@Draco18s
Some, yes. Those are not the best choice, true.

Lets make a short list:
You got:
Anti radiation: Great stuff if you need it.
Anti poison: Just great, since it reduces most poisons to the point, you may resist them using only body.
Anti disease: Same as Anti poison, but diseases are not that common.
Bonus to logik linked skills: You won't get bonus dices cheaper.
Bonus to intuition linked skills: Same as above.
Cheaper Knoledge skills: Well, not bad at all.
Recall: Mostly Useless.
Oxyrush: Depends on your environment. But not bad.
Implant medic: useless.
Stabalize: Useless (If you got shot down, the raiting of the nanoware is down too)
healing: not that great. Healing is fast anyway. (Would be cool if natural healing would be slower)

So yeah it burns down to about 6 systems you may find usefull.
Oh, and thats one nanohive...
And the best part: If you even get a better grade, you do not need to upgrade the nanobots, only the hive and the cyberleg/arm/hand/foot.
The reason it is not seen as that bad is, (I guess) that the nanohive is the only reason for having synthetic cyberlimbs in the book.
(I mean playing a character Luke style would just suck. Yeah you lost 0.25 essence and got yourself 2 points of capacity. And now your hand is that much weaker, because the muscle augmentation and the muscle toner are not helping anymore. Just great...)

Oxyrush is actually under-powered for what it SHOULD do (or likely would do in a sci-fi novel). Lack of oxygen to the brain is the only real cause of unconsciousness & death in cases of trauma. With oxyrush, As long as there's blood around your brain, you'd remain conscious, because the cells would have normal resperation (assuming the Oxyrush nanites scavenge CO2). Somebody cut out your buddies heart? No problem, put tourniquette on their neck, and wait for doc wagon to pick them up. Your heart could stop beating and you'd never notice (not even the pain from a heart attack, since that's cause by oxygen starved cardiac muscle). Your resting and max heartrate would be THE SAME. Etc, etc. Its pretty well described in "Engines of Creation", one of the first (non fiction) books on nanotech.

I think the reason its not so good is part game balance, part rules simplicity, and part Mike Mulvhil not understanding the tech when it was proposed for Man & Machine.

They totally need this in a new shadowrun novel!!

Oxyrush is just pretty nifty oxygen storage bodies; they aren't converting CO2 back to O2 or anything like that. Sure I guess you'll remain conscious longer once you get your heart stopped due to the blood in the your head "holding out" longer. But I don't think it'll be enough to really matter in most cases.

I might be able to see a cyberskull with an internal air tank working though.

or a cyberskull respirator mod, a sort of back-up heart and lungs.

The Amazing Screw-On Head?




-k