Lets hear some of the new and creative( or just plain wierd) ways some of you have used/seen used various pieces of cyberware that were never intended by the original design. little things like looking thru a wall with thermographic vison to maybe adding an extra pair of cyberarms to your favorite troll.

let 'er rip folks..

Hmm. Pretty much any cyber used in a legal, liscensed way would cover this topic.

Legal purposes indeed.

Hmm. Using Headware Memory to run a legal 'smart frame' or 'agent,' or just some legal utilities, like word processors.

Here's one. The Muscle Replacement. Probably one of the most worthless pieces of cyberware out there; especially when you compare it to the biowear Muscle Augmentation. However for all you min-maxers out there I have found a new use for it. Since the attributes upgraded through bioware are limited to the racial maximum of 9 for humans, but as far as I know not for cyberware. Under this logic. Take a starting character and max out his strength at six, but don't give him anything just yet. Instead improve his strength a time or two with karma, then get alpha or beta version of Muscle Replacement. This way you could have a human character with a strength of 10+

Or better yet, get the same human Exceptional Quickness & Bonus+Exceptional Strength, pump Quickness up to 11 (114 Karma) and Strength too (only 90, because it starts at 8). Then get Muscle Replacement 4. 15 Strength and Quickness.

What kind of game are you playing were you can save up 204 karma just to whore out your attributes? Don't you ever have to get skills or anything?

I pray that was sarcasm.

Fuck, you want to be strong, play a troll, and buy back those two piddly points of INT and QUI.

But that means you can only start with a base reaction of 4. Hardly min-maxing material.

Getting musslce replacment doesn;t affect your ability (or cost) to raise the attributes with Karma at all. Feel free to start the game with the Muscle Replacment already in place, the raise the (natural) attribute to maximum over time.
On the other hand, muscle replacment really isn't so bad. Its reasonable to buy as betaware, even.
Looking at the "layering armro" rules, +4 to quickness can be a pretty ahdny defensive option. Plus you gain 2 combat pool dice. That's a lot cheaper than getting them from a tactical computer or something.

Remember, though, that Muscle Replacement doesn't add to Reaction. The extra CP dice is nice, though. And not needing to worry much about Armor getting too much for you.

how could one look through a wall with thermo? the most you'd see is the heat variances in the wall?

but i always liked the idea of using ultrasound vision to look into stuff's structure. refraction at phase changes would really prevent looking through walls, but you could look into them. or safes! :]

mixing IVIS drones with an orientation system to get superfast accurate mapping.

combining Olfactory Booster & Clean Metabolism for a tactical advantage. and they call it "cosmetic", bah. :)

or Sleep Regulator & Chloroplasts for an anti-fatigue advantage.

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edit: how could i forget? as Kenji, i reprogged my Image Link and Cyberears to split incoming sensory data, encrypt the crap outta it and upload it to our Rigger's Drone Network. so i acted as another recon point for our rigger. hell, my "sensor rating" was pretty good, too. :P

sounds like a homemade version of snake-eyes...

well you COULD see the termo differences in wall if some one is touching it at otherside IF the material is thin enough and it does not conduct heat too fast thus the wall does not heat up wholly.

ultrasound bases simply on that, the sound is shot against a object after it resives frequenzes that are reflcetd and how much time the wave used to travel.
finaly the computer calcualtes the distance and builds up the pic.
simple as hell.

Muscle Replacement on a dockworker (he was an ex-runner).
A guy with the electromagnetic implants who freelanced as the computer equivalent of a shredder (a long time ago in a group that didn't realize that computer systems in SR were optical).
Retired person with high-quality cyberspurs getting job at Japanese restaurant making sushi with (well-sanitized, of course) spurs.

~J

Back on the original topic-- a street sam of mine once used the mag-grip system to win a game of Three-Card Monte.

On thermo graphic vision seing through walls. After a rousing discussion with my far more knowledgeable roomate who spent entirely too much time in the army.

Current day technology is capable of doing it. There are several types of thermo imaging. The ends of the spectrum (meaning the worse and the best) range from a "White hot/Black hot" system which can be adjusted from white background with all heat showing up as black or the other way around. Completely useless to see through walls.

The other end of the spectrum is known (again, this is current 2004 tech) as Thermal mirroring and in the words of someone who's used it before " Close range, 1 wall, no sweat, you could clearly see if a man was standing in the next room, even through a brick wall."

I imagine SR tech would therefore be even better though since this angel is not covered in the rules, one might suggest that the thermographic vision in SR was never meant to see through walls.

Though apparently, it could, provided it was of high enough quality, which, I'm guessing a couple decades down the line, shouldn't be a problem.

Sunday

the way that works is, there are parts of the EM spectrum to which brick and other construction materials are transparent, the way glass is transparent on the visual part of the spectrum. there's no real consensus on how best to represent this in game terms, but two workable solutions are to either treat it like ultrasound (half visibility modifiers, including blind-fire), or simply add 1/2 the barrier rating as a modifier in place of the blind-fire mod.

Don't forget that walls and other building materials' insulating values will have gotten better, too. Look at the advances in thermal insulation in building materials (ie. double- or multi-paned windows) over the past 20 years or so.
Given the current trend of conserving as much energy and resources as possible, it's not inconceivable to think that over the next 60 years, we will have gotten a lot better at keeping a room or building at a desired temperature with a minimal amount of consumed resources.
Better insulation means thermal "signatures" are probably less visible to thermographic vision.
So ruling that thermographic vision does NOT grant you the ability to see through walls - although taking a way a certain coolness factor - wouldn't be crazy.

I'd agree with mfb's remark on modifying perception tests with 1/2barrier, or possibly another multiple of the material's barrier rating.