if i seem obsessed with magical terrorism, i guess i just find the idea one of those amusing underdeveloped things in the setting. it's interesting that there's always a big deal made about getting cyberware through security but little said about mages and other awakened threats. however, there's no question a mage of any potence is a serious security difficulty for air travel.

1) there's no particular reason that blowing up a flight midair need be suicidal for the mage. between air spirits, oxygenate, levitate, and other spells, there's a good chance a mage could fatally cripple an airplane by blowing a hole in the fuselage and then float gently to the ground to watch the plane explode in the arms of his air spirit buddy.

2) even an alchemist is a scary proposition for air travel. is he just taking an unusually long shit, or is he whittling a bomb from a bar of soap?

now, ideally, if you're a mage working for renraku and flying renraku air, this isn't a problem. but for public air transport, what do they do? assensing? must be fun to be the TSA astral perception guy. magical profiling? "grab pointy-ears from line b for enhanced interrogation; that necklace makes me nervous." do mages have to wear those magecuff bondage hoods for the whole flight? air marshal adepts and sams ready to shoot and punch astral nasties?

the same problems apply to a lesser extent on mag-lev trains and other forms of mass transport. i can't imagine a big hole in the hull of a train going 300 kph a few inches off the ground is a good thing. dismount might be more challenging.

At the same time, dragons could swoop in from overhead at any moment and tear any plane, train, or other form of mass transport to shreds.

I think at some point it becomes prohibitively expensive to try to maintain full security against magical threats, especially when only 1% of the global population is awakened and any drekhead with a SAM or an assault cannon can down a low flying plane.

~Umi

Also, magical terrorism is somewhat covert... magical threats i.e. insect and toxic shamans. Also, the recent storyline features acts of terrorism by dragons. ...and so on. Magic could sort of destroy the world and so could nukes, disease and so on... I guess Shadowrun is over.

Damn those pesky Shadowrunners always somehow running into these possibly extinction-level threats...

How do we deal with magical terrorist? Offer them more money, or using a sniper riffle. The riffle is cheaper.

I would have gotten away with it to if it weren't for those meddling ki.. I mean runners.

Why be on the plane at all? Unless they have drastically drastically changed the rules concerning ritual magic, find some poor shlub who is taking the appropriate flight, get a lock of hair and drop a big AE spell with nasty fire effects. The presurized cabin and enclosed space will do nice wonders for the force of the spell. It's basically like setting off a grenade in the thing. All the damage none of the fuss, and you can be miles away having a nice soykaf while the Coast Guard is seeing if they can find pieces of the plane. Who cares about what security is doing at the airport. The airport was not the target. The "Bomb" walked right past without a glance. Also since there is no connection other than the flight itself between the actual target and the poor shlub who just got burned to a crisp most law enforcement types will be looking in the wrong direction for a connection to the poor shlub.

-LZ

When trying to think outside the box, first remove the box from the equation so you can start blank.

I think the major problem with blowing up planes with Magic is that it's gonna end up producing a lot of bad mojo.

When two hundred people die in a fiery wreck, that produces tangible effects on the manasphere and leaves behind a lot of residual nastiness. Magical forensics will pick up on that stuff, and they will trace it back to you. You'd better be impossible to find when they do.

~Umi

Kind of hard to even find "Ground Zero" it if the Event happens at 35,000 Feet. And if the Caster has ways to keep the Signature to a minimum, by the time people find out what happened, the Signature is long gone.

that is hilariously good, yeah. the only problem i can see is timing; easily takes hours to actually cast the ritual, so if something goes wrong you might end up blowing up the guy in the parking lot. also, i'm not sure as of recent editions how hard it is for people to notice the ritual effect, or if other magical personnel can notice it coalescing too.

Blowing up the guy in the parking lot, while not quite as effective as blowing the plane out of the sky, would still do fairly well as a terrorist attack.

Or you can bypass the guy, pay some 'runners to get you a piece of the plane itself and use that as a ritual link to the plane. Nail it with a ritualized Wreck spell, and for all the world it'll look like shoddy maintenance made the damn thing fall apart in the sky.

It wouldn't be that hard to find. You'd have a huge a streak of airspace tainted to a Negative Background count, much akin to places like the Shatter Graves and whatnot. Corpsec mages could easily find it via Astral Projection and Spirit Services, astralling "flying" to the plane's last known location in minutes.

I imagine that'd actually be standard procedure when an aircraft mysteriously explodes in midair instead of crashing normally via mechanical failure. You'd send someone astrally to the plane's last known location to verify if the cause of the accident was magical or mundane. If the investigating mage or spirits see a big ol' ritual magic signature in the vicinity, hey presto!

~Umi

That signature lasts for MAYBE a few hours. MAYBE! If it was my Mystic Adept, A Force 6 Spell would not even leave a Signature. *shrug*
As for finding that site in Astral Space, I think you vastly overestimate the accuracy of your search endeavors. Even a Spirit with the Search Power would be on the order of Hours, at best. If you assume that you will start from the Site of the explosion, how do you presume to get there in less than hours? Astral Projection will not help you, as you cannot get GPS coordinates for that. *shrug*

And why would you immediately assume magical issues when Planes mysteriously explode. I mean really, you have heard of terrorism, right? You know, Mad Bomber Syndrome is going to be VASTLY more common than a magical source.

A Force 6 Spell would also not even dent a commercial aircraft.

As for finding that site in Astral Space, you don't have to find it! You already know where the plane went down! Radio communications? GPS? Flight plans? All that good stuff? When a jetliner drops off the radar, you know exactly where. Consequently, the astral seeker doesn't have to search - they just "fly" to the last known position, then look around for signatures there.

As for assuming magical issues when a plane mysteriously explodes for no reason, you really only have two options: bombs, or magic. You send an astral searcher as a "first responder" to determine which it was. Even if it was a mundane attack, you still learn valuable information.

~Umi

So, who exactly has invented Astral GPS units, and why aren't they making a killing by selling, say, Astral Bullets that target spirits on the astral plane?

I swear, it's like you're purposefully being obtuse. You use the mundane GPS to determine where you're going before you go there.

~Umi

Uh-huh. Right.

And having determined that the plane's last transmission came from 43 degrees, 9 hours,8 minutes, 79 seconds north by 116 degrees, five hours, 58 minutes, 81 seconds west @ 10,000 feet up, how the flying pickadilly are you going to find that location in the astral, where you have no reference for your current GPS coordinates?!

The same way an astrally projecting magician successfully flies from New York to Los Angeles, using basic navigation skills? People are able to find their way across the astral world all the time with a little effort, and spirits who actually live in the astral do it with almost no effort at all.

But for the sake of argument, let's take this to the extreme. Let's say an MCT plane goes down over the middle of the Pacific Ocean. "Wut do?"

In twenty minutes, one of MCT's magical forensics teams (who are always on call) is ready to go. They're given their briefing and step into their Safe Room, where their meat bodies will be kept safe. A direct line route has been calculated ahead of time, allowing the projecting mages to follow a single straight line at 6,000 km/hr. All they have to do is start out facing the proper direction.

The Safe Room is adjacent to the Orientation Room. In this second room, the computer calculated trajectory is projected onto the single, cylindrical wall. A technician - or even a robot if you want perfect accuracy - enters the room and paints a line on the wall, on top of the computer projection, using Astral Pigments. The exact center of the circular floor is also painted. The projecting mages pass through the wall from the Safe Room into the Orientation Room. There, they "stand" directly above the astrally glowing center of the room, and they turn to directly face the astrally glowing line on the wall. They are now properly oriented.

With their "high speed" astral movement rate already known in advance, the amount of time the mages need to travel has already been calculated. Flying in a "straight line", the team will need to cover 7,142 miles, taking them 114 minutes and 56 seconds. They can be remotely alerted to the exact passage of time through various different means, and when the appropriate time has elapsed, they are at their target position, at which point they sweep the area for any astral signatures, background count, and other features of the manascape.

There are other ways of making this work, and surely several far more elegant ones than the quick example I just whipped up. Suffice it to say, it's not impossible, even if it would require training, pre-planning, or even Spirit assistance.

~Umi

Umi, it's one thing to find a city, another thing entirely to find an arbitrary point in astral space when you're going by coordinates and searching in three dimensions.

best solution might be to have a physical team throw up a cloud of FAB in the general region; how well this would work in the jetstream is an open question.

regarding the negative background count problem, wouldn't that be more a function of the impact site than the detonation area? also, if it's the spatial coordinates that are tainted with the astral signature and not the objects themselves, then finding that exact point where the spell went off could be extremely difficult.

i also disagree that a force 6 spell couldn't screw up a plane from the inside. a force 6 fireball could do up to 12P fire damage with an AP of -6. between that and secondary effects it could be a very bad deal and probably enough to blow through the barrier rating of most airplane materials. presuming a structure of 8-10 and armor of 10-16, it's certainly not implausible. plus fire in pressurized environment bad times for all.

It wouldn't work terribly well at all, and it's all dependant on getting both the physical team and the magical team (in astral space) to the blast site before the astral traces are scrubbed.

Except I provided a pretty flawless way of doing exactly that. Travel in a straight line from Point A at X Speed for Y Time and arrive at Point B. Or did you only read the first two sentences of my post before responding?

~Umi

Actually, I think it would be more like 'Here's the flight path of the plane. Follow it until you see the huge scar in the astral up in the middle of an otherwise pretty clear sky - that will be where hundreds of people died screaming all at the same time. You'll see it from miles away. Once you're there, check to see if there's a residual magical signature, and if there is, memorise it.'

The point of the explosion should stick out like the proverbial. Just sayin'.

OK, how do you know that you are travelling at X speed in the astral? Or for time Y? Sure, you can mentally count the seconds, sure, but it won't be anywhere accurate pass 60 seconds. And I don't know how to estimate speed physically (Ok, sure, there's slow, fast and faster but accurate enough for navigation?) much less how someone would do so astrally? OK, some guy can have Navigation (Astral) 6, but really how many mages are going to have that skill set?

Locating the point of the explosion would be like searching for the proverbial. Locating the huge astral scar would be no problem though.

You provided a pretty flawless way to get completely lost. If someone tried this and didn't have a lot of Navigation (Astral), he'd be lucky to make it back to his own body before he faded away, let alone find the explosion site, which is frankly going to be rather small compared to all of astral space.

Exactly how perfectly, flawlessly, razor straight can a magician follow that line, huh? Because if he's seven thousand kilometers away and he's so much as one frigging degree off, he will wind up one hundred and twenty two kilometers from where he wants to be.

And that's straight-up euclidian, assuming perfectly straight travel along that almost-perfect heading. You try heading in one direction for a full hour, mapping a perfectly straight line that follows the curvature of the earth over a significant portion of its length. Then you have to factor in the fact that our buddy here isn't looking for an arbitrary point on the map and arriving anywhere over it will accomplish his goal, he's searching for an an arbitrary point in space, so not only does he have to get his heading exactly right, he also has to arrive at the right elevation, as airliners tend to fly between 9 and 12 Km off the ground.. In short, he's boned - without Navigation (Astral), the magician is going to be hopelessly lost, and even then such a trip is going to be dicy at best.

Your "clever trick" only works in white room conditions with everything declared working exactly as it is said to work. It will not work practically.

Also, good luck sensing the aura of the spell amidst the Background count of the disaster and any masking that the magicians who did the deed threw up in your face.

As I see it, this is the crucial point, really. AFAIK, there is no rule to determine how quickly your Background Count fades away. Does BC for something like this take days to fade? Hours? Minutes? Weeks?

Does the BC fade faster than the spell signature? I think that you are looking for a bombmaker's signature in the mountain of debris that the bomb creates and you can't cart all that debris away and carefully sort it out and you've got until the spell signature fades to find it.

The counterarguments here bring up an interesting point. If it's extremely difficult to find an arbitrary point in space in the astral, how do spirits arrive at specific locations after directed by their controllers? How do mages running astral reconnaissance find their targets? How do mages who have to come help their chummers find them when all they know is their location from a phone call? One, mind you, that they can no longer interact with now that they've left their meat behind. Using your counter argument, spirit backup doesn't work. Astral backup and reconnaissance doesn't work. Not unless you have hours and hours of time to search and find the location you're needing to get at. So unless the entity has been to this astral location before, the chances of them arriving successfully in anything less than hours drops to nil.

Or is that not what you intended to imply?

I'd like to quote the SR4 rules for Astral Movement. Particularly important sections, both for and against my preferred interpretation, are bolded and underlined.


So let's dissect this issue in sequence.

From a fluff standpoint, all you need to do is think about where you want to go and you go there. If you want to fly from the bar you're in back to your apartment to check if you turned off the gas on your astral stove or whatever, you do so effortlessly. You don't have to manually navigate along the street route you normally take in the physical world, all you have to do is imagine yourself being home and you automatically travel to that spot.

However, if you're moving quickly you have no time to perceive your environment. Normally, this isn't an issue. If you're just flying back home, you already know where you want to be, so you aren't trying to find anything, and being able to discern detail isn't important. But let's say you're going somewhere you don't know the exact location of - now you have to find that spot. You can't simply imagine yourself in an unknown location, thus you have to seek it out manually - at least in part. If you had to fly from Seattle to a random spot in London, you could imagine yourself over the River Thames in front of Big Ben and that'd be enough to get you to that general vicinity. From that point you could then manually search out the specific spot within London you're looking for at a slower speed.

From a mechanics standpoint, traveling at 6,000 km/hour merely imparts a moderate negative modifer to various tests you make while traveling. If you want to engage in Astral Combat with a spirit that you're chasing at super speeds, you lose at least two dice. Likewise, if you want to make a Navigation test to find your way to an unknown location at Mach 4.9, all you suffer is the same negative modifer of at least two dice.

~Umi

A spirit can travel to any point it has been to previously, instantaneously.

Except that you KNOW where your Apartment is. You do not KNOW a GPS Coordinate. A coordinate that may not even be accurate in a Crash/Destruction scenario. If they were, we would never be missing any vehicle (boat or plane) that suddenly goes off grid. We would know EXACTLY where to look. Searches would be instantaneous, rather than taking days and sometimes weeks.

As for what pena;lty you would suffer at Mach 4.9... I can guarantee you I would assess more than a -2... Probbaly closer to -20 or so (Your quote says -2 OR MORE)...

Really? Do you truly, intrinsically, immutably KNOW where your home is? If I plop you down at some random destination 100 miles away that you haven't been to before, could you find your way back without consulting a map or at the very least getting your bearings via a landmark or such?

I mean, sure, we all "know" where we live, but that's a highly relative value. You don't really know exactly where you live, but rather you know where you live in relation to other places. And even then, much of our frame of reference is surprising fragile. You can lose your way home due to things like heavy fog, or due to a landmark that you unconsciously navigate by changing or disappearing. You must have turned down that road a thousand times, but ever since they cut down that old sycamore tree and built that shopping plaza, half the time you miss your turn because you don't recognize it.

But none of that matters. It isn't so much about "knowing" the location you want to fly to astrally, but rather that the location is one you can identify or pick out. The only time you have trouble, according to RAW, is when you have to find a location - like finding a set of lost car keys. You aren't trying to "know" the place the keys are in - at least not in the sense of being familiar with the location on a personal or fundamental level. You're merely trying to ascertain their location at all. If you do not know the location of the keys, you cannot fly to them astrally without slowing down to search. But if someone told you they were at the top of the Eiffel Tower, you could fly to the top of the Eiffel Tower and find them there.

The problem isn't that you do or don't "know" the spot you're going to, but rather if you can identify it. If you want to talk to Joe, and he's at home, you can fly to his house and talk to him. But if you want to talk to Dave, and he's checked into an unknown room at the Hotel California, you could fly to the hotel no problem, but then you'd have to take the time to find Dave where ever he actually is in the hotel. If you're trying to search through the hotel at 6,000 km/h, you're gonna have a hard time making anything out. But you could easily fly through the walls of all the hotel's rooms at a rate of 33 m/sec and spot him no problem.

As for crash sites and coordinates, we're talking about a plane exploding in midair, not crashing in a normal fashion due to a mechanical failure. Chances are the last reported position was accurate to the point when the plane, ya know, exploded. And when you get there, you'll find a big ol' astral disturbance from the trauma of a couple hundred people dying horrible deaths, readily visible on the astral.

And even if you somehow don't have exact coordinates, you can search the immediate area around the last known location a lot faster astrally than search and rescue teams can search for survivors or debris. Remember, you're not looking for wreckage or corpses in the ocean or on a mountainside, you're looking for bright glowing magical auras, signatures, and negatively aspected mana streams. If you're searching the atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean, there's not gonna be much else out there that would even register astrally, so it'll be pretty easy to spot.

As for your suggestion of a -20 dice pool penalty, considering the RAW baseline of -2 dice, your 900% larger penalty is patently absurd. Absolutely nothing incurs modifiers that bad anywhere else in the rules. The worst that comes immediately to mind is -6 for Blind Fire. I don't see how you can possibly justify such nonsense.

~Umi

as a point to the specific discussion of planes exploding, very few planes actually come apart in mid-air; it's more like there's an explosion, and then a terrifying decompression and uncontrolled dive towards the surface, followed by the really large explosion of everything cooking off. this may vary depending on the exact scenario.

in terms of generally finding things in the astral, i have come to the interpretation that a spirit would need to use search to find anything that wasn't specifically pointed out to them by the summoner (either in physical or astral space), meaning that the summoner would have had to have assensed the place or person beforehand. as far as magicians finding things in the astral, i suppose that depends somewhat on landmarks. i assume the space needle still kind of looks like the space needle in astral space, so in our running example, if the plane blew up a click above the needle you might be able to orient yourself. over ohio or the open ocean? you might be screwed. similarly, a security mage showing up astrally on site is probably not a problem, but finding your shadowrunner buddy without having been to the bar he's in before might actually require you to travel at the 100 meters per second speed and make navigation rolls to find your way through the astral version of the streets. a summoned spirit could probably search him out and give you the exact coordinates if you summoned one and had assensed him previously. this means it's a good idea to astrally case a place before things go south. if that's possible.

moving vehicles? fuck. unless there are some large physical or astral signs that differentiate one particular americar from another you're in trouble. a tank in the middle of a traffic jam or a parking lot probably stands out quite a bit though.

Very few planes are bombed, though, magically or otherwise.

~Umi

Depending on the type of manabombing, though, it's going to make a difference.

If you use a Blast element spell then yes, it will very likely rip the plane in two. A Fireball, not so much, but it is going to set everything on fire and result in the plane taking a screeching dive sooner or later.

Wreck the plane and you'll intrinsically damage a shitload of its components, so like, a turbine will shred itself and the hydraulic control lines burst and such.

even a bomb or sam/aam impact isn't "instant cloud of debris, everyone dead" in most cases, though. it's very likely the massive death and astral pollution doesn't actually occur till the impact of the fuselage on the ground. which makes it easier to pick the spell signature out from astral space but much harder to find said spell signature in the first place. not always the case, but sometimes.

Really? I do not think so. If you are only going to assess a -2 penalty to notice things at 6000kph, then that is equally absurd. The quote is -2 OR MORE. Personally, if you are trying to do things at a velocity that you cannot possibly even concentrate upon, well, you will not notice ANYTHING of consequence. And the Fluff backs that up (A mere -2 is NOT ENOUGH in those circumstances). You want to look at something, move at your astral walking speed.


As for your rant on KNOWING where sometjhing is. It Supports my argument a LOT better than it does yours. Good Luck Finding those coordinates in Astral Space anytime soon. It is hard enough IRL to pinpoint events like that (even given GPS), let alone in an environment that has no equivalent point of reference.

heh, do NPCS have Edge? Id say the edge pool of a passenger plane simultaneously burning edge to try and save their own lives is a pretty hefty pool that requires dedicated effort to foil.

Yes, but then they burn an edge to survive the exploding plane.... then you have to burn an Edge to survive the fall.. possibly needing to burn a third edge depending on where you landed.

Figure most folk won't have that.

Naah, just wait unitl the actual event has concluded and THEN Burn your point of Edge.

Heck with enough edge you can pull a 'refrigerator to survive atomic blast'

Heh... Crazy...

Yes, but they don't build fridges like that anymore.

They were made to friggin last back then.

Ain't that the Truth...

Summon SPirit
Search
Go to spirit

Yes...
Yes, but likely to take a very long time. If the target zone is 6000km away Again, jetliner over the ocean scenario at 35,000 Feet altitude), that is a +5999 to the Search Target... It is a Place, so another +5. Minimum Target Number fort the Extended Roll is 6009. Should take them a few days Minumum for that one. Lets see... Assume a Force 5 Spirit with Search. That is 10 Base Dice, I do not think that they get the +3 for Actively looking, but we will give it to them anyways, and we will NOT reduce their DP's per roll, because it is the Search Power... We will also assume that they obtain Maximum Hits on the roll, so 13 Hits. That results in 462.23 Time Increments (10 Minutes Each Increment). So, that equates to 4622.31 Minutes; That is 77.039 Hours to find the Event sight (assumming it is even possible to locate the point of the Event, and not the actual crash). So 3.21 Days of Searching (for a Maximized 100% success rate on Hits for the Spirit. For averages of 13 hits, you would need a Force 39 Spirit to pull that off), for a Bound Spirit. Signatures are LONG gone.

And some people are saying that they are BETTER than the Spirit in this regard, which I call BS on.

And lets just remember, that the mage only needs to see the plane... Well...

The problem with magic in general is, that it ain't restrictive enough.
The stuff which has clear rules works totally fine, for example healing.
But as soon as a broader approach is taken...