My copy of Augmentation arrived today; fascinating stuff. One item in particular leapt out at me: the cyber safety system detailed on page 40. A (relatively) low-cost item that keeps enemies from picking up my guns and using them against me, AND makes my smartlink unhackable? I'd have to be out of my shadowrunning mind NOT to plunk down the 350 nuyen.

Are there any other pieces of augmentation that, barring other considerations, you'd have to be insane not to take?

flare comp and some sort of night vision, assuming your meta type does not already have it.

Radar Sensors: Takes up 2 capacity, allows you to see through walls, invisible critters, and detect cyberware. It's ultrasound on steroids.

Platelet Factories: They add so much to your survivability, 25k is worth it.

Some kind of IP booster, obviously. If you're going to be in combat, you need these.

Synthicardium. +Rating to ALL Athletics skills, including the ever-popular Gymnastics Dodge? Thanks much!

Simsense Booster (Augmentation) and Accelerator (Unwired) are no-brainers for any hacker. They're expensive, but.. FIVE IPs in hot-sim!

Quick question for everyone here: If you put a Radar Sensor in your hand, do you have to point your hand in the direction you want to "see" or does it work no matter what your hand's position?

The Radar Sensor has a signal range of 2. Other than that, I imagine it acts like a commlink (omnidirectional).

Some kind of IP booster - all have their good and bad points. Wired reflexes are cheap, synaptic booster is expensive but very Essence-friendly, and move-by-wire incorporates skillwires and really boosts Reaction as well as improving dodge.

Smartlink mod, preferably in cybereyes. For a street sam, cybereyes, period.

Muscle toner.

Reflex recorder.

Radar sensor or ultrasound sensor. Radar is generally better, although ultrasound has its advantages too.

Attention coprocessor: 3

radar sensor stretches physics a little but the ultrasound sensor is really kinda dumb. If you do the math at 300 meters you have a 1 second delay in the info you're getting. Speed of sound just works that way.

one second is a LONG time. a bad ass sammi could have shot you twice before you even see him.

I try to be cyber agnostic, but I'm partial to Tailored Pheremones, Cerebral Boosters, Nanohives and Genetic Optimisation.

- J.

I've never once, in any campaign, had my own gun used against me. 350 yen isn't a lot, but if you get 0 benefit, it's a waste. The fact is, either the enemy has their own guns and they shoot you, or you shoot them first. The situation where your gun is taken from you is pretty rare. And the only time it would be used against you is when the enemy doesn't have a gun of their own handy (or some even more effective way to kill you), which is rarer.

With Runner's Companion out, I'm finding it almost impossible to resist Muscle Toner 4 plus Restricted Gear quality. That can take your agility 5 to an agility 9, which is incredible for any combat character, and it doesn't break the bank or use up all your essence.

Suprathyroid gland + Restricted Gear is also a hell of a good buy. And it's always fun to play characters who eat like pigs

In terms of vision, eye lights + lowlight is the winning combo. It lets you see with perfect clarity in full darkness. You still want to add on another mod or two in order to have some way of seeing through glare, smoke, or mist, but darkness is by far the biggest concern.

Fortunately, however, I think there are very few no-brainers in SR4. Most of the other stuff mentioned is great, but it's not a "duh" kind of thing. Even muscle toner isn't a necessity, just a very good buy. The real no-brainer is eye-light + low light because it's cheap and negates all lighting. Hard to see a downside to it... But even that isn't 100% required since you can always wear lowlight glasses and put a lowlight flashlight on your gun.

Downside? Your walking around in darkness with a flashlight! Almost as good as having a big "shoot me first" sign on your head. I admit the Armor spell is even better, but thato combo comes in close second.

Nope, both eyelights and flashlights use polarized beams, which means they're invisible unless you look dead on directly at the source when it's pointing at you.

According to the book, the low-light flashlight provides no benefit to characters without that type of vision, so it's at the very least less severe that slapping a standard light on there.

What does polarization have to do with directionality of the beam?

Polarization only means that the electric and magnetic fields oscillate in a certain direction. They still are always perpendicular to the direction of the beam.

If the beam was highly directional, it wouldn't serve well for illuminating an area. Only a point would be illuminated.

That's kind of what flashlights do. If you want to light a room, you use one of those car battery-size floodlights.

"Hey Tank, I heard something over there chum." "Yep see those 2 lights must be security, fire a warning shot between em." LMAO

Exactly, they're highly directional, polarized beams. I can't explain the science to you, I can only tell you what RAW says. They create partial light only for the place where they're pointed, and then low-light vision gives you 0 penalty for partial light, so you illuminate whatever you look at directly. That doesn't mean the whole area is illuminated, but per RAW, the penalty would be 0 I think. The GM might decide to impose a penalty based on how you're only seeing with a flashlight, but AFAIK there's no hint in the RAW that such a penalty is required.

Why not just get thermo vision in your eyes and not have to bother with low-light flashlights and crap like that?

Because eye-lights and low-light vision have no modifier for full darkness (and let you see colors), while thermo is -2 (worse if there's a HVAC vent nearby).

Unless you are a mage all this eye stuff doesn't need to be 'ware. Glasses/goggles also work fine.

The reason eyelights are a no-brainer is that you can't get them in goggles or glasses. For everything else, you're correct, they're cheaper and just as effective as cyberware, the only disadvantage being that they are easier to remove and you don't wear them to bed and such. I even played with a guy wearing both glasses and contacts, which seems like an obvious choice, but I'd never considered it as a way to get around the avail limits on non-cyber vision wear. For eyelights though, the only way to replicate them is with a flashlight. That means you need to have your gun out, or a flashlight in one hand, to get the same effect that eyelights would give you just for looking at stuff normally.

And you couldn't tape your flashlight to a helmet? or even easier, buy something like this?

It would seem that if eyelights actually worked as advertised, tight beams that only illuminate the spot you're actively focusing on, your peripheral vision should be still somewhat 'in the dark', as it were.

You'd still have low-light, but the eyelight illumination should only apply to the center of your visual field.


-karma

Well, if it's high enough power, omnidirectional would work... of course that would require enough microwave energy to successfully pass THROUGH your body, go a reasonable distance, score a return off another object, then the ECHO would have to pass back THROUGH your body and be processed by the unit.

Radar is, and has always been, directional relative to the antenna. They can make Advanced Electronically Steered Arrays (AESA) where the individual elements can steer their pencil beams around, but there is a limit to how far out of azimuth the beam can be bent. If you want a really good idea about this, look at either of the US Navy's AEGIS equipped surface combatants: the Ticonderoga guided missile cruiser and the Arleigh Burke guided missile destroyer. Both ships have a set of four planar arrays aranged at 90 degrees to one another about the hull and superstructure of the ship to generate a full 360 degrees of visibility. No amount of 6th world techno-magic can change basic physics. I suppose if you put the thing in a cap, it could work, but then you're just putting a series of individual dispersed emitters and receivers around a circumfrence instead of in a series of panels. While it is true that radio energy emitted from the antenna of a radar does propogate outwards, more modern beams are able to keep that propogation to a bare minimum, hence the modern Low Probability of Intercept radars on the F/A-22A Raptor and the forthcoming F/A-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter. They are able to keep the beams very tight and respond to a much weaker echo, meaning that they are detectable by ESM/ELINT systems at much shorter ranges than previously possible.

If mounted in a cyberlimb, you could get about 120 degrees of scan safely AWAY FROM THE BODY. Keep in mind the penetrating radars in the books are basically overpowered microwaves. A cyberskull would get you 360 degrees, but the density in any aspect would be more limited due to the limited cross-section of the skull available for the array in any single degree of radius, where as the whole of a forearm, for example, could focus on a single area. Think of it like having hundreds of VGA resolution webcams as a head band, as compared to a 16 megapixel camera on the arm.

Oh, and the old rule of thumb with radar still applies, even using LPI technologies: the enemy can detect that a radar (and they can determine frequency, pulse rate and scan rate to get a good guess what model you're using) is in use long before that radar can tell you there's somebody out there to hear it.

Sorry, just thought I should toss that out.

Sure, you'd just get a -2 doofus penalty to all your dice pools

That's fine, if you're infiltrating a coal mine. If you need to move though an office, eye lights are much less conspicuous.

Someone running around with glowing eyes and illuminating everything he looks at is only marginally less conspicuous than someone with a flashlight whether on his helmet or in hand.

For the sake of pseudo-realism and playability, I've ruled that the radar sensor is directional in my games. The user has to move the emitter (on the back of the hand in the case of one of the PCs) to sweep an area.

Again, the beam is practically invisible. The eyes are only seen glowing if you look right at them, and you only see the illumination if you're looking from or directly into the beam's source.

My point was that the eyes are more concealable. If you're in a dark enough area to need light, it's unlikely any disguise will help you.

My 2c:

1. Headware or cyberlimb commlink. There's no way in hell I intend to let one of my characters ever depend on a removable device to do something that lets him (practically) interact at all with society and his own equipment. I even give these to my mage and technomancer characters. Esp. technomancers, cuz then they're never lonely.
2. Cybereyes. First, they mulitply the utility of 1., above; second, they let you see stuff gooder.
3. Cyberears. Multiply the utility of 1, let you hear stuff gooder, and let you get a damper.
4. Tooth storage compartment. With a skinlink and a datachip, lets you back up all your stuff offline. Prevents tooth decay in them hard to reach places. Costs next to nothing and has no essence cost.
5. Sleep regulator. Lets my character do the work of two normal men, every day, forever.

Most of my cybered characters also have a cyberlimb, in which to cram stuff, but that's not essential. I like the cybersafety as well, since I don't even like the bad guys having the possibility of screwing with my firearms.

There's trade-offs and alternate ways to accomplish pretty much any other function. I can't think of a single character type that won't benefit from having those things, at less than 1 essence cost, though.

Why doesn't the TM use the commlink he gets for being a TM?

You know, I was wondering that myself... and why would a Technomancer ever be "Lonely"?

A TM would do well to have a standard commlink that makes him look like a non-technomancer. But cutting into his brain and costing him essence just to do that? That might be the insansiest thing I've ever heard.

Don't you know... ALL Technomancers are Insane...

Illegal cyberware is never a no brainer - because you need to make sure you only do that in games that will never have you walk through scanners in high security areas.

Those sensors are really rather pointless - you'll be revealed much quicker by the full-auto bursts you're spraying from your modded-out mega-gun and the heavy armor on your back - and that's only if they fail to notice your armor-plated Harley Scorpion roaring up the stairs.

How about that no memory problem with TMs, implanted commlink would help.
And does TM have allready have touch, soundlink and recording unit just because he is TM? Not that idea to run full tacsoft on commlink for 0.2 essence.

Memory is not a problem. All devices, this includes memory chips, are wireless enabled by default, so a TM could easily store everything he needs on such chips. Even if it were, the commlink needn't be implanted. An external one is sufficient.

A commlink biological or technical does not supply the sensor data for the TacNet. You need sensors the TM does not have unless he installs cyber ears or eyes or a simrig. If he has those implants, he can transmit the data via technical commlink (cyber or external) or his biological commlink.

He can run the simrig complex form. It's a rating 1 form so doesn't take that many BP to get.

Yeah, but if you ever have to go to a classy restaurant or catch a plane, you can actually leave that stuff behind, wereas cutting off your own arm may present some problems.

Clearly your characters lack sufficient dedication to the cause