There are references to fusion powerplants in canon, yes? They do not use fission to start the fusion reaction. So if fusion powerplants exist, we have ways to easily detonate a fusion warhead without a fission detonator.

Or do you wish me to find a page reference on Shadowrun fusion powerplants not using fission to get about the fusion reaction next?

Not in particular i just because i havent read about it dosent mean it isnt their.

It is a nuke, regardless of any misconceptions you may have about the implications of that terminology. And "standard" modern nukes aren't fission weapons anyway; they're fusion weapons that happen to use a fission bomb as a trigger. SOTA nukes in SR's time should be fusion weapons as well, but without the fission trigger requirement.

I personally prefer kinetic weapons, anyway. Don't need to mess around with fancy triggers or any of that stuff (which is apparently ridiculously failure-prone in the Sixth World). Just get a rock and drop it on them from really high up. If you want more yield, get a bigger rock. If you want to crack the planet like an egg, use Ceres or something. Dropping an entire minor planet on them counts as elemental earth damage, right?


And people complaining about how this is just a physical solution have missed one of the points I tried to make earlier (my fault; I implied it rather than explicitly stating it). That's this: Sometime in the last two or three hundred years, we crossed a critical line. Technological advancement has exploded in the last century or two. In the last three hundred years, we've made more progress than we did in the three thousand preceding that. We've gone from traveling by muscle and wind power to traveling through space. We've gone from literal horsepower to power generated by cracking atoms open. We've gone from killing each other face-to-face with muscle-powered steel and black powder to killing each other from halfway around the planet with nuclear fusion. We've gone from writing letters that could take years to travel to the other side of the world to sending full-motion video around the world in seconds. We've gone from bleeding the sick to genetic engineering and cloning. We've gone from a society where the bulk of the population was subsistence farming, one bad harvest away from starvation, to one where people believe that food spontaneously appears at the supermarket.

There are a number of reasons for this, and the reasons feed off each other, producing an ever-steeper research curve. But this is still just tech, you say? Well, here's the kicker:

Magical research should benefit just as much.

The much larger population, with the extra manpower (both physical and mental) it brings, the extra "leisure" time produced by not having to farm for survival, the better communications, better records, better education... these should all apply just as well to magical research.

Imagine the rate of advancement we've gotten out of tech in the last hundred years applied to magic. How long before we catch up with the peak of the Fourth World's knowledge? How long before we can do things that the Fourth World never even dreamed of? I'm figuring the smart money is on closer to three years than three thousand. Imagine spells and metamagical techniques as much advanced over what we have now as a Saturn V is over a horse and buggy, or a fusion warhead is over a black powder cannon, or a nuclear reactor is over a sail.

I can't say what these things are going to be... that's why I keep talking about the tech. It's fairly easy to predict where SR tech might go in the future... it has at least a passing resemblence to real-world science, so there's a solid basis for prediction. Magic has no such real-world basis, so where it's going to go is totally unpredictable. But we are going to take it there.

We were a bunch of primitives in the Fourth World. We used our primitive tech and primitive magic to hide from the Horrors, and it was only partiallly effective. But we're not primitive anymore. Our tech has advanced radically. Our magic hasn't - yet - but that's just because it's a new toy. Remember that everything that metahumanity knows about magic now was discovered in the last fifty years, within the working lifetime of a single human mage. If we have even a little bit of time, we can do the same thing to magic that we did with tech. And I wouldn't be surprised if that's why the Horrors are trying so hard to get through early... they think they can still beat us in 2063, but they know that if they give us any more breathing room, they're going to get their ugly butts kicked right back into Horrorspace when they show up.

This is a really good idea. It makes a big boom and dosent make the radiation. But i do have one question however wouldnt the incredible ammounts of heat still create a manawarp?

I see your point and i totall agree with part of what you are saying but the bigger question is not how far we will advance but how far the horrors will advance as well.

From what i an see their are 2 veiws on this.

1. The horrors have continually improved from the previous scourge and will continue to do so untill the next scourge. They will come at us with new horror powers and never before seen destructive capabalities.

2. The horrors have not improve and if they have it has been very little compairwed to us and by the time the next scourge comes around we will have Uber powerfull god killing weapons to use against them.

If anyone has a 3rd view on this please enlighten me to it.

Well, since there is no list of "Only these things cause Mana Warps in SR", there's no way of knowing. Why pure heat would cause a Mana Warp is beyond me -- that'd be the same as transformers handling extreme amounts of current would cause Mana Warps. But Mana Warps aren't exactly in the realm of sense anyway.

I don't recall any mention of a Mana Warp appearing anywhere near Hawai'i after the use of Thor Shots there.

These areas are the ones in question. One of the bigger debates is weather or not the horors will have advanced just as far as we have in these areas.

Here is my personal stance on the situation.

The horrors will have spent the past few Millenia improving and refining ther techniques they will come in with new and never before seen destructive power.

We will counter with advanced biotechnolology to prevent BIG A's corruption. We will also have uber powerfull destructive capabalities.

We will be fighing not only the horros but also their human allies weather they be marked or just greedy.

It will be a horrible and drawn out fight with a very unclear ending but i do feel we have a better chance than the last time 1 because of our ability to communicate and coordinate our assaults 2 because we are no longer primitive like we were in earthdawn.

EDIT - i would side with the prohumanist except for one thing. I have a hard time beliving that we will be fighting just the horrors. We will be fighting not olny the horrors but our own advanced technology as well. Unless we develop a way to prevent a horror mark we have a better chance of losing than winning.

The average person is certainly a lot more intelligent now than s/he was several thousand years ago. A large part, of course, is thanks to schooling and the general trend that cultures move away from the physical to the mental (instead of teaching kids how to work in the farms, they are taught algebra), and ED (AFAIK) had far more advanced civilizations and more schooling than the RL ones had back then.

Still, in almost all tests of a person's intellectual abilities, the SR man will do far, far better than the ED man.

Also, while primitive might not mean stupid, the primitives in question clearly were not anywhere near the level of effectiveness that modern humans are at when it comes to advancement in technology (including magic). They might have built great civilizations then, but they managed to achieve minimal amounts of technological breakthroughs.

BTW how long did it take for metahumanity to embrace new forms of metamagic in ED? Or was it all there when humans started popping up?

Any advents in (non-magic) technology during the Earthdawn era pale in comparison to what metahumanity can grind out now, let alone in 60 years. That comparison, at least, does not work as proof for Horrors not being stoppable with modern (non-magic) technology.

The big thing you need to understand is that you won't know when the horrors invade until it's aleady too late. By the time they show thier true faces, they will have firmly entrenched themselves into humaniti. They will have manipulated and marked thier way in little by little.

What good do you think your technology will be when you have no parts to keep it running and repair it? How about when you run out of that high-tech ammunition? They will have made sure that production facilities are either under thier control... or sabotaged. True, they won't get them all, but they will definitely get some.

Couple that with the creation of discord and strife. Thier agents will have worked to pit various groups against each other. Gang wars (and crime organizations) will spread violence along the streets. Full blown corp wars will break out. Nations will go against nations. Martial law will be enforced and the general populace will revolt into mobs from heavy handed police tactics. Plagues will break out and spread like wildfire. Outbreaks of nanites will also be introduced, killing and maiming thousands. All of this will happen, blamed on various terrorists and eco groups of course. Transportation lines will be sabotaged and hampered, reducing supplies of food and material which will increase the riots in major cities. All of this causing massive death that will thin out the worlds population. Bodies will of course disappear to make constructs. Homeless will also disappear for constructs and army building, maybe even testing of horror designed diseases and weapons. And since no one cares about the homeless, no one will notice or care.

By the time the scourge actually happens, infrastructure will be damaged and reduced in capability. Law enforcement and militaries will have already been stretched thin. Shadowrunners as well will have been so busy that even thier resources will be tapped. When the scourge comes, all those high-tech toys you plan to rely on will be worth next to nothing. The horrors greatest weapon that made all that impotent? Manipulation. That's thier greatest weapon and humaniti's greatest weakness. There are people that will be more than willing to sell out thier fellow man for promised; wealth, power and/or survival. Interestingly enough, most of those people are your type A personalities who work thier way into CEO positions or other influential spots.

I can garauntee you that's exactly the way it would happen, because that's what's going to make the scourge happen.

Yes, that may happen but it is just as likely that the people in the know (especially with ultra high Knowledge and Divination) could MANIPULATE these Horrors too. A sort of it-happened-because-I-had-foreseen-thing.

And don't forget Murphy's Law, the more manipulative/insidious things get, the more complicated things become and we all know that complicated is Bad and KISS is good. If Mr Murphy or his myriad cousins come along, the whole house of cards come down. Not to mention, there are those AI out there and those guys can get through a ton of data in a nanosecond to find your pawns. Don't forget Deus has a God syndrome (nobody's God but him/it) and Mirage DEFENDS the humanity! Both these goals are at cross purposes of the Horrors. Heck, individual Horrors will also go at each other.

We know they are coming, they know that we know, we know that they know that we know... Munchkins are going to "we know" +1 more than "Horrors know", and that is when they get manipulated instead.

Those in the "know" knew back then as well. Didn't do them much good did it?

Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying don't fight the good fight. Just understand that a head on fight with the horrors is and will be unwinable. It's not in the cards. Part of fighting a war is knowing which battles you can win and which one's you can't. Put defenses in place, keep 'em tight and do the best you can knowing full well that you can't save everyone.

Ah, but humanity survived didn't it? Look at it as playing for the end game. The enemy must be lulled into a sense of security before we can strike. How do you know it was not all a gambit? The Horrors must be stopped utterly, not piecemeal. As long as one of them is still around, it can still do much harm. They must ALL be destroyed and the way ALL of them can be finished off is to let them win until the time of OUR choosing.

We don't want to f*ck one of them, we want to do it to ALL of them. The END GAME, baby. Checkmate.

I don't think there's a particular need for me to understand that, especially when I disagree to a degree. Although I suppose it comes down to what you consider "too late".

They'd have to destroy a shitload of factories to stop earth from grinding out tools of warfare. Just about every sovereign nation, and in the SR world every sovereign corp too, has the capability to arm themselves in hurry even in the worst case scenario. Not to mention the incredible munition and parts stores held all around the world "just in case". The capability to produce the equipment neccessary in war time is one of the dearest things to many governments, and after the capability to produce food and perhaps electricity, the one thing that governments protect most.

The weapons industry is extremely de-centralized. To grind it to a halt in North America alone would require great levels of sabotage in hundreds of factories, thousands if you wish to stop the peripherals as well. And as long as the information and storages are held, building new factories to produce ammunition and parts is extremely cheap and fast. I would certainly not be afraid of metahumanity losing it's capability to produce weapons and ammunition...

And when the reports of really weird shit happening world wide start clogging up news reports, all nations and corps will begin to stockpile. I know for a fact that it would take more than sabotage and rioting to disable my country from fighting. To disable the military, law enforcement, and all of the central government of any Western country, you'd need an impossible number of people willing to sacrifice their lives for nothing, preferably well above 1% of the whole population, and they'd have to be people in some sort of significant positions, too.

This I do not doubt.

This I do.

This is obviously false. As everyone knows, Odin and his brothers created the world from the corpse of the giant Ymir.

Nope, I'm pretty sure the writers of the ED sourcebooks are human. And that makes Humans GODs of the ED/SR universe.

There are other metaplanes, full of theoretically infinate amounts of stuff to dominate, assimilate and/or destroy. Just because earth has a short distance to every metaplane doesn't mean that it is the only way to go between them.

To paraphrase Morpheus, "For 10 thousand years, we have fought these Horrors and we are still here!"

I'm playing devil's advocate here, but Harlequin also thought that Thayla could stop the Horrors and Darke until the scourge actually happened.

And then humanity proceeded to get its ass kicked again one movie later.

And yet they are still there!

You can be the one to go negotiate with Verjigorm for peace in exchange for killing Deus.

Let Verignorm try to do a number on the Banded. Technology vs magic.

And let Deus and big V wipe each other out. Wait till Verigorm realise all of his Marked are Deus sleeper agents. Oops... better luck next time

Marked would win every time. The marked individuals would find thier reality distorted and twisted so that the horror is using them like a marionette. The Horrors have been around far longer than Deus and they are experts at manipulation and control.

To paraphrase the Rock, "It doesn't matter" if their reality is twisted or if they are even sane, Deus will cut those strings like spagetti and the Banded will get on with the program. The Banded guys are like drones, no conscience, no sanity, no soul or spirit.

Deus has no influence over magic. Nuff said.

And Horrors do jack against machines. If neccesary, Deus can take the genetic material of all the humans on Earth, Judgement Day Earth and after the mana level drops back down clone the humans back.

BTW, if Deus has no influence over magic, then wouldn't it be better to control thoughts/mind probe Deus's sleepers? If so, wouldn't Renraku have done so already?

Oh, yes. Cortex bombs and psychotropic programming. Cortex bomb triggers on being Marked. Psychotropic programming against Horror control.

No? But would he not have control over the mind? And why the big V have influence over technology? So, I guess its not "Nuff said".

Still waiting on something to state there are more of them. The only quote I've seen so far is that there were "hundreds of thousands" in some areas. Which doesn't mean shit, because there are tens of millions of humans in some areas.

You won't get an exact quote because there isn't one to give.

But, the whole point of the horrors is to cause a scourge. Doesn't make much since for the universe to have that programmed if it doesn't have the numbers to make it happen does it?

By your admission, you have no proof. No quote, nothing Canon. I abjure ye, infidel, for thy lack of Quotes.

And you have no proof your technology will beat them.

"Can TO!!"

Or to put it another way: Nor do you have nay proof that our technology will not beat them.