A few questions that were unresolved during a recent game.

First, a Rigger has an aerial drone scanning the surrounding area. Can the Rigger take this information and provide a map for characters without Tactical Software?

If someone has an "active" PAN, can the Rigger/Decker pinpoint/triangulate their location? Or would he have to find the node, hack it, and access the GPS?

Going on the previous, if a Rigger/Decker finds a "hidden" PAN, can he pinpoint it's location with GPS? Or would he have to hack it first?

Finally, two Riggers (R1 & R2) are present on a scene, R1 decides that he wants to eliminate R2's drone that's shredding his buddies. Can he disable or overtake the drone? If so, how would he do it? Rigger 3 has some information, but I didn't see anything in 4th edition materials to help on this front.

...this is why I don't like Riggers and Deckers.

Sure, you can share that camera feed with your teammates in AR.



The way we play it, GPS information is simple to get once you hack a node, so as soon as our hacker gains access the team knows where that commlink is.



There's a great write-up about the Netcat vs. Slamm-O! skirmish that details exactly how this happens that I'm sure somebody will link for you. Basically, you hack your way into the node and engage the rigger in Matrix combat. He's still an icon present in the node and subject to the same rules as all other icons in there.

Sure. If it was not possible, then AR would not work: one needs the physical location of a node to display its ARO at the right place.

For the two icons in the same node, the way we've always done it in my group is that any rigger with access can give it commands so instead of duking it out via cybercombat or program crashing we've had some hilarious moments where drones were jumping back and forth from team to team. One pass he'd shot at the runners, the next he'd fire at the corp teams.

You can triangulate via wireless, *or* steal location data (GPS or otherwise).

SR4A matrix fiction mechanics
, thanks go to Aaron and Tiger Eyes.

This makes sense, though finding a comms address and hacking it to gain a precise GPS location are quite different.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I also don't believe that locating a comms address will give you precise distance to that comm either. It will only tell you that the comm is somewhere in mutual signal range.

Yep. The Rigger solution would be Electronic Warfare, while the Decker solution would be to sleaze in and access their GPS.

What's an address in this context? Do you mean finding the node if it's in Hidden Mode? Sure, that's a different thing than hacking that node.

Yes, the 'address' is the commcode or Matrix ID.