Had you read my previous post, you would have seen that he can do it only at the expense of counterspelling.

Then it all depends on your GM: he just has to say that these glasses capture the image, process it and rebuild it for you to see instead of just displaying a mask and letting you see the rest: no spellcasting through electronic devices. I don't think any book says whether an image link is transparent or not.

The whole point of contact lenses is to let Mages use AR without spending essence. They're contact lenses with an image projector on them, probably in the blind spot in your field of vision.

A lens that can become opaque here and there, while remaining see-through enough for mages is well within the reach of 2070s tech.

There is even an ARE Program that is desigend specifically for that purpose... it is in the Unwired Book, Page 108... It is called Negator, and costs 100

Keep the Faith

Or if a runner rolled a chaff grenade or some kind of jammer near your drone. Given how prevalent jamming tech is, I don't see anyone setting their drones to explode if they aren't logged into the matrix.

or nail a drone with a chem grenade containing anti wifi paint, which should blind all sensors which use any form of EM, and prevent the drone from making any form of communication with its rigger.
Then tap into its diagnostic and repair ports, and steal it

Exactly. Chaff grenades are cheap. Drones are expensive. If you had one cooking off every time it passed through a patch of static (or a storm hit) you wouldn't have Drones, or budget, for very long.

And if it get's known, you'll have people jamming you for entertainment.

leave the tags and paint the drone in WI-fi inhibiting paint, just stong enough to block the tag but nothing else...lol

Uh, why wouldn't that be par of the course anyway? Who cares if the guy spying on you just wasted a few thousand nuyen on their drone? If it was a threat they'd try to destroy it anyway. If it blows up because you jammed it, chances are it would have blown up if you attacked it. So what the hell do you lose by jamming? Nada. Especially if you're a scavenger after the fact.

I don't think a dead man's trigger is quite the deterrent you think it is.

Probably not. I generally operate under the assumption that no one would try to jam a corp facility just for the fun of getting shot at, but it sounds like I'm wrong.

That's not what I was saying at all.

I'm saying that if there's a hostile drone (be it a spy drone or a combat drone), who the Hell cares if it blows up when you jam it? It saves you the effort of having to do it yourself and the end result is exactly the same. And if it was loaded with enough explosives to do a ton of damage, it would have done so anyway whether you attacked it instead or not. It's not a deterrent at all. It's a time saver for the runners and a big money sink for the idiot rigger who thought he was being slick.

And if you're a scavenger, it was going to blow up either way, too. So again, nothing lost on the scavenger's side at all.

And if it gets out that a rigger or corporate puts dead man triggers on all their drones, that's going to cause everyone to join the jamming bandwagon just for shits and giggles. Not the other way around.

I think you are preaching to the choir:

Wouldn't be the first time I grossly misread someone. Sorry.

yeah, the point was that putting dead man's trigger explosives on your drones set to go off whenever they lose matrix connection was a bad idea, because then everyone else could blow up your drones by jamming them, and that's assuming your drones don't just randomly explode because of a lost connection to begin with... so basically nobody in their right mind would do it =P

This sounds like typically the kind of security screwup that actually happens a lot IRL; any security chief makes such a mistake once.

A deadman's switch set to immediately detonate explosives in the drone wouldn't be useful, but one set more selectively, and with more nefarious purpose, would be. Depending on how you store and use the drone, more selective criteria might be the complete absence of wireless traffic for X period [under the assumption that if it's in a Faraday cage, it's being stolen], or the failure to receive a particular coded transmission every Y period. Responses could vary widely, as well, and would depend heavily on the Pilot rating; the drone could wait until it detected an active wireless link and call home [LoJack], or it could attempt escape and evasion, or erase its own software, or intentionally overload itself to render itself worthless without possibility of collateral damage...or it could, of course, blow up.

The idea of a deadman's switch to respond to the possibility of drone theft isn't unreasonable; it simply can't be applied in a naive fashion.

Some version of the standard "vehicle is moving and all the wheels are not rotating/engine isn't running" that is used by car alarm systems with a phone home circuit works too.

You could have the best fun with your players if they start doing this.

Heavily disguised (-6 to Perception) hardened electronics hardwired to some vital part of the drone which is not it's dog brain. It's not an RFID tag so it doesn't come up as such in a magical sweep, it's powered down and shielded so murder to detect. It waits to be stolen, waits some more and then when it seems safe it waits a little more.

Then it wakes up the massive Agent and the package of Hacking code and starts slowly infiltrating the drone and anything it is connected to. It plants viruses and trojans, opens backdoors, lets it's masters into the teams peripheral nodes and gathers information.

If you are really cruel you could just familiarise a registered sprite with the hidden node and it can warp in whenever you want it to regardless of any wireless shielding methods. This has the advantage of requiring much less powerful hardware to be hidden in the drone and it's clean of all code even if it is found and can't be safely disarmed without destroying the hidden device. And sprites are much more powerful than agents to boot.

And then just when it is dramatically appropriate you can rain massively on the player's parade. Like, totally monsoon rain on their parade.

That's a pretty cool idea.

It's best for "special occasions" - to take down known drone-poachers. (Mental note: a specialized drone poacher is an interesting character concept.)

Using it all the time is unrealistic; this kind of thing is expensive and complex; if you protect everything like this, sooner or later something will go wrong horribly in unpredictable ways. Overly complex security is risky, and makes maintenance hard. Not to mention you become dependent on very exclusive technicians.

I agree, a surprise used too often is no surprise at all.

On the other hand it doesn't have to be complicated or expensive. The sprite method only requires simple electronics that are relatively cheap and could be spread like thousands of tiny trojan horses in all of a corp's drones and high-value equipment.

Heh, you could even spread them through another corp's equipment or the gear you release into the grey market....

It ain't much of a surprise if the "target" discovers it when they check the drone for damage.

It is quite disturbing how difficult it can be made to 'discover' such things.

If you embed it in the chipset it's terrifyingly difficult.

I think this is a really good idea. If the anti-theft system is completely isolated - physically, electronically - from the drone's main systems, a scan of those systems will turn up nothing: the drone, in essence, doesn't even know the anti-theft system exists.


The weirder you make it, the more this is true, too. If it uses electromagnetic transceivers at all, they shouldn't be standard "wireless matrix" protocol: the signal it has to receive could be a selection of famous Margaret Thatcher speeches sped up to a duration of a half-second and vocoded with a modulated waveform whose "valid" shape would be defined by a complex algorithm shared by the drone and the transmitting server [which itself could be physically isolated from the facility's computers]. If it needs an antenna, it shouldn't look like or function like an antenna: it should just be a portion of the drone's chassis that happens to already be metal [or which you've made out of metal to serve this purpose]. Its power source shouldn't be conventional batteries, and wouldn't need to be particularly powerful at first; captured mechanical energy could power the single logic solid you'd need. The "safeword" system wouldn't need to be electromagnetic, either: the drone could need to receive a measure of some enzyme or catalyst, whose absence would raise the conductivity of a fluid into which the power leads for the anti-theft system are routed.

For added cost of about as much as a potato battery and some Agent software, you could have a system in which, if the catalyst isn't added after a certain period - a day, a week, a year - then power is trickled to a solenoid [itself completely disconnected from either the anti-theft system or the drone's main systems] which would compress a mechanical cylinder, physically completing an optical connection and disconnecting the drone's own main computer. From then on, the Agent runs the show, and could make merry havok in a wide variety of stimulating ways: "plants viruses and trojans, opens backdoors, lets it's masters into the teams peripheral nodes and gathers information." Inexpensive, simple, low-maintenance.

There are just dozens of ways in which the deadman's switch is useful; this is just one simple one.


Wow. I need to do some sprite reading, apparently.

Just a quick question, if its powered down how is it going to know its been stolen? Its going to have to have a minimum of power to be able to conclude its been stolen, and if it has said power, a technomancer sprite, or a decent agent with scan IS going to find it.

Some sort of chemical or biological fuse.

You could rig a biodegradable band to a physical switch that is sealed from contamination by a servo that powers off with the rest of the drone. When the band snaps the switch closes and the trojan powers up and starts wreaking havoc.

And it will stay on the table all the same after dismanteling the drone and putting it back together.

Until word gets out such systems exist, then I might have runs just to 'play' with the corp using them.


Your special passwords and whatnot must still conform to the hacking rules, given this, I would create Trojans which might randomly rewrite the needed code to the frequencies given off by the tools needed to maintain the drones. I could poison the catalysts or enzymes so the drones at random could go berserk in the hangers, or when around the nodes carried by known security personnel, or better yet, when around nodes carried by CEOs or anyone else of value to the corp.

Then how is power getting to it exactly? Its going to be connected to a battery or generator of some sort.


And oh so easy to screw with, also given the standard search rolls, the presence of scanners, and various other detection spells, sprites and equipment, not nearly as hidden as you might like to think. Given the amount of specialized equipment and training needed by your drone technicians to NOT set this off by accident or equipment failure, knowledge of these systems is either ubiquitous among your drone technicians, meaning its easy to learn about, or its restricted to a small and select group of people, meaning it CAN'T be in all your drones just due to the problems of maintaining it all. Also hope the rigger doesn't have the knowledge skill 'corporate drone security procedures', which if you're going to make a habit of stealing drones sounds like a good skill to have.

Suddenly I think about extraction runs against the corp's drone technicians...

Or just stealing their tech manuals.....

I thought I had covered this but I will again if you really need me to.

Disguised can give up to a -6 penalty to perception checks on top of all the other potential penalties and threshold adders.

Hardened can supply up to a -6 penalty to detect them with sensors. A rating 6 NLJD looking for a fully hardened device needs 4 hits from 6 dice to succeed.

Having been thinking about this some tonight it occurs to me that drones might easily be earthed the way that cars are nowadays by connecting one terminal to the conductive superstructure and each circuit is bolted to the structure to complete the circuit. In this instance you could actually cast these devices into the structure of the drone during the manufacturing process. They would be a bitch to find if you didn't know they were there and removing them could be designed to be impossible without doing terminal damage to critical structural components.

Just that disguise can't hide the fact that the things inside still are different from what should be inside, which is what an UWBR, unaffected by hardening, will tell you - especially if it's an intricate system running without power.

Of course, said disguise will make said system six times as expensive.
Additionally, those need to maintained and reset manually before the relevant interval, which translates into extensive downtimes.

Bottom line: It's useless, expensive and a chore.

No, it's excellent for special occasions. But not for regular use.

Just this thread is about regular usage, so...

Well my original post was about the special occasions such regular usage is likely to make inevitable.

You would have to be a bit of a dumbass not to disguise the item as a component that belongs in the device in question. Up to and including functioning exactly like the duplicated component.

I'm not sure you can use UWBR for such a purpose, even if you can the innocuous components the device is disguised as are likely all you will detect.

And so it evolves, from a device disguised as something else, to a device made from recursively disguised parts that, in addition to their regular functions, perform the dead mans trigger, too.

It looks a lot like the 1 cm square 0.05nm IC that controls the regualtion of an ultracap with 40 KwHr of power in it, because that is what it is. And it's powered by the ultracap (which is also the main power supply for the drone) and would always be powered by it to prevent unfortunate events. Like the ultracap discharging too fast. Oh, and if you want excitement, 1kWkr of energy is about equivalent to 1 kg of TNT.

As evolution continues, now it's not connected to the main systems of the drone in any way while regulating it's main power system - and every drone battery is a bomb.

It's the Morph-Trigger - it's always not what the players check for, protected by the Power of Plot. Sounds like fine and balanced GM fiat to me, yessir.

The awesome power of plot has clearly been deeply intertwined with SR background stuff. This has the advantage of at least making sense.

Except for the fact it would be expensive to implement and if anyone learns to circumvent or cause it to malfunction, you no longer have drones, you now have bombs which may explode at any moment literally all over your compound, and you got to pay for all of them, and they'll blow you and your stuff up. Really its only plausible if you don't think about it.

Background, this isn't.

No, the only advantage that has is honesty. That it doesn't make any sense at all. And is just there to rain on the players parade.

Actually it really isn't. It's a minor change to an IC and addition of an antenna. It just requires that they use a 25 cent processor to run the power system instead of a 10 cent processor. Given that there are dozens of similar processors in the average car, some with their own battery backup, this isn't exactly a big deal. It's perfectly viable for Ares Drones to use a modular COTS Ares PowerSystem to run their drones, who use a chipset produced by Ares Semiconductor using a design by Ares SystemLogic to control the power system.

And unless you take apart every chip with a scanning tunneling microscope and have a lot of experience in building ICs and have crazy expensive design tools you are not going to find any evidence that there is anything wrong.

But Ares isn't going to use this to keep a hacker from stealing a drone. It's reserved for a time when the stakes are a lot higher.

And that antenna is the Achilles Heel - now it will show up more with an NLJD than it's supposed to be, as well as be a lot more vulnerable to EMP than the normal ICs. Of course, if it's linked to the internal bus in any way, it will show up when hacking it, too.

And unless you harden it, which will make it much more expensive, it won't be much more effective than the RFIDs scattered through the vehicle... you know, like explained in Arsenal. Which are the reasons why thiefs use NLJDs and EMP in the first place.

So while this will result in finding it, too, you don't need to do so.

Absolutely! No one should think this is a be-all, end-all, Shadowrunners get reamed every time, forever kind of device. There will be modes of detection which would expose it, countermeasures which could defeat it. Then responses are developed to those countermeasures, and the cycle continues. I would expect a constantly evolving arms race between security design and criminal technology. I would expect that because that's what has always happened.


Yeah, I don't think you understood anything I wrote if you think any of those things would have any effect whatsoever. In my - single, undeveloped - example, the catalyst would function only as a delay mechanism, whose absence would alter the chemistry of either a conductor or power cell which was disconnected from the drone's main system. Changing the composition of that catalyst wouldn't make the drones randomly go berserk.

Your point stands, though: absolutely, a system like the one I described could be subverted, once it was known. Then another system would be created, until it was known and subverted. And so it goes.


A tiny ultracapacitor, or even a chemical solution which itself could be what the catalyst is added to. Any kind of chemical battery, or even a heat exchanger. The initial power source would need to do nothing more than move a single small solenoid, which by 2070 I would expect to be a deeply trivial amount of power. [I mentioned potato batteries for a reason.]

The entire system, with today's technology, could be, what, a few cubic millimeters, most of which could be hidden, built to conform to the shape of the frame, be distributed about the unit in ways which would mislead people scanning it? Even assuming an equal arms race between scanning and miniaturization technologies, the point is, it'd be a tough find if you really tried to hide it. More importantly, the technology to locate it would cost radically more than the technology to produce it.


Security doesn't stop crime. What security does is produce a good return on investment by making crime a bad return on investment. Systems like this one - not just this system, but the idea of evolving anti-theft devices, of which this would be one example - are critical. Look at all the stuff you're talking about: scanners and spells, sprites? That stuff costs money, a damn site more money than the security measures they're designed to exploit.


It absolutely does not have to be. The systems being described are all very basic electromechanical or chemical systems which exist in common, inexpensive form today. [Otherwise, I wouldn't know about them!] Now, Shadowrun is full of expensive, unlikely technological inventions, like monowire and nanotechnology, and if the system being described required that level of sophistication, I would agree it would be very expensive indeed. But in 2070, when what's impossible now is simply very expensive, what's very simple now will be absolutely commonplace.


It actually doesn't have to be any of those things, and I apologize if I've miscommunicated the necessary expense. I could build exactly the system I'm talking about for a couple of bucks, seriously, and I'm, you know, just this guy. I couldn't build, obviously, the Agent software, but you just kind of have to take Shadowrun's word that they'll have that stuff by 2070, and that corporations will have some spare programmers to write code for security drones. The maintenance of such a system could be limited to pennies a day for an entire facility's drone fleet, whether using a chemical or electromagnetic "reset," and would be part of the daily checklist of maintenance every security drone should undergo during its charge period.


It's not the "evolution" of a single system: it's multiple people talking about multiple possible systems. It doesn't have to be "the Morph-Trigger" when you're at the table: the GM would decide how the system worked in his own mind long before the game. No one is describing an anti-theft system that always works, that has no countermeasures, that can't ever be detected, that's specifically designed to fuck players in the ass no matter what. Seriously. A system is being described that could cheaply and simply make stealing drones more expensive and more dangerous. That's it. Your ass is safe.

I don't remember saying anything about an antenna.

In fact I'm pretty sure I said the exact opposite.

The drone already has an antenna that can be used for whatever you want once it has been quietly subverted.

If you can build it, people can disable it. If it justs costs a few bucks, it's easy to disable.
That's why there is a security arms race at all.

In which case it just got even easier to circumvent.

..that try to improve the system posted before, without actually reading the thread.

Or, you know, he could stick to the provided rules instead of making up silly stuff.

Actually, that seems to be the motivation of some posters.

Guess what - there's a mod for that. It's called Termination System and even can go boom.

Yeah, you didn't - but read the rest of the thread neither.

Which means it's linked to the vehicle node and can be found from the node, too.

Not if it is turned off, which I'm pretty sure I said to start with also.