I was looking through the sixth world wiki hoping to find some information on the who, what, where, and whys about the Desert Wars. It's been more than a few years since I've torn through some of the older source material so beyond the reference itself I haven't a clue as to conflict. To be honest the information is simply for a little character background information but seeing as I haven't had any luck so far drumming up more than "today the former Libya is the battleground of the Desert Wars" I figured someone out here might be able to lead me in the right direction.

thanx

(information about Libya from Target:Wastelands via the SixthWorldWiki)

They are part-War games, part live-fire training exercises, part
tridshow and part duelling system for the megacorps and merc companies.

It started out serious I think. But the trid ratings and later sales of the combat footage were so high that it kind of caught on.

There is sort of a competition now I believe, with some kind of structure you could be on. But sometimes I think there are battles against different groups trying to prove whose products are the best. And sometimes I believe it's actually how some corps settle a grudge match without losing their precious buildings.

Plenty of work for mercinaries there as the corps would rather not lose loyal security forces when they could field some runners instead.

It's a major sport now, and I'm sure the Government Militaries are also in on it, to try and win some prestige back as well.

"See, we're still tougher than the Corps in one thing!" type publicity.

GO BLACK DEVILS!

Does the French Foreign Legion still exist in the sixth world? I could see them being part of the Desert Wars thing.

I lump it up as:

Corporations send troops and equipment to promote, and test, their new products/arms/doctrines,
National Militaries go to, well, compete: and regain lost prestige, to train, to test as well. Maybe to copy.
Larger mercenary companies I can also see participating stand-alone, but mercenaries are also hired by the two categories above. Mostly the first.

They are set in North or East Africa: I think I heard Libya and Kenya, but I might just be making it up as I go along.

I imagine the different categories/"events"/"leagues" have ... "Point limits" or regulations in the same manner that Wargamers "choose" their army based on pre-set point limits or varying rules. Maybe not, though, but it wouldn't be much fun to see some UCAS Light Infantry Regiment get mowed down by the Saeder-Krupp 14th Armored Batallion, armed with their prototype Cougar A3 tanks.

... or maybe it would.

Or it'd be hilarious to watch the Armoured Unit get picked off one at a time by skirmishers with portable Anti-Tank weaponry and low-tech traps.

Yeah, no doubt, I'm just saying there are probably pre-established scenarios and leagues: Urban combat, open desert, night infantry tactics, etc, or maybe it's one big FFA that looks more like an RTS game on steroids. Gravy either way.

Hell, I'd watch.

Or at least download the torrent.

Oh, and speaking of UCAS Light Infantry...

GO BLACK DEVILS!

There is a lot in Shadowrun that straddles the border of the illogical, the irrational or the completely unbelievable. Desert Wars, as it is conceived, doesn't just straddle that border, but has far crossed over the insanity horizon and keeps accellerating.

bread and circus...

it worked for the romans...

this is basically the Colosseum on a much grander scale.

now say you have bookies, prices for objectives met and so on...

shit, i can see it happen if the world becomes fucked up enough. beats having WW3 anyways.

hell, one could say that we are seeing the building of it down in the middle east and similar as we speak...

I think we all realise by now how incredibly expensive a war is. Perhaps I don't quite realise what the scale of a Desert War is, but the cost of the loss of life and equipment in an actual war is never outweighed by the revenue generated on sports channels and at the bookmakers. And to use this is a testing ground for new material makes even less economic sense. Not to mention the fact that regardless of the intent of the equipment being displayed, I can't imagine that a grissly battlefield with torn off limbs and half the equipment for sale crushed into a fine dust will make for an attractive advertising campaign. Maybe it's just me, however.

It's a game, stupid.

thats why you get mercs to fight over a price and lend/lease them some toys from the showroom

btw, while its called wars, i dont think they are the massive scale invation style tank battles of WW2 desert campaign and similar.

more like 1-2 APC/IFV's with maybe a artillery-piece backup.

hell, things we call sports today can potentially be traced back to training programs for soldiers.

a modern example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biathlon

but the old greeks probably used the classical olympic games as a non-military way to show off ones best warriors.

heh, even today the olympics are just as much politics as sports...

See, I get that, and would agree with you, except for the following; if you play a game, then you decide upon some rules. In the context of a roleplaying game, especially set in a rather fantastic setting, I understand that things don't always have to mimic reality, but we can all agree that things should obey the rules that were agreed upon. To me, this means that if you play a game in a high fantasy setting, you don't have adversaries in steam-powered tanks. It means that if you play a horror game, in which you fight vampires and werewolves, that you can assume that gravity is still gravity. And in the case of Shadowrun, where corporations go out of their way to hire expandable criminals to do their dirty work so they can maintain deniability, probably because the grizzly and the gritty has a negative effect on their shareholder value. Get where I'm going with this?

more like they hire shadowrunners to have a plausible deniability against being stomped by every other big corp on the planet.

think of it as a corp cold war.

at the same time the desert wars work as a nice way to say "this is what we will throw at you if you decide to go hot on us!".

and at the same time they get to see if the design can deliver what the simulations predict.

Interesting. That would mean that in your Shadowrun universe corporations are more afraid of the damage another corporation can do, rather than appeasing their shareholders and consumers. I guess that's valid, if you consider them as entities maneuvering on a political stage rather than an economic one. Kind of like nations and states instead of corporations and businesses, but even a nation needs to appease their constituents.

hey, corp court is a political construct...

and with extraterritoriality, they basically are nations...

as for stockholders. i dont know how many of them are publically traded.

s-k for instance has a big lizard as the majority stockholder, and i dont see him trading himself below the 50% mark any time soon. aztechology basically owns aztelan. ares has damien knight in a similar, if weaker position (22 rather then 63 for the lizard), so there he is probably playing politics to keep the bit players on his side.

as for the rest, sadly the BBB do not have a good writeup to say if they are publically traded or not. renraku seems to be private. neonet is publically traded by the looks of it (iirc, one part of what became neonet has a IPO that is a big part of crash 2.0).

one thing to remember is that a corp is not a democracy. your vote carries the weight of you stock percentage.

so one person can rule, 2 people can cooperate, 3 can have a political infight that would make a royal family proud, any more and you got the makings of a bankruptcy and cross-pollination of the market.

sometimes i find myself thinking of the corps as modern day aristocracy...

The corps are definitly interested in profit.

But I think you're thinking the scale of these conflicts is more than it it.

I don't agree with the 1-2 APC thing. But it isn't hundreds of thousands in battle.

Also there probably is a requirement to field test stuff before people will buy it. This isn't just a BS concern. Many(most? all?) military systems have bugs that need to be worked out. A lot gets altered after they see field action. From assault rifles (M-15 and the British rifle they still use had major issues on release), to the fanciest jets (the F-22 had some weird error where computer systems shut down when crossing the international date line).

Think of it like crash testing for cars. Now there is the issue of people. I believe some events use non lethal weaponry. But beyond that if the soldiers are SINless mercinaries nobody cares and even with lethal tech 2070 medtech is pretty good at keeping people alive.

mercs could even be criminals with gps enabled cranial bombs...

Aztechnology and S-K are not publicly traded. The rest have various different stock options going around, but they're very limited in a lot of ways.

The Kings of the Corporations make damn sure they keep their Controlling Interest.

Although Shiawase had a major dustup during Crash 2.0 when the "Old Man" of the corporation (Who had died awhile back and was doing his Stocks from beyond the grave!) finally shut the hell up and the kiddies fought over his percentages.

We have a desert. We have competing corporations looking for lucrative arms deals. We need a way to show that Corp X's bang-bang is bangy-er than Corp Y's. Hey, let's have a staged war in it! And make it an annual televised event! Cha-ching!

I mean what else are you going to do in the desert?

I always figured that Desert Wars as a corproate sopnsored deathmatch was a good idea. I mean look at cost versus rewards scenarios.

Monetary: the costs are going to be enormous, similar to holding the olympics with little more than prestige to show for being there. however one would assume that the primary corps involved are makers of killing machines of some kind. with a spectacle like that your guns advertise themselves. if a potential customer is unsure of the combat effectiveness of a product you can show them a real, legal example of what being put into this particular meat grinder is like.

Loss of Life: well first one has to admit that life is rather cheap in the sixth world. further corporations as monoliothic entities tend to grind individual ethics and morals into the most basic versions of themselves for survivals sake. finally as the combatants are either primarily mercenaries or corpsec it's easy to remember that they chose to do this. they went into this knowing full well that they are being paid to go into the meat grinder. when you out that together it's hard to argue that the cost of life is out of hand. after all there is a difference between a patriotic young person serving their country dying for nothing and a mercenary dying for fame and fortune.

so when you get visceral demonstrations of product viability combined with the lack of moral outrage over senseless death plus millions of devoted viewers you end up with a cash cow with enough milk for everybody.

Manchuria and Northern (most of?) China too... There's a constant low level war going on between the Warlords there and its actually where the Desert Wars began.

Wandering off away from what's actually been said about them in an actual book. If I were to decide to go into detail I'd suggest that the North African wars are probably more corp/national military based. They're closer to training exercises than actual warfare and the stakes are quite low. I could almost see it taking on a bizarre WWE type of atmosphere where individuals not actually involved in the actual combat trash talk each other and explain 'why' they're going to fight. The NA 'war' is the one with teams, leagues and a relatively low casualty count. Battles will be staged, various units and equipment might even cost 'points' to create fair fights. It's literally war as a sport. Very popular among gamblers, tech nerds, and casual viewers. Defiantly less gory.

By contrast the Manchurian war is just as televised but much 'grittier'. Most of the factions participating in it are honest to god fighting each other. They fight for a pittance from the networks and in a desperate attempt to fend off the neighboring tribes. There's execution videos, torture, massacres, and all sorts of other crap like that. They occasionally even kidnap a tourist or suit, make a bunch of demands and kill him in an unpleasant fashion. Any time things start to slow down, one of the Networks will drop a big merc unit in with orders to stir shit up. The money they give the actual tribes is enough to keep them in ammunition, combat drugs, and a bit of cyberware, but not much else. Needless to say with a much less carnival like atmosphere it attracts a... different sort of crowd.

Basically the only "rule" in Manchuria would be. "Nothing goes into, or out of Manchuria that can harm anybody outside of Manchuria... Occasionally the rest of China is fair game." This means no bio weapons, nukes, or anything like that. The boarders around manchuria are kept pretty damn secure but the rest of the time it's just ignored.

Unknown to the public but security is also provided by the fact that 90% of the combatants have a small kink bomb and GPS unit implanted at the same time as when they get a sim rig implanted, which in turn is often a condition in order to get supplies or money from the networks. The Manchurians literally can not leave... Or rather they can, but if they do ever pop up on the Networks radar they might end up having a 'stroke'.

Come to think of it... That might actually be a cool idea for a character.

Shouldn't they be called Frozen Wars instead of Desert Wars in Manchuria? I know the definition of a desert is lack of percipitation but come on. When you think desert you think sand, sun and camel spiders.

They started in lybia read target:wastelands and I think fields of fire has some information. Any how normally only the championship match is live fire the others are cgi and gel/capsule rounds and other such things but that can be live fire if both sides agree.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gobi_Desert

simply put thanks everyone

Your welcome.

GO BLACK DEVILS!