I know that this is perhaps the ultimate aim for a few rad anti-corp groups. It is also likely to me one of the most heavily secure place near Earth. How could one Destroy the ZOH and what would happen if one did. I'm new to SR and I wounder what the effect on the world would be with the Corporate Cort's HQ destroyed and a few justices killed.

"Collapse of the world economy" is gonna be one of the side effects.

You can say that again. As far as I can tell, in addition to adjudicating corporate disputes, the CC also controls world monetary policy by regulating the relative value of the nuyen. It would be like blowing up the Federal Reserve, except instead of taking weeks for the fallout to reach all of the global markets, it would be brought to them instantaneously via the Matrix.

Yeah i can guess but surely no one would put all that on one space station that could get blown up by a freak lump of rock sure predictable to some extent but really I doubt the ZOH is that huge a object in the worlds economy. But I could be a catalyst leading to some thing like the wall street crash I guess. Woo my runner have a new job. In my world these a group of anti-corp rads who aim to bring down to corp machine and bring around a new world order. (kind o' sound like Duse Ex now i think of it). My runner can help or hinder this. Add in my Crusaders of Purity a completely different rad group aiming for equality by removing "all" unfair advantages metas, awakened, cyber, bio, gene, nano, you name it. Look like rad groups are having a filed day in 2071.

Didn't we just go over the fact that ZOH did die? During Crash 2.0... it was being discussed over in the "Frequently Unanswered Questions" thread I believe.

They apparently rebuilt it page 41 of the BBB

But how could or would one destroy this facility or at least have a chance to do so. So the group is actually a threat no just a joke. I assume the corp sec on this place would be the best form all 10 megas plus some AAs and may be other corps too many the security ones.

Hack a sattelite using the group's surpreme hacker and his sprite/agent army, accelerate it and crash it into the station. Similarily, have the mancer hack Thur Shot Rockets and crash them into the station. After all, extended hacking always succeeds because computer security in SR4 is a sad joke.

Of course, your group better hurry before Unwired comes out and supercomputing rules establish systems with ratings above a surpreme 2070s PDA. Then, ZOH might just become a harder nut to crack.

Thought ZOH had a pretty extensive ASAT / Missile Defense network around it?

And then turn the sattelite that is looking to crash it into a cloud of shrapnel. Good choice. No, that wouldn't make a lot of sense. Their best bet would be to evade the sattelie or deflect it using another solid body to make it change course. of course, with a thur projectile, that'd need an awful lot of kinetic energy, them traveling at astronomical speeds and all.

Also, hijacking a solar collector sattelite and frying the station with the microwave beam it usually uses to transmit energy down to earth might be a workable idea. as would camouflaging a nuke as space debris and detonating it close to the station (unless it's on collision course, noone really cares about debris).

Of course, if your group really is nuts, they can just build themselves a babylon gun (though possibly using magnetic acceleration, it's 2070 and all) and take potshots at it with ICBM-capable nukes.

The real flipside is of course that as spacestations are fragile, they will have a land based backup. Or 5.

Yeah I was think that if these 13 are super important there would be back ups on standby in case of there lives ending as well as at least one secure back up.

I'd use Bloodzilla. But, given that this has been eratted, I'd find a place with LOS to the station and a telescope and cast a nice high-force (possibly ritual) Wreck Space Station spell with the drain offset by Centering and Sacrificing.

Like it now we just have to find out where the station is orbit wise isn't is in a LG? some of thous would be in place hard to get LOS to.

Space stations cannot hide, and their current position and trajectories can likely be found on any astronomy enthusiasts' associatin's node.

First and foremost, the ZOE's ASAT network would probably maintain an exclusion zone around it for precisely that reason. You're also assuming that we're dealing with kinetic kill technology - likely a poor assumption considering Arsenal discusses destroyer-mounted lasers that can seriously damage LEO satellites. It's highly likely that any kind of technology that the Corporate Court would entrust its continued survival to would be capable of either deflecting the renegade satellite, or destroying it almost completely. Any incidental debris could be addressed with a minor course correction.

And how are they going to do that. given how cluttered SR makes LEO?


A technology that has been around since the 80s. Besides, what's gonna happen to the rump of a sattelite whose optics and maybe electronics have been fried by a laser? Is it going to vanish? And yes, a multitude of kinetic kill vehicles is a safe bet to decompress the station and kill everyone onboard, not to mention destroy most of the hardware.


And what kind of technology would that be? Disruptor beams that magically make matter go away when hit instead of breaking up matter into smaller bits of matter?

Summon Force 12 Spirit of Man with the Innate Spell Wreck Space Station (or just Powerbolt) using Sacrificing and Centering to offset Drain. Blood Invoke it, against using Sacrificing and Centering to offset drain. Feed it 126 points of Essence one way or another to get it up to Force 2418. Have it overcast Wreck Space Station (or just Powerbolt) at Force 48 36 on ZOH. Have it add Edge. The spirit has 7254 exploding dice or can buy 1813 successes. Space reduces the Force of the spell to 3624. If both the spirit and the space station survive the initial casting (each highly unlikely), have it cast again.

Well the best answer I can think of is either a very, very big chunk of metal going very, very fast, or a very big and powerful laser weapon. Essentially the SR equivalent of a railgun big bertha. Failing that nuclear weapons, should do the trick. Also I suppose that ZOH could have issues with a truly extreme solar flare if we are looking at natural disasters.

A novel way for a shadowrunner to do it would be get a low signature space suit with ruthenium coating and a very hefty air supply, work out the maths, and then launch him into orbit towards the sattelite. He just floats towards Z-O (it may take him hours to a day - but he'll live.) he floats past the defenses without being spotted, grabs the station and attatches a briefcase nuke and jumps off into the void. For the more personal touch he could try and breach the station and kill everyone on board.

Of course, this is kind of senseless because there is no way to hide something in the nothing that is space, and at best, the runner is considered space debris on collision course and avoided by ZOH maneuvering out of his way.

I'm still all for the TM/Hacker hacking other habitats and go crash them into ZOH, though. Mabe hack a shuttle en route to ZOH (you can hack anything, given a 30 min interval) and make the thrusters kick inwhen it's past the supposed defense screen (which I still doupt exists, becasue it's just impossible to put up).

For the record Z-O was not destroyed during the Crash 2.0 (in fact in System Failure a meeting is being held there after the Crash regarding Winternight's nukes). Z-O cut itself off from the Matrix before it was infected.

Z-O does indeed have an orbital exclusion zone (with a radius of about 500km which is nothing in LEO terms) which is maintained by both the station itself and smaller weapon platform satellites forming a secure perimeter (note the sensor/detection perimeter extends much, much further). As defensive measures you can count on a variety of early warning systems and medium range sensors of various sorts, kinetic and missile point defense, lasers, coil guns, and "bodyguard" interception drones in tight orbits to take the hit if anything gets through the outer defenses.

If I recall correctly, Wastelands has a section on sneaking into the station. I remember thinking that the station was a lot smaller than I expected. Maybe I'm remembering incorrectly. Anyone?

Um, that is a huge hole in the sky. This means you can't have ANY other LEO objects in a 800-900 km altitude band, as the precession rate depends on altitude and any sat at a higher or lower altitude would in short order enter your exclusion zone.

Just a small correction, since it significantly changes things: all the exclusion zone means is that you can't have any unauthorized LEO objects in a 800-900 km altitude band. Every single Triple A has a vested interest in preserving Z-O exactly as is and each watches everyone else.

Yes but to avoid a corp war between the all the mega's and collapse of the world economy, death, chaos and strife etc The mega's are going to cover all the bases, three times a gizillion, as only mega nuyen can.

the safest bet would probably be to drop a large field of radar/thermal-absorbant & ruethem polymer coated pellets into the orbital path of the ZOH while its on the other side of the planet.

Ok, That makes sense.

Which probably means that even if a hacker does chop through what are probably system rating 12 or so networks to get attitude control of another orbital, it would probably get blown to small bits as soon as it's vector started to alter towards Z-O.

If Z-O came down though, it would be a huge disruption, though almost certainly fairly short-lived, in many respects.

I think I'd prefer to avoid altering the world in such a major way in the game, if only so that I can keep using the Catalyst material as it comes out, without having to do major surgery because some significant part of my campaign setting is so different from the 'official' campaign world.

You can't hide thermal signatures in space. The vacuum temperature is so low that your pellets are going to radiate heat if they absorb any.

That also sort of assumes that there is nothing else on that same orbital plane anywhere, which seems vanishingly unlikely.

I did it once. Killed it with an itsy nuke built into a Renraku shuttle carrying their rep. Nearly simultaneous with some sweeping board-room changes of the Jpanacorps carried out by the special purpose units of the Imperial General Staff.

However it's extremely hard to deal with many thousands 0.5cm marbles made of a high temp stable material with a low observability coating that forms a cloud several km in size and are moving at 20 km/sec.

To add to the responses thusfar, HOW is heat doing to radiate, given how effective vacuum is as an insulator? You're not gonna be able to detect heat as anything other than as IR radiation, and to be fair, the stars are going to be casting a hell of a lot more of that.

No, you can hide thermal signatures in space just fine so long as the stars or a large, warm body (Earth) rather than a large, cold body (Moon) form the backdrop.

What, exa<ctly, will make the several thousand tons of metal and ceramics vanish when they are on collision course with ZO? if anything, blowing up the station will make thngs WORSE, since insetad of a single body, ZO then has to avoid a spread out field of debris, many of which may well be enough to cripple or kill the station when they impact. Also, if the sacrifice drones don't have mass significantly larger than the body they intercept, they will be smashed and the body will, at beast, be minimally deflected.

Countrary to movies and star trek TV shows, when blown up, objects in space DO NOT VANISH.

As for the IR radiation of stars, moon, earth and known LEO bodies - since that's a known background, what's stopping ZO from filtering that out and detecting your space marbles cloud?

Thanks, I do understand this. They don't just go poof. But if they are nailed before they have a fully developed intercept vector on Z-O, then that expanding field of bits is going to be somebody else's problem, not Z-O's directly. If the bits are small enough, Z-O can probably weather the storm. If they are too big for that, it becomes a point defense problem, not a catastrophic collision. And also, assuming a fairly substantial explosion, the vectors of every bit of that debris are going to be altered by that impetus, which also would move at least some of them off an intercept vector for Z-O.

The same thing that keeps you from filtering all those other stars out when you're looking for one particular star right now - the fact that they're way brighter than what you're looking for, and are casting much more IR out than vaguely warm marbles.

No matter what editing software you're using, there is still energy falling directly on your sensing apparatus and mucking it up. Think of it this way. If you stare directly at the sun and are looking for a bird around the sun, you can't see it. If you stick your thumb out so the sun is behind it, it's still really hard to see the bird, because the atmosphere scatters light. Since there's still enough debris, radiant body heat and atmosphere in LEO to scatter IR, you're dealing with the same problem with slightly different variables.

It would be funny for a group to destroy themselves in order to destroy ZO, only to find out there is minimal disruption to anything since most of the "real work" is done in Manhattan in the CC buildings there. The Justices would die. New ones would take their places. Boohoo.

I suppose the good news is that the group who destroyed themselves would never know.

That kind of the plan. "YAY we did it take that you mega scum oh drek we did nothing thell have a new upgraded ZHO up in 6-12 months FRAG!"

One thing to think about on the plan for using marbles... NASA devised copper shielding to protect Deep Impact's impactor and main module from the possibility/likelihood of getting hit by comet dust at extremely high speeds during its mission. (Impactor needed to be intact until the last moment in order to make last minute course corrections.) That shielding was tested and successfully stopped projectiles at 6 km per second. If they can do that today, surely they can do the same or better in 2070. Also, since 20km per second was thrown out there by another poster, that's almost double earth's escape velocity, meaning at that speed they'll shoot right out of orbit.

Ra-di-a-tion. Heat can't convect in space, but that simply makes it easier to detect objects via IR signature.

Hiding in the sun only works if you are directly between the sun and the sensor at a near 90 degree angle and the sheer mass of a several-kilometer-wide cloud of marbles dense enough to reliably destroy a space station makes it highly unlikely to go unnoticed.

Hyz, I know you think you're on the money, but the thermal radiation statement you have just made is totally immaterial given that I have already addressed it.

Thermal radiation is only transmitted in space via the electromagnetic radiation - specifically that in the infrared spectrum. The light shed by stars, the light shed by the sun, and the reflection of light on both the earth and the moon are so gross in power that a handful of ball bearings aren't going to show up unless they've been heated to several thousand degrees. If this were not the case, NASA wouldn't have to analyze telemetry to find drifting or decomissioned satellites - they'd just point a big IR camera in the general area and go, "Ah! There it is!"

I know you believe that thermal radiation will be enough to see objects like this, but you are incorrect. There is too much IR noise to do what you are suggesting.

That said, I'm not suggesting a huge cloud of ball bearing is undetectable. It's not. I'm just saying that you won't detect ball bearings - or even human bodies or missile debris - based on thermal radiation. Even if a ball bearing cloud was big enough to detect via heat differential, it'd be easier to detect in other ways.

Well sure. That's the plan. You don't WANT a cloud of really fast moving and hard to spot crap in LEO. A single pass at the target should do a good job. And I'd be that the size particle NASA designed for was a lot smaller than 2 gm, and it wasn't metal.

I think the point is that the mega's would stop you before you got into orbit/position to effect your stratergy. They simply have devoted to much resourses and strategic effort to allow anyone (including their mega rivials) to dick with ZOH and ZOGB. They must have had teams of stratergists planning how to take out ZOH and how to stop those plans. Foremost in thses anti attack stratergies must be monitoring the equipment (that they build) to get at LEO stations.

Not from orbit to orbit they don't. The ultra mach speeds are all down to the thing plummeting from orbital velocities to rest on the ground. Gravity helps. They don't have rockets, AFAIK, they're de-orbited by railgun type mechanisms.

I am remembering years and years ago. But if I wanted to destroy Zurich-Orbital and I had near infinite resources I would use a nuclear explosion powered X-ray laser. If the math is sound and it should be, it should work just fine against orbital targets as it does against when firing on land based targets from orbit.

Easiest way though is simply taking over several old GPS satellites and send it at Z-O. With 2 tons of weight and 15lbs of thrust/inch Once it comes within 200 miles on the correct rotational approach it detonates itself. The debris cloud should be enough to leave a ring around the earth where Z-O and anything else on that plane was.

I never knew that Lexan could wreck Aluminum so well...

I have a feeling that it's not so much the lexan, it's the 23,000 foot per second velocity. Hell, you could probably get a notepaper spitwad to make a dent in that block if you shot it that fast.

No, it was geared towards rock and ice and while they expected most of the dust to be fine, they also expected larger chunks of ice and rock.

Either way, it toesn't really matter. I'd go with the KISS method. Keep it simple, stupid. Logistically, you'd be better off designing and building a few stealth missiles over trying knock out ZO with a bunch of marbles.

That's as opposite KISS as it's possible to be....