I'm sure that nukes and mana interact in soem way. See toxic mages and Big-D's will and such. I'm also sure that only some and seemingly only ICBMs have failed to detonate in the ICBMs case failed to land any where.

Which adds to the theory of a pro-metahumanity free spirit (or something else) "eating up" ICBM's

Cases of nuclear warfare in the SR timeline :

-6-Second War : pre-awakening, turned Lybia into a radioactive wasteland.
-Lone Eagle crisis : pre-awakening; ICBM fired by members of SAIM and aimed for Russia fails to detonate. It was just one rocket, BTW, and not fired by the regular crew, but a bunch of guerillas who had seized the launch site and probably didn't know a damn about what they where actually doing.
-India-Pakistan war : early 2020s, goodbye Kashmir.
-Cermac blast : 2053, blast effects contained by active use of magic, unprecedented side effects on the astral
-in addition, there have been several cases of nuclear meltdowns, like the one in Cattenom that created the SOX or the one near Seattle, both of which cause massive irradiation till this day.

So the only example for ICBM failure takes place before the Awakening actually happens, while at roughly the same time, Israel is highly successful in obliterating Tripoli with nukes.
In the following decades, several nuclear power plants blow up without any spirit doing anything about it.
A few years after the Awakening, nukes which where likely made before the Awakening are used successfully, too.
Doesn't seem particularly convincing to me.

Of course, there's unpredictable interactions between radioactivity and mana in some cases (note that the effects in Chicago have not appeared anywhere else in the world, in spite of inflationary use of nuclear wastelands in the setting), as well as the fact that atomic catastrophies cause massive background count, which shouldn't surprise anyone.

But i can see absolutely no evidence whatsoever that nukes have outright stopped to work.

I'm sure there have been some post awakening ICBM failures I remember something involving japan.

Never heard of that, bit i dimly recall some incidents i did not list.

Anyone care to shed some light on this?

- North Korea tried to nuke Japan sometime waayyy back, those missiles also disappeared...or just fell apart in mid-flight, Kimmy's Communist Paradise is not exactly known for their high quality standards in manufacturing
- The ammount of reactor failures and meltdowns around the time of the Awakening is certainly not normal.
- Winternight's doomsday plan included nukes at tectonic fault lines and those nukes caused very little damage for their size...there is a bit of fiction in System Failure where a CC analyst tries to bring up this issue before the council but gets dismissed.


Not exactly consistent, but nukes behaving oddly (at least sometimes) is a topic which is brought up every now and then by the authors.

Sorry to drag an ancient thread back to the forefront, but it's become very relevant in my current game. I'm running a tempo arc that's going to lead into some Amazonia/Aztlan brinksmanship as a plotline. If things go Defcon 1, and we assume that nuclear weapons work normally, is Amazonia's magic in any way going to protect it from Aztlan ICBMs? Are there likely to be any countermeasures on the ground of any sort, or would a power be purely reliant on space-based defensive systems and the like?

As far as the canon goes (in the Aztlan and SOTA:2064 sourcebook), Aztlan has never been described as possessing nuclear capabilities, let alone in the ICBM range. Aztechnology, as most AAA megacorporations and a number of AA megacorporations, is supposed to possess only a "token stockpile".

A corporation, however, cannot resort to arms as a nation-state. Aztechnology is bound by the Corporate Court rules, which actually only acknowledge the fact that, unlike states, corporations do have worthy assets in a very large number of countries around the world that can be targeted for compensation of the destruction caused.

Strategic magic has never been really covered in SR. The magic rules allow for some utterly specific use. In theory, you can design a Detect Nuke spell and use it as a trigger for an anchored manipulation spell that would get a chance to destroy or render it ineffective right before it hits. Anchoring is pretty much required since the range for detection spell is at best Force x Magic x 10 meters while ICBM terminal velocity is likely to be at 5,000 meters/second or more (although you would actually have to track the ICBM entire travel to know how far it is when the caster's initiative pass comes up). However, nuclear weapons are often scheduled to detonate several hundred meters above the ground to maximize the burst. A 500 kt bomb would thus explode out of detection range for most metahuman caster at 1700m, while a 20 Mt could only be detected ahead by a powerful dragon at 5400m. That's assuming the caster's at ground level, indeed. I guess you can keep either drones or spirits flying at a higher altitude with an anchoring focus (or spirits of man with Innate spell). On the other hand, the attacking side may send astrally projecting mages or spirits to attack the focus right before the missile arrives...

Sure, even without any "nuclear dud" spells, there are plenty of ways to simply destroy the missile in flight. Physical Barrier, Wreck, the classic Fireball, Fling a bunch of steel balls, ask a friendly elemental to simply pluck the missiles out of the sky. Just remember that magic does not work in space, so the maximum height for a magical intercept would be around 100 km, depending on your definition where space begins. 100 km is the official definition but magic might not adhere to that

There's also just hitting it so hard with ECM that it loses targeting and wanders off, or is Bricked and just ceases to function utterly and inexplicably.

But not with magic
Ballistic missile warheads follow a simple ballistic flightpath once they are ejected from the missile "bus", by the time the warheads are back in the manasphere their only guidance is physics.

@Nath: The detection can be done by radar, you could even aim an optical telescope based on the radar tracking so a mage can get his mystical link to the target. Of course Amazonia would probably rather go for epic ritual sorcery creating kilometer-wide barriers, and more technologically advanced nations would simply couple a bigass laser to the radar tracking.

I can picture that, a long-range radar feeding a powerful optical periscope with auto-tracking and auto-focus. With possibly the need for a cluster of them if your aggressor has multiple warheads (and decoys) on its ballistic missiles as it's likely already the case for US, UK, Russia, China and France nowadays.

But now I think about it, I'm just not sure how hard it will be for the defense industry lobbyists to convince their political puppets to fund a system that can only stop a nuclear strike launched on a sunny day

And so I reassert Anchoring seems a smarter choice.

In the Sixth World, the MIRV may also include kinetic penetrators for the purpose of collapsing physical barriers in the way, beyond the fact that the existing ramming rules make no difference between a vehicle moving at 201m per turn and one moving at 21,000m. But I'm not sure how practical such barrier may be as a defense without resorting to arbitrary epic magic regarding their size and accuracy anyway (as the mage mustn't target the missile proper, but an ahead of airspace in front of it, neither too high nor too low, which would require an epic level of range estimation skill that would put most snipers and golfers to shame) which could then be just as arbitrary regarding its armor rating. So in the end I'm suggesting an arbitrary counter-counter-measure to an equally arbitrary counter-measure.

Look at israels IRON DOME system, one of the best anti missile systems around

even it cant knock out every missile, consequently some nukes will hit the ground, the goal was always to just reduce the amount significantly






signature:

Use the metric system goddamit! We are well past stone age where people used parts of their bodies (feet) to measure length.

Some people like their simple measurement systems.

Communist! We didn't beat the reds so we could turn around and use their measurement system!

IMO, the CC is the best argument against using nukes in SR. Also, the bigger they are, the less reliable they seem to be, if I remember my sources about nuclear tests right. Tactical nukes like in Chicago are a possibility, but given where the Az-Am war is fought, conventional weapons and daisy cutters should usually suffice. Especially considering that it's a war for, among other things, territory, and scorched earth strategies are not often viable there.



Using your fingers is too difficult?


*cough* http://themetricmaven.com/wp-content/uploa...olation-Map.jpg *cough*
It's french, though. Doesn't make it better as for origin, but at least it's not red

Are you implying that you do not like Links, Rods and Chains? Barbarian.

That is discriminatory against countless shop class drop outs who are short a thumb or two.

JK

I would have thought barbarians especially like links and rods and chains. Also lots and lots of leather. And riddles about steel.


Presumably, there are toes.

We're talking about Aztlan here, they'll twirl their mustaches of evilness and think of something to do with a post nuclear moonscape, guaranteed. Or just recruit enough expendable labor for the cleanup.



Thermonuclear weapons turn every day into a sunny day. A bit overcast, but definitely sunny

Ahhh... Steel is Strong, but Flesh is Stronger.

ICBM tech is a proven technology in the SR universe as the basis of semi-ballistic travel. The missiles will work great, it's only the payload you have to worry about. I recommend an anchored Slay Gaia spell.

You could just handwave it, sorta like how the setting already has. Nukes don't work the same way we imagine, because of the nature of magic. I'd say you could rationalize that with "Nukes do so much damage, that they tear open parts of reality before they hit their full potential, which ends up with less radiation and weird craters and a fuck-ton of toxic radiation spirit goodness.

Nath, all this talk about Anchoring and kinetic penetrators and so on, this is exactly the kind of thing I was hoping to get! Thank you!

And I like a lot of these other ideas too. I'm not so worried about the Corporate Court angle; they have no hold on Amazonia, and there are no extraterritorial corporate properties in Amazonia for Aztlan to worry about hitting, and I intend to play this thing as a fearful slide towards war motivated by unintended incidents and perhaps certain malefactors who'd like to see everything burn (I recall a nuclear winter being Winternight's Plan B) rather than some consciously preplanned offensive.

I don't actually know if things would go that far yet, but I want the fear of where they're headed to be the talk of the shadow community, you know? And I want to sound like I know what I'm talking about.

The megacorporation nonetheless have assets in Amazonia, even if those do not receive extraterritorial privileges. Only Aztechnology is banned from operating there. For any other corporations, a 250 millions people market base is simply too big to ignore, even if it requires to run business "the old way". I remember a book mentions Evo contracts with the Amazonian air force.

ICBMs are most vulnerable when first climbing up the well, because that's when they're going the slowest. Minding that effective area denial is next to impossible on astral, I suggest simply powerful spirits manifesting at launch sites or above them and destroying the missiles via whatever means necessary being a simple but effective way to destroy them. Actually, that'd explain the rise of the new Awakened powers like the NAN, Amazonia or the Awakened Yakut.


Iron Dome is getting more publicity than its effectiveness warrants. It's used against unguided MLRS-type rockets coming one at a time, and it still misses its targets. Against these, CIWS installations like these or other decent anti-air systems like Tunguska or Pantsir would work no worse.
But anyway, Iron Dome has little to do with protection from ICBM, if only because with nukes, you can't afford the risk of missing even a single warhead from a single missile.