Luckily, there are plenty of drones that would fall into that category.

Ya, i that is what i had in mind to start with. I should have been more explicit in the orginal post.

Anyway, i started thinking about it a bit more, and any vehicle armour (usually the part that gets busted 2nd, windows are first) is quite likely going to end up weighing more unless it is installed in relatively small panels.

Maybe this calls for a new spell. "Useful Fix" might be a bit confrontational , so lets call it:

Fix Vehicle:
Type: P Target: OR Duration: P Drain: (Force+Body)/2(D) Range: Touch

Fix Vehicle is used to repair damage done to a vehicle. The maximum Body of vehicle that can be repaired is Magic/2, rounded down. Note nearly all vehicles will have a TN of 10 (Computer Equipped). The rest will have a TN 8 (alloys, electronics) outside of a very limited number that could be constructed to function with simple materials (wood framed glider). 1 box of damage is repaired per success up to a maximum of the Force of the spell.

EDIT: Added the Range.

The thought train behind that final drain:

Take Fix (S), drop it to (M) because of limiting it to Vehicles only, then use the bastardized Extended Area -twice- to get to get 10*10*Magic (yes a stretch, but basically the same as Extended Area + Area). However to save trying to guess/calculate weights of vehicles SR normally uses Body as an approximation, so i did that with the spell. The reason i included Body in the drain is because once you have the Magic rating Fixing a tank was just as hard is Fixing a drone. Didn't seem right. *shrug* So i put in that extra drain.

In the end you can only attempt to use this spell once on damage. Unless you use the spell at a high force (as high as Force 10 perhaps), and manage to nail that TN 10 every time (look how often that works for Heal Checks), you are going to have to eventually get your hands dirty. Even at a mage below Grade 2, without the aid of a F:2 Power foci, won't touch anything hefter than an Americar.

So it is more like a preliminary patch job, with some serious drain, to get the car back to the shop. Not some Bewitch nose wiggle to make all the bad things go away.

EDIT: I thought about Threshhold, but with a TN 10 threshhold is truely insane. For Body 3 you'd need at least *takes off socks to count* 20 dice to have a decent outside chance.

...for -attack- spells, which that entire section is clearly talking about. The use of armour is somewhat dubious in this case.

But going on that assumption, given those TNs, reducing the drain to the more standard +0(D), no threshhold, 1 box repaired per success up to Force/2 seems perfectly adequate. At a TN 10 (Body 2, assuming a perfectly healthy mage) only one in 8 die are going to succeed. At TN 11 for an unarmoured Body 3, less than 1 in 12 die will succeed. Even a Grade 2 initiate is only going to be able to scrounge up dice into high teens, perhaps 20sh if they have a nice Power foci. In doing so they leave nothing but their naked Willpower as drain protection.

By the time a mage gets to the point where they could reasonable expect to repair 5 boxes of damage on the Americar they likely could just buy a new car with the interest they earn on their bank account each 1/2 hour.

The sectoin mentions damaging spells, but absolutely nowhere does it state or even imply that it is for these types of spells only. It spends some time on them because really, the vast majority of spells that someone is going to cast on a vehicle are combat related.

The section is titled "Vehicles and Magic," and the only index mention of the topic points directly to it. There is absolutely nothing to indicate that you would use any other rules for vehicles, either explicitly or implicitly.