I always chalked it up to a mechanical inconsistency - for a universe that has developed C-12, the damage codes on other explosives has always seemed a little under-powered to me.

-Siege

For the life of me, I can't find it's stats. What page, what book?

While I mostly agree with your post, I think this part here is off kilter. Comparing the cost of losing a drone to a tank seems exaggerated. If the trends over the last 50 years stay true in regards to the costs of training and equipping soldiers, it's entirely possible that your average trooper's monetary costs could skyrocket over drones. While I will agree that there are situations where drones would be unsuited to the task, a soldier would hardly be something worth risking if you could instead send a squad of drones in that wont cause you to lose a huge sum of money in training, armor, weaponry, and augmentations. Which means that the vast majority of assignments would be handled by drones.

Soldiers First, Mission Always.

If you can't get your hands on more drones easily or drone parts, a cautious commander might be more inclined to risk Soldiers over the more "valuable" drones in order to keep a functional reserve of drones on hand, just in case.

Keep in mind, all this is based on hypothetical scenarios - and your scenario is just as plausible as mine. I just picked a tank as a large, valuable bit of equipment that is difficult to replace if lost "in the field."

-Siege

Well, remember, replacing a drone is as simple as building a new one on the assembly line. Replacing a soldier in 2070 is a matter of months of training, replacing lost equipment, and a series of difficult surgeries with lengthy recovery times (assume we're talking about soldiers more important than basic corp goons, way I see them, they're a matter of an armor jacket, a helmet, and an SMG with enough training to not shoot themselves) to put in a series of highly valuable implants. Which sounds more expendable?

125, arsenal.

btw, i keep thinking that the utility of mil spec armor depends on ones reading of "custom fitted".

if its 1. can never be refitted to another person, then the utility of it drops like a rock.

if its 2. can be refitted to another person, given custom tools and days of testing and adjusting, then its utility is on par with any other specialized gear.

the rules allow for second hand cyberware, why not second hand mil spec armor?

Hasn't this topic died yet? We've come full circle here. The entry in Arsenal specifically states that an armorer can refit a suit of milspec armor to another person of roughly the same size and shape. There's no more specifics associated with it than that, but it does say you can do it in the rules.

*snicker*

You'd be surprised - the US Army had (on some things still has) a helluva time producing, procuring or otherwise obtaining some equipment. And then getting the right part to the right unit is another headache. I picked a tank (Abrams) because for a while, some units couldn't get parts to maintain the heavy wear and tear while in Iraq.

Tangent: Months of training, for basic infantry, is roughly three months. Factor in virtual training sims and that can probably be cut down even further. And nobody can agree on what augmentations, if any, would be "standard issue" for rank and file.

But, as I say, your own mileage may vary.

-Siege

I'm basing my opinion on the trend since ww2. The cost of training and the time it takes to train soldiers has increased exponentially. The difference between an American soldier in ww2 in one in Vietnam is rather substantial, it's even worse when you compare a modern soldier to a Vietnam era soldier.

I would assume that it would be minimal, really. Mark 1 Mod 0 human bodies heal themselves with proper care and cyberware doesn't. Bodies also don't need regular maintenance in environmentally-controlled facilities. Besides, the best combat-effectiveness bang-to-buck ratio equipment can be used via goggles or installed in helmets if not shot into the soldiers veins through low-end auto-docs.

The 'with proper care' part invalidates this argument. With proper care, cyberwear keeps on ticking just fine. Cyberwear needs periodic software updates, but your unmodified human needs training and briefings - if you can't communicate long enough for a software patch every few months, you're likely far enough outside the loop to be an ineffective combatant in many cases. An injury that would require cyberwear to be physically repaired would likely require medical/surgical treatment on the unmodified human too. So, in short, I'm not really seeing your argument as being a good one for not enhancing troops.

Cost might be a better angle to take here.

Oh, I'm sorry. I completely forgot that cyberware can be repaired without more cost or logistical support than bedrest, pain killers and Big Macs. My bad!

WTF are you going on about? I was referring to the the argument that it would be more of a cost issue to cyber troops vs. a healing issue. My other point is that whatever type of trauma causes damage to cyber-systems is going to be the type that damages flesh-and-blood beyond the 'bedrest and painkillers' level of recovery. You're going to need medical and/or surgical help to deal with such massive trauma, and if that surgeon is trained to deal with your 'ware then they can do that too. The only real added requirements are added supply (cyberware spares) and training for the doctors - but increased need of training is going to be inevitable, that's just how the future rolls.

Although the soldier itself never actually changes, their equipment, training, tactics, and upkeep get more complex. It's one of the few constants as technology becomes more advanced. I'd imagine if we were discussing modern weaponry from a more primitive standpoint, someone would probably say that interceptor vests and automatic rifles were just needless strain on the logistics train when your breastplate just needs a hammer and a bit of polish to fix and your musket just needs a rod down the barrel and a bit of oil to the mechanism.

Three month is Basic.

How long does AIT take?

How long does a unit train before it is combat effective? Or would you want to be at war in a unit where everyone else in your platoon (including the platoon sgt) all graduated from Benning yesterday?

US Army Basic Training? Roughly two months, give or take. 11-Bravos, infantry, have another two or three weeks of AIT.

Your average Platoon Sergeant will be an E-6 to an E-7, although based on available manpower, E-5s have been known to fill the slot in a pinch. It is unlikely that a Platoon Sergeant, Section Sergeant or even Squad Leader will be new to the Army, although don't kid yourself - some NCOs have sailed their entire career without having deployed or deployed to a serious situation.

Psycho - the whole "cyberware, yea or nay for Soldiers" is two threads that way. I am so not gonna boobytrap that dead horse here.

Janice - A lot of time in Basic Training was spent trying to look busy - one of the many issues I have with the "mass conscription" theory of training and the US Army as a whole. The Army standard is - successful completion of Basic Training imparts all the fundamental skills needed to function adequately on a battlefield. There will obviously be a huge disparity between seasoned veterans and green troops (although I wonder if monitored BtL training might change that), but the basic training imparted to both was the same.

"Army Training" = "Death by Powerpoint".

-Siege

More sack time and someone cuddly to share it with.

What?

Remember guys that due to the fact orks are well suited for the military life and overwhelming come from poor areas, the military in 2070 will almost all be comprised of orks, who unlike the general populace will all have body 4 (If they are in the military, they are not going to have human body 1 when the average is 3)

So you can expect near universal issue of heavy milspec to the actual privates and non-commissioned officers, because they will be disproportionately orks.

Orks could be a generals dream. Breed like no other, mature fast, naturally resilient.

Drop in the odd dwarf or troll for those roles that need em, and the only place you run into humans (or maybe a elf) will be the desk pilots and other support roles where brain is more needed then brawn.

I would see alot of orcs in Uncle Sams Misguided Children. Elves as the brains behind the desk. unfortunately this would bring us back to all the issues had in 19th century armies. I prefer armies as being meritocracies.

Don't forget that microphones and cameras only take up 1 capacity slot, and you can put audio and visual enhancements on said items. So for 1 slot you get a lot of enhancements otherwise not gained.

Its not that they breed fast - that doesn't help you at all because you need to train them up anyway and that takes years.

Its just that poor people end up in the military in the rank and file. In SR4, poor people are orks. So you're going to have lots of orks, and the fact that they are strong, fit and tough by default is just a happy side effect.

Yes, and orks are especially bone on braking the cycle of poverty. They are saddled a drastically higher reproductive rate. That means that if parents want to keep a significant portion of there children provided for at even subsistence level it will be that much harder to invest the resources necessary to get even 1 child apprenticed/educated/vested to a conformable level. Next we have the issue of age. Orcs are having kids younger that other meta types. Even if orcs start working earlier, how many people do you know who could support 4-8 kids or whatever after 2-3 years in the work force? Top all this off with a healthy dose of racism exacerbated by orcs actually having a lower upper bound on logic and you've got large tacks of screwed people.

Some of those assumptions are taken straight from Humanis propaganda, chummer. I can't believe that 2070 technology doesn't make contraception incredibly convenient and reliable. It is simply incompatible with the cost and effect of other items of gear, cyberware, treatments, etc. that you couldn't spend 10:nuyen: and have a contraceptive treatment that would be good for years at the least (for men or women). In the dystopian world of SR2070, I see abortion being treated a lot more casually and again, it's incompatible with the rest of the setting that it wouldn't be quick and (too) easy. And when an ork does decide to have kids, that same tech should make it pretty easy to decide how many you want. Let's just make the point clear: this is a world in which breast implant surgery costs less than $100 (taking 1:nuyen: = US$1). You can get replacement eyes (including cost of the surgery) for $500 and you can get it done at a high street shop. Whatever the natural biology of the ork, it's easily overridden by 2070 technology. Want support for that? A real world human can manage have a child a year by nature. A woman in developing countries may quite commonly have four or five children. But in developed Western countries, two is the norm. It's not for biological reasons, but for the ready availability of contraception. If human women in 2070 aren't living up to their breeding potential, then there are few reasons why ork women would be.

There is a documentary about exactly this subject called "Demographic Winter". Most of Europe is down to under 1.7 children per couple. The minimum amount to actually replace the existing population is 2.1. You have to have the .1 to make up for accidents, murder, etc. Consequently, the only reason the U.S. is above 2.1 is because of immigration. Gotta love Mexicans (seriously), now if I could only get them to sign the register book at the border. On the other hand, that amount of immigration leaves Mexico with a population deficit of their own.

I just thought I'd add this in case anyone wanted more info on the subject. This documentary could give you the why, how, and results of population decline/population aging. (Population aging is when the average age of your citizens is increasing because fewer children are being born and senior citizens are living longer.)

Knasser,


Taken together I'm assuming that you read my post and heard me saying there are biological reason that orcs are/must be/should be/will always be/ poor dumb breeders. (I further, but irevently assume that this triggered we places red-flags you have build up while dealing with rl race). I said that those challenges make it harder to specifically break out of poverty, not avoid falling into poverty. Because yes, access to a Stuffer Shacks and Plan Parenthood's matrix node is sufficient to trumps most of the biological issues. But today in California every minor has easy access to free and confidential reproductive health services and information. By your logic there should be no teen pregnancy in CA ... but there is. There are still barrier to getting those services. Say an orc is working 2 jobs has really really been meaning to renew her 3 year treatment. She only put it off an extra 2 months and bam 4 mouths to feed. Then there are old wifes telling you that if take that pinky medic you've never have an awakened son. Then there are the people where all the street docs within half a days walk don't supple contraception because taking that makes you a race trader. Etc etc etc. Stepping away from speculating about culture, I see there being tons of SINless though, no small number of them orcs, who don't even have that level of access to basic health care, let alone reproductive health care for searly economic reasons. People die in the barrens for want of clean water and anti-botics.

First off, we're talking about a fictional race that, unlike real world races, actually does have significant differences to other races (I'll ignore petty real world issues like sickle cell anemia, in the real world, we're all biologically pretty much the same), so any outrage on the part of the orks you read into my post wasn't meant. The line about Humanis was just an in-character joke because some of the stuff you said was the sort of stuff that Humanis would put about - orks will outbreed humans, orks just churn out litters of young, etc.

This line: is incorrect. That's not my logic. Greater teen pregnancy (not that it's necessarily a bad thing in itself, that's an issue about society's economic structure and cultural mores), is not a result of racial tendencies, but of wealth distribution. In the USA, which is where you sound like you are from, there is a very large wealth disparity and some ethnic groups are very predominantly on one side of that gap, statistically speaking. But it is incorrect, just as it would be incorrect were orks a real race, to attribute a higher number of children to ethnicity rather than economic disparity. Religion can also play a role in contraception, but this is another correlation rather than causation.

The point is that if a human woman can have 0 to 8 children, but stops at 3 or 4, then there is no reason why an ork woman who can have 0 - 16 children shouldn't stop at 3 or 4 as well. An ork family need not be anymore bound to poverty by the cost of raising children than a human family. Note, for simplification, I'm ignoring that humans and orks are quite capable of forming mixed couples with each other.

Also, I think you underestimate the potency of another sixty years of birth control technology. You raise a case of a young ork girl working two jobs leaving her three year renewal too late and getting pregnant. She probably has months of time to nip to a Stuffer Shack and get another contraception DIY kit. ("Press injector nozzle against upper arm. Press red button. Do not use with Dermal Armour.") The odd ork (or human) woman that gets accidentally pregnant isn't going to shift the demographics. At any rate, the issue was whether an ork woman is tied to a poorer life because of such mishaps. Probably not. A human woman that has a kid will find herself in a similar predicament as far as job prospects go. And note that I said I thought that in the dystopian world of SR2070, sixty years from now, abortion is probably much less of a concern to people and would certainly be medically cleaner and cheaper as well as choice of number of children when you do have them.

In short, the important point is that there is little to no difference between the situation for young humans as there is for young orks as far as pregnancy goes, once you factor in modern 2070 technology. SR2070 technology makes any biological differences between the two irrelevant.

As to taking contraception making you a "race traitor," I see no pre-existing reason for such a cultural artifact. You can use it if you want rapidly breeding orks in your setting and wish to justify it, but I don't know why it need exist in the setting otherwise. As you raise the issue, yes - equating SR metahuman races with real world ethnic groups is a sore point with me, and I'll say that orks are orks whether they are white, arabic, black or eskimo. Someone on these forums recorded his Shadowrun sessions and whilst they were entertaining, I immediately noticed that when some ork characters came in, he immediately started talking in a stereotypical "US black" accent. I don't know if that was conscious or not, but it was startlingly obvious to me. With goblinization and UGE sweeping all ethnic groups and (more importantly) nationalities equally, there's no reason to start equating metahumans with any particular culture or ethnicity.

But re-reading your post, you do say "harder to break out of poverty, not harder to avoid falling into poverty", so perhaps we are not in disagreement. You are right, race is a red flag for me, though I seldom admit it because I like to argue everything from first principles. So take the above as a valid argument that you could agree with, or disagree with depending on the flavour and outcome you want in your game. SR2070 technology is way beyond the levels of sophistication and cheapness needed to make number of children a conscious choice for all but the utterly most careless of parents (female AND male), but if this is not an outcome that is desired in the setting, then your arguments are good fluff justifications for playing otherwise. And you may see things from the exact opposite point of view with my reasons being good fluff justifications for it being other than what you see as the default. That's fine. but my case needs to be shown because the matter hasn't been examined in canon and some take a throw away line in a race description about number of children in a single pregnancy and extrapolate something that, if you consider the setting as a whole, has no necessary basis.

Peace,

Khadim.

Its a tough issue - and I'm not sure that if SR was 'real' it would break down at all like the books present it - but in the fiction as presented, orks have higher birthrates and are poor.

It is true that globally there is a strong trend that the lower your rate of birth, the better off you are wealth wise.

See this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUwS1uAdUcI it runs through the data nicely.

I think we are actually pretty much on the same, page believe it or not, with just a couple different assumption. First off, I assume that the wealth gradient in SR is effectively infinite, and that "rich" and "poor" don't come close to describing the extremes of the polls. AAA exec's have wealth such that they can do literally anything so long as others with such wealth don't check them. On the flip side I see people 20 miles from down town Seattle dying for the most trivial and preventable reasons. People who would kill over hand-truck's worth of clean water generally aren't thinking about birth-control. That's actually my biggest departure from your view. I see large tracks of current first world nations being as economically ravaged as Tanzania or Cameroon and birth control along with most other industerial consumables just isn't available to most people. My second concern stem from the sex education I've done. It is simply amazing what crap you hear coming out of the mouths of intelligent, internet savvy young people about sex. I have trouble imagining a poor society that doesn't have rampantly false folklore about sex and reproduction that mutates faster than HIV, even if it has access to free health care and information. Maybe that's just the American in me who has issue thinking that 2070 people will make rational decisions around sex and start valuing self-care at the societal level. All wage slaves will have nearly identical, and highly technologized biologies. That is cheap and extremely beneficial for both the individual and the power structure. The extreme outliers, the absolute poor and corp researchers with augmaxed logic, do have real differences at between metatype the way that rl races do not. For me a large part of cyber punk is contrasting such extremes.
I'm usually the first to person to point out the ways that culture, technology, and training have a much greater impact on a forming the individual and individual experience than biology. XY people tend to have hormonal levels more conducive for building muscle mass than XX people. And any woman who devotes a couple hours a week to an effective strength training routine will be way stronger than most men. And while there are meaningful biological differance between individuals, there really aren't when talking about populations with equivalent life styles.

I think it should be noted that, given 20 "productive" years, if an ork woman is kept consistantly pregnant, she will have between 160-320 (240 average) children.

Tell me again why there isn't an Ork + Ghoul nation? Ghouls provide support and protection for the Orks, while the Orks get their rights. In return, Orks have as many children as comfortable, and their bodies are... "confiscated" after, ahem, "use." It's a win-win situation.