Hey guys,

I'm in mid character creation and I am a little stuck.
What kind of gear (B&E as well as Matrix) would one need to be a car thief?

thanks

A hacker, pretty much with his commlink and a spoof & edit program.

You'd also want a Tag Eraser, and tools to physically break into a car. Possibly a maglock sequencer.

Depends on how your GM decides that cars are secured. It's not spelled out, and different cars might be secured differently. Warlord is right though, it would likely be mostly hacking.

However, if your hacking attempt fails, there's always the physical option, however, that will likely only get you as far as opening the door. The car is going to have some sort of computer security that you won't be able to physically bypass.

The Tag Eraser comes into play when trying to sell that car, or drive it around without being tracked down by Knight Errant.

You need: A hacker contact, a towing truck with a farady cage (and chameleon coating, spoof chip and morphing license plate), charisma and con/etiquette.

Two trolls with a high running skill.

Canray beat me to it.

A tarp helps too. In SR4, it would be a Faraday tarp.

Hack that thing, drive it into your garage shielded with a farady cage and throw an EMP grenade or create a similar effect just to be sure.
You really dont want to let a 10$ stealth RFID ruin your catch.
Let your rigger remove vehicle identification numbers and anything which could be used to identify the car, install a new pilot and youre basically ready to go.

You forgot hacing to the DMV and setting up the new registration ID's and ownership documents should you want to keep it. If you're selling it you are not going to get much, depending on wear and tear and the fact that it is hot your talking maybe 20% the value of the car if you are lucky.

...are you sure the cars are weighted down with all that shit? Let's be reasonable for a minute, really.

You mean 'weighted down' with locks and tags?

And a pilot program, gruide guide, lojack, and theft deterrent system (Robocop style). Yeah get into the car make sure it ID's you as legit then edit the records to show you that you're the legit owner/operator.

I mean, without a Pilot, GridGuide, 'Lojack'… it wouldn't even be a 2070 vehicle. So the only 'extra' stuff is locks and tags, which are eminently reasonable.

The first question would be:
Can you remotly start a car or is there an "OFF" button inside the car? So no starting if it is in the "locked" mode

As for security there is actually no limit. The main issue here is, that the car will be hardwired, which can make it really hard to steal. (Since there are very few rules for beating hardwired sensors)

So I guess the only solution working in all cases is still two trolls and the "farrady-truck"...

You can remote-everything, by default.

What is a 'hardwired sensor'?

@Yerameyahu
Well, you probably connect stuff in one car with wires, not wireless like all other stuff. Or using a signal jammer inside a car...

Ah, yes, all vehicle sensors are assumed to be wired directly, AFAIK.

But, my understanding is that a car is basically a single node; hack the node, and you've got everything. There are some add-on anti-theft options in Arsenal, but I've never really heard of the car's sensors being involved in stealing one.

I meant that with all those sensors, IDs, tags and more security than you can shake your commlink at, stealing cars turns from "pretty easy as long as nobody sees you" to "bring four trolls and a large truck with a Faraday cage". It's a bad joke!

@Seriously Mike
Why? The point is with how cheap and good computers have become it is freaking easy to secure cars.
Think of what you needed to steal cars 20 years ago and what you need now.

20 years ago it was probably your hand and a bit of wire.
Today it starts by one computer and depnds on the car.

And sorry, most cars today are also better secured as the avarage laptop. Never heard of an laptop alarm.

@Yerameyahu
The question is how you may access it. Is it possible to shut my car down and just keep the maglocks on juice?
I guess it has to be, because otherwise how to park your car for a few days, without paying huge bills for used up energy.
It would be easy to integrate and make storing cars muche easier... They still need to be transportet, stored etc. If you have 1000 carnodes running 24/7 this gets expensive.
Of course if somebody keeps it running, you will have it a lot easyer. Thats like people forgetting to lock their cars. Can't drive away with it right away, but the first barrier is down.

Basically if you want to STEAL a car, you need a way to Hack It, and a way to Break In.

If you want to KEEP the car, you need a way to deal with any physical or electronic tracking materials left on it.

Funny. You never heard jokes about Polish car thieves? Those guys can steal anything faster than Nicolas Cage in "Gone in Sixty Seconds". And when you're designing security for mobile objects, you need to factor a couple of things in. First, relevant to security in general, is the probability of security device failure and what happens in that case. Security computer responsible for shutting down the ignition, locks and all the stuff that prevents a thief from getting in and driving off? With Shadowrun's ubiquity of networks, computers and other devices, you can create a disaster, or at least a traffic jam, sitting in the backseat with your commlink on while your wheelman keeps you in MSR of the target. Instantly stopping a car on the highway by crashing its onboard computer? Snap. There it goes. If you're less of a dick, you can break the car when it's parked, drive up with a tow truck (impound or service, depending on your plan) and steal it without the owner even figuring out.
Second, the best security is self-sufficient. And this, children, is the advantage normal locks have over maglocks. When a maglock gets cut off from power supply, it either stays closed, turning whatever inside it was protecting into a deathtrap, or immediately disengages and opens, becoming very, very useless. And while we're at it...
Third, overrides. When something goes wrong, and the more complex a thing is, the more things can go wrong with it, you need overrides. Example: There's a maglock on my office door. There's an UPS connected to it, in case power goes out, that's one thing. But if the UPS dies too, there's also a manual override in the form of a normal key lock.

Yes, and are normal locks in SR even harder to crack than maglocks? Yes, they are.
The second you start really thinking about it, it just goes even more nuts.


Or you could just take it over and start crashing it into other cars....
This more a reason to not make it easy to access. (But yes, a car driving on the "grid" would be much easier to steal, as it just needs an spoof command, as far as I see it. But there would be people inside)

Just put a normal lock on the car. Then you go:Lock, ignition lock or hacking the computer, still removing tracking devices etc.
Yes, this all can be done quite fast.

(And by the way, normal locks may break to and lock you out)

Seattle's Greatest Car Theft Mass Pileups!

...

Probably sell better in Aztlan if the police do it, and make the person that stole the car responsible for all the damage, injuries, and death.

Irion, you can shut the whole car down 'dead', but my understanding is that's not normal. Typically, there's the vehicle node right there for you to hack, open the doors, and drive away. While great hackers are the norm for shadowrunners, the rest of the world doesn't appear to be set up to worry about them all the time. Think of how easy it is to hack John Q.'s commlink, which is even more important than his car. I'm not too worried about power concerns, especially on the Grid.

@Yerameyahu
The avarage hacker will do the trick too, I guess.
It less about security, more about saving energy.
Well, maybe this has something to do with me, always driving to the last drop of gasoline....
So waking up and find this last drop gone before I get to the next gasstation...

Heh. It's just a node, and not a very powerful one, in some kind of 'standby' mode. Most of the time, it just has to sit there listening for commands from its owner (or hackers). Power usage concerns mostly don't seem to exist in 2070.

Why are you opening the doors?

Why are you anywhere near the car?

Hack the car from the comfort of your own safehouse, shielded by multiple proxies, and drive it remotely to the drone-automated chopchop/cleaner facility to get rid of the identifying marks/RFID/etc.





-k

Hehe, yes, that's also true. In this mini-scenario, you're stealing a car for transportation purposes. The point is, a car thief in 2070 is a hacker, nothing else.

At least for my game, I don't think I'd let players get away with this. I'd probably assume that most cars by default have a signal of 1 or 2, which would prevent them from being hacked from a remote location without a driver.

If you wanted to remotely hack the car, you'd at least need a Drone or another car nearby following that car to maintain signal to it.

Once you have access to the car, of course, you can simply instruct the Pilot to drive the car to your garage, and as long as your garage isn't in the Barrens, you can simply log out and wait for your new car to show up.

Unless it's within Signal 1/2 range of the Wireless Matrix. Then you just hack it like you would any other wireless node on the Matrix. It's a good reason to park in Spam Zones. But Sheeple like John Q. Wageslave don't think like that, 'Runners and Security Personnel do.

EDIT: And both groups would upgrade the security of their car node as well. At least the Firewall.

Yeah: everything is always within range. Besides, normal people don't cripple your devices for the sake of security; if hackers can't get to your car, neither can *you*.

Everything is in range unless it's in a Static Zone. Spam Zones make it harder due to the bandwidth being sucked down by the Zombie Systems spewing out the drek.

I'm not an expert GM when it comes to hacking, so my lack of rule understanding may come out here.

Why would a car that isn't being used be in "Active" mode and be able to be found on the Wireless Matrix? I would imagine that a parked car would put itself in "Hidden" mode, and only visible to its registered users. That would also necessitate having some sort of spotter in proximity to the car in order for you to find the node that you were looking for, wouldn't it?

Yup. So? It's a parked car, you have the time. Besides, presumably you selected it in the first place, so you must have already found it somehow.

Just make sure the car is parked for work, not for a quick grocery store trip.