so i remember a debate was going on for quite some time about whether armored vehicles were basically useless in shadowrun due to spirits could just manifest inside them and murder the crew. i had always thought a combination of quickened spells and FAB II in the walls was used to defend against that, but i was never sure if this was something that ever really got a solution. partially just my own curiosity, partially since the new easy mode high-force spirits really kick standard magical protections in the dick and might make armored vehicles useless again. thoughts?

Neither fab or quickened spells are listed as standard anywhere that I know of. Maybe war did something with this, but with quickened spells costing karma I kind of doubt those are spread out on all armored vehicles.

Nope. It's just one of those things that doesn't happen. One could draw an inference that heavily processed materials are difficult to astrally travel through, but AFAIK that's not supported by the game mechanics. They may also intentionally keep vehicle crew compartments cramped, so that there's no room to manifest.

yeah, that makes sense for vehicles with rigger cocoons especially, but APCs and transport helicopters would be pretty screwed, it seems like. i like the astral travel difficulty solution, it's probably the cleanest option, but i'd really love to see official rules in that regard someday. maybe force vs. vehicle armor/barrier armor to push through might be a reasonable house rule.

i know FAB hasn't officially made the leap from 4th ed, but i'm not sure i see any technical reason why you couldn't put suspensions of the stuff in plates around the crew compartment of a vehicle to form a barrier. actually, depending on the critical mass required, i can't see why you couldn't put it in plates inside military armor, thought i suppose it might not form a complete enough barrier.

The armor/barrier vs force should not apply since a mage astrally projecting does not really face these issues so why would a spirit?

Unfortunately I doubt you will find an official reason for this as there are few good reasons that wouldn't require massively reconstructing the equipment in general.

Consider Mechs in Battletech. Fun game, run around shooting up stuff in really big machines. Nevermind the fact that a biped is tons more unstable than a quadruped design or other little niggling facts.

Why the hell would you ever engage Mech vs Mech when you could do the equivalent of Thor Shotting them from orbit. Not like most have any sort of decent dodge.

The most likely solution in case of spirit/mage attack is the military will then focus their own mage/spirit forces to counter these. It's reactive, but sadly the best you can do unless you have a lot more mages tucked away somehow to be able to supply adequate counterspelling or other magics to every unit.

well, i'd assume that it would apply to a projecting mage as well. it would have the beneficial side effect of making "astrally projecting mage in a warded room with really thick walls" less of an incredibly viable defensive tactic if for no other reason than he would have to fight his own armored walls.

maybe militaries don't give a rat's ass at this point about troop survival, or maybe this is one of the reasons that warfare is so much about special ops units. but then again, we did just have a massive war in the amazon, and i can only imagine that amazonian summoners would have been amazing anti-armor and supply chain disruption units if azatlan didn't do something to counter it.

I do sorta wish Spirit Proofing things was as 'easy' as it was to Angel Proof/Demon Proof a location (fixed or not) ala Supernatural tv series. Draw some ward circles/sigils on the inside (low cost, don't even need to be mystically awakened) and voila.

With the Clans I believe it's a matter of honour. Inner sphere... honestly, I'd assume that your ships would be focused on A) destroying weapon sats that might target your ground troops and B) keeping enemy ships too busy to start an orbital bombardment of their own. Other than that, no suggestions.

I would imagine that battalions would have astral overwatch on standby for large operations. I mean honstly how big of an area can one mage on an open battlefield observe and cover?

How common are battlefield spirits? If militaries have the resources to deploy mages/shamen to summon spirits to attack vehicles, then don't they also have the resources to set spirits to defend their vehicles? A group of tanks has a spirit or two tasked to protect them from enemy spirits, for example?

I know on one rather nasty run one of my characters was involved in, the pair of attack helicopters we ended up fleeing away from had a spirit protecting them from magical and spirit based attacks. It was very effective at stopping many magical attacks.

i'd certainly assume there's astral overwatch for big troop movements, sure. but that doesn't do the troops a lot of good going house to house and then getting wasted by an unstoppable spiritual IED. at least in the case of RPGs and IEDs there are some things you can do about survivability. but i'd never want to leave base at that point. also, this is yet another area where i could see any half-competent military force either detaining or killing every awakened person they could find in the population as a matter of course.

i don't know, there's this huge disconnect between how easy it is to make a death-mage in character creation versus the setting's insistence that these people are as rare as almost 1 in 100,000 according to some of the freelancers, so the idea of spirits wasting convoys is maybe overblown. or maybe not. there's just so many holes and rule problems becoming apparent at this point i'm just sort of losing my interest in the whole setting.

Well, The Inner Sphere really did not HAVE Military War Ships, they had Transports, and that was really it (They had lost the technology to build warships, and never really regained it). Until the clans came anyways.

Couldn't tanks just be created with a srayed on biological layer, like a specially created film with bacteria in it. It would require maintenance, but it would certainly stop spirits.

Easy alternative, houserule that spirits require a reasonable amount of room to manifest, say a 2x2x2m cube. You'd never get one of those inside most vehicles and it wouldn't stop most spirit use inside buildings, in alleys, etc.

In 1e and 2e sure, maybe 3e my memory is fuzzy. But somewhere along the line they decided you needed astrally active bacteria not just a thick enough coat of living matter. Earlier editions hand waved bacteria as something with insignificant astral mass so you could pass through most of it, but things like ivy would need you to actually push them aside. Later on they decided that did not make sense and required astral ivy etc. It does make more sense but I preferred earlier editions layman defense options.

i think the space limitation works fine.

for transports, you could even have stuff that is simply designed to take up space as needed when there aren't troops filling that location. i mean, a fairly simple inflatable framework could make an area unsuitable to materialize in and take up next to no space when you need to put a soldier there (and might even be part of any safety harness the soldier is expected to wear, if any).

Just put a ward inside each vehicle. This takes hours, but it lasts weeks.... or until the spirit rams into it. It seems to me that in the long run, the ward makers outlast the spirit summoners.

It always burns down to the fact, that summoning spirits is fast.
Summoning a spirit is just to easy. No matter how you twist it, you can't really counter it unless you use the same trick (spirits).

SR4 had a special, astrally blocking ivy. Just wait until the splatbook for it comes out.

Also, what makes you think that spirits are easier to summon now than they were before?



Can you ward mobile targets in SR5? In SR4, the ward was destroyed the instant you moved.



Doesn't the same apply to Deckers too? I believe that the optimal solution to countering a Decker should be another Decker/TM, and the optimal solution to countering magical threats should be a magical character. Anything else is just players feeling entitled.

This was fixed (SR4 FAQ?). Movement in relation to the ward object destroys the ward. If the ward object is inside the vehicle it stays in the same relative position to the ward, and the ward stays up.

Only if you can keep it perfectly fixed in relation to the vehicle. Which means rough terrain, a lucky hit or a driving glitch could all potentially negate the ward, which makes it a somewhat unreliable strategy.

Could still be viable for mostly stationary vehicles such as a mobile command center, though.

it seems to be back to the old way in 5th ed, saying the anchor can't move relative to the Gaiasphere. so, yet another retarded move. i am losing my ability to be surprised at them, except by the sheer number of them.

as far as stability, i can think of two solutions:

1) anchor the ward to something that's welded to the floor; should be stable enough?

2) anchor it to something gyrostabilized. object resistance, sure, but you could maybe stick the chunk of virginal hardwood in the gyrostabilization device and then enchant it?. i like the idea that military vehicles now have to have gyrostabilized ward anchors. that's actually man meets magic and machine, not magic fucks man and machine with impunity.

alright, that fix goes in the game for sure. otherwise, anything that isn't airtight to the pilot and passengers is a death trap.

also: biofiber? never made it from 3rd to 4th as far as i can tell, but it really should be in. like fab, but a little easier to imagine being in the walls of places.

Can you imagine the first few attempts by the military trying to tackle the whole spirit invading a tank issue back in the early days?

And here sir we have the Go Green Concept where we have strapped special turf to the outside of the tank, as this awakened form of grass and its root system provide an effective barrier to astral movement by these so called spirits.

And the flowers?

Well sir, we thought it would spruce things up a bit.

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

you win one (1) internets for this post. warning: there may be a bit of pornography in there.

I figure tanks would be almost wholesale replaced with drones by SR times. Any chance the military gets to effectively reduce manning they take - for better or for worse (politicians deserve more of the blame than the brass). Other than troop transports I can't imagine why too many military vehicles would be manned. Anything carrying nuclear weapons would probably require a living person, naval ships would probably maintain small crews - primarily for maintenance but it costs a lot of money to train and deploy bodies if you can have one rigger running a whole mess of tanks you're in a good spot, and if you got to remove the crew compartment when designing that tank you're in an even better spot.

I still see the human factor still being used a lot.

While Drones are used for lots of missions, they are still moderately sized carrying up to a medium payload. Even if some are lost or hijacked by rival rigger/deckers there are limits to what it can do.

When you scale up to tank size, the brass gets nervous about remote control on something with that much potential for mayhem and will want a crew inside, even if its just a single rigger in his cocoon running the show.

As for a lone rigger running a fleet of tanks, again the potential for the controlling rigger being cut off from the units while ECM and ECCM duke it out or flat out hijacked makes it less appealing.

If you look at the armament that Predator drones (reaper and avengers more specifically) carry you might reconsider how ready the military is to automate. I realize that modern militaries don't have to worry so much about enemy rigger/deckers hijacking their drones but a dozen hellfire missiles isn't really what I would consider a "medium" payload. Honestly I'm not sure if there is a place in hypothetical 2070ish warzones for traditional tanks. Weapon technology seems to be outpacing armor so if hypothetical man portable anti-tank weaponry is cheap enough then tanks probably won't see too much play.

That is normal, whenever damage exceeds armor capability tanks do tend to fall out of favour, at least until armour comes up with something better. But that does not invalidate the tank entirely from the roster of tools to use.

As to modern military not worrying about being hacked, they do take it fairly seriously since it could be possible despite the arguments about encryption levels and such. Which is also why the self destruct is kept on another channel just for that reason. But sooner or later it could well happen and then you will see people screaming about why wasn't there more control over this and so on like so much sheep.

On a fun side note, a satirist wrote up a scenario where the drone itself goes rogue here and is fairly amusing.

Shadowrun 4th Edition, page 256 and 340, or Shadowrun 20th Anniversary Edition, page 264 and 348.

The engagement time windows of modern drones is rather short, and the situational awareness of the pilots is extraordinarily poor (even though pilots claim they are more aware - it's been termed "Predator vision"). There's been some strikes at motorcades but those are usually carefully planned, with boots on the ground guiding the munitions. It remains to be seen how useful armed drones will be in more dynamic, and electronically hostile, environments.

In Shadowrun? Not sure, I haven't looked too closely at it. The old MIJI rules tended to be too complex for their own goods so a lot of people avoided trying to ECM or hack drones, and just shot them.

Yeah, at 1000 nuyen/square meter for force 10 biofiber, (assuming that the militaries of the world can ignore availability) it seems the easiest way to defend against spirits and other spells. More likely, you'll see a layer of force 5 or 6 biofiber, cheaper and more easily available. Have they put it in core for SR5, or is it another thing that needs to wait for a splat book?

We use biofiber a lot. Ramming a spirit with a biofibered vehicle or hitting them with a rod made of biofiber or shooting them with biofiber bullets should lead to an opposed roll between the biofiber and the spirit like it crossed a ward (though most people here seem to prefer it to allow the attack to overcome ItNW if they let it be used at all). With so few options for effectively dealing with spirits, especially the Force 12 spirits that terrorists are apparently constantly throwing at anyone they don't like, it seems idiotic that biofiber has not be weaponized. Instead it is just used as an alternative to warding.

biofiber warheads are frigging brilliant. you also win an internet. it's literally carpet bombing something! also there's the part where you need to occasionally take a breather and water your missiles. that's very good.

as far as i know, biofiber and FAB haven't made the leap to 5th. thanks to Nath for the reference for 4th ed, though; i hadn't seen it in street magic at last glance, so i guess that's why i was thinking it wasn't in 4th.

A lot of military vehicles have an Availability rating in the 25-35 range, so I would hazard they are also able to acquire additional equipment with similar rating (top biofiber being rating 10 with Availability 30).

I assume a rigger cocoon is not perfectly form fitting, so maybe abstract it to a 2x2m box to get an upper size? So 24 sq m per crewman at most?

as of arsenal, it sounds pretty tight, if not form fitting:
"It consistsof a seat completely surrounded by fire-resistant ballistic cloth,
reinforced by metal plates to prevent someone from merely
sticking a sword through it, and including cushions and har-
nesses to keep the rigger from rattling around" (p, 142)

so, great for pilots, pretty good for tankers and other drivers, but might not fly for APCs and is probably not preferable for limo services, though with a sufficiently important VIP and VR i suppose it wouldn't make much difference.

What crew ?

Seriously, given the level of automation and sensor tech in SR each tank is piloted by one rigger in cocoon and some autopilot programs.

The benefit is enormous, less personnal, smaller tanks, faster tanks, suppression of the need for access and escape and all living space make the vehicule a lot more compact and resilient to damage. Given the price of a MBT, rigging one pilot is nothing.

For APC... I dont see the trouble. The risk is the same than having Spirits materializing in Barracks or any other closed space. The trick is not to get localised or to keep some spirits on Watch.

It also seems that Spirits are like Mage, a very rare sight on the battlefield contrarily to the player group.

About Aztlan vs Amazania remember that a lot of Aztlan troups are Adepts, with focus hand to hand weapons. i am not sure they would be tottaly disarmed versus a spirit.

Anyway Spirit summoning is too easy and common in the game compared to fluff. I think more binding should be required to really get a Spirit to manifest and help. You could summon for service and spell, but physical manifestation and battle should require binding.

-- Shadowrun still has an action economy. You would have at least two-three crew in a large combat vehicle for redundancy and efficiency.

I maintain my "What tank?" argument. Yes I am being overly dismissive. It does seem that most of the open warfare I've read about so far has been regular vs irregular forces though. I haven't gotten all the way through the fluff yet so I maintain the right to completely change my mind.

It seems to be implied that the CAS doesn't use heavy tracked armored vehicles much, their "tank" force are all heavy LAVs. I'm not sure we have enough data points to compare tanks vs their natural enemy yet. Nor has Shadowrun ever presented a very detailed or compelling narrative about Sixth World warfare.

I do like the idea of seeing a lot more LAVs. More of a distributed force approach. Think Chinese navy vs American navy. More LAVs, UAV bombers/interceptors, less carriers and amphibs more destroyers/cruisers/any boat big enough to carry a ASCM/LAM, smaller overall standing armies but more spec warfare oriented.

and those LAVs are retarded, if we're thinking about the things like the stonewall from mil-spec tech. a t-bird like the banshee makes some sense as an armored close air support vehicle, but just the fuel consumption of a flying tank is a bit hard to swallow as practical unless they've got some sort of nuclear air-ram running in those. nothing could stop stonewalls with the stats they had. lofwyr would be pissing his scales if two of them were coming for him. hey, is that a gauss cannon embedded in tank-scale armor flying at mach speed about 20 feet off the ground? shadowrun 4th edition, everybody!

unless you meant LAV like LAV-25, then, yeah, that makes sense. stryker brigade style strategy could still be very useful in the 2070s.

I would think a fight between standing armies would see the mages die pretty quickly, in an orgy of astrally scouted indirect fire.

1) Each side races through the atsral trying to find enemy magical meatsacks. Remember in world, the actual likelihood of a Magic 4+ mage is something like 1/8000 so, its not like there's a ton to look for.

Even if done on the straight, that's 63 magic 4+ types in a 500,000 man army. if you apply to a standard bellcurve instead of A heavy left distribution for Magic scores, merely 1/1200...or only 415 mages in a 500,000 man army. That's before the payscale for private versus public sector kick in.

MATH
(1/100 awakened, 33% mages = 1/300 mages. Societal inefficiencies like not realizing your a mage, never getting training because your SINless and were never found, etc probably bump that to closer to 1/400. Now apply a heavy left distribution..so magic 3 and less would be about 2 standard distributions of the population, or 95%...so 1/8000 people would be 4+.)


2) Magical Meatsack identifed by astral recon, expend 15k in precision guided munitions from a mortar, tube, drone, plane. Yay. Willing to spend a few million in shells to kill every sorry mother****** mage who comes anywhere close enough to the front lines to be doing the summoning thing? Almost certainly.

3) Those that are left summon spirits. Spirits start dying by the truckload in the face of...well...combat. Spirits decide they aren't playing this game anymore and mages start having exploding head syndrome and conspicously misinterpreted services.

The Stonewall is from Shadowrun, First Edition.

Neither side sends their mages out on the astral. Both sides hide their mages behind heavy wards and far behind friendly lines. I think that mages and other Awakened would be quite weak in combat zones unless they are very skilled and/or talented - Magic 6+ or with Initiation, due to the very fact that combat zones are areas with not insignificant Background Counts.

Are they? I know what the descriptions say, yet at the same time apparently most of the Chicago crap zone is BGC 2, the barrens are 1-2 as well. I'd say the quick fluff of a BGC does not match the reality of how it is used in the game supplements. Kind of like I doubt heavy rain will actually give a noise 2 in any adventuress.

So..can you send a spirit out through your own ward?

The idea of the astral recon is to find the enemy, then relay those coordinates to the artillery/drones/bombers/whatnot so that the mages can be squelched with firepower. If you find a warded spot that spirits keep getting summoned from..might as well give it a battery 6.

The bodies are probably back at a heavily defended base. They're no easier to take out than other command staff, harder in many ways. What are they using to trace the astral form back to the body? Why couldn't the enemy just eliminate your entire command staff if it was a matter of just flying in some drones? The body of the mage can even be on the other side of the planet. At "slow" running speed the mage can travel at 6,000 km/h (13,400 mph) so he doesn't have to be even in the same theatre of battle.

Spirits can't 'misinterpret' services like an evil genie (at least, I don't see any allowance for that beyond GM fiat in Grimoire and Street Magic and such). Currently they also cannot spend Edge to resist summoning by "bad" mages like they can in SR4.

Nowhere is it written that they adhere to your intent rather than your word - and for magical creatures, the idea that Exact Words can't be an issue just seems wrong. As for Edge, the rule against Edge use applies to summoned or bound spirits. A spirit in the process of being summoned is not yet either, and may still use its Edge.

That's certainly an interesting interpretation of the rules and text in Street Magic and elsewhere. "When a spirit owes services and a service is requested, however, the spirit must obey."

And no, you still haven't explained yourself around the text box in SR5 that says the spirits don't spend Edge. You know, the one that says "Summoned and bound spirits don’t have their own Edge pools (or if they do, they don’t use them)." But feel free to play with that house rule and your creation of a pre-summoning step that doesn't exist in SR5 at present.

So other then GM fiat and house rules, I'm not seeing much problem with throwing spirits into the grinder.

Actually I have. Summoned and bound spirits don't use Edge, but the spirit doesn't qualify as EITHER until the summoner has succeeded on the Summoning test.

As for spirits and "exact words" issues, consider this question: if there should be a conflict between the letter of a request, and the intent of it, which do you think a spirit is bound by?

There's precisely ONE place in all of Shadowrun canon (that I'm aware of) that mentions anything about spirits even trying to misinterpret commands. And that's in SR4A when it mentions it under glitches.

Shadowrun has always been clear that spirits are pretty smart and can figure out what you mean, or your character is sufficiently detailed in explaining it. You don't need to write a paper contract out with the GM to explain exactly what you mean by "guard this door."

As for spirits, if they wanted spirits to resist summoning with Edge they would have said it. If you want make an argument by absence, the books also don't say that demon rats don't molest your characters in their sleep, so I guess that's what happens.