According to page 9 of the Seattle Sourcebook,

Traveling the highways at night is not advisable, for the criminal element is out in full force. When not fighting among themselves, go-gangs -- whether on bikes, in cars, or in aircraft -- often terrorize and even kill anyone foolish enough to travel the roads at night.

I have no problem visualizing bike gangs, and the Fast and Furious line made car gangs easy to imagine, but aircraft... ?

So, what kinds of aircraft do they use? Which go-gangs are likely to use aircraft? Has anyone done anything with this option before?

high carry capacity drones?
ultra lights?
magically lifted gliders?

Maybe they are riding Puff the Magic Dragon followed by Garry Owen and the valkyries?

Lockheed Sparrow + Vashon Island Steampunk Line, of course.

and maybe the odd stolen autogyro?

ok, now i have the mental image of a a dwarf (or gnome metatype) flying a yellowjacket, wearing full steampunk regalia...

or maybe goblins (hmhvv infected dwarfs) in a jackrabbit fitted with a lighter then air mod?

Red goes fasta?

There is no Word in goblin language for "flying". The only ones that are near enough just mean "falling down slowly"

Good catch on the writing that i think can otherwise be responded to by: "What the frak?"

Maybe something like THIS and small planes with WWI style hand-dropped bombs.

Personal helicopters would allow them more control. Modify for a passenger and then you have the gunner/bomber and the navigator. They would probably attack in small squadrons of 3-5 and with ground support in the forms of cycles and other fast vehicles to keep up with them.

in all seriousness, check this out.

dominator gyroplane

Sure it will be almost 70 years more advanced, but gyroplanes are almost ideal for urban gang aerial warfare.

- short takeoff/vertical landing
- very maneuverable
- the two-seat version gives you roughly 200 lbs of payload.
- as aircraft go, they are CHEAP!

YouTube has lots of videos showing what gyros can do.

It's always been a stupid idea that in SR world you have large organized attacks on traffic running on major highways in Urban and suburban area. Hell, on major roadways at all. One of the devs watched Mad Max too many times. Sorry, Seattle isn't the Australian outback. It's SMALL, it's under constant video surveillance (and open areas like expressways are under constant aerial surveillance), and the response time is short when your responding vehicles are moving at 300 km/hr. The Seattle cops patrol with drone aircraft carrying stabilized machine guns and equipped with NODs. Go Gangs that get into a fight with 4 strato drones armed with MMGs are not going to do it again, because they are are going to be mostly dead in 6 seconds.

If their goal were just to stop their target from the air, they wouldn't necessarily need ground support. Take out the engine or blow a bridge and you can land at your leisure to collect your shwag. I could see this being an interesting addition to a Mad Max/Cal Free style smuggler game.

Double Post

The Black-breasted Buzzard (3BA-102) drone used by the UCAS has the wingspan of a two lane highway. It runs on both solar power and two General Electric TF34-GE-100 turbofans allowing it to maintain itself in the air for 2 weeks at a time.

Its strong airframe can survive direct hits from armor-piercing and high-explosive projectiles up to 23 mm. The aircraft has triple redundancy in its flight systems, with mechanical systems to back up double-redundant hydraulic systems. This permits riggers to fly and land when hydraulic power or part of a wing is lost. Flight without hydraulic power uses the manual reversion flight control system; this engages automatically for pitch and yaw control, and under rigger control (manual reversion switch) for roll control. In manual reversion mode, the drone is sufficiently controllable under favorable conditions to return to base and land, though control forces are much higher than normal. The aircraft is designed to fly with one engine, one tail, one elevator and half a wing torn off.

Its standard weapon payload is the 30 mm GAU-8/A Avenger Gatling gun. The 3B usually carries on urban deployments cluster 2 bomb canisters, 2 air-to-surface missiles, 2 air-to-air missiles, ECM and sniper pod. The Gatling is loaded 1,174 rounds of depleted uranium rounds (tracer)

The 3B operate in squadrons of three lending each other through a smart system mesh support.

The price is 17 million nuyen for the airframe and gatling gun. Its availability rating is 30F.

Sounds like an overpriced Nimrod to me.

I don't think the Nimrod can carry 11,000 kg of ordinance, fly at over 21,000 meters, and carry out ELINT functions as part of its role.

The Nimrod would try getting close for aerial combat, utilising natural contours as protection. The 3B would puil back to 10,000-20,000 feet would use its combat software to negotiate with its squadron and friendly forces, mark the enemy and destroy it. The 3B's wide wingspan is not meant for close aerial dog fighting.

Alternatively it could launch drones similar to the nimrod as parts of its weapon package.

You can of course ignore any fluff text in your own games, and the "aerial go gang" might be cover for some nefarious corp activity, but check this out:

• Tamil Tiger Air Attacks
• Again
• Navy, too

Smallish rebel groups have support arms, too.

How about the Russian Ka-56 "Wasp"? Considering it was designed and built back in the early 1970s modern advances nowadays never mind by the 2070s could make it a much more viable option.



Well at least until they start to lose badly and then start screaming for the opportunity to lay down arms and be taken into custody by a third party. Such a shame.

is no one else pointing out how crazy the logistics of this is?

bikes or cars are one thing but copters take a lot more to maintain, esecpially when you start talking about the msaller ones that allow less room for a jury rig than older bigger ones. This means psecial parts special fuel special facilities to take off from. way easy to track down and frag off.

i expect it takes a lot less to maintain it to a level where it works fine 99% of the time, rather than 99.9999% or whatever airline companies have to maintain. i recall once watching a junkyard wars episode where they had 4 man teams working for 2 days to build an airplane. one team was able to make an airplane that flew up to several hundred feet above ground, looked absolutely fine. if 4 people with 20 hours and scrap parts can make an airplane that works, why don't we have super-cheap commercial airplanes? because there's all kinds of regulatory agencies that restrict how you build aircraft, what kinds of safety margin you need, etc. a go-gang isn't going to be dealing with all that stuff; they don't get bad publicity when the rival airline's parent company's news station tells a huge story about your airline's crash that caused death/injuries to dozens of people. delta airlines doesn't put a 100 passenger jet in the air if it thinks there's something less than ideal about it's jet. it costs them a lot to replace, and the bad PR would be immeasurable. for a bunch of go-gangers, these concerns are drastically reduced.

in other words, just because a huge airline flying massive aircraft with extremely large stress factors on said aircraft require a great deal of maintenance to obtain an extremely low rate of vehicular failure while dealing with dozens of regulating agencies, doesn't mean that the same applies for a small 1-2 man craft being flown around by a bunch of adrenaline junkies in a go-gang in the redmond barrens. would their aircraft pass an inspection by the appropriate government agencies? probably not. are they as safe as a commercial airliner? probably not. are they going to explode after 1 week without maintenance? probably not.

sure you could strap the odd aircraft together but the maintenance, stuff like AV gas or stable enough to actually work as a platform for weapons. Is going to be off. Even an ultralight right from the factory is not going ot be able to manouver and shoot. The first combat planes used in WW1 had like a 60 hp engine and to keep these up took a lot of mantenance. I know the gear heads love that sort of thing but the other side is that the parts get harder to find. If you have somethnig the size of a hughy you've got more space to frak around in to jury rig to make sure stuff works. When it's the size of a lawn mover engine you really don't have the space to trade out part 2365/45z-89-g with some chewing gum and duct tape.

My other ponit is that for law/corps to track this stuff down a plan needs a lot more space for storage to store it's parts and to store it's fuel than does a Harley.
Although for savagry a go gang on the ground might be ale to give a corp sec team trouble. but in the air, a squadron of SOTA corp gun ships are going to eat for lunch a go ganger's jury rigged utralight.

My personal favorite was always Torgo and his Spikes, who not only did the whole "grr, we own this stretch of interstate" nonsense, but also attacked Tir military patrols for kicks.

By "personal favorite," I mean "I retconned in my personal games that the Tir occasionally allowed this sort of thing to happen as a way to reinforce their anti-elven paranoia, leak patrol information to sic Torgo's boys on patrols full of political dissidents, and to occasionally send out Ghost teams to mark the sight of one of their own black ops with Spikes graffiti in order to point the finger at those filthy trogs and cover their tracks, because I can think of no other way that some two-bit fucking gang can regularly assault Tir military forces given the elven paranoia and reputation for the strength of their border."

I think it was a grab for the 'mad max' type world but yeah, we kind of 'forgot' that part. street gangs powerful enough to drive off police would elicit a massive response to exterminate them.
Team one- 5 go gangers on their bikes with smgs, shot guns and an LT Mg.
Team two- 5 lone star troopers in a Banshee.

I just have to wonder... I mean sure if you crash your car into a guardrail you can salvage a good amount of parts. You crash your autogyro into the ground? Not much going to be left of it to salvage to fix your other ones.

There have been a number of threads discussing the viability of militarized gangs and what it basically boils down to is your vision of the world. Many think that parts of the industrialized world in 2070 are equivalent to Mogadishu today and the corps and governments are either too fragmented or too apathetic to do anything about it.

I think Go Gangs with this level of firepower would be bad for business. The Corps would want these bozos shut down and shut down HARD!

Then please excuse my snarking. I always saw the Nimrod as the 70's equivalent of the MQ-9 Reaper with an appropriate wingspan and everything (i am not really good at visualizing lenghts )

It all depends. What costs the corporations more: loosing an occasional truck or a military operation to bring law and order to the barrens? As long as people are uneducated, discontent or desperate there will be crime, and none of the corps are rushing to build schools in the barrens or employ all those unwashed masses. You kill one go-ganger and there are half-a-dozen street punks waiting in line to take his place. You can decide you don't like the idea of go-gangs in your game, but the cannon says there are SINless, and there are Z-zones and there are militarized gangs.

And if you think its an simple matter for corps or militaries to just clean up a gang problem, you are mistaking. Inside the Z-zones its really more like Mogadishu, Somalia or Sadr City, Iraq. I doubt I have to recount for you the recent history of sophisticated military forces attempting to operate in those urban environments. If you want a more "domestic" example, take a nighttime stroll down the National Mall in Washington D.C. If it were easy to clean up a gang problem the U.S. capitol would be safe for citizens, but law-abiding people don't go there at night because its too dangerous.

This isn't an urban warren, this is an interstate highway. It's two very long 20 meter wide strips of concrete surrounded by large amounts of open space with fences preventing easy access. You can only enter and exit at well defined points. There isn't any population or buildings to hide in, because nobody lives right on I5 outside a very limited number of places, and there are walls and fences around it. If you move on I5 you can be spotted and tracked. If you leave I5 you can be tracked. If you shoot guns the flashes are seen, if you start a fire the thermal sig is seen for miles. If someone calls for help on I5 it's easy for aerial support to find them rapidly and if someone comes up with a clever idea like jammers that is easy to spot also.

Gangs are easy to solve, you just have to be willing to do the things needed. Issues like "civil rights" and "due process" are obstacles to dealing with them. SR tries to both have their cake and eat it. The police in SR have a willingness to use force and contempt for rights and procedures that would make an ACLU member curl up in a fetal position for a week and have immediate access to massive firepower that no modern police force would dream of having at all, much less flying around ready to unleash.

Lets propose an SR style solution to bad people on the national mall. You place 6 sniper teams on high points covering the mall, each with a close protection team. Then you send in 3 or 4 robbery decoy teams. If they get threatened (defined very loosely) the threats get shot in the head. You repeat this for a week. On day 8 how many muggers and gang bangers are there going to be on the national mall at night?

That's alright. The Nimrod is kind of based on the A-10 warthog and MQ-8 Fire Scout. The problem with aerial drones is lift. The Nimrod to be kewl has been made small. Unfortunately then you have a whole lot of other problems such as limitations of weapon packages it can incorporate. This is not counting the lack of usual problems of signal weaknesses in an urban environment.

The major problem with the Nimrod is that as a tilt rotor is that its a loud little beast, even using electrical motors and battery power it still has the equivalent sound of an angry weedwacker. The armor of 8 and a body of 4 means that it can be taken out with an RPG or an antimateriél rifle.

The 3B which I wrote up is basically the A-10 Warthog as a UAV, with an updated sensor package and the use of solar panels allowing it to have an operational life from hours to days. Obviously it has a different operational role than a Nimrod.

how about a bit more Machiavellian?

yes, lone star or knight errant could basically go to war with the z-zones and break the backs of the gangs. but then they would be out of a reason to exist in the way they do...

also, if one where to wipe out the z-zones, where would one "hide" all the sin-less?

And, if one were to crush the go-gangs, how would you conceal the stuff you deliberately lost? How many of those supposed "go-gang hits on corp trucks" are really the corp hitting itself so they can hide something, and say they "had it stolen"?

hehe, now i got the mental image of truckload of toxins getting lost on its way to a expensive sanitation plant for destruction, blamed on go-gangs, and the promise to increase security in the future.

then a week later the whole load shows up in some out of the way dumping ground...

also gives me the idea for a run

johnsons, fixers and the need to know...

We've only used go-gangers in the barrens and other largely lawless areas. If they come into more civilized zones, they have to be prepared to strike quick and get the hell out.

Agreed upon. Do enough to warrant an aerial response, and you are in trouble. Still, rotor drones all over the town does not happen, as providing hackers and (worse) technomancers with deniable assault gear all over the town isn´t wise.


Issues like "civil rights" and "due process" were created with the understanding that a functioning society can´t allow certain tactics to happen and keep functioning. Police is even nowadays massivly outnumbered by the rest of the population (which is good). If they try to extend their coverage, they find themselves outnumbered by far.
And SR society has it worse than real live: more downtrodden, militarised gangs and syndicates, lack of cooperation, magic and technomancy. Even the gang in blue has to pick a territory.

Exactly the first point I wanted to make.

The second was that most of the aircraft cited - folks, we're thinking a) too large and b) too 20th century.

In seventy years from the first powerd flights at the dunes of Kittyhawk, we had built passenger airplanes capable of routinely crossing continents and oceans with one hundred or more people at twice the speed of sound; We landed men on the moon. Within the next forty years we had a semi-permanent manned presence in space, day-to-day dependence on satellites in orbit and casual air travel by the middle class. We have seen the first effective vertical takeoff jets and an aircraft that can't seem to decide if it's a helicopter or a turboprop airplane (see: V-22 Osprey). In another sixty years, with the benefits of new materials, computer processing power for modelling and design, and time to develop new engineering ideas, why couldn't we have VERY small personal air vehicles? Look at the older artwork: prior to the drone, most aerial support was via YellowJackets - tiny single person helicopters. And I DO mean tiny, with rotor spans less than a two-lane road. Also remember the various vectored thrust (T-bird) vehicles (DocWagon^TM uses them for HTR teams) and other "VTOLs" in use in the game. Runners usually avoid them because they're a) expensive and b) obvious as hell. But they would all be perfectly at home between the wide avenues of devastated parts of the 'plex OR RACING ABOVE ROOF TOPS! To quote Mr. Spock "He's intelligent, but his patern would seem to indicate TWO DIMENSIONAL thinking." Think vertical since we're talking about aircraft. Only the "core" of the 'plex is especially "tall" in regards to aircraft playing tag at low level.

As to logistics of aircraft, hydrogen's cheap in the future (it's one of the listed fuel types in the fluff), and batteries have gotten WAY more advanced both in storage and weight. A future carbon-fiber evolved material and wicked engineering could mean the pilot is literally the heaviest and bulkiest single component of the vehicle. So logistics might not be the problem some people seem to be assuming.

Now, for a go-gang, it's about the thrill, so financial gain isn't the motivation in the first place. And most go-gangs already happen to hang out in areas the corps and cops have abandoned (sometimes BECAUSE of the go-gang's activities).

So I see no reason a lerger, better financed and successful go-gang might NOT have a few aircraft terrorizing around the skies.

In a quick bit of attempted rationalization, how about this:

Up to the 70's-80's, being a police man was seen as a profession to look up to and respect.

But then came things like the vietnam war, and the police became a villain, used by the government to suppress contrary opinions and minorities en mass. After that, its become popular to be the classical criminal, the gangster, as they at least was willing and able to defend themselves, unlike the neutered masses.

Now how about in SR there is massive spin control by the big boys? When lone star rolls out the heavy artillery its portrayed as the clean shaven, big chinned officer that gallantly steps into the dirt to protect the common citizen from the sub-humans, and only fly by night independent media provides the image of the young meta-human being beaten to a near pulp by the lone star thugs in full riot gear, just because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time (coming out of the corner stuffer shack near a drug bust gone bad maybe).

I don't have a single problem with anything in this post. It's to the point, and actually is a great candid description of how the media and "law enforcement" in the Shadowrun universe actually operate. To which post were you specifically responding?

technically it was aimed at Ryu's post...

Actually, they do have rotor drones all over town. The Lone Star Strato Drones. Armed with a MMG, used for routine surveillance.

Probably loaded with stick-n-shock or gel rounds, unless its operated close to z-zones. Or maybe even then, in case one found it hijacked and used against own personel...

You may have noticed that for all the negative characteristics of 1939 Moscow under Stalin and 1939 Berlin under Hitler, it didn't include anti-government street gangs running half the city. Or a pervasive fear of random street crime by the residents.

See the ongoing extermination of the Tamil Tigers for a counter-example.

Many military vehicles today have selectable ammunition feeds, so the drone would be able to respond both in a less-than-lethal fashion, and also to tear up anybody foolish enough to cross it's pre-programmed threshold into "lethal force authorized". I would figure Gel on one belt and Standard on another. The "conversion" option for dual feed is listed in Arsenal.

I can totally see a VR gang jacking a bunch of armed rotodrones and roaming the streets... cheap and easy and chock full of thrills.

*shudders* OK, now THAT is a disgusting image.

"Hey, Bob, do you hear that buzzing sound?"
"Yeah, Joe... what the hell is it?"
*Rattatattatattatattatat!*
"Aieeeeeeeeeee!"
"Gurgle..."

and thats my reason for saying stick-n-shock only...

for riot suppression its plenty, and can be used for spotters until the heavies arrive if needed...

And then how does ARES channel 7 report the masacre/riot/incident....?? They wouldn't be biased against Lone Star would they? Fair and Balanced, just like they advertised.....They have no interest in making KE look better than Lone Star.

There will be differing points of view, usualy dependent on their own self interest. Hence the lack of cooperation to help "law enforcement".

Remember: the Star and KE are both COMPANIES and the bottom line matters. Stick-n-Shock is expensive. And their Public Relations/Spin departments are slaried, so it's cheaper to just deal with any occasional "accident" that might occur. And also remember, they take their network security pertty seriously and they have a number of riggers and spiders full time monitoring for any shenanigans like that. It would take a concerted and powerful cyber attack to be able to hijcak more than a single drone.
Remember Fight Club? A recall is only issued when the estimated price of the lawsuit settlements exceeds the price of the recall and fix. I figure cheaper ammo trumps (meta)human life.

sadly, its one of the movies on my all to long "never got round to watching" list...

its one of those movies that came out while i was way to deep within my own world to really watch anything close to popular culture...