*Hands Dim Sum a Sterilize spell*

~J

Oo-er, thanks, Kage! Is it one-use only?

Fortune, did you have to ask?

BitBasher, you are now the official Dumpshock hot chick

And yes, it's multi-use. Just so you don't have to tell me each time you need it again.

~J

You may well be best-suited for the job

~J

Hey, get it right! It was you and mfb who said anything similar to that. Although I do agree with the post.

Why is surgery costs even a factor in these debates? Aren't the surgery costs listed in SR3, simply for folks hiring docs to work on them? Obviously LS would employ their OWN surgeons, so the cost of surgery shouldn't even be a factor. They already have clinics to implant those radios (I assume - it doesn't make sense to outscource in this case), so the surgery cost would be pretty negligible as LS has already included those clinics in their budget..

Wasn't it suggested that every beat cop didn't actually have cyberware?

That kinda derails the whole "canon every cop has cyberware" defense.

Mpt that I'm supporting Doc Funk -- see the "racism" thread for that exchange.

-Siege

PS: Ya know, it's really damned hard to type while drunk.

...I dunno about you all, but I always assume that the surgery costs and the damage to one's system is included in the base price. Availability of electronics and all. Thus, I hereby declare from my point of view the M&M implantation rules to be bulldrek. Hey, in our REAL world, things like Smartlinks'll pro'lly be dirt cheap by 2060.

edited - nothing to see here, folks. move along.

Well for my games it depends on who you're facing......

Knight Errant always has implanted smartlinks.
Lone Star is extremely common.

However some of the smaller outfits don't. ( They can't afford it ) Unless its a triple A or double A corp doing the policing I just don't see it happening. ( Of course they may have a few SWAT teams that have all the gear )

advantages are simple
1) auto-eject clips
2) security device in gun to prevent non-police from using it
3) -2 tn compared to -1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ-8VaXMQCU&NR=1

Here is YouTube footage of a cop accidentally firing a pistol while pointing it at a perp who is on the ground and being handcuffed. What a crappy circumstance for accidental discharge, huh? Anyway, it is related to this topic since it would be showing the benefit of having an extra layer of smartlinked safety for cops. Maybe accidental discharges would be less common with smartlinked control of weapons.

*Snicker* "accidental"… you crack me up.

~J

Maybe you're forgetting to figure that while it might be encouraged, some people just wouldn't feel comfortable with it. The corp may not care, but they probably wouldn't force them to get linked.

(Holy Thread Necromancy!)

Of course in SR4 smartlinks are equipped on contacts, sunglasses, or helmets for about 550Y. Odds are they bump for the imagelink, lowlight and flare comp for the other 175Y. They probably also use earbuds with Audio Enhancement 1 (which IMO is equivalent to the implanted damper) tied into their "radio" (aka comm). The low light & flare comp makes them safer & more effective at night and the imagelink provides data feeds away from their vehicle or without looking away from a potential threat.

By the same token, I imagine most Lonestar vehicles are rigger adapted so their officers get the VR driving bonus. The ones given the pursuit/interceptor vehicles probably use hot sim. The cost vs. benefit ratio is very low, given that it dramatically decrease accidents (-2 to thresholds, extra IPs to control the vehicle and possibly bonus dice), improves the odds of capture and is a relatively small portion of the base vehicle price.

The SR4 world is a bit more dangerous for the runners because all the security essentially has about 1 essence worth of cyber all the time.

I can't imagine being a cop, looking at the cop fatality statistics in the SR world, and avoiding getting a smartlink.

Think "Ghost in the Shell" for a second. Admittedly, that was supposed to represent a heavily-cybered group, but the *least* cybered character in the storyline, who frequently has people asking why he's such a cyber-refusing throwback, still had a cyberbrain (that world's equivalent of a datajack/implanted commlink).

The Shadowrun world happens at high speed, with little room for error and little room for missing your target. Getting a smartgun link implanted may run the corporation 20k, but how much does training a new officer cost? That 20k may well be an insignificant portion of his overall costs, and I have a hard time imagining that the company is a fan of regularly having officers killed.

Well, the Lone Star sourcebook says that officers get sixteen weeks of training and get paid ¥20,000 a year as new recruits, ¥48,000 a year max as precinct captains (the highest rank the enforcement arm has). I suspect that Lone Star would balk at spending an extra year's salary on a new guy.

(Just for reference, a Middle lifestyle costs ¥60,000 a year.)

To be fair, they do get DocWagon coverage as an added benefit—Basic while off-duty, Gold plus expenses on-duty.

~J

I wouldn't say by default all Lone Star cops had them, nor would your average soldier or basic security man, purely though costs. However, there probably is a high take up, where the corp offers discounts in exchange for loyalty eg. stay with us 2 years, and we'll foot the bill. The Ruger Thunderbolt comes with either a laser or smartlink, so obviously the demand within Lone Star is there for the beat cops to have the option of a smartlinked sidearm.

When it comes to SWAT, Special Forces, HTR etc though, I think Smartlinks are probably mandatory - with the loyalty clause obviously. Given the SR world, those loyalty clauses probably count dying within the term period as non-compliance and payment taken from wages/insurance.

Where possible, the cyberware is always going to be recovered and reused either by the corp or on the grey market as 'surplus'.

That's why SR4 external gear works so well. It costs half as much as cyber and can be issued at the station as needed. Okay, maybe not every beat cop will have smartlink issued to them but lots would, just like people working night shifts would be issued glasses with lowlight & flare comp and detectives may be given image enhancement glasses.

Only sixteen weeks, yes, and there's indication that combat training is even being deemphasized. There's disagreement amongst the Shadowtalkers on what this means—some say that Star officers forget most of the little they learn in training, others say that their skill ramps up due to personal time spent at the range. Certifying's not trivial, but they're described as only having to do it once ever.

~J

That's actually one of the problems I have with SR4—all of a sudden large parts of the tension between implanting and going with external gear is gone. For most personnel, the corporation no longer needs to make a choice—the external gear is uniformly better.

~J

Ironically, it is one of the things that makes me happy. Implanted tech should be horribly more expensive than external tech simply by making it able to survive in the human body and making it survivable for the human body. Plus it should generally be slower, given the time to test the equipment. All external gear should be 1-5 generations farther along. IRL it would be more like 5 generations but given the lack of oversight and some advanced tech in SRverse lets say closer to 1 generation.

I could accept some performance difference between implant smart and goggle smart simply because IMO implant smartlink got the eye positioning data (wii-style micro gyros) while older smart goggles were limited to the positioning of the entire head. With SR4 contact-style devices or goggles that can monitor the direction of the eye (external imagelink fires lasers into the retina so it has to know where it is) you should get the same performance as an eye implant.

Cyber/bio still has a role to play but it's now much more feasible for the masses to avoid cyberware and surgery.

Heh, obviously you've never worked for the city of LA. By 2070 the LAPD will have finally received the funding it was supposed to get for 2007, meaning they can put exactly half the number of officers on the street that they'll supposed to have. They'll also finally get the budget approved to get Windows XP upgrades on their computers, and get rid of the last of their dot matrix printers.

Cyberware? The LAPD'll still be working on getting funding for a peliminary investigation into the costs/benefits of allowing metahumans to enter the Academy.

Holy moly, dot matrix printers are badass, and so 80s, too. The next time I GM SR there are going to be dot matrix printers.

2k for NVGs, 50 or less for a flashlight.

Not to mention that the flashlight doubles as a club. Sterotypically cops would go wild over that. OTOH you can't use NVGs as a club. Well, not easily, anyway.

To go with the original question (despite the pages upon pages of responses) I'd say this: No Smartlink for your typical Lonestar Officer.

To cut through the chaff here it's comes down to the following:

1. The reason why I believe some GMs want to justify doing things like this to "stock" NPCs is to make them more challenging to PCs. Given that the PCs are so "elite" in comparison to the world it can be a tricky setting to GM for, though far from impossible.

Decking out too many "rank and file" NPCs with this kind of cyberware makes it less special in comparison to the world setting, and can cause conceptual problems. If PCs aren't that big a deal (and keeping purely cybered characters in this league can be tricky from a conceptual standpoint as well as a practical one to begin with) in comparison to the world, the setting starts to fall apart. I mean there is a reason why PCs are supposed to be capable of going head to head with top of the line goverment/corperate/conspiricy based organizations.

Understand that for all talk about "disposable assets", that's only a tiny part of the logic behind the game. Most Corperate entities for example already possess their own "Black Ops" and "Dirty Tricks" squads that don't exist on paper. Shadowrunners are supposed to come into the picture when that kind of tool is insufficient to the job. A starting "Shadowrunner" is already pretty experienced and part of the idea is that your Samurai or Mercenary type might have STARTED as being one of the aces of one of those black ops teams, but for whatever left the corp, had his ID killed, and took his skills into the private sector. Indeed such is the entire idea behind the "Former Company Man" Archetype that has been around since pretty much day #1.

These kinds of arguements, combined with developments like "unreachable" grades of Cyberware (Beta, Delta, etc..) are in part what I believe has hurt Shadowrun in the minds of a lot of players and caused people to leave the game over the years, but that is part of another (more involved) arguement. I only mention it here as it lightly touches on this issue.


2. Conceptually Lone Star (and other police corps) wouldn't do this. One thing to remember is that these corperations are a group of paranoid nutbags who want to fulfill their security responsibilities for each city as cheaply as possible. Rather than equipping their officers to clear out the heavily crime infested areas, or ones where gangs are armed with military ordinance (provided by other corps) they simply have their men abandon them. This is a big part of the game.

Your typical "Cop" is some goober who signed up to do the job and is basically assigned to provide a dog and pony show in the more secure areas. He might buy the corp propaganda, hook, line, and sinker, but then again maybe not.

Due to the fact that they pull people off the street, send them to a training class, and stuff them in a uniform (the bodies have to come from somewhere) Lone Star as a corperation trusts their people even less than many other corps. A *BIG* deal was made about the fact that Lone Star does something that most corps doesn't: they take a tissue sample of their employees and keep it in storage so that way they can rapidly execute "rogue" cops if the need arises through ritual magic. Such was treated as being one of the things that made Lone Star fairly unique in the corperate world (even though some might see it as standar practice now). In novels like "Lone Wolf" a big deal was made about this tissue sample and how unusual it was for a character to have gotten free from Lone Star by having it destroyed. Of course Lone Star doesn't tell it's people that is what the sample is for, but it is.

The point here is that corps that do this kind of thing are extremely paranoid (perhaps in part because of competition for their contract) and trust their people less than your typical corp trusts it's wageslaves.

What's more there is the issue of these guys being disposible. I mean when for political reasons you might literally have to throw a thousand people into "The Barrens" knowing they are all doomed, your not exactly going to be enthusiastic about spending a couple thousand extra Nuyen on Smartgun links. Not to mention the general concern that those Smartgun links might be turned on you (given the level of police corruption).

You also have the concern that this is basically like hanging a "Cybersnatch me" sign on your cop. Digging a radio out of someone isn't much of a lure, but if you can collect Smartgun Links to sell second hand in "The Barrens" just by killing cops and chopping off their hands/digging out their eyes, next thing you know your going to see all the bad boys with their Knight Errant provided weapons slinking out of The Barrens periodically to go Cop Hunting, and that isn't going to look good when the police contract is next up for bid.

3. Some Cops *DO* have quite a bit of cyberware. While it might be harder with Lone Star, there are some people who believe the propaganda, and manage to survive the police meat grinder for a number of years. The guys are probably going to be enhanced and turned into SWAT team members or put in charge of units and such. The old module "Bottled Demon" features a character a lot like this as one of the antagonists.

4. While it's not very "effective" against world class criminals like Shadowrunners, remember that Lone Star still has a lot of people, and gang bangers and such (despite their hardware) aren't exactly cybered to the gills themselves for the most part. Lone Star is able to hold the "civilized" areas of the Metroplex not because of the uber-toughness of individual officers, but because of numbers, combined with the fact that the armies of Sinless (which probably outnumber Sinners) don't have any reachable goals to go after. In your typical "encounter" if two dozen go-gangers go tearing through the commercial district with assault rifles Lone Star can (given enough time) get scores, if not hundreds of uniformed guys on scene.

Not to mention the fact that Lone Star has access to things like Armored Vehicles (Ares Citymaster, Yellowjackets, etc...) which given enough time it can bring to bear. These are also the big thing that allows them to (occasionally) stomp on some gang on the fringes of The Barrens to prove their doing something (while glossing over their own fatalities).

5. It's important to understand that in Shadowrun the police (corp run) are supposed to be Knock-Down bad guys. Sure there might occasionally be some really dangerous guy introduced as a villain (or foil) for the PCs but they are the exception, rather than the rule.

A lot of "Dark Future" fiction like "2100 AD" (Ie Judge Dredd), "Appleseed", or "A.D. Police", is police oriented and as such presents some compelling images of very effective, heavily armed, extremely facist police officers/organizations operating in a Shadowrun like enviroment.

That is now what Shadowrun is however, rather it's focus is basically on crime and terrorism, the "bad guys" in many of the above pieces of fiction effectively being the "heroes" in Shadowrun (with the world defined accordingly, and the "heroic favor" placed on the criminal/mercenary elements).


>>>----Therumancer--->

Hi,

Just thought I'd pitch in..

How are DataJacks handled ??

By which I mean, who gets them in a company ?? How's that funded ??

The SmartLink situation should be something similar, I'd guess.


From what I remember of the Cyberpunk 2020 England sourcebook, all soldiers get things like SkinWeave as standard..
..So I'd go with the 'getting a SmartLink when joining up' option - either a loan scheme or paid for by the company.


Also, there's the whole interaction and security factor - codelocked guns, ease of information and maintenance, tracking of operatives, any other things the company wants to install.
Just because the circuitry is installed, doesn't mean it does more than link and show data - they may work just as DisplayLinks, rather than fullon SmartLinks.

From what I remember of the SR rulebooks, a DataJack + DisplayLink would give much of the functionality of a SmartLink.


Just my thruppence..

In my game...

Here is the standard gear loadout for your usually beat cop (not including the gear he or she would likely have available in their vehicle).

One thing to note is the "Porticam" that would be REQUIRED gear for all officers to carry since the gear is cheap, tiny (size of a button), and very useful in evidence collection. This would be turned on right as the cop was telling a subject their miranda-rights (or before if the cop is observing illegal activity).

The video would be stored in a OMC that would be uploaded to HQ using their terminal in their vehicle or just turned in when processing the arrestee.

2063 Lone Star Officer (beat cop, not including vehicle gear)

Std. Gear:
Ruger Thunderbolt - + 3 spare mags (standard ammo) (smartlink or laser)
Radio (Flux-5, Scramble-5, ECM/ECCM-5) (subvocal mic and earbud)
Concealed Porticam (on glasses or pin on shirt) w/ audio pickup.
Concealed Armored Vest
Police Belt
(2) Sets Handcuffs
Extendabale Batton , Taser Stick, or Tonfa
Pepper Spray / CS Spray
Smart Goggles (if needed)
Backup Pistol (Usually Hold-Out or Light / Concealed Holster back/ankle)
Tracking Signal Braclet / Anklet (Can be activated silently for backup, has biomonitor like DocWagon Braclet)
Bright Flashlight (150+ Lumen) w/ spare bulb and spare batteries
Combat Gloves

(Optional)
Forearm Guards
Armored Jacket
Chemsuit (For hard-rain days)
Slap Patches (any)
First Aid Kit