QUOTE (Supine @ Jul 20 2013, 11:37 PM)
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To be honest, I haven't read deeply into this thread as about halfway through it I got hit by all the things I've always wanted Tacnets to be, all at once, and my excitement hurried me down the page to the comment section about as fast as I could skim through the posts. That said, I'm very interested to see where your ideas are going and I'll try my best to contribute to them-- Right after I get my fill of brainstorming, that is.
When I first head of tacnets, I envisioned a Tom-Clancy milspec piece of information-gathering equipment, a black box meant to interpret sensor information and distribute it across the battlefield. Early in the thread, I saw it compared to the Commander mode in Battlefield 4. I would rather argue that it is more like the 3D Spotting system. In case a few of the people reading this haven't played, the spotting system allows one soldier to hit a button to 'spot' an enemy soldier or vehicle. Once spotted, a bright orange symbol floats over his head and points him out to everyone else, adding a little bit of tactical gameplay that even the one Recon player who's sitting on a rock and firing aimlessly can contribute to. The sheer usefulness of it is substantial, and since it relies on a HUD that doesn't exist in real life (but does certainly exist in Shadowrun), it's a mechanism that I can definitely try and incorporate.
This leads to the part of my post that actually has to do with Tacnets. I envision two sides to it: The first, a sensor suite that picks up information from each soldier, vehicle, hacked camera and drone that it can find. The second, a piece of security hardware that allows the decker to treat his team's individual PANs as if they're slaved to his Tacnet. The first is the important one, and the one I'll spend my time talking about. The second is pretty straightforward, and I still haven't quite convinced myself that it doesn't stem from a misunderstanding of the Matrix rules.
The use of a tacnet as a sensor suite wouldn't be based on a dicepool or anything by my model. Instead, the only thing that matters to the Tacnet itself (and by extention the DM's struggle to keep track of it) is what it knows, and what it does not. If the tacnet knows the location of its enemies, then it can give that information to everyone connected, and they can get a hefty Perception bonus (or whatever, I'll talk about possible applications later). If it doesn't know, then it can't give a bonus. It's as simple as that. No need to give overarching dicepools to simulate in the abstract, no need to toss +1 and +2 modifiers at everything under the sun, in general, less bloat. Or at least, that's the idea. The Tacnet would exist as a way of preventing the team from needing to communicate such things as where enemies and important items are, how to navigate the area, and other things that are better done by a computer, leaving the team's mouths free to say more important things. It would have strictly gamist applications, too: By spotting the enemies, it could eliminate a bunch of Perception Tests and assist in the rest. By measuring ranges to the targets it could provide a bonus to long-range attacks. It could do the targeting for a drone, allowing it to bypass the Sensor Test and go straight to the "fire" stage of its plan. That isn't strictly the point, however. It would exist mainly as a tool of information. Information being the first and greatest tool of the decker, and the most revolutionary portion of the Internet and Matrix themselves, I think that fits the Decker's role very well.
On that note, it's time for me to lay down the list of things that I've envisioned a tacnet being used for. Some of these would be impractical, quasi-practical, or simply not as useful as I hope; I assume you'll tell me if they are. I also assume you'll figure out your own ways that a tacnet would be an advantage on a battlefield, and if you think that it's the kind of thing you can write in a rulebook or use on a run, I hope you'll post it. Even if nobody cares about my little pipe dream I've posted, I might use them in the houserule I've just now convinced myself to write. All of these rules are presented in the abstract, without any numbers or crunch to apply them to a game. That would be decided later.
Proposed bonuses/uses:
Spotting the enemy: By making enemies in the tacnet's view sufficiently obvious, the tacnet makes visual Perception Tests to see enemies unnecessary. Enemies are either marked by software or an operator (I haven't decided).
Virtual Rangefinder: By using visual cues and any other information it's gathered, the tacnet provides soldiers with distances to important markers and enemies.
Firing Through Cover: If the tacnet has enough data to infer an absolute location of an enemy who is obscured by cover, the enemy's location is marked so that the soldier can fire through the enemy's cover. Also applies to shooting through walls, doors, floors, and whatever else.
Mapping: With enough data, the tacnet can provide a three-dimensional virtual map of the location in question. An ultrasound sensor might be enough for this to work, or UWB Radar. A single trideo feed would probably not.
Trap Marking: Any security measures noticed by the tacnet or its operator can be marked to the soldiers. Tripwires and lasers would be clearly marked, cameras spotted (perhaps with a rough estimate of their field of view, if such information can be inferred). Passive security measures like locks could also be marked, with any other information the tacnet has, such as whether a door is locked.
Targeting: Targeting could be run through the tacnet rather than the drone, allowing for example one drone to make the active targeting Sensor Test and another to take the shot. This could help in situations where the drone taking the shot could not get a sensor lock, such as when your Fly-Spy has a clear line of sight and your Roto-Drone's is obscured by trees.
Flare Protection: If someone fires a flare and your whole team doesn't have flare compensation, the tacnet could turn the NV off in time to save the team's precious eyes.
Weapon/Vehicle ID: For those cases where it's useful to know whether the troll's carrying a squirtgun or an Assault Cannon, the tacnet could tell the soldiers what's slinging the bullets. It could work for drones and vehicles too.
Information-Gathering: Noting the license plate of the unidentified van driving off is the example I though of, but things like reading SIN chips, matching names to facial-recognition softwares, naming the song playing at the bar tonight, and anything else that relies on simple info would fall under the same idea.
I'll stop there for fear of running out of steam and edit this post if I get enlightened later. It should probably be noted that this would likely end up being a fairly high-end piece of equipment, not available at chargen and with a price tag prohibitive up until the point where the team can buy military-level gear. With that in mind, it won't do much to solve the problems of deckers being left helpless in certain missions until the team can actually obtain and use it. A tacnet, under this system, would serve as a comprehensive and complete network of sensors in combination with a powerful piece of hardware, made with the sole purpose of leaving nothing unknown to its user. Then again, it could be priced competitively, since it would largely depend on how much a decker is willing to spend on sensors in order to be more useful. Coincidentally, that would make the Decker/Rigger duo very powerful indeed if they both spent money in the right place. If the runners' enemies use tacnets to boost their surveillance capabilities, it would certainly make infiltrators' job difficult and a decker insanely useful to have on heist jobs. And on that note, if the runners end up fighting 2075 military teams with money on their side, it can be assumed that a to-of-the-line tacnet and sensor array would be a significant part of the enemy's tactics.
[EDIT: I posted this and immediately realized that I'd forgotten to weigh in the current argument over what a tacnet can and cannot use as a sensor. I believe that it goes both ways. There is no reason a chameleon suit wouldn't be able to give some sorts of data to the tacnet. It might even have certain camera angles that prove extremely useful to a tacnet's operator. However, using things for uses other than those they were designed for tends to have its hiccups. The suit, for one, might not have the processing power to both use and send the data it has at the same time. For another, the sensors would almost certainly be specialized, and changing the purpose of those sensors would probably show that. The sensors wouldn't be as good as a decent camera for doing simple trideo recording, for the same reasons you probably can't slap together a ball of trid sensors onto a RP coated suit and call it a day. This could be reflected by a -1 or -2 penalty in gamist terms, although I'm not yet familiar enough with the 5th edition crunch to say what number is more or less fair than another. In the end, the tacnets you see in-game would probably tend to be a mix of high-end sensors and those jury-rigged from smartguns and chameleon suits, because on the one hand, deckers like reliability, while on the other, runners tend to be just a little less wealthy than they desire.]
[EDIT: As for the initial subject of the thread, I don't have a seething hatred for the wireless bonuses as many of you seem to. While some may try and rules-lawyer about the meaning of it all, it's a generally regarded concept that common sense comes before RAW. In the case of wireless bonuses, that means that rather than bonuses requiring an active Matrix connection no matter what, it makes perfect sense for a character to be able to use the wireless Smartgun mag ejection & fire mode bonuses if he has any sort of link to the gun. The only problem I have with the bonuses that I've seen so far is the induction-charging bonuses on shock gloves and the shock baton. Magnetic induction doesn't work via wi-fi, after all. That's a simulationist problem for simulationists to complain about, however.
I like most of what you said. I would say a user or software can mark potential targets.
How would you implement it? as a dice pool seems to be a good way to do it.
The reason I don't like wireless bonuses. Is not because the concept is bad. but because what worked before with out the matrix now requires the matrix. Which is stupid. Now if their was new functionality that it actually made sense for the matrix to be needed I would be fine with it. I also would run your cyberware through your comlink. Because just like to day you don't stick your computer straight into the net if you have a brain. you don't stick your cyberware straight on to the net. you use a datajack to your comlink.