Well, I've already figured out the shape of the defenses. Most of the Vory are busy in Tacoma wasting Knight-Errant's time.

They figured that they'd never sneak something this hot past Knight Errant, so they're pulling a fast one. They let KE believe that something was coming to Tacoma, while the goods are actually making landfall via smuggler-submarine in Everett and being put on a truck there. The truck has a rigger and three passengers; a gunner in the front seat coordinating the drone overwatch who can shoot out of the front gun ports, a bojevik in the sleeper cab who can shoot out the side gun ports, and a mage from an impressed wizzer-gang in the sleeper cab. The bojevik is named in Vice, so players can get a profile on her if they just think to browse Jackpoint!* ((What they don't know - or might, if they do legwork on her - is that she has an addiction to Tempo, so I'm going to roll some dice to determine what her state is when they get to her. She might be normal, she might be cruising on Tempo. She might be in the middle of sexually assaulting the poor helpless wizard/asleep after doing the same, or, if they're very unlucky, she might have fallen asleep and be possessed by a Force 5 Shadow Spirit when the gunshots start flying. They might wind up facing an augmented killing machine, or a magical Threat benefiting from many of the augmented killing machine's passive augs.))

The mage is low-powered (Magic 3,) and mostly-crap, but his street name is 'summoner' because he's a good, well, summoner. ((He's got two bound F3 Fire spirits with Noxious Breath.)) The drone overwatch is going to take the form of a Kull drone flying between overhead and three miles out, so it doesn't just scream "Keeping tabs on this truck here!" to any casual observer, with two LEBD-1 drones concealed in pop-open canisters under its wings. If shit goes down, the Drone flies overhead, drops the drones, they pop out and start shooting everything with their RPK Heavy Machine Guns. There will also be a hot sim rigger/hacker in Moscow running Matrix overwatch, ready to interfere with hacking attempts or jump into one of the drones.

((There will also be a GMC Bulldog with six Vory soldiers in it. The two in the front have HK-Urban Combat machine pistols concealed in the leather of their seats and are wearing ballistic cloth Stuffer Shack delivery uniforms, while the four in the back are armored and carrying RPK-7.62 Battle Rifles. One of them is also a named NPC with a custom rifle and generally superior stats.))

Everything in double parenthesis is going to be information the players won't have access to, even if they do crack the data vault. The Bulldog full of soldiers is a late addition to the security, a 'just in case,' the Vory don't trust magic and as a consequence just told the mage to be at a certain place on a certain time, and obviously it won't contain info on the potential twist. They might find partial or complete information about any or all of this if they decide to go and do some legwork.


*They seem to be averse to doing legwork. This infuriates me. The only one who regularly does do Matrix searches is the amnesiac who doesn't have a Jackpoint login. (I'm reckoning that Jackpoint is more like the old Shadowlands in that many know about it, most Shadowrunners can access it (assuming you haven't pissed off FastJack by threatening a kid or something,) and read stuff, only regulars with high (or low) reputations can post comments, and if you have reading access, you may well be tapped to write an article once a year in your area of expertise to fulfill your 'contributing member' quota... Or just fork over some nuyen to help cover server costs.)

Punishing lazy player's who fail to undertake basic due diligence is a time honored tradition in these parts.

- J.

For anybody who's wondering, I've got the details of the run in a big document, which I tossed up as a Google Doc.

It's probably something of a softball, but sometimes you get really, really lucky. Even so, for being a little light on the defenses, these Vory soldiers are still heavy hitters, and the Vory have access to a lot of nice toys.


I still need to configure the datavault they're going to have to crack. It's basically a non-wireless Rating 4 device which is going to attempt to administer horrible rape to anyone who slots it who isn't Vory, and then hijack their systems to call home. I figure I'll just use a Rating 4 version of set-up I have on Lyubov's commlink.

Looks like a good setup for what your going for. If it was me though I would include at least one fast car in there. Even if its a sedan. Or a jackrabbit. Something that's maneuverable and has some speed. And maybe 1-2 guys in that trailer. With a team of mages, it seems like it would be just too easy to take down a just 2 vehicles and only 4 guys each. Even with the spirits and drones. As is, my group of players could probably handle this with no real problem and with no magic in the group at all. But they're the type of players that spend 2 sessions planning, 1 session running.

That's the Shadowrun way, or at least should be. Runners who wing it die.

Welp, I gave my players the what's what...


They've decided that the best course of action is to tamper with the ship bringing the goods towards Seattle, so it offloads a completely wrong container to the smuggler who will meet the ship and take the container to the Vory, and arrange for the delivery of the container with the real goods to the destination of their choice (the Ancients, probably by way of a proxy or two.)


I have to say I can't actually fault them for this one. What's getting me is that this is frustrating the ninja/street sam on two levels. First, he's a combat character and the only real fight we had, he missed. Second, he's kind of boggled by the sheer amount of planning that players will put into a Shadowrun, when his preferred M.O. is more along the lines of 'make a rough outline, show up and wing it.' So I have a couple of strategists and a pink mohawk. Also, the AI is chronically AFK/no-show due to real life and this has left the Face to do the hacking. She got relatively far into it, having hacked herself an admin account on a Rating 4 device within four hours, but then got stymied when she realized she didn't speak Russian; she left to figure out how to fix that problem, but then the AI showed up and cowboy'd it, hacking it all on the fly. The device rolled godlike on its rolls to detect and as a result both admin accounts were flagged as fraudulent (though the device couldn't actually delete them.) It tried to terminate itself, the AI kept shutting down its self-termination attempts and beating up the IC it kept launching while the Face liberated data.


So, yeah. Now I need to figure out how they're going to handle redirecting cargo while it's on a ship at sea, and come up with some violence to satisfy the street samurai.

Linguasofts are trivial to find, in real time.

But yeah, that's the central problem of SR, I think. Violence, and smartness.

That seems like a darn good start of a plan. A lot better then fighting head on.

I know, right? I thought they were 200 per rating point, one of the other players said they were 500 per rating point, I alt-tabbed to check the book and when I got back, the AI had said "screw this, hook my nexus up, let me at it."

I mean, hell, you'd think a Russian linguasoft would be useful. Especially since you can find a cracked one for 50 per rating point in dark corners of the Matrix. Hell's bells, it's like the Russian language is evolving fast enough for it to suffer degradation!





Indeed it is, but the sam is getting restless. He wants to apply his monokatana to some fools, or pull out his Predator and start busting caps. Or at the very least do some infiltration.


So now I'm thinking of requiring some physical shit on the vessel which will require them to deploy him to the container ship so he can fiddle with things (like RFID tags) and stuff. Of course, how to get him out there... Their current plan is to summon a Spirit of Air and have it fly him out to the ship. The ship is presently (game time) off CalFree, and it is moving northward, but still!

Hmm, have it hit a ward on the way out and make him take a reaction test not to fly off through the ward while his spirit is stuck on the other side.

I have this problem as well. Every once in awhile as a GM I have to force the player's hands a bit and put them in a situation where no matter what they do, SOMEONE is going to throw down and weapons are drawn. I've had many, many an encounter that has been meticulously planned out on my part, only to be out-witted by my own players thanks to several gaming sessions consisting of nothing but planning. I don't want my Street Sams to get bored because he hasn't gotten to even roll initiative in 4 playing sessions or more.

You should never allow a player to create a character concept where the only thing that they do is fight. It just doesn't work in SR.

He actually has the full Infiltration skillset, and Athletics as well. My players usually decide after a ton of planning that it's easier to Magic your way in instead of using Infiltration, or just have a good fake SIN and walk in the front door instead of using Athletics and climbing the wall.

The campaign I'm currently writing I'm hoping will solve some of those problems, and give him a chance to use some skills.

The character amusingly has his best moments in social situations simply because he has a few underworld contacts that the group makes use of fairly often.

Well, that's not strictly true. If the actual player is mature enough, the sam/ninja can easily be the team leader, or at least the tactical synchronization guy. Typically mages/hackers/faces and such get so fixated on their part of the threat that they tend to get immersed, with just basic situational understanding after things kick off. The sam is the guy who can step back from the chaos and orchestrate. Since shooting is typically either part of the plan, or a reaction, he works well as the team reserve too, able to commit when needed.

Also, the fact that he isn't trying to maximize his dicepool and dig through the rulebook every two seconds, he can actual try to look forward, and prevent trainwrecks BEFORE the team is in "oh shit" mode.

Now, if the player isn't the type, he should still be deep in tactical analysis and rehearsals. He's the guy who should, even if he's not team lead master, be the one thinking "man, If I had to defend this macguffin, I would totally make sure something could shoot from...THERE", be doing route analysis, and generally working his part in the drills and SOP management, plus all the other good tactical bits. Basically, become the physical world subject matter expert.

I'm thinking for this to work, there's going to need to be a physical infiltration on the ship. That will be problematic since the ship is at sea and they don't have any pirates or smuggler friends with helicopters or something. Their fallback for every occasion is Magic.

But the one thing Magic can't do is interact with electronics. I think something's going to need to happen, something requiring good, hard, honest, factory-assembled metahuman eyes. The ship has a crew of only six, so I figure it's not remotely impossible for them to be all asleep or belowdecks at the same time. That would be infiltration hour - the hackers hacking, mages doing astral overwatch and confuddling the Watchers, and the samurai gets onboard to activate the wireless links to the cargo-handling system and swap the RFID chips on containers.

Generally speaking, cheap contract astral overwatch would be expected in anything that bothers to secure itself. Even if its not direct fighting, the moment a spell is cast or is lihgitng on the atsral within x, the alert level of the target should go up until the contrcat overwatch can verify whats up. Basically, using magic should be the equivalent of firing a gun. Just doing it is a tip off.

The ship has a wagemage aboard who has a couple of watchers patrolling, but other than that, I don't think they'd be very heavily invested in astral security.

That is the way I run low grade Magical security solutions. A watcher spirit or bound spirit doing overwatch is an easy solution. One service to "notify me if someone casts a spell or uses a spirit against these targets" or some such.

- J.

If there are only 6 guys on the ship why would they have a mage? 6 guys means they have no security team on board, just a bridge and engine watch.

So they need to infiltrate a vory ship right?

A lot of fun would be a ship possesed by a master shedim (Spoiler)
But I would give them a little surprise on the ship if they act careless without researching and do some background work before trying to get on the ship.
Give them a character profile of a high rating vory officer if they search for it. The vory officer likes to have "pets" around him for his personal security like 2-3 Barghest or Hellhounds.
So they could get poisoned food to kill the dogs or try to silence them otherwise if they get on the ship. Maybe the hellhounds are in cages and the cages are alarm triggered.

Other possibility would be 2 different nexus on the ship. 1 nexus for basic operation, crew members and logs while the other is basicly shut off from the rest of the ship and is only accessible through a physical terminal with a datajack and has no signal rating. (frocing them to infiltrate the navigation room).

You could also let the vorys smuggle rare animals for big game hunters and if they screw up with infiltrating or hacking the terminal they accidentaly open the maglocks for all the cargo containers and all hell breaks loose on the ship.

Another idea would be that the ship uses an old navigation system (cpt. doesn't trust technology and is really old) and thus they need to stay on the ship and manually redirect it to another port while defending it against vory speedboats that try to capture it back.

It's not a "Vory" ship. It's a commercial container vessel.

I've been thinking of reminding them that they're going to need to physically infiltrate the ship by way of a fluff piece. I don't want it to be too obvious, obviously, so I was thinking of framing it in a different context - a delivery in space. Say, one of the Jackpointers (Orbital DK, because that's his thing,) shares a story that cargo hauler X was docking at Station Y where Companies A and B had installations. Company B wanted a crate Company A was receiving and had put a dummy box on the hauler, then had some expert hackers hack the hauler's manifest to switch the delivery location of the two containers, so Company A gets the dummy box and Company B gets the goods. But, because the containers were chipped and the chips didn't match up with the delivery manifest, it sent up a red flag and the hauler called back to base to verify their orders, which didn't match up. So Company B gets egg on their face (in the Shadows, where everyone knows they did it, anyway,) and Company A got their goods, all because Company B thought they could pull a fast one without paying for real Shadowrunners who would have caught that.

Then rub it in by having him point out that they got tripped up on the same basic security measures every commercial hauling vessel dirtside uses, and they really should've known better.

I don't think I'd bother with reminding them, but I'd let it be pretty clear that they screwed up and fast if the job goes south in that manner. Still give them a chance at swiping the goods, but now they've got to do it at another point in the delivery phase, do it fast, and against a higher level of security as the Vory'll know somethings up.

Or possibly not even a higher level of security, but with a single nondescript tailing team whose job is not to interfere in any way with the highjacking, but find out who it is that's after the Vory's assets and to whom they should send a "thinking of you" card*

If you want to spice up the action on the ship, there's always the possibility that another set of runners is after a different item on the ship or maybe another group (Yaks, some corporation, etc.) is using that shame ship to transport some semi-important material and has a couple of people on board (maybe hidden away in a shipping container). Possibly trite, but it can be a danger of hitting some third party outfit: unless you really do your leg work you can't be very sure that what you have going down is all that's going down.

*Or wetwork team, maybe both, dealer's choice. But if you leave it at the card, you also can run with the "well, chummers, you owe the Vory big time and their sending you to do this ridiculously dangerous job. The payment? Oh, it's generous indeed. It's having various bones remaining in one piece and the notable absence of a bullet in your head" thing.

Killing anyone or even anything on ship that has a master shedim onboard can open a very nasty can of worms. But it can be an object lesson for trigger-happy PCs (though it can drive them to even more excessive violence, on the priciple that a corpse spread in finger-sized fragments all over the room is unlikely to cause trouble. The PCs aren't that sort of cleaning staff...)

Given the easy availability of vibroweapons, I imagine that a Shedim "Gotcha!" like that once would just ensure that all future bodies created wind up being segmented at the joints.


And I'm gonna go with the reminder fluff piece. It's one thing to hold their hands, another entirely to let them not realize that there's an entire job that needs doing to complete the run.

You could also give them a moral choice when they try to steal the goods.
The vory also use the ship for human trafficking, selling children to rich people as prostitutes. And they have to choose either the goods (lots of money and angry vorys) or they save the children from experiencing hell (more Karma, less money, still angry vorys).

You could use that to get them into the next campaign also
(Rich Corporate Johnson made a "special order" and is waiting for his delivery of a young girl and is pissed off when the ship doesn't deliver it and sends a merc team to hunt down "his property" and who's responsible for it)

Careful, they're shadowrunners. They'll probably just blow up the ship after stealing the goods, to save those kids from their fate. … And destroy evidence.

Dark, so I like it.

For the love of Dunkelzahn, it's not a "Vory ship". Why do people keep making suggestions as if it were? It's not a tramp freighter owned by shell companies owned by shell companies owned by the Vory, it's not a private yacht owned by the Vory, it's not even a garbage scow, fishing boat, or rowboat owned by the Vory!

It's a massive, modern, post-Crash-2.0 multi-billion-nuyen post-panamax high-seas container vessel. The Vory could, theoretically, own one if they could liquidate and monetize every single asset controlled by every single disparate Vory clan in the world. They just arranged for someone else, through the magic of crime, to put an ISO shipping container marked as something innocuous and containing an AK-147 nanofax and feedstock on the darn thing and to have it "delivered" to a submarine somewhere outside the national waters off the coast of North America.


Come on, they're already doing this as a side-job to another, real run. I don't need to keep layering on complexity and layering on plots until they've forgotten who their Johnson actually is when they're hip-deep in murdering Vory in Moscow to make sure they never traffic another girl or boy again.

Wouldn't it be cheaper and easier to just bribe the customs guys? Last I knew you need cranes that ships like that don't carry to unload the ship. And most subs don't have 45 by 15 foot hatches, much less hatches that large that they can open at deep sea without flooding.

Normally, yes, but with Knight Errant being all uncorruptible and proactive in the serve-and-protect-for-a-price thing recently, at the moment, not so much.


Besides, most subs don't, but this is Shadowrun. If anyone's even conceived of the need for a smuggling submarine which can bring an ISO container from the high seas into port clandestinely, someone's made it.


As for the crane, I figure that in the dark days of the post-Crash 2.0 period, the big shipping ports' equipment was all so much scrambled spaghetti. Since then, cargo vessels, even the big container ones, have been designed with rail-mounted crane-drones that tuck away neatly when not in use and can be used to offload (slowly, but offload) anywhere, even in a clandestine rendezvous out at sea.

The transfer method - out at sea and to a sub - will be a complete giveaway to the shipping company and the ship's crew that there's something fishy with the container. It will also create a disrepancy in the cargo logs between loading and unloading. If it's done anywhere close to legitimately, it will make the shipping company an accomplice, which can translate as an hefty fine and maybe up even to a ban from Seattle's port if the containers turns out to hold something nasty enough. And if someone's arranging a clandestine transfer of illicit goods, it means they might BS you about the container's real content to "T'was supposed to be some high grade dope man, how could I know t'was a frigging nuke".

In my opinion the safest way around that would be to arrange something with the ship's captain to have the container declared 'lost at sea' (it happens quite often IRL to lose a few containers in a storm). A Vory netrunner/rigger can both make the offload and tamper wit hthe loading crane's log to make sure they don't remember what happened.

But there will still be the problem of the ship's crew noticing the loading gear getting into action and dumping one container. Odds are they'll notice the submarine too.

PS : i think I have way figured out of that : generate a security alert for the container right under the one you want - something like it's going to catch fire and explode or something like that and need to be dumped overboard ASAP. So you pick the Vory container on top and drop it, then pick and drop the 'risky' one. If the Vory container's log says the top container is filled with cheap chinese fliflops, the insurance company won't bat an eye.

Then you have the submarine retrieve the first container, sink the second so nobody wil know the alert has been bogus and go on your merry way.

As sidenote, I don't thenk the Vory would control a cargo sub with container-capable hatches. Something smaller that can tow the container and a proper packaging for the nanofab seems more likely. Wrap the goods in an airtight pocket, then pump the container full of polyurethane foam or the like. It will protect the fab from both shock and water and make sure the container doesn't sink.

I figured it was an accepted business practice - on the high seas, you can offload anything you want to anyone you want. That said, yeah; the captain of the ship, the crew, and the shipping company itself do this sort of thing frequently.

On the other hand, I like your notion, too. But it would leave my players looking in the wrong direction - trying to subvert the automatic cargo handling system when this sort of thing is going down manually.



As for the submarine, the Vory don't control it, they just hired it.


My players' plans at the moment are to hack the manifest to offload someone else's random container to the smuggler and put the container with the nanofax on a truck. They'll need to do some crime aboard the ship - either fiddle with the RFID tags so they match the manifest, or fiddle with the crane so it doesn't give a damn whether or not the RFIDs match the manifest. Then they need to figure out some crime ashore; the hitch is that Knight Errant is watching the port the ship is going to because they've got word that the Vory are bringing something hot in. So they'll need to get lucky and sneak the very cargo the Vory paid six figures to steal through the Knight Errant security that the Vory themselves tipped off that something was going down (so they'd be looking in Tacoma, not Everett,) and past the Vory, then out into Redmond and to the Ancients.

A cargo sub that can accept a 40 foot shipping container at sea is going to be crazy expensive too. You'd be talking about something like the size of an Alpha class sub. The compartment on the top of the sub that accepts the container is going to fill with over 100 tons of water when you open the hatch in the open ocean, so the entire sub has to be a lot more massive than that.

The price tag of the sub would make the container ship look cheap.

In my opinion, a container-capable sub is going to be a major pîece of equipment - You need to haul enough cargo to pay for the expensive machinery. So basically a submersible version of the 'small' container haulers. Not something you'd hire for a casual, one-time stroll. I'd say a Typhoon classe or bigger - a Typhoon's 'dry' tonnage puts it about on par with a 2500 TEU boat (twenty-foot equivalent unit - 2500 20-foot containers). 2500 TEU is on the low end of today's container freighters.

And if yo'ure going for small, high value cargo (microchips, high purity drugs, diamonds, gold ingots - or sightly more bulky stuff like high end comlinks, expensive guns or the like), you save more money by foregoing a container-capable design than the extra handling will cost. Especially if it's a cargo you're going to drop in a place where there's no customs agents looking. Those places rarely have the capacity to handle containers.

A smuggling sub designed to haul one or a few waterproofed containers in a 'wet' area seems more likely. Or a relatively small smuggling boat - lower the container in, put a radar-absorbing tarp on it and yo'ure good to go. Either can be hired by the Vory without breaking a sweat. A container sub wouldn't.

The nano fax and feedstock shouldn't take up a whole shipping container. I'd say you should have whoever is doing the pickup, ditch the container. Have it modified so that its partially boyant, all the internals are protected as manuancy described, a transponder, and the top is designed to blow off. Cargo vessel keeps on going. Pickup vessel can then sweep in when they are on the horizon, wireless signal to pop the top and ejects the foam encased cargo, which floats to the surface. Have a small barge or something with the submersible that can pull it out of the water and dump it into a small cargo hold.

If the submersible wasn't set in stone, you could just have it picked up by a vory owned fishing vessel which would take it back to the Fishmonger as a bunch of <insert fish here> packed in ice. Ship it across town in a refrigerated tractor trailor. And if you the players want to have a cool action sequence, they can hit it at the fishmonger, a bunch of russian vory in fisherman garb with blocks of ice (some of which may also contain other smuggled items like guns, dope, chips, etc) and crates of fish everywhere.

If you don't use this I am.

I wish DS ran a jackpoint-style rating system, so I could upvote you for this post.

As it stands, I will just leave you with an arbitrary ninja to represent your awesomeness.


~R~

Yup.

The trick with a large scale smuggling sub is that it needs a deepwater channel and heavy material handling to unload. How many places have 100 feet of water all the way up to a 300 foot long building on the water? And nobody who will notice the 500 semi-loads of dirt being removed? And if anyone notices the 60 foot wide underwater doors it's going to be pretty obvious what is going on.

This is classic stuff. Getting stolen, with your permission of course?

I don't think it would be that big of a deal. The germans did this in both WWI in WWII. I would think that in 2072 for sensitive cargo it might even make economic sense. Certainly not for bulk deliveries though. I would think that the Vory probably don't own them directly and that the captains/crews of both vessels have been bribed/blackmailed to do the job.

Case in point:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_submarine_Deutschland
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Type_XIV_submarine

I may have missed a few things as i havent had time to read the entire thread yet, but on one of my runs when my guys were trying to hijack a shipment, the smugglers had rented a large number of Uhals, all the same size, and sent them all out on different routes, with a small security detail following several of them. This gave them lots of leads to track down and made things a bit more fun. Plus, hell, NO one suspects a Uhaul to be holding 4 armed guards with cargo in the back.


---P.S. oh that poor poor troll when he opened the back door.....

Absolutely. And thanks for the ninja Raiki.

If we look at all the points made so far, my thought on the sub is that even if its feasible, the overhead may just be too much.
It comes down to the fact that if they spend a whole lot of money to smuggle it into Seattle and then ship it, then they are cutting out all their profits.

Either the nanofax is something that the vory has no qualms with because they can get them easily or its a drop in the bucket to their income (like on the level of some corporations) in which case they're not gonna spend a whole lot of money on smuggling it in. Or its a big ticket item for them...which means they don't have a lot of cash flow.

If its the first, then they are gonna own the sub because its not cost effective to have to hire a sub every week when your shipping in some sensitive goods.

If its the second, then their gonna use a fishing vessel because they already own it as one of their business fronts.

If its the first, then they would save money using something like what I said so they don't have to be able to load a 60ft shipping container, instead just dropping a few pallets into a custom cargo bay on a smaller/cheaper submersible. It'll have a shallower draft and wouldn't require super heavy equipement to unload once you get it in to dock.


Another alternative for the shipping container could be to put a smaller container inside it (containerception) with bottom portion exposed with a coupling mechanism attached. The sub can be modded to attach to the container and when they drop it in the water, outer shell blows out away from it, sub floats up under it, attaches to it and just sails into port with container on top. Will be slow going and have a sonar cross-section the size of an underwater aircraft carrier, but could get beside the dock, unhook and drive off.
Then it just needs hauled out of the water.

I think this is probably overcomplicating and overthinking things, guys. Too much realism is just as bad as too much pink mohawk.


It's Shadowrun. Smugglers in Shadowrun routinely operate T-Birds, and evidently they do so profitably despite all indications that there should be no way in hell to operate a T-Bird profitably for very long without getting shot from the skies.


Is a small submarine that can surface at sea, take possession of an ISO shipping container, slip through a harbor undetected, surface at any two-bit wharf or dock you care to name, and winch that sucker out of their hold and onto your flatbed really that much more unbelievable?

Yes...

I ignore the stuff in the setting that strikes me as pointless and/or stupid and/or seriously interferes with my suspension of disbelief.

I really don't have much difficulty seeing such a submarine with 2070s technology; stationkeeping thrusters all around a vehicle which is built with the express purpose of opening its hold, taking an ISO container into it, and closing up before submerging. It would need to have a lot of buoyancy in the front and rear, and similarly effective balance tanks. Stationkeeping thrusters could keep it where it is while it's taking cargo at sea, and the "other equipment" modification seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to use for a big crane that can unfold out of it and lift the ISO container, especially with the presumption it'll extend legs down to the bottom of whatever it's surfaced at to brace itself, or else be lashed to the shore.

Except that it will be many times more expensive than what would normally be used, Would not be for rent, and would not likely have the capabilities that you were asking about up-thread. You would not use a submarine to move ISO Containers. Submarines are used for relatively small shipments (of which an ISO Container is not). There is a reason that Container ships and freighters exist.

So yes, I have a very hard time seeing such a vessel in the hands of the Vory (whether owned or rented) for something that is smaller than the size of a Desk. Just don't see it. You do not tend to pay more to ship something than the item is actually worth. That is usually considered a bad expenditure from the purchaser's POV.

My Question: Why does it have to be so complicated? The Nanoforge is relatively small... buoy it in the open ocean, have a fishing trawler retrieve it and bring it into port with the rest of the Fish... easy peasy and done. Simple, elegant, and the KE Snoops are never likely to catch on to that. After all, it is just a fishing Trawler. Bonus points if the Trawler has a full load of shrimp or fish to process with it.

It's not just the nanoforge, it's the nanoforge and several shipping pallets of untagged feedstock. Somewhere in south America there's a battalion wondering where in the hell their rearmament supplies went.

No mention of the cargo subs from Deadly Waves? Darn I was hoping there would be...

Well, it's got a sub called the "Aztech Profit Transport" - a stupidly cheap cargo sub that has a collapsible crane and conveyer system for loading/unloading, and a description that includes holding "ten container equivalents in its forward hold" and an aft to hold "non-containerized goods"

Of course it has zero frills besides the special Machinery(collapsible crane), but a good smuggler organization could tool that sucker up and still have it fit in with common cargo sub traffic.

Wow. Even if you assume "Container" means "pallet" and not "ISO Shipping Container" (which would make the thing absofrigginloutely huge,) that's probably still enough space for one or two ISOs.