would also have to factor in the costs of building the infrastructure for a project of this scale and I doubt they would save money by using clones.

Not to mention you have to wait nearly two decades to see if the project would even work. If it did, you would need another two decades to get the first production batch ready for deployment. It would be much more efficient and cost effective to just use hand-picked volunteers from existing personel.

The fundamental problem with the uber-soldier is that in spite of his advantages he still gets squished by the big guns. Armor, airstrikes and arty will kill him dead no matter how expensive his armor is.

To put it another way: why aren't more troops trained to the specifications of the various spec ops groups <i>now</i>?

Because it's not cost-effective, and frankly, the average soldier doesn't need to be that elite.

Actually I accounted for it. Buying the lifestyle.


As I said, it has an 18 year lead time. I don't believe that I have ever said different.


Actually, only some times. And again, you have to hit.



A large part of it is that the military can't find the right people for it. The US military would love to increase their SpecOp's forces but they can't lower the requirements. They will take most anyone who can meet said requirements. It is also infeasible for the military to raise people from birth as soldiers and the benefits it would provide aren't worth the costs associated with it.

In this case the benefits are most assuredly worth it. Ignoring the actual training benefits it allows you to field 3 times as many men for the same cost.

And no the average solider doesn't need to be that elite, but when you can have him be that elite for a minor increase in cost there isn't any real reason not to.

Because spec ops are a hugely overrated waste of time? Really, they don't do the heavy lifting.

*blinks*

Where the devil did you get that idea?

They er... aren't supposed to do the heavy lifting, that's neither the design nor the intent.

And the lifestyle accounts for being raised by employees with PHDs instead of their parent's time? You can bet that a project like this would get that kind of scrutiny.


One of the big benefits of dropping a 1000kg bomb on a target is that you don't have to hit it directly. Add steering fins and a rigger setup and it won't 'miss' by more than a couple of meters.


This is a related issue, but not that way. The military is constantly recruiting for these positions because it can't keep filled because they leave for the private sector where they can make a lot more money. Mercenary groups like Blackwater pay them at least three times what they get from Uncle Sam.


And that is exactly what the cloning business amounts to. All the more reason to use the best of the enlistees.

Fighting a war entirely with special operations is a recipe for disaster. Special operations is called "special" for a reason. It is basically guerrilla warfare. Fighting a regular war with people trained for guerrilla operations is the height of foolishness, particularly when fielding so many of them that they're unable to use guerrilla tactics.

Luckily, these clones aren't Special Forces. They're stormtroopers. The majority of them wouldn't have any sort of special forces training.

And 8 years is a respectable lead time if you're making clone armies. I can't see any reason why adult clone soldiers would be any more effective than child clone soldiers.

Why? Add in another hundred million for the cost of that if you want.


First you have to find the target, these guys don't just stand around. Then you have to have an airplane in the area. Then said Airplane has to find the guy (again, not exactly easy). And then he drops his bombs, which has to land within 11 meters to even potentially do any damage. Since it has no AP the solider gets to roll 32 dice to soak at most 22p Damage. That averages 12p damage. Bio reduces that to 10p. But if the bomb is off by even 1 meter then that becomes stun damage and it doesn't mean much thanks to the Pain Editor.

So yes, a direct hit with an Iron Bomb will deal an average of 10p if it gets a direct hit. For every meter off reduce the damage by 2 and switch to stun. So no damage at 5 meters. Assuming you use an AIM-27 and it manages to get and keep lock on all the way to the target (not easy seeing as it has to get through a rating 6 Jammer) you get -2 AP and 22P damage. For 30 dice to resist, and again an average of 10p damage. But if your off by a meter it becomes an average of 6s.



True, but they still don't have enough qualified people for all the slots.


Not really. Right now the military gets no benefit worth the cost in political capital to train soldiers from birth. In 2070 with SR4 tech that is no longer true. It saves them over 5 million per solider, gets them better trained soldiers, and allows a drastic simplification of the logistics management


I never said I was doing either. Other people keep calling them special forces.


Yep. Highly effective, very powerful, very professional, stormtroopers.


Actually all of them would have it.


Were you as strong, fast, tough, and fit at the age of 8 as you were at 18? Again, you may be able to get away with 16 but 8 is far to short a time.

I can tell you that people running off to join Blackwater is only a small portion of staffing special forces units. First off their contracts are already the better part of a decade, secondly, and this might come as a surprise to some people.

Not every special forces guy wants to kill people in awful places for the rest of their lives. Well they usually start out that way but a couple pumps in the desert seem to mellow most of them out.

Also, you're really underplaying how difficult it is to find qualified special forces candidates. It's hard to find people who can actually gut their way through all the training without:
A.) Breaking mentally
B.) Breaking physically

I went to school with a guy who washed out of BUD's (SEAL training) because he BROKE HIS PELVIS during hell week. The guy is in ridiculous shape but something in his pelvis took the day off and he sat down and couldn't stand up again. Being in special forces is very very physically demanding (duh) and even after training they're constantly getting injured and taken off the line. Hell, the boat guys were getting fucked up because they were hitting waves too fast and mangling their spines.

Of course with cyber, bio, and 2070 medicine it's going to be a great deal easier to keep your people going. Then it's just a matter of finding people with the right mental fortitude to perform in the special forces community. Of course from my understanding most people who wash out of special forces training are DOR's... drops on request, people who decided "Nope, fuck this, I'm tired of being hypothermic and eating MRE's in the surf while on 2 hours of sleep in 3 days."

You would be if you had force grown muscles, cyber, genetic enhancements, and skillwires.

Maybe. I'm still doubtful. Maybe 16 years lead time. 14 at the bare minimum.

for the sake of argument, i am going to stat out the 1,000 kg bomb mentioned earlier. note that this is not the iron bomb in arsenal, it is a huge explosive device. it does unpleasant things to large areas.

now then, just to keep things nice and even, we'll assume that the bomb casing is 190 kg (this is probably high, but it keeps things even because we're using square roots). so, we'll assume 810 kg of rating 10 explosives for this bomb. that's 90P damage. given we have a casing that weighs 190 kg, i don't think it's unreasonable to treat this thing as using the fragmentation rules as if it had burst a barrier. this means we are looking at a radius of 90 meters, with the bomb still doing DV 30 at a range of 60 meters. 60 meters is not terribly precise. and 30P damage is a lot. even if they do get to add +5 to their armor. furthermore, with that large of an area it is imo not all that improbable to get some chunky salsa effect going (not that the already huge damage wasn't already causing chunky salsa mind you).

expensive? sure, that bomb is gonna cost you 810k just for the explosives, never mind the guidance systems etc. but when we're talking about potentially destroying even one of your guys, dropping a 810k bomb starts sounding kind of cost effective. if it hits a large group of them? well, let's just say nobody will even think twice about whether this bomb is worth 810k

(note: i have this odd feeling 1,000 kg is not necessarily the bomb's actual weight, but then again it is my understanding that the weight of the explosives in the rulebook are quite ridiculous anyways).

I think hyz is going off the "cloned tissue in vats time". They'd be decanted with the body of an adult so it'd just be a matter of the brain catching up. Simsense and knowsofts will go a long way towards that.

No, I'm going off of third-world rebel militia recruiting ages. The fact is that there are, as we speak, eight-year-old human beings of both genders wielding AK-47s on the battlefield in the name of freedom and doing a damn good job of it.

Modern soldiers don't need strength. They need endurance, agility, alertness, fast reflexes, energy, sharp senses, good hand-eye coordination, a naive sense of personal invulnerability, and the ability to treat killing other humans beings like a fun cool game. Children have all of these traits and they tend to be more agile and have better reflexes than adults.

Augmentations could easily compensate for any deficiencies in Strength and Body and a lifetime of highly specialized training is more than enough to teach them how to follow orders and kill.

I think DocTaotsu was just trying to point out you can force grow an adult body in less then 6 months, then raise the brain using the same procedures used for making drone clonal brains and install them when they are trained up.