Per AUGMENTATION (cause I type faster than I think) pg 127

Implant Surgery (Cyberware/Bioware)
Basic Grade = Medicine (Implant Surgery) + Logic (4, 1 hour)

Makes no differentiation between types of cyber or bio, only the grade of said materials.



You are correct, of course. However, let us consider that a smaller population would likely correlate to smaller standing armies. In a smaller army you need better equipped and trained individual. Those seem like very likely upgrades for men on the line only. Logistics aren't going to need those upgrades, and actual ground-poundin grunts make up a smaller amount of our forces today than most people think. And at the price listed... could they afford to not give them that upgrade?

LOL! I didn't even know that Arsenal had rules for surgeries. But that's my point, I'm talking about Augmentation and I could be wrong but I'm pretty sure the more essence the surgery takes, more time of work and recovery it takes.

Bugger all, why did I say Arsenal? It's Augmentation... must go edit posts now...

There is a table further down in Augmentation on damage caused by surgeries, anything over 1 ess causes 7P damage (and suites can be installed all at one time so you only have 1 source of surgery damage). Basically meaning the time frame for the surgery is much less than the healing time frame.

Given they can develop ware which impacts your essence less, and have things like adapsin, I'm pretty sure its known.

The exact amount of Essence Loss generated by a specific augmentation can be calculated a number of ways, the easiest & least dangerous being Assensing. Yes, Essence is very real, known, and measurable in game.

They do put it in, but they seldom go through the trouble of getting it back out again. Implanting it, about 20K, taking it out.... another 20 K.... leaving it in, free.

Right, but look at the legality code of most popular combat cyberware. They don't let soldiers today hold onto their rifles, ammo, tanks, or body armor. Why would they let them keep something so much more expensive and just as illegal?

Deactivate it or put limiters in to civilian levels in the case of hardware like cyber limbs. Tag it with an RFID that identifies it as military hardware in case you're scanned by the Star or Errant and it should match your record. A snazzy Cyber Doc might be able to get it running again and modify the tag in such a way as to not arouse suspicion under normal scrutiny.

Well, fair enough. Your post was right except you mentioned Arsenal instead of Augmentation
And I was wrong, only the damage increases according to Essence, the amount of time is the same. So, let's say we have a pair of doctors with logic 4, Medicine 4 and specialization on Implant Surgery, it gives us 10 dice. It would take approximately 1 hour per surgery with teamwork. Which means 2 doctors can implant Wired Reflexes on 8 soldiers per day, 40 soldiers per week, 2080 per year.
Also, assuming an average Body of 4, the soldiers would be healed in 2-3 days.
Yeah, ok. I'm sold, Wired Reflex 1 looks like a good investment for soldiers.

I would be sold too, except for the niggling factor of what you do at end-of-service.

On the ONE hand, removing it seems a bit much. (What most people forget is that everyone enlisting in the US Armed Forces incurs a statutory service obligation of at least 8 years...Most people serve most of it on active duty, but then spend the rest in the Individual Ready Reserve. If they couldn't bother to do much more than a cut-and-paste on the Constitution when forming the UCAS, somehow I doubt they did much to that, either. That provision for callup at any time during the remainder of your 8-year obligation seems like a heck of a reason to not remove the cyber.)

On the other hand, what kind of maintenance does cyberware require? Presumably it requires some.

More: What cyber would one implant? WR 1...I suppose. Anything else as part of the "Everybody gets it but the magicians and adepts" package?

I don't see an implanted commlink as being a good deal - brain surgery tends to freak people out.

Eye surgery too. Honestly? I can see why cybereyes would be given to troopers, but honestly you can get the same package deal with a good pair of goggles for more than 1/10 of the price. And yes, I know, eyes are forever until they are gouged or injured. But how many soldiers have their new protective glasses falling on critical situations?

"I don't see an implanted commlink as being a good deal - brain surgery tends to freak people out."

In the 40s and 50s all the kids will be laughing at the Neo Luddites fuddy dudies as they go get a direct neural interface so they can jack directly in to the matrix. Got to have the edge if you want to stay on the fast track.

In the 60s and 70, they wouldn't even understand the concern unless you were awaken.


If people are willing to spend 2 to 6K for laser eye surgery right now just to correct their vision so they don't have to wear glasses, do you really think anyone will think twice about getting cyber eyes or a data jack?


Hell the "play the football game while at the Recital" feature alone would make it worth it to a lot of guys.
Or how about never having to worry about someone looking over your shoulder again.

Add in 20/20 vision, vision link, and a built in camera, and cool options like night vision, flarecomp, plus never needing to wear glasses or even goggles again....

Plus you never have to worry about someone losing their gear or having it stolen.

It is also a lot harder to tamper with.

You see all those ATM card skimmer schemes some of which are pretty scary. Wouldn't take that much to use a microdrone to add a little some thing extra to some com gear while the user was sleeping. At least with cyberware, it is a lot harder to pull something like that.

You see, I would be the first one in the line for surgery to give me cyber eyes with all the cool stuff I could fit in. But most people wouldn't. Sure, SR shows that transhumanism is a popular trend and all, but it applies mostly to bioware, because "chromo is so 50's". A good pair of goggles conected to your PAN plus tacnet does wonders already.

I've stated it in other threads, but I'm reasonably sure if tommorow cyberware became available especially things like perfect vision and other non invasive life improving techniques huge portions of the populations would adopt, one need only look to the number of people on steroids, mind altering drugs, or laser surgery to see the exact demographics it would play to. All improve the quality of life, all involve risk, but people still pursue these treatments.

Actually depending on the country they sometimes MAKE them keep their rifles. The legality code is R meaning you need a permit, which you would get from the army(edit) if you complete your term of service. Also rifles and tanks are MUCH easier to repurpose to a different soldier then an artificial spine.

Well Said LivingOxymoron... Semper Fidelis....

Keep the Faith

This. Really, a lot of it comes down to what people see as the lesser of two evils: being an unaugmented human facing the rigors of warfare or the cost and side effects of cyberware.

The Sixth World is pretty scary on the face of things. John Q. Public will likely never see a sasquatch much less a real bandersnatch, but in 2070, he knows they are real. Combine things like that with the general uptick in gang violence and the relentless drumbeat of megacorp advertising and you likely have a culture that is a bit more receptive to the idea of "personal defense" 'ware than our own would be. After all, it is fair to say that at least hundreds of millions of nuyen (if not billions) have been spent on making 'ware seem like a mandatory step in becoming a complete combatant. Going to war without it is going to seem a bit daft to a certain breed of young men and their families.

And that my friends, is when politics steps in. Now, I saw it brought up earlier that politicians may not buy into the idea of cyberware even if it is proven combat effective because it is expensive and scary to the common man. That may very well be true, but the flip side to the coin is that getting soldiers killed has generally proven to be very unpopular, at least in modern Western democratic politics. Politicians simply cannot afford to be perceived (at least by everyone, anyway) as genuinely undermining the chances of the rank and file troops to come back home in one piece. Basically, the same forces that made the body/vehicle armor shortages into a political land mine may very well force the suits to field some questions about why our boys don't have blood circuit control systems.

Anyway, I'm personally very much on the fence about how cybered up troops would be, particularly since the cost and logistics is obviously a big hurdle. It's inevitable that there would be a wide swath of attitudes on the subject. I just think it's going to be one of those things where the majority opinion is liable to hold a rather marginal lead-- there's simply too many good reasons on each side for it to be otherwise.

Unless it is impossible to counteract such things with tactics or training by virtue that the technologies breaks the paradigms these things are based on.

The only difference in skillwired skills and normal skills is the limitation on the usage of Edge. The Marines may end up with a higher proportion of humans than the Army due to the reduced emphasis on skillwires, maybe the Marines may end up using alpha strike ambush tactics (unloading Edge at the enemy), but I do not see it as sustainable in combat. It may turn out that Marines are used as expendable shock troops instead which would defeat the purpose (and expense) of their training or be pigeonholed into an obsolete niche. And given the genre, it is not an inconceivable thing unless the Marines can reinvent themselves.

One thing I have observed is the cost of cyberware seems like almost purely a game balance issue, the actual price of cyberware hasn't gone down since first edition despite the usual factors that would cause new technology to be cheaper smaller and more reliable. I must therefore conclude that cyberware purchased through legitimate means would be a lot cheaper then it is in the books.

The in game reason that cyber prices have stayed consistent is the SOTA curve. The game mechanics ignore all the little changes to things like wired reflexes over the years, but the in game prices, which is what you are paying do not. Hence consistency.

Certain implants did drop in price between SR2 and SR3 (I don't recall anything dropping between 1 and 2, but I could be wrong), especially things that had rule changes (a fact that supports your argument about game balance pricing). Many implants were repriced between SR3 and 4, especially those whose abilities were now duplicated by bioware, which prior to SR4 simply wasn't as good (but did not use up essence), which again reflects game balance pricing. Compare SR3 wired reflexes to synaptic accelerators (+6Rea and +3d6 for max wired vs no reaction and +2d6 for max synaptic) or dermal sheathing vs orthoskin (+4 body and 0/2 armor for dermal sheathing vs +1/2 armor for orthoskin) for two of the more dramatic differences.



Actually, older editions took this into account with the street index number, which has been dropped from SR4. Legitimate items cost whatever the list price was. Many items were two or three times as expensive on the black market. Some were much cheaper (fractional street index). Few items had a street index above 3; APDS and AV ammo were 4, and a few of the vehicle weapons were 5, IIRC. Most illegal cyber was around 1.5 to 2, with a few extreme pieces falling outside that range.

Couple of things.

1. Yeah, the UCAS is not actively at war. However remember that it is what is left of the United States. It has lost the South, California, most of the Northwest, Hawaii, Alaska, and most of the West. I think that the UCAS is going to be very paranoid about losing any more territory. (Of course, California just got chucked out. But one can't really blame them for that. It's Cali.)

Yeah, the CAS is pretty friendly (the North let them go this time, without to much of a fuss), and the Indians are apparently being peaceful, but you can never tell (it's not like the NAN is actually unified in a meaningful way), and Aztlan could come rolling in. Even in today's world we don't have the luxury of time, in case of invasion, like there was in the WW's. Add 60 years (such as low space commuter flights, just as an example), and you have to always be prepared (otherwise you might as well not be).

2. Ok, let's just go with a combo of suggestions from earlier in the thread. First, it's good PR to keep soldiers alive, and the soldiers like staying alive to. So front line troops have cyber. However we don't want to rip the cyber out at the end (for whatever reason you want). So you have to sign up for a long contract to get cyber. Combat mods are part of your "signing bonus." You get extra mods for extra long contracts or re-enlistment. At the end, if you are honorably discharged, you get an ongoing permit for your military mods (so long as you stay squeaky clean) and enter the reserves. It's expected and in the contract (and a weekend a month is not a big deal, especially in a dystopian future).

That should cover it. Front line infantry get the cheap mods they need, and it solves what happens afterwards (and no one but "bad people" get their ware repoed).

I think a lot of soldiers would have 'ware, but I don't think the military would be providing it for them. They'd be paying for it themselves, maybe on a payment plan, but it would be their own. Why? The same reason everyone else does it - the competitive edge. And pride in themselves and their job. And the desire to get ahead; bucking for promotions. And the glory of being the best.

Then why enter the military? There are alot of other ways they can get 'ware, if they are going to have to pay for it themselves. Corps run that way, but the military does not make you buy your own equipment. Why would internal equipment be any different? It makes them more efficient, it makes good PR for less soldiers dying, they don't have to be replaced as often, and they sign up for longer tours. For the low, low cost of a couple of thousand a year.

Why would they (have) to pay for it themselves? Sure, I'm sure they can invest their hard earned monies in extra upgrades (which the military will kindly supply and implant, while taking the money out of the soldier's paycheck), but basic mods are likely provided (in the specific cases that have already been mentioned).

You know if someone is willing to have an operation on their eyeballs to get rid of glasses and spend many thousands of dollars of their own money to do it, I don't think people are think twice about spending a little more and getting their eyes replaced with cyberware.

Especially when you consider the risks with the early forms of Lasik Eye surgery, that fact that people where doing this before they knew the long term effects, and the fact that there was no plan B. You only had one set of eyes and you just have to live with the results.


Now compare that to some thing that has been around for fifty years and has many more benefits and worse comes to worse you can just get your eyes regrown?

Not going to be a lot of people thinking twice about it.

That was one of the changes in 4th edition that I really loved.

Cyberware was finally a mass production commodity.

Some thing that most of the time, you walked in to a clinic at the local mall, got it installed, and walked out.

Back to the original point in this thread, if you hijacked a jet with 300 people on it, then 8 of them with have wired reflexes (working on 1 in 6 men are former servicemen and 1/3 of those would have wired reflexes).

One wonders how many would have wired reflexes at a gun show?

Don't take the Shadowrun tech curve too seriously. We're probably going to see the first human-level AI this decade, and in the next your laptop will become significantly smarter than you are.

Shadowrun has technology moving at a snails pace because the game doesn't really work when meathumans are totally obsolete.

What to do with ware after enlistment is indeed tricky. But maybe it's easier to think of ware as "training" rather than weapons. You can make soldiers hand in their rifles, but they still have military training, which makes them more dangerous than untrained slobs.

It makes sense for the military to pay some (within limits) attention to what happens to honorably discharged personnel. A friendly note of recommendation to potential employers would go a long way. After all, the best way to keep people from going postal is to make sure they have a real job.

Dishonorable discharge would merit removal, however.



As for how freaky implants are: remember, this is the military. Normal people aren't killers; you're training people to become different, capable of pulling the trigger, risking their lives, staying loyal and calm under fire. Freaky implants might even be a comfort to them.



As for militarism: the Sioux and the UCAS have been on bad terms for most of their history, same for Aztlan and the CAS. They don't need pretexts for maintaining their military strength.

As many games do, it's artificially crippled just for the benefit of the Players and the game.

Meat Puppets [it works for prostitutes] ??

Join up, get modded up, get chipped, do your tour, at the end just unchip and not remember the last few years.

Interesting show premise, lousy execution, lousy, and lousy twist ending....

oh wait we were talking about shadowrun.

Not to mention scifi literature and movies. Pretty much everyone just handwaves away most likely technological advances and their consequences, especially in nanotechnology and AI. Even Charles Stross did it in Accelerando - they say he didn't dodge it, but by following a group of meathumans trying to remain meaty on the outskirts of the posthuman civilization, he avoided the (probably impossible) task of writing an understandable story within such a context.

Pretty sure personafixes lack the creativity a person working on their own has. Plus the implant that turns off memory lowers general perception while active, that's pretty suicidal for military use. Even without that it'd kinda suck to train a guy only to have battle damage or something wreck the implant and make him forget all his training. I'd be willing to bet though the original intent behind inventing those PAB units (or at least the publically given intent) was for treatment of things like PTSD, not brainwashing. Might even be the most common use of them; there are probably a lot more people who've seen something they want to forget than there are inconvenient witnesses that can't be dealt with more cheaply by a bullet to the head .

With regard to PTSS etc and modern conditioning of servicemen it should be noted there are several treatments to deal with traumatic stress afterwards. Basically they re-call the experience with the subject. I imagine sim-sense and +50 years development can offer some valuable assistance in that regard.

and further and further off topic...

Ken MacLeod did the same thing in his very good novel "Newton's Wake." If posthuman society after a Singularity is, by definition, unknowable, how then you do you write about it? All such fiction and RPGs (like EP) have to be from the point of view of the stragglers who did not transcend and maintain something in the same order of magnitude of current human intellect.

There are plenty of reasons why the SR world would be behind our own in the tech curve, but I totally agree that the tech curve is kept "low" to keep it playable. That's how we get cuddly human-level-sapient AIs after two editions of only the godlike posthuman ones.

Richard K. Morgan touched on this topic in "Altered Carbon" and it's sequels. His world has cortical stacks and resleeving (and was one of the inspirations for said tech in Eclipse Phase). When a soldier dies in combat and his stack is retrieved, they put the soldier's mind into a VR simulation to determine whether the means of their demise drove them insane. Since, in his world, subjective time in VR can be made to run much slower than real time, you can fit in months of PTSD therapy in a handful of days in real time. If they decided the soldier is mentally stable, they resleeve him/her into a new body and send them back out to the front lines. That's also how soldiers get a few weeks of mental and emotional R&R time on a beach in only a couple days of real time and without ever leaving the combat zone.

In Shadowrun terms, the fact of multiple Matrix initiative passes in hot sim, without any other kind of reflex augmentation, supports the idea that the SR virtual reality compresses time in a similar, though not as drastic, way. I think I should make more of that fact in my game.

I would say probably at least 25%, since many of those at gun shows are (or were) reservists, military, or police.

Well, it really depends on culture. I'm a computer science grad and during one of the classes (History and the Future of Computer Science) our teacher asked who would do a surgery to trade their for cyber-eyes with all the mods we can find on shadowrun, I raised my hand instantly, a few others did too. Most didn't.
When he said that having eyes like these would give you edge when looking for jobs because of AR technology, video-recording, etc. more companies would be eager to hire people with these modifications, a lot of more people raised their hands, like 90%.
Later the weekend, at a barbecue party with my girlfriend's friends (she is an architecture grad) I asked them the same question and even after I've told them the benefits of being hired an all only three of them (out of 30 some people) said they would.

Of course, with enough media coverage on television, movies, internet, etc. This trend could be changed. People would be looked down for not having some kind of cyber...
Just my 2 ...

Did your teacher mention SR by name?

No, and I even asked if he ever heard of SR before he just mentioned a cyber eye with what would be an imagelink plus low-light vision, flare compensation, zoom, image enhancement, etc.
But he is a big fan of Bladerunner, Gibson and Herbert (ok, Dune is not exactly a cyberpunk setting but it kinda is a dystopian one).

I think there would be a difference between a good P Mod, and being a Meat Puppet.

A Meat Puppet is plays out it's programming.

A PMod mods your personality. It expands on what is already there in one specific direction.

Unless specially coded otherwise, I expect a person to remember what happened while using a PMod unless the PMod has the safety's overridden and is running BTL level simsense.

That is given that a PMod is really a finely tuned BTL with a lot of skill softs built in.

One of the Game Lore holy grails with PMods was to boost some one active skills using the PMod allowing you to get more out of your skill wires or to not even need skill wires.


I also see P Mods being used as an emergency tools.

If you got some one losing it and there is no way to Evac them them, they you might use a P Mod to keep them frosty.

Shoot you have a hostage or prisoner you need to transport through dangerous territory, you might use a PMod to keep them calm, given them basic survival skills (the sounds of gun fire means drop to cover and NOT stand up and look around), and make their reactions to stress and danger more predictable.

Or you need to pass your self off as someone else (you need to believe it totally too) then a P Mod might be useful.

The Harlequin adventure had the PCs flying on a suborbital and got into the airline security aspects of cyberware. People who board a plane with Wired Reflexes have to wear a taser bracelet that activates when the reflexes trigger. Perhaps it was other dangerous forms of 'ware too.

One fun question... how long does it take to train someone to get used to wired reflexes and use them properly?

Depending on the number of sharp objects around.... too long.

I expect that is more of an issue with Wired II or higher.
And you would ramp up slowly (only turn the Wired II to Wired I levels) until the owner was comfortable using it at full speed.
Likely just need a few weeks for your muscles to get used to it.
Perhaps some VR training to get your mind used to moving that fast and on what to expect.


After all if it took extensive training to use wired reflexes, then the various combat drugs would be nearly useless.

I image any one planning to provide combat drugs to their forces would have the users take them several times under controlled conditions to make sure they know what to expect. Perhaps once per year after that. Kind of like qualifying with your weapons anually.

The goal would be to have them take them enough to be able to take full advantage of them and be aware of the risks but not so often that they might be come addicted.

What do you mean, "why enter the military?" You ask that like people join *because* they can get 'ware. How does the average Joe get restricted 'ware on the street? People join the service for the same reasons they do now - sense of duty, need for education or a paycheck - plus the added bonus that it's a little easier to get cyber. I'd imagine military service entitles you do a nice discount or payment plan. We've already discussed that the grunts don't get it. But I'm sure they can buy it, just like anyone else can. And it greatly improves their chances for promotions, wouldn't you say? Just like the wage slave going to school for that MBA, to get a promotion. The military provides soldiers with all their needs, but that doesn't prevent soldiers from obtaining or upgrading their own equipment. I recall a few years ago, how families were sending body armor to their kids in Iraq.

I don't see the military removing wired reflexes, but I don't think it would be very difficult. Wire-eating nanites? And don't wired reflexes have controllers? Couldn't those just be removed, along with the connections?

Not really. Wired reflexes, IIRC, replace parts of your musculature with wires - remove the wires, and there's nothing there to replace it functionally.

you guys only read stuff on strict cyberpunk themes? I must say I do not read cyberpunk scifi I usually stick with hard scifi and some space opera, usually only from authors that do good hard scifi. Most of the stuff I read has us behind the tech curve if on nothing else energy. Heinlien and some from his age plotted the price of energy and just extrapolated, they didnt realise america would let other countries have any resources I guess. The real point is meat humans do fine in most of those stores although Peter Hamilton does seem to favor enhanced for a straight up fight.

...okay.

In fairness, they've been saying this for about thirty years now. I'll believe it when I see it and not a second before.

As far as soldiers and 'ware goes... well, the military will surely pay for you to get laser eye surgery now. You may have to deal with a ton of paperwork about it, but you can make it happen. I'd be amazed if cybereyes (which are cheaper and more reliable) wouldn't be standard issue. Slap in low-light, image link, vision mag, flare comp, and smartlink while you're in there, and you've just massively increased the combat effectiveness of your soldier for a few grand. No reason not to. Eye recording units for officers and NCOs will go a nice long way towards victory, too. Not saying that governments aren't occasionally stupid about equipping soldiers, but I think it would be standard to everyone in uniform.

Wired Reflexes, for a fraction of the training cost you're already tossing around for a combat soldier, will easily double the combat effectiveness. That's a good RoI, my friend. It looks good to the brass, it looks good to the politicians, it looks good to the grunts, and it looks good to the military-industrial complex. You're more likely to see soldiers going to war with Wired Reflexes and muskets than assault rifles and meat-only speeds.

VCR, on the other hand, will actually be even more common, I would wager. As has already been pointed out, there's going to be a lot of drones involved in warfare in the SR universe. A lot of combat drones means a lot of riggers to run them. On top of that, while your average grunt driving a Jeep (future analogous vehicle type), will probably not be equipped with a VCR (unless he was a professional driver in the civilian world already or something), your T-Bird jockeys, chopper and jet pilots, and heavy armor drivers will. If for no other reason, the ten grand on 'ware may be the difference between victory on the battlefield and losing a 50M:nuyen: piece of equipment. The bean counters won't be happy when they start totalling up those numbers. Save a lot of trouble for the Navy, too, unless I miss my guess... Oh, and you can't forget sec riggers. The military will have its fair share of spiders as well, I'd wager.

Now, if you wonder whether or not they'd pull it out at the end of your term... well, for that, you pretty much only have to look at the bottom line. A rifle takes about two sheets of paper and one goon to trade from an outgoing soldier to his replacement. Less if the weapon is assigned to the position instead of the person (I don't know how common this is, but that's how it was done in my unit). 'Ware, on the other hand, takes a bit of doing, and is probably behind the on the tech curve by then anyway. Ever seen Lord of War? You know how there were huge piles of rifles because the government decided it would be cheaper to buy more in America than to ship them back halfway around the world? I imagine they'd have a similar reaction to cyberware for soldiers. Your dystopia may vary, of course.