Ok, I'm building a corpsec team for a secret research lab that has to pose a challenge for the team, at least enough to slow them down until the elite guys show up. The problem is that I can't see them risking damaging the facility with misses or explosions, which limits my options somewhat. here's what I'm thinking so far:

Flood the corridors with Breathtaker.
Give all the corpsec Mituhama EE suits, FFBA and helmets, making them tough and letting them operate in the breathtaker filled corridors.
Giving them smartlinks so that they can take advantage of their smartguns (No, this is not in the core book!)
It's an aztechnology base, so I'm going to upgrade the squad mages to magic 4 and power focus 3.

Now to weapon loadout: I'm limiting them to SMGs, with either gel or frangible rounds (to avoid overpenetration and property damage) along with flash bangs, smoke grenades and flash grenades. Sidearms are tazers, and for close combat I'm thinking stun batons. Now I've got two problems that no amount of small arms like this are never going to help with: A troll with a riot shield and 30+ armour, and some heavily armoured drones. Now I have some ideas on the troll, but the drones are a bigger problem.
Ok, to deal with the troll I'm thinking my go-to weapon is the Ares Screech Sonic Rifle, which ignores armour and body and is resisted solely by willpower. Skillwires should take care of the exotic weapon skill easily enough.
Also for the troll but effective against drones as well: one large net gun per squad. A well placed shot with one of these should take a foe out of the action for at least a little while.
My main problem is the danged drones. At present my only effective weapon against them is going to be the squad mage, who I'm giving 'melt [drone]', and this bugs me. Is the HERF gun effective against drones? What other options for RANGED anti-drone work (I have plans for close combat anti-drone gear) without risking serious collateral damage?

If it's a facility, why not have a rating 10 jammer. It won't actually disable the drones, but it will make them much less effective.

Oh, forgot to mention: The facility is effectively one giant Faraday cage, which will force the rigger to be on-site. However, due to enemies using scan to pinpoint her and her drones she's taken to using laser links instead of normal wireless connections when possible. Fortunately smoke will be effective against that, but I think she's also added microwave links to get around that. So jammers may not be as good as they could be.

Laser still only gives comms when there's LOS. Again, it will put a cramp in, not disable them. Remember it will also screw up the teams comms.

Aren't tasers (and electrical damage in general) pretty effective against drones?

Drones don't take Stun Damage, so no.

Did a quick check, and drones are still susceptible to electrical damage. When a drone (or a vehicle or other electronic device) takes a hit of electrical damage, they roll (for drones) Armour and Body. If the fail to beat the number of hits scored by the attacker, they shut down, and may need to reboot. Page 164 of SR4A, just above the falling damage table.

It seems that everybody forgets how laser/microwave links work ....

Flashbangs can be fairly destructive too - expect any and everything made out of glass (or glass-like materials) to end up into small bits (computer screens, fluorescent tubes, glass doors, see-through office partitions etc...). things like lighwight ceilings are likely to end up pretty beat up too.

Knockout gs is probably the first choice, with gel/chemicals/S&S rounds close seconds. Though when the going get though and the place is already trashed, havign a few flashbangs 'just in case' make sense.

You could load them up with Frangible Rounds as an excuse to still use some pretty powerful weaponry.

A memorable fight in one of my previous games came when a low-level corpsec guard panicked and started throwing his frag grenades he had bought on his own and kept "Just-in-case" a HTR team was needed but wasn't yet on site. The guard played nice until he was cornered and half the corpsec team was down and bleeding. When he couldn't flee the fight-or-flight response kicked in and he did what he had to do to save his life, no thought wsa given to keeping the facility in one piece. His paycheck wasn't worth his life. All the players said it made for a very real but surprising game. Look into motivations and what real people may do when faced with similar circumstances and you can often come up with a few surprises.

Other Drones, offsite hackers.

Also, I believe laser comms only work when objects are stationary. Or at least one of the printings of it has that limitation - it may be the one in arsenal or the eye comm in augmentation i am thinking of, however.

Electrical damage works against drones pretty well, though, due to the shut-down factor.

In terms of gear, I would upgrade your response team a slight bit further: Flash Paks(underrated as shit!), thermal smoke(screws everyone), and ultrasound scanners(cuts through the smoke), and a tacnet 1 should do a lot to give them the edge in coordination. Possibly package the flashpak/smoke into a offensive iball drone instead.


My personal favorite combination of drones to throw in a facility defense, especially urban combat scenarios is a Steel Lynx(it has legs AND wheels, otherwise it would be a crimson samurai) and a Vacuum Cleaner Bot to follow it around - better used with large, solid concrete walls and the like.
The Steel lynx has a reinforced weapon mount, ammo bins, and a minigun. It fires Rubber Bullets(caseless) with Suppressive Fire exclusively.
The vacuum cleaner bot( a Busybuddy or similiar) follows the combat drone around, scooping up the bullets for re-use later.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but couldn't the building's Security Rigger participate in the Corp Sec Team's tacnet along with all of the rail mounted drones installed in the building?

He's probably too busy making sure the water coolers and coffee makers are secure.

The D-CAF's don't run themselves!