QUOTE (Shemhazai @ Jun 17 2013, 03:55 PM)

Some thoughts. Anger directed at me for them will be ignored.
If using a skinlink, would it be fair for a hacker that can touch you or something connected to you through it to hack your things?
If something touching you is skinlink capable and matrix enabled, could it be hacked to serve as a bridge to you by enabling the skinlink capability?
Could there be a special round (dart) especially for attaching this kind of bridge onto you?
If using fiber cables, would it be fair for a critical glitch on a damage resistance test to result in a bullet going right through one?
Could some combatants well-versed in cyberware knowledge purposely target those wires with a well-placed slash, not unlike going for the jugular? Could a very skilled sniper try his luck?
Could bandwidth be an issue? Could wireless protocols of the future implement a nearly full-spectrum approach that at very near distance can utilize the combined bandwidth equivalent to multiple high definition satellite channels (by today's standards).
Could the difference between the speed of light traveling in a direct, straight line between your systems, and therefore potentially remotely hackable, make any difference as opposed to the speed of light through fiber (slower) that may need to curve to reach its destination (requiring a slightly longer distance)? What about the latency of converting an electrical signal into photons able to travel through the fiber, as opposed to the electrical current needed to broadcast? Is it plausible that your body or nerves are also not as fast?
Does this nerf cybered characters in favor of deckers? If cyberware is unable to let characters safely max out their intuition, does that further empower magicians that can, and can do it for their teammates?
No anger.
I think this was part of the mistake of making previously cyber-only gear available as non-cyberware. If you look at the transition from SR3 to SR4, a lot of the really important benefits of smartlinks, cybereyes, and cyberears (primarily those three) were restricted to installed cyberware. SR4 took those things and applied them without penalty to small bits of gear you could wear with no essence loss.
That is, you could wear vision-enhancement contact lenses with a display link and skinlink connected to your smartlink, and earbuds with spatial recognizers and record everything on your commlink (skinlinked) and transmit information to your team without ever using an invasive bit of cyberware. By and large you could skip the transmission step and keep everything local.
In SR3 you could do similar stuff, but at huge penalties. Non-invasive ("external") smartlinks took the form of special goggles with bulky cables and even then didn't provide the same level of benefit (-1 TN for external, -2 TN for internal, which was a relatively huge advantage). Vision enhancement could be accomplished with goggles or binoculars, but they were bulky and obvious and had to be put on and taken off. Recording images and sounds required extra equipment, and required links to storage and transmission media in order to get the full benefit. Also these objects were generally limited to a handful of operating modes, and you couldn't toggle them freely like you could with the DNI of cyberware.
I think for SR5 they should really have reestablished the barrier between internal cyberware and external gear. Then they should have killed the skinlink for mass data transfer (say that transferring large amounts of information over long patches of skin is too easily disrupted, too much resistance, etc, and force the hookups to be wireless that way). Internal cyberware costs Essence and should be relatively free from interference, generally not obvious (unless intentionally made obvious or spotted by a millimeter wave scanner), and fast. External gear should require some transmission sites (eyes and ears could be routed through a Google Glass type headset and wirelessly connected to your commlink which serves as a data processor and storage medium, smartlinks would have to wirelessly connect through your commlink to those devices, etc), and be vulnerable to hacking.
So then you could have your physical adept with his smartlinked contact lenses and noise filter earbuds hooked through his glasses, but he'd be hackable. Meanwhile the guy who spends Essence and large amounts of cash could have his eyes and ears replaced and a nerve-induction data line to a smartlink skinpad, and not be hackable.
And then the internal cyberware should provide better results than the external stuff (in SR5 lingo, +1 accuracy +1 die for external, +2 accuracy +2 dice for internal?), in addition to being more secure. They could easily make it so there could be literally no debate over why someone would buy the internal cyberware rather than the external gadgets.
But if they're following the SR4 trend, then it's backwards. There are presumably large benefits to
not getting the full replacement, since for example contacts are cheap, easy, noninvasive, and hey, if you get hacked you can always pluck them out.
All in all, most of the
wireless non-cyberware technology out of SR4 and later is
too good for the game and needed to be scaled back. Following the trend, I'd expect to see 'trode-induced reflex enhancers that cost 0 Essence and mimicked Wired Reflexes. Or spray-on peel-off dermal plating.