Ok we are going into an area that i'm betting is going to be very buggy. We have a mage, a couple cybered up individuals (Sammie-mercs) and an NPC Rigger. We have a couple of big guns, which i'm not sure if were bringing or not (we will if I have any say) being as we are supposed to be evicting some squatters and gangers from an area and so are not expecting any real serious trouble.

I plan on packing a couple of cans of roach spray that i'll toss and shot in mid air (and hopefully run for it and make it) if any so up, but I'm hoping for a few more pointers if anyone has any ideas (besides nuking them because we all know that don't work)!!!

Concussion grenades, very useful for oppressing the masses for a sweep and clear operation.

Just try not to pick on the cute chick with the goth husband, he might come back and whoop you

The best way to handle them is your mage or an adept with killing hands. Otherwise, overwhelming firepower is your only hope. Note that if the spirits are in close quarters, grenades and chunky salsa are your best bet.

[edit]Actually a troll physical adept with a dikoted combat axe weapon focus should be able to handle the problem (provided he has the "multiple combatant" penalty reducing martial arts). [/edit]

Can lots n lots of gasoline. it'll be a 'controlled' fire, i swear.

Get some respirators and a few smoke-bomb insecticide grenades. While it might not kill them, it will definitely give them some modifiers and give you an edge.

Also, have the rigger check to see if an old gas main is on the street in question (gotta love those city block maps). a few rapid bursts and boom, no more city block.

Don't bother trying to shoot the cans in the air. I've got two suggestions for you on that one:

1) Insecticide can and a small expolsive (M-80 or so) light the fuse and throw. Homemade splash genade.

2) Bug bomb. They have then now. Its the cans where you press the button and leave the house for 6 hours. The spray pumps out until empty. Don't know how long it takes to empy. Its would also give some vision modifiers as the smoke is thick.

Good luck.

Bug bombs emptying faster could be unstable (eg fall over, or, if fast enough, skid around on the floor from the force of the decompression). You want to empty it quickly? Put a 9M hole through it.

Call the Orkin man.

I rarely create a Mundane character who doesn't have a Tazer for just this reason.

With elemental damage power 10 any spirit under essence 10 is vulnerable despite it's resistance to normal weapons. On top of that with base damage S even a few net stageups will kill a bug really fast.

that, and a streetsweeper. you can fill 'em with anything--like, y'know, natural rocks.

Uh, I'm pretty sure that tazers were never intended to be allowed to overflow to physical. You've got to be kidding.

Once a non-flesh form takes deadly stun it is disrupted, so the point is moot.

what about white phosphorous grenades?

Hey, there are plenty of reports of people being hit by police tazers and dying soon afterwards. It's the combanation of adrenaline, fear, and the blast of current through your body that kills you. I can see it happening.

As for drugs that cause unconsiousness, there are a lot of cases of a downer causing a heart to stop or the like if applied to someone improperly. Somehow, I don't think a gunshot wound and a Neurostun grenade equate to a "proper" application of the stuff

Of course tazers have killed people. Of course overdoses of anaesthetics have killed people. But not even remotely in the way that the rules handle it. That was a simple oversight, and any fatalities resulting from that sort of stuff should be handled by the GM. CS gas and smoke grenades have caused more deaths in confined spaces than I'd care to look up, but they're not exactly touched by mechanics for doing damage.

Well, assuming you can't get hold of a Sea-Saber to fire at the Queen...
A UAV drone with a decent rating missile launch system can fire multiple Great Dragon AGTMs. These things are easy to get, and quite a bargain. If you have a bunch in a group, go for HE missiles. If you don't mind making noise, that is.

Don't forget that a strong streetsam may be able to knockdown and hold on to a bug spirit taking it out on the fight for a while till the party can kill it. My troll surprised our GM when he did this in a game. I didn't even know know they had a set of rules to cover tackling and holding some down it was just an act of desperation because guns weren't working.

What about Capsule Rounds? In Cannon Companion, it clearly says that you can fill up a few rounds with insecticide and they'll do damage to a bug spirit.

Cascade with DMSO and DDT. You can manufacture DDT with a chem lab and DMSO is cheap. Use the cascade rifle or a squirt. It will suck to be an insect spirit.

Don

Or to be a flower...

The issue of Stun damage causing chemicals overflowing to Physical was discussed: They almost never cause significant Physical damage in SR rules. It is completely impossible to kill a human being with such a thing alone. Only the GM's call Overdose-rules can allow that, or if you pump a person full of several different types of Stun-causing chemicals. You can never do more than (Original Damage Level + 1) DLs with a chemical. See Additional Dosage, M&M pp. 106-107.

My mistake, then. Seems I missed that rule, which helps things quite a bit.

My team seems to like using VERY big guns in their bug hunts.

Problem: 2 Mantid spirits (Force 5)

Solution: 1 Streetsam named Raven.

Strategy
Used smoke grenade and hoped to use his blindfighting skills against them and then kick their collective hoop with supreme unarmed skill and MK1 Fist.

Problem
Raven suddenly had an epiphany and remembered that smoke didn't really stop something that looked at you astrally.

Solution
Didn't give a damn about the smoke and killed the first one with one hit from his fist and then took his time (two entire combat turns) to bludgeon the second hapless little bug into oblivion. I really don't think those two realised what hit them...

..............

We were really quite surprised that the battle against them took such a short time but that sammy has taken more bullets to the head (and the needed medical stay) than a normal person would take during an entire campaign and STILL walked out of the hospital after just one-two weeks. Note: This character was quite balanced and not that much of a "tank".

Hmm. Grab yourself a shotgun and a handfull of Big D's Temper rounds (Preferably a few spare shotguns too). The bugs only get half their immunity versus fire damage so it should be quite easy to toast bugs using them. They max-out at 15m (taser ranges) but they use the choke rules and get +2 power.

You can also fire them from some heavy-pistol platforms (Roomsweeper or Hatimoto II) for some akimbo fireballing action, although the 12S damage a defiance T250 does with them is respectable.

We just had a little problem with some wasps. They apparently had a hold over a little pissant gang we... ahh... "encountered." This early in the campaign, we would have been lunch so we just located hive and called the Star on them. The fuzz took care of it pretty well.

Great the GM saw this post and has commenced to make me even more paranoid....

Taking down a spirit is relatively easy if you've got the hardware. Get a assault rifle. Now load it down with recoil compensation (with a 6 strength, you can recoil comp 9 points on an Ares Alpha). Now point the gun at the bug. Pull the trigger and let the full auto do the rest. The spirit would need an essence of 9 to have its hardened armor take care of a salvo that size, and at that point, you've got bigger problems, anyway. No need for special ammunition, even. Most spirits have trouble soaking a 2D, which'd be the least you'd deal out.

The only problem with this strategy is that you can only deal with one target a pass. If the spirits are less than force 6, a couple of 3 round bursts would work fine. Particularly if you're using insecticide capsule rounds (at 20 for 10, SI 2, they're a steal).

The rules about full-auto and burst fire modifiers not applying to hardened armor do not come into play with the spirit immunity power which has its own way of doing things.

People have already posted the best firepower solutions for dealing with the strength of bug spirits (or any spirit really). But they also have a couple of weaknesses that you can exploit. Most bugs have a reduced sense of sight. While that probably won't be enough to keep them from spotting and attacking you (they are dual natured) anything without a serious aura on the astral plane might well be all but invisible to them. Trip wires, claymore mines, grenades and just about anything else might as well be invisible to a bug. Also, bug spirits don't show up on their own (unlike real life bugs): they need a bug shaman. That guy won't be immune to normal weapons at all, and the little bugs all do what he says. Not saying it'll lead to a good outcome if you point a gun at an insect shaman's head and order him to call off the little guys (they are insane after all), but bugs are reasonably intelligent on their own. You might get some mileage out of that. Not as much as having a mage or an adept with you, but some.

If you are definitely going to tool up to deal with these, you might hire a mage to summon some elemental bodyguards and bond them to you. Hellaciously expensive, but with the kind of cyberware/guns/vehicles it sounds like your team has, you might just pull that off. Probably just a good general precaution to take, come to think.

Likewise, if you know an initiate that REALLY likes you, you might get an anchored spirit blast spell for your personal use. Just because you're not a mage doesn't mean you can't use magic!!

Can I ask a quick question? I've been looking at the rules for the bug forms, and I don't see the hardened armor notation anywhere. Is there somewhere in MiTS that states which spirits and which forms get the Immunity to Normal Weapons power? I didn't see it anywhere on the chart.

It's part of the materialization. Basicly the spirit gets immunity to normal weapons when it materializes which, in turn, gives it hardened armor equal to essence x 2 which is generally force x 2.

Thanks for pointing that out.

But, only true form spirits can manifest, and if I read the entry on what's produced in the merge, isn't a true form spirit the undesirable merge? Basically, the failure of the merge between host and spirit? Doesn't that mean there would be less of them then anything else, if any at all?

There are less True Form because they are more powerful than Flesh Form. The shaman may control only so many True and Flesh Forms per potency rating (rounded UP!), but they receive many more fleshies. Note, that only Good Mergers are even considered close to equal in terms of usability by the shaman. Flesh forms are the mutants, near worthless in terms of stature; they just happen to make great cannon fodder.

[edit]
Manifest <> Materialize

General anesthesia is so complicated that is has its own branch of doctors. An anesthesiologist is virtually required for any major surgery. A whole doctor just to make sure you go under and don't die. Even so, the stuff kills people on the operating table all the time. Not enough to justify not using it, but the risk is there. Now talk about applying that stuff under field conditions? You aren't adjusting the dosage for the patient's age, weight, health, metabolism or medical history? Those are just basic precautions. A real doctor is probably going to have your heart rate and respiration hooked up to monitors so he knows the very second that you start having problems. And the problems only get worse in the sixth world: you have people with all kinds of allergies to common substances, cyberware and bioware that filters the bloodstream getting in the way and people weigh as little as skinny elves and as much as trolls. The remote chance that you'll get so many successes that you flat out kill somebody with stun overflow ain't even worth worrying about compared to the massive strides that have apparently been made by 2063.

Though I agree that anaesthesiology is very complex, I also don't think it'd entirely outside the realm of believability to say that safely knocking someone out with a chemical substance is much less dangerous 60 years from now. That, and the fact that what I'm talking about is the fact that you're resisting serious stun every 3 seconds with some of this stuff. With a body of three, you could concievably be dead in less than a quarter of a minute.