1)Does a clone that isn't force grown mature normally? I.E. you clone a guy, wait 9 months for it to become a baby in the artificial womb, and then raise the kid normally.

Yes. That's pretty much the definition of a clone. It'll be just like having a substantially younger identical twin.

Ok, so then if they wanted to the military could take 1 person and run off a few thousand clones? Meaning that like Type 0 system bioware should be cheaper as they can mass produce it for them, correct?

Oh, another question:
2)Does genetic heritage cost essence?

wasn't there something about cloning not being able to actually produce licing beings, only a clean slate or a set of spare-parts for a specific human?
no memories, no mind at all, maybe even no aura/essence?
as for the second question: i think the rules state that genetic heritage costs essence, but common sense more or less says no because it's your own body, you grew up with it, it is a part of you since conception . . no augmentation . .

I know it says that about force grown clones (the ones that reach adult size in 6 months or so). I was wondering about non forcegrown ones.


Augmentation just says "free". It doesn't reference either or essence and I was wondering about the average opinion (unless it has been clarified somewhere else).

Sure. Or you could have the people of your country have a few thousand children. You could give some modest financial incentives for child rearing and just let the market create some for you. Or you could just be a market parasite and allow the large world unemployment rate to force people already born and grown to come to you for work.

Cloning isn't cheap enough to make it a financially important competitor with biological reproduction (which I remind you will happen for "free" unless condoms are involved).

-Frank

The cost saved by mass producing bioware would be dwarfed, and by dwarfed I mean size of a pea versus size of the sun, compares to the cost of creating the clones, keeping it hidden, and feeding and raising those soldiers from birth to fighting age. Then, as soon as your enemy gets wind of your plan, you can watch all your soldiers die of a precise-engineered cold.

There are practically no advantage to vat grown soldiers, unless you REALLY REALLY need an army of endoctrinated from birth morons, or you merely need a few custom-built spec ops soldiers.

The cost to run a massive cloning initiative is cheaper than custom designing delta grade bioware for each solider. IT also allows you to completely standardize equipment because everyone of your soldiers is physically identical.


A great shadowrun I think.


There are a few: standardized equipment, training from birth, all your soldiers can share blood and organs if needed, and you can mass produce delta grade bioware (basically, all your soldiers get type 0 system).

The last one is where the real cost savings come it.

wrong side of the gun . . imagine what kind of money you could make selling type-o bodies . . then use said money to hire cheaper soldiers when needed

If you create an army of bioengineered clone soldiers then it is a foregone conclusion that Kurt Russel will kick their asses.

Or some douchebag comes stealing them all.

And in 18 years, this may or may not pay off. There was a story about this kind of thing that didn't quite make it into Augmentation. There are limitations.

-Frank

Sure, I never said it was guaranteed. Was just asking if something inherent in the cloning process made it impossible.

A medical facility costs 200,000 and a single clone costs 25,000 A medical facility can support 8 patients at a time, so 8 clones seems like a good number.

Let's go with 500 facilities for easy numbers. Base cost is 100,000,000 and you can produce 4,000 clones at a time. Sure you are talking an 18 year lead time on the project but in then you get 4,000 soldiers every 9 months.

To buy a medium lifestyle for those 4,000 soldiers costs 20,000,000 and that covers all their expenses for life. Each batch costs 100,000,000

Now what do you save? How about 2,430,000 per solider on just his bioware? And thats assuming that cultured bioware can't be massed produced for a specific DNA type. Assuming it can (which makes plenty of sense) you save another 2,900,000 per solider.

And if genetweaks carry over to clones (which makes sense) then you save 110,000 per solider as you only have to perform the alterations once.

So economically, you are better off making a clone army than you are making the same army without clones. The only real problem could be just what can be done with ritual magic and a material link (i.e. a blood sample). Basically, can you make a ritual that effects every clone with just 1 sample from 1 clone or can you only target 1 clone at a time and use a sample from any clone? Both are interesting.

If you can effect all the clones with 1 ritual then all the soldiers will have some very nice magical defenses but you also have the potential for your whole army to be killed off with 1 spell. If its just 1 target at a time then they don't have magical defenses but your whole army also can't be killed with 1 spell.

Uh.. yeah. Let's say for the sake of argument that you're someone who could actually spend that kind of money on making children. Like Aztlan. You do realize that just for getting up in the morning, Aztlan has a birth rate of 20.04 people per 1000 residents per year in 2008. With their 2008 population of 109 million, they create approximately 183,626 potential soldiers every month. In order to actually turn them into soldiers, they would have to make sure that they are fed, clothed, sheltered, trained, and indoctrinated over the next 18 years, which is where all the real expenses come anyway. Sending them in at even a Low Lifestyle for 18 years would set you back some 432,000Â¥ per child. Now repeat that for 4000 children and you are out nearly 2 billion yen. Just for the feeding, clothing, and minimal education.

If you aren't a country, you probably don't have the resources to raise thousands of children. If you are a country, you already have millions of children being born and seriously don't need to artificially create any.

-Frank

This is only true if you assume that you need every member of your army to have those mods, and that you won't need them for about twenty years. And that your investment won't be obsolete in 20 years, too.

In one case, you could spend 2,900,000 yen per soldier to make a guy who has some awesome 'ware, is a killing machine, is born and bred for combat.

In another case, you spend between 7500-10,000 yen on guy off the street to make a soldier with an AK, some combat drugs, some basic smartgoggles and a grenade or two. Maybe you get fancy and throw in a shitty skillwire system, too.

You get 1 of the super-soldier for every 300 (or thereabouts) of the latter. While Super Soldier is awesome for commando shit, 300 to 1 odds for regular troops will smoke the shit out of him any day of the week.

I'm not saying it's a bad idea. I'm just saying that en masse, it's just not cost effective.

At this time I would like to add, you could force grow the body, and use the same techology drones use to make and train clone brains, and then insert them into the bodies so you'd only have a 6 month production time.
But to be honest I'd just use modified Otomo drones with +3 body to increase str and damage soaking, 10 point concealed armor or 18 points of obvious armor if you don't care about them looking like killing machines out of their uniforms, and enhanced sensors. Outfit them with souped up military armor, a lmg or Hmg or minigun (drones don't worry about recoil), and they'll have agilities of high teens for their firearms tests plus level 5 skill softs, with specalizations, and smart guns.... ya.... lots of dead people.

Actually the numbers game is deceiving, 10 million will get you 1 super solider full equipped (including his lifestyle). At 10K a guy that is 1,000 to 1 odds. Sounds bad, right? Now lets look at how many guys can attack our single solider at any given time, its far less than 1,000. And if you field your 1,000 guys our single solider calls in a T-Bird with some Seven-7 cluster munitions and drops them all over your soldiers.

Massed, crappy troops are just a way to inflate the body count. They can't really contribute to a war. Even on the occupation level they just don't have the muscle to stand up to the local guriella groups who would be making their life hell, much less organized resistance of the military variety.

However, for the cost of your supersoldier you can buy far more vehicles and weapons for your far cheaper grunts. Yes, your supersoldier can call in an airstrike from a Tbird to obliterate the grunts, but they can do the exact same thing to him. And you're a hell of a lot more out of pocket having lost that one soldier than you are when 10 or a hundred grunts get cacked.

I do think it is perfectly possible in SR4 to raise a clone army as you propose, but I don't think it's likely to be done for practical reasons. Basically, as far as kit, support, maintenance and training go, the costs are the same. The only saving is that in exchange for the cost of the facility to grow and rear the clones to maturity, you make certain high end 'ware cheaper to plug into them, even if you consider part of the rearing budget to be covered by training costs.

Sure, and the final number (without using clones) is 6.2 million per solider including a bought medium lifestyle. And using a T-Bird (which costs 2.35 million before weapons and fuel) to take out ground forces is uneconomical if you can't use chemical/biological/nano weapons. There is also the slight fact that the Super Solider is a bitch to target.


But the real savings is in that ware. 5 million (or thereabouts) per solider to be precise. Or a savings of 20 BILLION per clone run. Even as a 1 off for a brigade of these guys (4,000) it's worth the infrastructure costs. And even if you don't put ware in them it could still come out as a net gain.

Total cost for 4,000 of these guys is as follows:
100,000,000 for Cloning Facilities
100,000,000 for the Clone Batch
20,000,000 for the Lifestyle
110,000 for the genetweaks to the original
5,548,000,000 for the Enhancements
800,000,000 for gear

Total: 6,678,000,000

I think thats a fair price for a brigade. Considering that just training and equipping 4,000 US marines costs 5,000,000,000 USD (and that was before the dollar weakened) and doesn't include food, clothing, shelter, or pay.

If clone soldiers would be that great, governments or corporations in the sixth world would already have adopted the idea. As far as we know they have not. That tells us, there is a flaw in it. And after all we are not talking about Star Wars here.

3 billion vs 5 million $

I don't know what the exchange rate would be worked out as but that's still 3 orders of magnitude. And a 20 odd year lead time. And not factoring in deaths through training mishaps and accidents depleting your nice round 4000.

Sure it's doable, but I don't know why anyone would sink so much of their military budget - which must be less than the total budget for things like infrastructure, health, education etc etc. - into a relatively small military force, when they might be called upon to fight in more places than their armed forces allows. If a country expects to not have to fight in many places, why would they spend 3 billion (admittedly over twenty years) for a brigade of soldiers, when that money could be spent on other things? If they are expecting to have to fight a lot, they'll need more than a brigade of troops, which pushes your 3 billion over twenty years to mind boggling heights.

Doh. I forgot a 0. Thats supposed to be 5,000,000,000.

For all we know they have. The things do take 18 years at a minimum to grow up. If a nation or corp decided to do it back in 2060 or so then we wouldn't see the results for another 8 years in game. That 18 year lead time is the bitch. I mean once its out of the way you have a new brigade every 9 months. The only problem is that you can't really ramp up production if you need too. What I see them doing is running off 10 or so brigades worth and once that is done run off a new one every 5 years or so (to cover losses and other such things).

Too bad SR doesn't have cryogenics or I would say just keep putting the excess in the freezer (without implants if you want to save money) and unfreeze them as needed.

IIRC it's stated somewhere in Aug that you can't make biodrones out of wimps. But you can use wimp brains for cyborgs.

Well with Move-By-Wires and a really good custom pilot you theoretically can but it has no real benefit. It's just a meat body that cost you 200K plus and has no real benefits (your ignoring the human brain completely).

I made a mistake in my numbers, forgot to include the cyber and nano ware. Revised numbers edited in.

Just a quick sidenote: Comparing gear prices in SR and prices of comparable gear today I'd say that your assumption of 1 Dollar being equal to 2 Nuyen is a bit difficult to hold up.

EDIT: In the Neo-Anarchist’s Guide to North America there is a table that shows value the UCAS $ to vary between 6.25$ and 4$ per Nuyen. It was always my impression that the UCAS $ exchanges into US $ 1 to 1.

Why? The following is from the Military Weapons thread



It seems reasonable and I did halve the value of the (1/1 instead of 1/2)

Yes but those are 2050+ UCAS dollars. As in after the dollar stopped being the benchmark currency, after the US ceased to exist, after the UCAS lost most everything west of the Mississippi (like California), after the mega's came in and messed with the economy, etc.

Buying power is a much better way to judge a currency.

And if you look at the food prices they are almost exactly like current prices. As are a surprising amount of the other common costs. And the ones that aren't can be mostly explained away with increased use of automation (hotels where they use a drone for maid service instead of a person for example).

An 18 year lead time is just stupid. 12 is perfectly reasonable and you can get it down to 8 with a little bit of effort. With certain unethical training methods you can get that down to 6 without any drop in quality. With skillwires, p-fixes, and muscle augmentation you can get it down to 4, perhaps even 3. If you use orks or trolls you don't even need the muscle augmentation.

You think a 12 year old is ready for combat? Or a 3 year old?

That lead time has nothing to do with the training, it has to do with waiting for the clone to physically grow from a baby into an adult. If you force grown a clone then the mind doesn't advance. I want competent soldiers, not idiots.

As for Trolls, lower max agility. 7 vs. 9. And I would rather have the dice in offense than in defense, 31 dice to soak before AP already.

Orks are actually better in a pure numbers sense and they have a 6 month vs. 9 month gestation period which means that they could be produced quicker (2 brigades per year vs. 1.3).

Hmm, I may switch to Orks. The increased numbers combined with the reduced BP cost for attributes does make it worth it. Pump the 30 net points into body and I roll 12 dice to soak (excluding armor). If I pump body the same as I did on the human version then I get 15 dice to soak (excluding armor).

Yeah, I think its time to switch the base meta type to Orc. Although I do loose that 1 point of edge, which was quite nice. Perhaps buy it back and lower body by 1 for 14 dice.

12 year olds are certainly ready for combat. In fact, there are 12-year olds in combat as we speak and they kick a surprising amount of ass. 10 is also reasonable. 8 is more difficult to train in some ways, but easier to train in others.
Kids around that those ages have the advantage of being psychologically divorced from the consequences of their actions to a certain degree, which allows them to commit some horrific atrocities without developing PTSD. This is a rather huge advantage on the battlefield. The fact that many child soldiers are able to reintegrate into society without any psychological damage in spite of having done some really brutal crap like cutting open pregnant women after taking bets on the gender of the fetus is a testament to this.

If you're training them to kill from birth, then 6 isn't at all unreasonable. 3 is absurdly young but can be done with the technology available in the Sixth World. The trick to using three-year-olds is to make them meat-puppets. Of course, if you're going with meat puppets you can pick up anyone off the streets.

It's not the training thats the problem. It is them physically reaching maturity. Even if you assume that Orks grow 33% faster than humans (based only on their gestation period) thats still 12 years to physically mature.

But they don't need to be physically mature. There is no law that says your soldiers have to be physically mature. All they needs to be is strong enough wield an assault rifle and carry spare ammo, and a canteen. Given the light weight of modern assault rifles, an 8 year old human can do that. Add some agility augmentation and level 3 reflex enhancements to that kid and give her some training and you've got a cute little supersoldier. Strength augmentation can give extra carrying capacity as necessary. And they can do double duty as "companions" for the adult commanders.

that works fine out in countries where nobody cares, but in most of those places they don't really have the money to invest in huge clone armies.

and it still doesn't get past the fact that you don't really want a full-sized army of massively augmented supersoldiers anyways (it's substantially cheaper to have a small number of supersoldiers and a bunch of regular soldiers).

incidentally, i really have my doubts about the supposed cost of training a single marine. there's something really screwy about that number, because that is a stupidly large amount of money.

certainly, with the advent of simsense, tutorsofts, etc, it won't take anywhere near that much money to train a single soldier, imo.

Ot that one of them will turn against you.

I still figure its cheeper to clone and train the brains using VR and sim sense, and then plug them into cloned bodies. Then you only have to care for the brain during this period of time (cheaper), and then Use cloned/augmented Orc bodies. With a little work on its genome, you could have the cloned bodies growing and making much if not all of their own bioware internally as part of the natural development cycle. Then you'd just ahve to add any cyber you wanted, which because of the cloning process is mass produced delta grade goodies.

It's probably cheaper just to use warforms.

when your brain is inside your body, it requires very little to keep alive. indeed, the body does an excellent job of keeping your brain alive, even if you treat your body like crap and don't feed it properly, keep it clean, exercise regularly, etc.

on the other hand, storing a brain outside of a body apparently costs an awful lot of money (250,000 plus another 2k a week to be precise). if they're going to go that route, they may as well just make cyborgs. (to be fair, probably 150k or thereabouts of the cost of storing the brain comes from the 'ware they install as part of the CCU. of course, on the other hand, there's that tiny little drawback of your entire army being insane in 4 years because of being only a brain without a body.)

in short, your body is an extremely cheap storage unit for your internal organs. technology has not yet come up with anything cheaper, to my knowledge, in either RL or in shadowrun.

Ok. I think I've finished Mr. Super Solider

Infrastructure: 2,000 Cloning Facilities (can clone 16,000 clones at a time) - 400,000,000 1 time expense

Cost Per Solider less Lifestyle and Cloning cost: 1,910,000
Lifestyle Cost per Solider: 65,000 for permanent medium lifestyle
Cloning Cost: 25,000
Total Cost per solider: 1,500,000

Total Cost per Batch: 24,000,000,000

ToE is as follows:
Division: 4 Regiments (16,000 Combat Soldiers)
Regiment: 4 Battalions (4,000 Combat Soldiers)
Battalion: 8 Companies (1,000 Combat Soldiers)
Company: 10 Platoons (500 Combat Soldiers)
Platoon: 5 Squads (50 Combat Soldiers)
Squad: 2 Fire Teams and the Command Team (10 Combat soldiers)
Fire Team: 2 Wings ( 4 Combat Soldiers)
Command Team: Squad leader + Wing (2 Combat Soldiers)

The smallest tactical deployment is the Squad. Wing's never split up.

Clone Divisions take after the Mobile Infantry in that every solider is a combat solider, most logistics support is fully automated and handled by the soldiers Agents.

I'm working on transportation and will add that in when I finish with it.

Oh can an LAV aircraft (the MiG-67) do VTOL or does it need a runway?

EDIT: Saved 500,000 per solider, edited numbers to reflect it.

I think the whole thing would be cooler if you went for batches of between 50 and 500, rather than 16,000.
You want these guys to be your ultimate special-forces badasses who go in in small teams, do the impossible, and get out. Sending them out into a general battlefield, so as to require 16,000 per batch, is just getting them killed and wasting money when you could be doing just as well with drones and cheaper soldiers.
If you want to make Spartan II's I'm all for it, but part of the coolness of having elite megabadasses is that they're rare, not standard.
YMMV, of course.

Actually Moon-Hawk, senor Tippy's whole argument revolves around having the entire army be clones, 'wared up to the gill at low cost thanks to the Type O background each of them has. Legions and legions of super-soldiers (although I'm sceptical about the compatibility of Type O with extensive gene tweaking). Frankly, as they're all clones, and you're mass producing the 'ware in house anyway, you don't need to make any of them Type O. The way I see it, the Type O System quality lets runners buy off the peg bioware, and treat it as specially cultured for them, since they share Owen Whitting's MHCs, and all the rest.

Of course, I still don't see what the point of all this effort is, especially the statting. It's not the model used by any cannon armed force in SR, and it's hardly useful to players or GMs to stat up a Division of super clone soldiers. How would you run against them? Who would run against them? Why would anyone run against them?

Still, if this is how El Imperator wishes to spend his time, then more power to him.

It's not Type 0, its just that as every single solider is genetically identical the government can run off 16,000 copies of a piece of bioware and have it be a perfect genetic match for each of them. Same end effect as Type 0, just actively getting the quality and using it vs. random chance.

As for why I'm doing it, I don't happen to have anything better to do at the moment and its kinda fun. As for it being useful, who knows. Even if it was being done in SR 4 right now they would have had to have started around 2060 or so (that being when the tech really became available), in which case they wouldn't have any of these soldiers until 2078.

So this actually could come up ingame. Some corp/nation finds out about some other corp/nation having this project going on and wants to derail/steal/extract the project so they higher the runners to do somethign about it. At 8 million a copy without clones they really are elite soldiers. SO the players might end up facing 1 or 2 potentially. Cyborgs without all the nasty negatives.

And it does fit the setting. Clone army bred to be soldiers, trained from birth, massive enhancements programs. Kinda dark angel like actually.

That could actually be a kind of fun high power run, some of the kids escape and they are trying to survive. They have millions worth of enhancements in themselves but no gear.

Could you tell me what country do you see having the needed money/infracture to do something like this, it not like the countries of SR are swimming in money, most of them are pretty poor.
And the corporations do not have the need for this kind of an army.

Um, it's not that bad actually.

World Wide you have to go down 12 spots to find the nation that couldn't create 1 division out of its 2008 military budget.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_count...ry_expenditures

And remember, most of the clone division is 1 time cost per division. As for the corps, a Regiment of these guys is fairly easy to see (that being the size of the biggest corp armies according to Corporate Shadowfiles). A 1 time expense of 6 billion ?

Those countries really and i mean really don't have as much money in 2070 then they have now, so that is not a good place to start.

Even if the UCAS military budget is 1/10th the size of the current US budget they still have enough money for 2 divisions per year.

Exsept that your calculating this based on rules not ment to be used for thinks like this and make huge assumptions like thinking that a permament lifestyle would cover for raising those troops for 18 years including thinks like food, a place to stay and all the training and indoctorination.

I think you should look at those number you wave around for training one marine right now and multiply that for atleast by 10 to cover for that 18 years of training and other stuff.

Mäx is right. You can't compare real life training cost of a soldier to something as abstract as a permanent lifestyle in SR, which just exists for the sake of simplicity.

Did anyone already point out, how difficult it could be to sell clone warriors to the public? After all the clones are fully developed humans. Which are deprieved of all rights. Human rights still exist in 2070. In most cases corporations don't pay more than lip service to them. But governments want to be reelected. And so they need to keep a strong eye on public opinion.

*Shrug* It's the only rules I have. Show me a better one and I will use that.