So yeah, through various means, my group "acquired" a Skytrain our of Arsenal, modded it to hell and back, and are now living out of it. The only problem is that I have no clue how to price the lifestyle. They don't need to pay rent, but they still need nourishment, and fuel and such. Any suggestions from those wiser than me?

Bust open the Advanced Lifestyles in Runner's Companion and simply drop or halve the element that constitutes "rent."

Or leave it exactly as is and assume they're paying for upkeep, maintenance, fuel, or permanent storage for the vehicle (presumably it's not in the sky all the time).

I think it would be up to them.

I mean if they just park the thing in the middle of a salt flat and spend their time smelling really bad they could probably get by on squatter level.

On the other end if they want to park the thing in reputable locations, fly around some, have roving gym memberships to stay crisp and clean and order out all the time because they don't have a kitchen I could see them easily being middle or possibly even high.

Considering these things burn fuel by the hundreds of gallons if they want to dress nice, impress the ladies, and be jet setters in UCAS one day, Japan the next, and Africa on the weekend they could push themselves right up to luxury.

Charge 'em one level lower than whatever amenties the aircraft has, multiplied by the number of people living in it. Like if it has 5 residents and "High Amenities," charge 'em the Medium Lifestyle amount (what is that, 3k a month?) multiplied by 5.

If it doesn't have the amenties mod, well... Squatter it is!

Query: Is it stationary? Or do they actually fly it from one place to another?

If stationary, they just need to do basic maintenance on it, so maybe a medium lifestyle.

If they're flying it from one place to another, they need permits, fuel, regular maintenance (which can get really expensive after say, a bird strike on the leading edge of the wing). I'd make them maintain at *least* a high lifestyle if not greater.

At least 10% of the airplane cost per year.

Look for prices on fuel per gallon and how much mileage you would get out of it and charge the party for how far they want to travel. Tack on a low - squatter lifestlye per person and tack on a medium lifestyle after everything is accounted for general plane upkeep.

A few things to clarify:

1: "Various Means" = Pwnd a Mitsuhama strike team with a bulldozer

2: This thing is stealthed like crazy & we have a technomancer on board--no permits or flight plans thank you.

3: It can land in water and we generally keep it to uninhabited areas to avoid having people figure out we have it

4: We upgraded the amenities, I forget how far

5: It has two full robotic arms, we don't need fuel--we steal planes out of the sky, drain them, and drop them on our enemies

6: We're pretty much staying around hong kong atm, not planning to move for a while, barring another "Oh shit we gotta leave the hemisphere for a few years" situation. Y'know, like when we stole the plane. We won't be returning to seattle for a while...

[edit]

7: We've also got a repair drone and a couple mechanically-inclined characters, we do our own maintenance. Got it from "one rotor shot off mid landing" to "flies better than it did out of the factory" in about an hour with one really good repair roll.

How is that even possible?

Vehicle mod rules in Aresenal, omae.

They don't have to make sense, they just have to be RAW. We've informally named the plane the "Outlaw Star"

Unless the skytrain can generate lift in excess of the weights of both planes, with its' forward speed reduced by the additional drag of an awkwardly grasped airplane, it's going to fall out of the sky. Even shifting to a hovering profile means generating thrust in excess of both planes' weights, while addressing the other plane's thrust.

I'm not saying it's not possible, but for a heavy lift tilt rotor to do it does seem more than a little silly. Then again, so do a lot of things in Shadowrun.

Air Elemental bound to the hull makes the physics cry over the rapeage.

There, explanation done.

Thank you CanRay.

Draining fuel and dropping a plane out of the sky could get you in SERIOUS trouble. You don't know who you are going to piss off with stunts like that. Personally you knock over a plane and drain it's fuel and then drop it on someones head expect to probably destroy or take something that will probably get a AAA sending multiple teams and shadow runners at you. If not you are destroying millions and millions of on a constant basis and dropping it on whoever you don't like. Expect to get thor shotted after you do like 10 million in damages (a.k.a. 5-10 planes.) Doing stuff like this splashes the pond a little too much I would think in a SR setting.

For serious. Maintaining an aircraft that presumably moves most of the year is going to be a monumental expense, much less fueling it. They're getting no bargain.

Assuming you're refering to the movement power, Adam has stated that its effect is basically non-existant on larger-than-metahuman objects, so I don't think that would fly.

bahdumpah

Was that before or after they included the bit in the rulebook about how DocWagon uses spirits with movement power to run their ambulances?

i don't believe he ever said anything solid, but rather that sufficiently large objects should probably be harder to effect with movement.

Isn't there a bit of a difference in size between an ambulance and a airplane that a group of people can live in?

Given that DocWagon uses tilt-wings, too... no.

Actually, that was more of a joke--although this is a VTOL craft and the arms themselves have a strength of 30 each. (Equal to the plane's body) Granted, we're playing things a little loose with real-world physics even putting arms on this thing, but this is shadowrun, not the real world. Beleive me, it's in everyone's best interest that I not be able to apply my IRL knowlege of aerodynamics.

As far as repercussions go, we already stole this plane from a AAA after raiding one of their black labs, killing everyone inside, rigging a charge to the geothermal tap powering the place, killing the strike team they sent in, and stealing their plane, armor, and weapons.

I'd say we're already in "super pissed-off AAA" mode.

Thing is, we covered our tracks so perfectly there's nothing for them to go on to actually find us. The plane's stealthed to hell, and we've also adopted such uber-paranoid security measures that it'd be damn near impossible to even tie our various activities to the same group of people--let alone identify or locate said group. Thor shots don't do you any good if you don't know where to aim, and by the time things get hot enough that taking out a city to get us becomes an acceptable option, we'll have already left the hemisphere.

Besides, runner teams and corporate strike forces we can handle. To quote our GM from tonight's session: "That's it, I'm not sending any more strike teams after you."

We beat them in 1 IP, without any of our guys taking a hit. Unfortunately, he seems to be looking at dragons now.



Except that it's not moving, hardly ever in fact. Too high profile. We just got our hands on the means to blackmail our way into control of an airport, as well a various utilities around Hong Kong, so we'll have a better means of fueling and storing this thing soon. Meantime it's parked out in the middle of nowhere and serving as a fully stealthed base of operations from which we launch our fully stealthed amphibious submersible citymaster and fully stealthed amphibious motorcycle.

As for splashing the pond, we're way beyond that. We're trying to take over the world, omae--the normal bounds of an SR setting were left bleeding in the dust with that MCT strike team we fragged.

At the moment we're cementing relations with 9x9 and surreptitiously taking over Hong Kong. From there we'll expand our power base.

As for what the GM decided on, we upgraded the plane to medium amenities, and have to pay a group lifestyle cost to cover food, security and such. I forget the exact figure it worked out to, as I'm not the one handling the group account, but he used the alternate lifestyle rules in Runner's Companion to factor in the plane's accomodations.

Our sniper's comment when the GM asked us what kind of entertainment we wanted:

"We have high explosives and low morals, we have all the entertainment we need."

*Sniff* I haven't heard that sentence since I moved away from home...

Now I feel homesick.

I wish I had heard that phrase before. It may become a new mantra in my games.

Chris

im right now in a mental state somewhere between those two

given the threads i have been reading here lately i needed this one

this is clearly in the realm of pink mohawks meets the a-team

Ok even with on board mechanical types, you will still need a facility to perform certain maintenance functions, like engine or rotor drive train etc.

Stealth gear/items will need similar maintenance also.

I will not even go as to how you stealthed this airframe. Truly stealthed airframes are designed that way from the beginning not a mod job later on.

As for grabbing other airframes while in flight....Blanket No.

What are doing for the various lubricants? which are different that lubricants used on non rotor airframes.

But your GM does not have as many ways to "locate" such a thing as your airframe.

Why locate you when I can lure you into a "trap" location of my choosing.

Wonderful thing about EMP Weapons/Pulse spells and the like, render TM and hacker mute.

As for the GM never put out something that you do now want/wish your players to get a hold of.

As for the spirit movement power that is true but unfortunately the airframe is not build for such speeds....

WMS

he probably didn't expect us to get it, because of two things, we were fighting several mitsuhama tomino's with a strike team (we had to shoot down the plane to get at the strike team, we only hit an engine, so we could repair it), and we were only maybe 3 or 4 sessions in, not enough to have enough karma to develop

So.... your saying your GM is just handing you thing on a silver platter and letting you take over the world. This does not fit into my vision of Shadowrun but if that is the way you want to play it then that is how it gets done. 3-8 sessions in and you have almost taken over Hong Kong is fast in any Shadowrun game. What is your starting BP or karma? Never mind... why bother... If they are taking over Hong Kong why are you even asking about how they are going to pay for their plane? I.... blarg! *head explodes*

Did the mage clean his/her signature after casting spells? It is the way most teams get found out and hammered.

You can accomplish a lot quickly when your GM is Monty Haul....

you can accomplish it really quickly when 3 of the players are evil geniuses, and 1 of those three bought 50 bp worth of explosives, and laws

So you do enough damage to an airplane's engines so it has to make an emergency landing in the middle of combat, but you can hop right in it and fly away? Despite the fact that takes a lot more power to take off than to keep flying? And you can then blithely get a spare engine for the plane and get it installed without anyone seeing anything suspicious? Right....

no, shoot a couple of laws at one engine, it lands, technomancer is jamming all signals from the riggers on board, we wipe out the strike team with a 40 mph bulldozer, and i can't remember how we did the tominos, then we start using our repair drone on the plane, and then the session ends, and i missed the next, so i don't know the whole thing.

The Diffrence from how the players see the world and what's really happening are a great deal different.

A law hitting an tilt rotor engine in flight, causes the engine to cease functioning ie BOOM engine is now a non working engine. Ie "Its Dead Jim".

Pilot makes some very interesting crash landing rolls, with out damaging the airframe.

Check out the ranges on Jammers until Arsenal came out the ranges SUX, unless your TM is was using the ECCM thingee.

Ok now you have a airframe with a basically non functional engine ie it is blown away. Anti Vehicle/Armor weapons are not gel rounds, they do not inflict stun damage on airframes. Tilt rotors with only one engine do not take off very well.

Your repair drone walks over and pull another engine out your arses and installs it.

Since the strike team did not spread out they let some bozos with a bulldozer kill them. Bulldozers are not anywhere near a tank. They are not designed to be shot at. Too many exposed things, hydrolic lines, etc.

I am with KZT on this one.

WMS

oh come on, let them have their fun

Meh, It will not matter after next session. No matter what happens, they are screwed.

does anyone know how to counter a thor shot? I have a feeling one is coming our way

Nah, you painted yourself into this corner. Have a Backup PC.

That or hemorrhage Edge.

You leave all of your fancy toys behind, get new faces/voices, and then find the deepest, darkest cave you can find and pray to the spirits that the corps never find you again. Then in ~six months or so you die when they finally track you down.


Or, given the fact that your DM let you have all these fancy toys in the first place, have your Decker/Technomancer hack their way into the Thor platform and rain the ultimate destruction upon all those who stand in the way of your ultimate conquest.

"What are we doing tonight Brain?"

"Why the same as every night."

First, good intel (to know when and where it's launched) and high mobility - it takes quite a while for it to come down and it can't exactly fly after you.
Then, ship lasers, interceptor missiles or a mage with a telescope and a physical combat spell... or a levitation/spirit spell to make it deviate from course.

Yes be in a suborbital or orbital location maybe even Zurich Orbital.

Actually best thing is to scrap the current characters, start over, give the players a bump in starting bps, then learn from the experience and game on.

WMS

Or, the next best thing - a flying airplane.

You don't need a thor shot. You can't see or hear the plane that drops 6 2000LB JDAMs on you from 30,000 feet.

Another thing to consider. Assume the plane was tricked out prior to the steal. The corp, realizing the loss of that tech was really a problem, immediately sets R&D into finding ways to counter their own stealthing tech, and implements a prototype as soon as they're able. They send out a fresh team equipped with the prototype tech to track down the runners and/or the plane. If they find the plane, they have orders to vaporize the blasted thing. If they find the team, they wipe them out. Realizing that if the former happens, they'll be able to track that to the runners if they're careful about it.

Make an epic cat and mouse game out of the runners' equipment being targeted and systematically destroyed, and force them on the offensive just to keep themselves alive. Maybe eventually reach a settlement with the corp (Something like run for us, and never again against us and we *won't* kill you and everyone you know).

I bet by the time Shadowrun takes place, satellite imaging is very fast and very detailed. I would suspect that with imaging recognition software and advanced spy satellites, many AAA corps (on their own or by contracting out) could locate just about any aircraft sitting on a runway almost anyplace on earth. There are only so many of those kinds of planes… and in a data age, you can bet agencies like the future FAA can look up exactly where 99% of the planes are at any given time. A simple cross reference and the odds of finding / identifying your plane are very high.

And there's a really fair chance that the project will be cut before it's ever finished.
Just because the exec got replaced (because he wasted tooo much money) and the new one want's to impress with cutting costs.

It always helps to have backup characters, but when the GM says make one because you have just shot yourselves in the foot hardcore it seems to me that strapping arms onto a plane and thinking it's inconspicious might not be the best move. One of the players/GMs at my table put it nicely. The only reason you survive right now is because it costs more money to hunt you down and kill you then to leave you alone, but the minute those rolls reverse you and your team are just dead. The minute you ping anywhere you just die.

Ummm.. what do you mean "by the time Shadowrun takes place"? Satellites today can read your license plate without fail.

And yet can't tell one building from a Chinese Embassy.

Or tell Fighter Pilots about Canadian Training Missions going on that they've been made aware of during their briefings!

A AAA corp may be able to identify the plane, the corp should have the resources to be able to do so. However, can the person in charge of the project authorise the resources and manpower to do so? Sure, if you stole Lowfyr's personal aircraft... But given the bureacratic infighting within a corp, not to mention the infighting that will occur within a cross-corp authority like Corp Court (which has jurisdiction over the corps) and friction between the CC and national authorities, how much resources and information do you think they would share? You can bet that there is likely to be as little as they can possibly make it while appearing to be cooperative and if they do not want to even appear to be cooperative, then you can make it zero.

Once you start dropping planes on your enemies I would imagine that the status quo which keeps Runners safe vanishes in a puff of smoke because it quickly becomes everyone's best interest to put down these rabid mutts. Sure there is going to be infighting amongst the various factions but that doesn't mean the Runners are going to survive the crossfire.

One note not in the SR4 rules, but in RL anytime a Active Jammer is turned on, it can and will be detected at twice the ranger of the active jammer, at least. A skilled EW operator withe some basic gear can go well beyond that 2x range.

Since all Jammers in SR4 are active....yes they may not be able to pin point your location but they will now the general location, the longer the active jammer is operating the more exact the location fix.

WMS