NORAD, not SAC.

Omaha was, IIRC, mentioned in the old forums. Someone from there had some choice comments, namely about how it is (apparently) a hub for fiber or some kind of telco lines.

DAT wuz me.

Omaha, as of 1980, was a telecommunications hub... there is more fiber-optic line and more telephone lines going into and out of the city than any other city in the Western Hemisphere. Originally, it was for SAC at Offut, but now it's for the telecommunications industries that sprang up to take advantage of all the lines going into the city. Kinda neat how that happened...

I consider the line in Target: Smuggler's Havens to be wild and apocryphal. Omaha is a major trade hub, with rail, highway, river and air traffic coming through it. If you look at the border between the NAN and the UCAS, you'll note that it lies on the timezone line between Central and Mountain timezones... a line which bisects Nebraska. This makes Omaha possibly the biggest overland trade hub close to Denver that there is. Even Kansas City is further away.

True, Omaha does have STRATCOM and Offut... an aging military base whose strategic importance would have passed by the time the Sovereign American Indian Movement reached critical levels. Still, Offut is a major air transit hub, and may very well have been reactivated to serve as a military base with accompanying Army and Marine bases reactivated or constructed. I know that the National Guard base in Lincoln, Nebraska was once an Army facility, and there's another in Florence, Nebraska which also was an army facility (back in the 1800's, but...).

They're discussing creating a major air nexus in Ashland, Nebraska, a project I fully believe would have been pursued by the corporations. Ashland lies halfway between Omaha and Lincoln, and would have created a large airport capable of handling international travel in the center of the nation. By 2064, this airport would easily be able to handle HST and Semiballistic traffic, and the stable ground makes the location optimum for launching Suborbitals. So again, Omaha looks to be a major trade hub.

I can't see smugglers leaving Omaha alone. Yeah, we have a military base. Just means your T-bird riggers avoid the place... but your truckers, your pilots, and the couriers would have a field day here. Omaha being the closest transit hub to Denver, we'd also probably have embassies from the signatory member nations of the NAN here as well. Political intrigue abounds!

On the corporate side, Omaha is the home of Warren Buffet, and I highly doubt that the second richest man in North America lost his fortune in the crash of '29. (He may not have survived that long, but Berkshire Hathaway almost certainly did.) It is also the headquarters for ConAgra, a corporation which, until a few years ago, was the first true Mega-Corporation of the world. (No extraterritoriality as of yet, though.)

It's also the home for First Data Resources, the company that handles 99% of the credit card processing in the world. And no, they would not have lost their information in the Crash. There are such things as backups. They use offsite backups, backups on nonvolatile media and stored inside Faraday cages. Even a nuke wouldn't have slowed FDR down. In 2064, they're probably the basis for the world economy, since credsticks have replaced both money and the credit card.

I could continue in this vein for quite some time. Suffice to say that I firmly believe that Omaha has had a major disservice done to it by the writers of Shadowrun.

We have many of the amenities any modern city has. We also have the same problems. We're not as populated as Kansas City, but we're working on it. We have a professional basketball team -- okay, so they're CBA. So? We have a professional hockey team. We rank high in cities with pleasant attributes. Omaha is not a death trap for riggers.

I personally run Omaha as a large city that's grown and swallowed Council Bluffs and Lincoln. In my games, Omaha is not a free city like Seattle, but it's only a matter of perception that makes it so. There are several second-tier corporations that dominate the corporate shadows here and as I stated before, with the UCAS being nominally in charge and the embassies for the NAN, there's a lot of political turmoil going on here too. And the smugglers. Yeah, the t-bird jammers avoid Omaha like the plague. But the city's dotted with airstrips, and the telecommunications towers all over the city make the airwaves a drone rigger's playground -- it's almost impossible to conduct electronic warfare operations to stop a drone rigger without stepping on someone else's bandwidth.

Like I said above, the demarcator is the timezone dividing line between Central and Mountain time.

Also remember that Eastern Nebraska is filled with tribes as well, mostly Native Americans who are doing well enough that they didn't buy into the SAIM concept. One of the things about my games is the large number of casinos run by the Omaha tribe. The Omaha were actually barred from the NAN (in my game), because when the SAIM happened, the Omaha sided with the white man. (The theory being that the Omaha were actually making more money from their casinos, so they told the SAIM off... and consequently 'missed out' on the NAN. Not that they missed a thing.)

Also, the Black Hills were under the control of the oil companies, IIRC durning the Resource Rush and likely defended by them durning the conflict - if there was anything left worth defending/fighting for.

Sure do! That's http://www.shadowrunrpg.com/missions

For my home campaign, no. My energy's tied up in Missions right now. One of these days I'll put my campaign up on some webspace, including all my custom 'ware, adept powers, spells, metamagical techniques, vehicles, vehicle rules, house rules, etcetera...

Yes, the state flower is still the orange road cone.

Actually, I never thought about it, but I suppose it would follow the rules in Rigger 3. The AAA and AA areas of town are all southwest, with the corp zone around 120th & Dodge. Those areas would have very little road maintenance problems. Everything else, it depends. Since this is the UCAS and there's no real cause for it, there's no Z-zones in town... but Goblintown is south of Council Bluffs, and that's pretty crappy down there, especially with the swamps.

Whilst I'm here, let me quote some more folks so I'm not doing a triple post like last time:

There isn't, or wasn't. There's no oil in the Black Hills. Some very small gold deposits, none of which are really commercially viable, but the whole thing about oil being in the Black Hills is a myth. Trust me, if there were oil in the hills, Nebraska would be a whole lot richer right now.

And no, Chance, I just want to give people the opportunity to play the official campaign. The Nuke-Con staff love Shadowrun, but don't get to go to the big conventions to play it.