A mind probe cannot directly count as evidence unless the judge (or entire jury if there is one) is the one with the spell. Even if that condition were true, UCAS courts don't accept it.
However, a role of police is to gather evidence, and a mindprobe can point to the process used to dispose of more explicit evidence. It can't be used directly to crush the alibi, but it can ID the exact weapon used, location of disposal, and sequence of events all of which should be supported by more concrete evidence.

Wouldn't it just come under the whole expert witness thing?

I'm getting my SOTA 2064 today! I'm getting my SOTA 2064 today! I'm getting my SOTA 2064 today! I'm getting my SOTA 2064 today!

Woo! Woo!

*pant* *pant* Should have taken that Valium...

thx guys. Now that makes sense

Now consider how Alter Memory could be used as the ultimate tool to frame someone...

That makes me wonder... What constitution does the UCAS use? Mind probes would definitely be inadmissible as evidence if the 5th ammendment was still in place.

Mindprobe, spirit testimony, and all other forms of self incrimination remain inadmissable in the UCAS. However, they have a new Constitution in place.

7 posts down.

The Fifth Amendment still exists. The Fifth Amendment only applies to federal criminal trials, however.

So, since the RL 14th doesn't exist in the UCAS Constitution, you just have to hope on a wing and a prayer that the states and provinces and metroplexes (i.e., Seattle and FDC) have such a provision in theirs. The existing states will have them (they all do now), so you just have to worry about Eastern Canuckistan and the two metroplexes.

It would be strange for a subset of a former state to discard the laws of that state. More likely, they would just take all unique properties of both state and local law, cut out the duplicates in favor of higher pay, and minimize the change for the citizens.

i dunno. despite the fact that its population was, what, halved? the UCAS still seems hell-bent on creating as large and arcane a bureaucracy as possible, subdividing the hell out of everything. the CAS seems to have reigned in its bureaucracy.

i've said it before, and i'll say it again: magic and other fantastic elements are no excuse for unrealism in the rest of the game. unrealistic elements in mundane areas make it that much harder to suspend one's disbelief when it comes to the fantastic.

that said, i don't think most people (myself included) know enough about spy satellite technology for the SOTA:64 rules to ruin much suspension.

Note my inclusion of cyberware and bioware. I could also throw in otaku.

In the end, the book does not describe the exact technology used to generate that resolution. For all we know, there has been some breakthrough in optics that allows much better satellite imaging than is currently possible.

The point, which I thought was abundantly clear, is that the term "science fantasy" could be used to describe the entire game - so using the term condescendingly to apply to a specific device within the game is somewhat silly.

i'll agree with that.

Unfortunately it's actually impossible to do anything like this. The problem isn't in the optics, it's the combination of optics with a principle called the Rayleigh criterion. Once you start getting to *very* long distances and *very* small wavelengths, you start to hit an upper limit on how large your mirror (apeture) can be before you lose resolution. They're doing surprising things lately with apetures that are much smaller than the wavelength of light being measured, but honestly I wouldn't hold out hope of being able to beat these limits any time soon, which if I recall correctly we are fast approaching already.

[edit]Of course I could be dead wrong here, and someone with a physics degree might come in and laugh at me, but from what I remember from my college courses you can't resolve anything smaller than *maybe* two human beings standing next to each other unless you're using some sort of low-flying aircraft instead of a satelite, especially if you're using infrared. And viewing things at an angle is right out, because you have to view at a much further distance to get anything other than the straight vertical.

While my physics arent as good as I would like them to be, it seems that the linked article is referring to cosmic light sources - things like stars - and the distances associated therewith. I find myself skeptical that the distance beween a LEO satellite and the ground is comparable to the very long distance that exists between the earth and any (non-sun) star, and thus am not convinced that this principle really applies.

In the meantime, I will go ahead and attempt to figure out the necessary calculations. Wish me luck.

Edit: Dammit, im drawing a blank on my basic trigonometry. When you know the length of two sides and the angle they encompass, youre supposed to be able to calculate the remaining angles and side, right? Anyone remember off the top of their head what the formulae to do so are?

it, uh... damn, i should know this.

Oh God Damn, I'm an idiot. If you actually read that page, you'd see that I'm talking about the exact same thing Starfurie is, and that the distance x between two resolvable points is inversely proportional to the size of your lens (or mirror, as the case may be). The problem here isn't so much theory as it is implementation: even at the most generous interpretation you'd need an 8- to 32-meter lens to have even a hope of capturing a license plate at the very short orbit distance that the space shuttles use. This size increases by a factor of seven if you want geosynchronous orbit; a real spy satellite would probably be somewhere in-between.

This of course assumes a perfectly concave mirror reflector; even a slight abberation would have a huge effect on resolution. Giant, perfectly parabolic mirrors are pretty hard to come by, although they may be possible through the application of intense computer and nanotech monitoring by the 2060s.

Oh, and the capturing at an angle thing still stands. Angles also have the added problem of increasing atmospheric distortions, which are not good for other reasons.

Yeah, finding the other sides and angles of a triangle, given one of them you do by applying what's called the Law of Sines and the Law of Cosines. Very heady stuff there. And, at the moment, irrelevant; mostly because in this case the angles are so small you can use the small angle approximation for sine which in this case is just x/D.

(Edit): Oh, unless you're talking about right triangles or isosceles triangles, in which case the equations become much simpler.

Oh, unless you're talking about right triangles or isosceles triangles, in which case the equations become much simpler.

this is an isocoles, duh. make it two right triangles, pythagorean theorem, ta-da.

mfb: thanks, but i noticed on that very same page that they provide all the means to do the calculation without any trig at all. so i'm just a fool, but at least i figured it out eventually.

Basically, Eyeless is about right: you would need an 11-meter mirror, or an equivalent interferometric array of mirrors, at the closer end of LEO (~160 km) in order to attain 1cm resolution on the ground for visible light wavelengths. I don't find it hard to believe that in 60 years one or both of these will be feasible.

And I stand by my handwaving about the angles. perhaps they have diffraction/distortion compensation algorithms....

I ran into an obscure reference to another of FASA's games in SOTA 2064. The model for the UGB(SR) is the same for the Maskirovka(Battletech); the purse bomb in a restaurant together with the name of the colonel extracted and the name of the poster who posted it leads me to believe it was a reference to Warrior: Riposte by Micheal A Stackpole.

The Davion intelligence/counter intelligence was called the Rabid Foxes, the Colonel extracted was Pavel Ridzik and the method of assasination was a purse in a restuarant.

Also, whose to say that there isn't an "invisible" (read: infrared or some other naked to meta-human perception) version of your license plate or VIN on the roof of your vehicle or some other piece that always points up. Also, I recall seeing spy-sat photos of someone reading a book, the text is clearly legible, and this was in the mid-eighties in a school text book.

Rigger 3 is to say, otherwise the transponder libraries and morphing license plates become useless.

The issue with reading license plates is angle, not resolution.

~J

it was just a though, given to bypass the angle issue

I know. I was addressing your second statement about the text of a book being legible.

~J

incidentally, the "duh" in my last post was directed at myself, not Eyeless, Jason, or anyone else.

Whee! I finally got my copy (Fuck the USPS), and so I guess now I can actually review it without talking out of my ass.

I haven't read it all yet, but I've read through each part and I am really enjoying what I like. Regarding what I have said before about SR products, I never had anything inherently against SOTA because they were by their very nature what I was most interested in seeing.

Synner: The Adept chapter kicks as much ass as I've read it does.

I think Critias might re-think the Euromagic chapter once he reads it. It's pretty interesting and I like how the chapter identifies major academic institutions which teach certain arts. Nice touch, and useful outside of Europe (At least, I think MIT&M and U-Dub are outside of Europe).

I read half of the spy chapter, and it pretty much was everything I expected espionage in the 2060s to be but never wrote it down. I appreciate the good mix of technical details, operations and entities. It's a good mix, with just enough to pique my interest but short enough so that I don't have to redo any of my ex-CIA spook's background (Which is only a couple of pages long and needs filling). Interesting things to note: I never realized Spook was a woman, which is cool. And Langley is in FDC, not North Virginia, but... meh. Shame Aztechnology's spy satellite superiority went down between Aztlan and SOTA64 (I guess they had other things to spend money on), and I guess the NRC does exist (It seemed to be implicitly abolished in Target:Wastelands). It would have been a nice way of going full circle if the UCAS Army's SAD could have gotten a mention, too.

Adepts: Like I said, the new rules kick so much ass it should be illegal. The discussion about the Ways looks cool (better than Awakenings from what I gather so far). Major f-ing props.

F- The Police: Good summary. I liked it. It was a nice summary of Lone Star (which I regret selling only less than Bug City), although like what happened above it might have been nice to explain the why there is FRT and SWAT. The prison stuff is cool and long overdue.

Euromagic: Cool, especially since I have a Hermetic who just kind of picked up his knowledge of Hermetic magic from random learning opportunities and sources given that he was running through the NAN, and it's just as likely for him to know bits and pieces of this stuff as "American" Hermeticism. Like I said, adding the major schools was a nice touch. I like the Pythagoreans, especially.

Culture Shock: Dude. Dude, dude. Fucking "A." This is the kind of stuff I enjoy because it can be an aside that makes a character (as has been the case for many of my PCs). I like the Orxploitation (And, frankly, I do realize I was generally talking out of my ass about it earlier, but not completely) section. Clothes is a nice touch since I spent a month and a half on and off this summer trying to think of what one of my PCs would wear, and so it's not something to be overlooked. Didn't read the gambling part, but... meh. The Top Ten Lists, though, were the icing on this deliciously decadent book.

You cannot even begin to imagine how much I like this book. I'm just as giddy as a pyromaniac in a Zippo factory.

OK, now I'm certain Szeto was really putting in BTech references in Games of State. The Indrahar surveillance drone and its designation O5P should be a reference to the Draconis Combine which is incidentally also Japanese based culture.

So after 15 years of canon history, including three "And So it Came to Pass..." chapters in three rulebooks, and a (falsely assumed) definitive guide to nuclear wastelands in *ahem* Target: Wastelands... NOW we learn that India and Pakistan lobbed nukes at each other 40 years prior to SOTA64.

Oooookaaay...

In other words, it looks like Asia's going to be interesting. And the art's cool.

Don't forget too, North Korea has nukes and they must have tested them somewhere.

heh. remember, nkorea's nuke didn't go off.

It's funny, it seems like whenever a thread comes to mention the CIA, whatever the context is, you always end talking about states limit around Washington (F)DC... The Neo-Anarchist Guide to North America says that the Federal Capital District Act of 2024, added Montgomery, Prince Georges, Howard, Arlington, Alexandria and Fairfax counties to the District of Columbia, creating the Federal District of Columbia (so yes, Langley would be in Washington FDC, not in North Virginia). In 2033, the Treaty of Richmond created the state of North Virginia from the part of virginia lying north of the Rappahannock River.

While we're talking about the UCAS/CAS split, SOTA:64 mentions Norfolk as an example of significant military site. It would be in the CAS, and according to SoNA, the CAS Navy primary base are Pensacola and Mobile... I previously guessed it would have made sense for the UCAS and CAS to agree to leave the base as a DMZ. Maybe Ares reactivated it later.

I can plead guilty for every mistake, I was around when SOTA:64 was written.

Cheers. This gives me a great idea for an espionage-based run set in the barrens of what used-to-be Montgomery county....

Thanks Nath.

I couldn't help but read the legal stuff with some measure of giddiness and trepidation. Overall, it's great, although I find it interesting that there are actually more 4th amendment liberties available if the police are corpers given the overall tone. Furthermore, p.75 reinforces what I said earlier about how the lack of the RL 14th amendment can be hazardous to a SINners (let alone SINless person's) health. My only concern is a comment by Legal Beagle that mentions juries being possibly thousands of miles away--which brings up both factual and legal questions (1. Why, 2. how are they legally considered a person's "peers?"). But it's shadowtalk, so I think I'll just ignore that. OTOH, simsense opens up a whole new can of worms when it comes to testimony and the right to face one's accuser (or not, in the most likely of cases--being, child molestation cases where this would be immensely useful).

Anyway.... God, I love this book.

[edit]
OBTW, I'm not sure but it's kind of bugging me. On page 166 in the football section, it says seven other opponents were still in Harborview, but given the context I'm wondering, Was that supposed to say teammates instead?
[/edit]

Re: Football

Could be my mistake. I was talking about Mauler's opponents.

I'm very happy you liked the book, especially Culture Shock. Side question: how would you approach/use Orxploitation in your campaign?

Depends on the characters, of course, and the sort of jobs they like.

If you got really lucky, you'd have a stereotypical Ork or Troll gangbanger or street mage type, who'd be into the whole Orxploitation thing anyways (with appropriate knowledge skills and tridset accessories) -- that'd make it easy and fun to draw the characters into it, as some contact of his/hers called up one day, all excited, and offered them "a bodyguard gig you won't beleive!" Hell, depending on the morality and general nice-guy nature of your various characters, they might not even initially get dragged into it as Shadowrunners. Just have 'em at some club or concert one night, when their favorite band gets attacked.

Likewise, if you've got a character that's already known for bodyguard work, that's an easy plug, but it might make it feel less cool and different/special/whatever.

If not? Well... it'll mesh a little less smoothly, but you can always just pull it as "just another job," and hope the feeling and cool-factor picks up all on it's own.

Ah. That makes sense then. Thanks.

As for Orxploitation, I'm still thinking about it, though I'm not at a loss to think of RL events to rip off.