For instance, How could someone tell the difference between skillwires and wired reflexes? Bone Lacing and muscle replacement?

Similarly, how could someone tell if you had retinal duplication in your cybereyes? What about if they suspected you had a smartlink? How would they tell?

Would a MAD scanner flag cyberware that might be illegal? Would a cyberware scanner tell you if something was illegal?

consider each cyberware has it´s unique design and unique place installed it would most likely not be a tough feat to just cross reference a scan with the countries cyberware black list but I can´t say that´s fact.

Well, the scanners have a database which they try and match the ware to, but ultimately it's up to the GM to interpret that. For instance, in my games we play that a mass of cyberware is far easier to spot but harder to identify than a single piece (the dice bonus to find multiple pieces is also added to the threshold when the time comes to determine the details of the ware.) So, someone with a bunch of high grade (more customized) ware stuffed inside is a messy bag of mystery to a simple wave scanner.

So, it looks like it's up to the GM. I'll go ask them about it, see what they say.

Then the corps should have developed stealthy versions that can pass as legal. If not fot the public, at least for their own agents.

You can try to scan for RFID chips used for diagnostic purposes, of for the nodes the cyberware uses to communicate. Cross reference the replies with a database of the responses given to such queries by various types of cyber-hardware, and boom- you've scanned for cyber, the easy way.

Of course, that assume people don't somehow disable such responses. Any cybered runner worth a (used) jack would.

Still, there physical scans, say using milimeter wave radar to peer inside the body, or a high rez MAD scanner. Metal bone lacing would be pretty easy to identify with such a simple physical scan; you'd have metal following the form of the entire skeleton. Similarly, large amounts of abnormal (vat grown) muscle tissue (which is likely much denser than human muscle or otherwise detectable) in all the large muscle groups indicate muscle replacement. Telling the exact grades apart could be tricky, but that's what multiple successes are for. It gets trickier with cyberware where the entire function is neural, or where multiple items are jammed into a small location (eg, telling just which eyemods somebody has), but a cyber scanner could you can tell SOMETHING is there, and then you start asking questions / running other diagnostics.

So yeah, its kind of up to the GM, in terms of how people interpret and what they do with the info they get from a "cyberware scanner". Personally I figure that a good con roll and some decent (false) documentation might let you get away with claiming your wired reflexes were something a bit more legally acceptable, for example. But if you are claiming they are skillwires, you might get asked to slot some chip and demonstrate the (rather obscure) skill on it...



Consider how hard it can be to ID a Car seen at a distance through the rain (analagous to looking at micro-tronics inside the body). Sure, each model of car has "it´s unique design", but people do all kinds of custom mods. No two bodies are quite alike (especially after you load them with other bio and cyberware), so there's likely to be a lot of customization goes into implanting any piece of cyber. Besides, if you are just looking at circuit board shapes and so on, some smart street dock would be sure to slap a plastic and metal casing around illegal cyber to make it look like something else on a scan.

So, mongoose, what about passing Move-by-Wire (which is forbidden) as Skillwires? They are basically just a Wired REflexes system married to a Skillwires system. Would they have a larger amount of machinery in the brain, for instance?

I can't remember which book I read this: but it was some shadow talk about forging passports with health issues problem to justify some cyber. One of the examples was parkinson or alzheimer to explain the need of wired reflexes.

Yeah, and a degenerative bone disease to justify Bone Lacing. I can't remember where it was either.

The rules are actually somewhat clear on it. The only thing left up to the GM is determining how many successes on the Cyberware Scanner's test determine how much detail.

The bizarre quirk about those rules -- which exemplify what I hate most about SR4's dice mechanic -- is that the more implants you have, the greater the level of success the scanner has in not only detecting that you have implants (which is reasonable enough) but also how specific it is in determining what you have. More implants give the scanner more dice on the test, and more hits determine how much info is gained about each one of them. The only thing that keeps it in check is the threshold depending on grade, which itself is odd since the amount of Essence or the size of the implant doesn't matter at all. It's just as easy for a scanner to go crazy at an Obvious Cyberarm as it is a Retinal Duplication implant, and it has just as hard of a time determining what each one is, too, despite the obviousness of the former versus the latter. Even if, say, you have multiple retinal mods that should, in a logical world, at least confuse the scanner a bit. Not make it more accurate as it currently does.

Up to your GM, but I'd agree there's likely some overlap in the physical configuration. Of course, if the MBW was active, the effects on the characters movement might be pretty obvious to the person observing them, making it hard to pass off as skillwires if an actual skillwire test was required.

Funkenstien raises a good point. Its not a very good mechanic in this case. You really should test individually to see if each item is detected / recognized. Of course, having a bunch of essence intensive gear does make it obvious that something of questionable legality is in there, so in a way it is easier to ID each one, if only because you'd be more suspicious.

I like the idea of having the bonus to detection added to the threshold for determining what any particular piece does. Very concise, logical, and simple to implement.