I was looking over the prospects of having a Technomancer as a player char, and i caught myself wondering a few things...

Do you have to log to a node to enter cybercombat? I mean, if a Technmancer is travelling a sector in AR, finds a specific comlink signal, can he battle it? or does he has to hack his way in to drop the hammer? I remember something about rogue sprites atacking people in AR on some part of Emergence.

And VR chars appear in AR when not running a Stealth program? What about Sprites? Are they visible in AR enviroments if they aren't on Stealth? Because i love the idea of a techmancer os sprite "walking" next to the group as an icon in AR, and interacting with them directly, and not through ARO windows.

I think you have to either be logged on legitimately or hack into a node for cybercombat to take place, either AR or VR.

In "Matrix Space" everything is contained in a node of some sort. If I remember correctly, a technomancer is considered his own home node (his brain). He has to access another node in order to interact with programs/users in that node.

the SR1-3 seattle matrix was basically a creation of the regional LTG/RTG, as such a "super-node" that all the others connected to, and that acted as bridges to others again. This is pretty much how the the line switching phone system have been working since the days of bell.

SR4 pushes the LTG/RTG system into the background (its there in some of the fluff, but one should not have to deal with them). Instead you have ARO (and with unwired, data requests). Note that a ARO do not have to be a window, it can be a free floating 3D object with (simulated) mass, for example, even when viewed in AR.

hell, a "textbook" on car engines in AR could basically be a long list of 3D models where each part can be highlighted for more info, or popped of to see how things fit together, fully interactively using gloves, trodes or datajack.

i guess one trippy mental image could be that your walking down the street wearing trodes, see a coin on the pavement, pick it up, only to have its surface cave in, and draw you into some VR space thats as expansive as the real universe we inhabit. The coin would basically be the ARO of a virus that forces the target into VR and logged onto a special node.

or SPAMware.

virus, spam, same diff imo