Let's talk about satellite coverage. Right now for free you can get low to medium resolution photos of most any urban area for free. What do you feel runners can get for free in 2070? What do you think they could get for 3k ? Given the number of factions in space is it reasonable to ty to completely zero out an installation's foot print on satellite. If not does this mean all facilities have cover stories?

IIRC one of the sourcebooks mentions that the orbital data haven/auction house Asgard also offers very high resolution satellite coverage for a price. For for 3,000 I'd think you should be able to get straight optical photographic coverage of the target and surrounding area plus maybe infrared or radar as well, although more likely you'd probably have to pay extra for those. One of you're big problems though is going to be image interpretation after you've got the imagery unless it's something large and obvious since that's a fairly specialised field,

for the right price, real-time coverage in a wide variety of spectrums would not be out of the ordinary

And, for an even more right price, that same footage won't be sold to the opponents.

My friends and I were using GoogleMaps to look at Fort Riley, Kansas for a Rifts game we were playing. We had enough detail to see the shadows of individual soldiers, fer chrisakes. Of course, the next weekend the US DoD had requested that the resolution over military bases be severely reduced to individual buildings but it was pretty cool while it lasted.

this is an EXCELLENT point. I think coverage denial would be very profitable. especially if done auction style.

Hey, just thinkin' of Desert Wars. Be a good way to modify the odds, or give a Penalty.

"For having Tanks Offside, the Saeder-Krupp Steel Dragons are penalized Satalite Surveilance for Ten Minutes."

What about being sold outdated info, or totally wrong info.
What if the sat. corp sold the fact that you were wanting the info to the target and they had a suprise party waiting on you.

Just dont feel to paranoid about it.

I feel like any Mega with a security division worth it's salt would have a department dedicated to corrupting or "creatively modifying" any kind of satellite intelligence on their important facilities.

I was reading a story recently about a town, which is like a members only place and they got Google to unmap it - breach of their privacy.
Several military forces are complaining because it allows people to see their training grounds, and find previously hidden locations.

There's been several stories of images so good [with todays gear - so imagine the future's to be much better] you can see people, dogs, swimming pools, etc.

More interesting is the whole pointer thing for Google - showing map visitor locations...
...Or even more useful [???], the whole Google street level thing - where they've had to fuzzy people's faces so they aren't identifiable.


The whole map thing reminds me of a book I read a few years ago ["Raiders of the Lost Car Park", I think it was]...
...Where the hero has a proper map of London - one that shows all the places the other, commonly available maps don't show.

Because these places aren't shown on maps, people don't go there.

Hi

The problem is, that this High Res pictures in Google Earth are made with Aircrafts rather than satellites. So if you need good pictures, take a drone, I think Lockheed Optic X should work fine, and fly above the target area and take fotos.

According to my Aerospace script, satellites have the following Resolutions:
Height/ dx
1000km/1.4m
800km/1.2m
500km/0.7m
300km/0.4m (this is minimum height for satellites that should stay in orbit more than a few days)


cya
Tycho

Unbelievable.

If you where just interested in layout is there some other type of imaging that could do better? Just curious.

The yanks were all bout telling people how they had satellites capable of reading number plates...
...So google planet imaging should be about the same level.

Except, would any satellites be active - 2 separate global datanet crashes...
...Against tech that won't be upgraded very often.

This is what we in the business affectionately call "bullshitting". The causes of blurring your satellite imagery mean that the numbers that Tycho gave are probably minimums (unless they're the result of some kind of statistical analysis of observed imagery), meaning that they can expect any object of 0.4m in size to cover a single pixel at best and anything smaller is gets blurred in with a bunch of other things and is effectively invisible. Letters blur into their background easily because of this and they're rather difficult to profile from higher resolutions. They can interpolate from a number of shots from nearby points, but there's a limit to the improvement in the resolution; the resolution is not going to be all that good.

CCD technology will have improved, but there's a hard limit on it in the form of the minimum size of a track, in the end the major factor becomes the size of your imaging equipment, which is primarily limited by other factors when we're talking about satellites. I see the megas focussing on shrinking the whole apparatus and reducing the costs so that they can put more packages into orbit and get closer to realtime worldwide coverage - better profits for more up-to-date information.

In short, I don't think the satellite imaging tech of SR will be able to improve significantly enough that they'll be able to read number plates or newspapers. I'd be willing to call the best dx as 0.2m, at a quite significant cost (charging around a month of high lifestyle for a good footprint of imagery). Most people will use drone footage instead.

And, given the kind of customers that want satellite imagery of sites, I can see customer privacy being in the standard contract.

I'd say we'd easily have full motion on areas currently in the sattelite footprint. However, I think that with extraterritoriality, different corp services would have different things available for motion at different times.

Also, with extraterritorial land, it's a good chance that there would be widespread censorship, so you'd look at an area and get a few locations blurred and motionless/covered with ads.

I imagine there might be some higher class prestige service that rents from most of the corps with satcons, and correlates it for you at a higher price.

Without paying? I imagine there would be a limited zoom, and maybe a time delay.

Of course, you can always hack your way into a relevant sattelite feed if you're good enough, and I'm sure there'd be hackers who specialise in exploiting and re-tasking sattelite surveillance to provide you with the cover you need, or even obfuscate you position.