I believe Bull weighed in on this during one of my threads. His answer is that spirits were intended to have and use edge when acting outside the control of a mage, hence their edge rating. A pissing match then ensued over "why this wasn't clearly delineated in the rules" vs. "but we clearly implied it." None the less, the nearest thing to a dev answer is yes, spirits have edge until the summoner owns them.

.Which his NOT until after they have resisted the Summoning.

If they want to errata it, cool. But until then I'll stick with what the book actually says.

Without, apparently, the qualifier the book uses.

I actually wouldn't doubt that a spirit could take a tank down without much difficulty. Hell, nowadays a bloke with an RPG and a shot from the side/rear can do it.

The brilliant thing about tanks, though, is that there's never just one.

it's mostly just the lack of defense against spirits though. at least you can put a cage around the engine block and reactive armor on the flanks. mount automated antipersonnel systems to wipe threats (not popular with your own troops, civillian populations), automated missiles defense systems; hell, pop smoke. without some magical defenses, spirit just pops up in the crew compartment and says "oh hai" and then engulfs the ammo bin.

it's a shame FAB III isn't faster acting. something like a FAB halon system would be pretty awesome as an anti-magic panic button in an enclosed space if it did. then again, faster-acting FAB III would be bad for the world in general...

The crew is probably in cocoons, so not much, if any, room to manifest - even if the rules clarify this to be rather optimistic. For open spaces large enough to fit a spirit, you might be able to use flexible biofiber strands to prevent anything from popping up.

for a legit tank, absolutely. i think it's more of a problem for transports both ground and air, and both military and security. your HTR team doesn't actually get to the place the incident was called in from if the spirit manifests in the troop compartment of the helicopter or SWAT van before you get there. i suppose it's possible modern APCs and transports have everyone ride in rigger cocoons because of this. it almost seems like such vehicles would need to look more like the mech-dropping choppers from various anime and films. just a cockpit and a spine with individual troop pods on each side, though probably with a continuous outer skin for aerodynamics and/or armor, or the cocoons being built in to the shell of the existing helicopter or APC. something like (forgive ascii fail)

0 pilot
0|0 troops
0|0
0|0
0|0


where the 0 are rigger cocoons/cocoon armored seats. that makes cargo transport or casevac kind of a bitch, but the fucking thing can still manifest if there's open access space. so it's a tough choice. could be you have this sort of setup for response teams and troops and mana barrier solutions for more open vehicles. you could probably pull the seat and stuff cargo in one (imagine this is actually something that is designed to happen with relative ease), and a cocoon with an autodoc might work for casevac purposes. there's always the old korean war strategy of hanging the casualties off the side of the chopper (probably safer with an autodoc pod now). would work for cargo pods too.

it's an interesting tactical asymmetry: high-tech forces are more likely to have this sort of setup, but probably less likely to have on-the-ground spirit support except from one or two battle mages way back from the front. meanwhile, some place like amazonia probably has its army riding around in open jeeps and old pickup trucks, but there's far more shamans integrated with the troops since it's not like they're not being invaded too. very similar dynamic with shadowrunners, actually.

i'm sorry if this seems really anal, but it's one of those things both for gameplay and atmosphere where i like to think through the implications of the rules. if the HTR team shows up in something that's basically a UH-1 with drone racks and canards, that's a different vibe from the showing up in an angular, windowless dual-coaxial rotor monstrosity that barely resembles "modern" helicopters that then opens up eight separate doors for each individual trooper. it also means that you have to handle shit like "can we move around in the chopper" and that sort of thing much differently.

That is the thing...though...to be honest the current gen tanks can suck up RPG-7Vs from the side easily enough. Especially when you throw on ERA. Even the rear more often causes degrading damage than an outright kill. The worst shoulder mounted hit I've seen was an RPG-29, and it did not manage to burn through the side because the ERA panels blew out (though it did leave a lovely hole part way in). I'm not sure if the RPG gunners lived or not, but the roof they fired from caved in a few seconds later when the tank sent main gun back.

The flip of course, is that there a dozens of little weak points that really shouldn't be there, where the warhead goes off at just the right angle, and somehow finds the gap between skirt and hull and burns its way through a torsion bar from the front, even though the tank should be impervious, theoretically.

nothing real-world and shoulder-fired is smart enough to pop-up yet, is it? that's still basically the javelin and similar not-ready-for-third-world armaments. in shadowrun, though, i could see a smart shoulder-fired missile being a real threat to heavy armor. especially if it's got a database of those weak points you mention to home itself in on.

Does the book say anything about spirits ever using Edge? Or just about them not using Edge.

this is one of those things where it's not clear and they are never explicitly permitted nor allowed to use edge to resist summoning. spirits have edge in their stat blocks, but don't ever use that edge once they are summoned. some interpret this to therefore imply that they could use that edge to resist summoning, but this hinges on interpreting the definition of summoned: is a spirit that is resisting a summoning still "summoned" but trying to break free, or is it not yet summoned until it fails to resist the summoning? the book does not say either way. the fact no spirit appears if the summoning fails seems to imply that they are not yet summoned, but again this is all highly open to interpretation. i happen to agree with the interpretation that they can use edge. their edge is so low that it's unlikely to make much difference.

this leads to an interesting problem for spirits and suppressive fire that may be exploitable. if summoned spirits have no edge, they presumably only roll their reaction to avoid hits from suppressive fire. unless they still have the attribute and they just don't use it. the whole spirit edge thing is a mess until errata comes out.

Pop-up attacks require a large volume of space ahead of and above the target in order to execute, which can be problematic in urban areas. With Shadowrun tech it would invite immediate counterbattery fire and anti-missile engagement. Of course, Shadowrun doesn't yet have rules for anti-missile systems or many countermeasure of any kind