Just wondering... considering that corporations would like to protect their investments, and the relative low price of for example a VCR1, wouldn't every corp-owned vehicle worth more than 200k:nuyen: have a driver with a VCR?

I think it should be cost effective, getting the most out of your vehicle and since the driver is the vehicle while jacked in, the driver will know much better about need for maintenance and such and there will be less accidents like driving into a lamppost etc.

So, how much must a vehicle (or it's cargo) be worth for it to make sense to have a rigger as a driver? In my opinion, almost everything not beeing cheap and easily replacable.

actually, most of the cheap and replaceable stuff would probably be remote-rigged. hook a satellite dish up to the vehicle's drone brain and rig from halfway around the world. i honestly can't imagine a corporation putting an actual rigger into a vehicle except if the cargo is very, very valuable.

Most goods travel by auto nav 3 or pilot 2 with overall control by a SK witch is supervised by a rigger.

When there actually is a driver he will be a rigger if it is an aria where loses are likely or the load is valuable.

The formula the corps use to determine wether to use a riger or not is something like this.

D = chance of loss with a driver
R = chance of loss with a rigger
V = value of cargo & vehicle
C = cost to equip, train and pay a rigger.

If (D-R)*V>C use a rigger.

Its actually a little more complicated than that involving the skill of different riggers and different powers of VCRs but thay do have a formula.

Edward

Edit. Do what mfb said

you should probably change that last R to a C, or something, to avoid confusion.

Pretty much everything valuable will probably be a drone with remote capabilities, but probably with just a rigger at a central location watching ten or so vehicles at a time and no major modifications to the vehicle's Handling.

~J

Makes a lot of sense... scary thought then, that any vehicle you confront could within seconds be directly controlled by a top-notch rigger >;)

A little like the Matrix and the agents that pops up... the runner tries to get away, and every truck, deliveryvehicle and some cabs belonging to the same corp will try to ram them. *chuckle*

Extremely doubtful. A top-notch rigger would need ¥300k or more worth of cyberware, be highly skilled, and be willing to sacrifice most of their nervous system integrity for the job (5 out of 6 points of Essence). If you want the most for your money, you also need a significantly modified vehicle. Top-notch riggers are only going to be there for truly valuable shipments; a VCR-1, maybe 2, is much more likely.

~J

But considering the satlinks, what company can't afford to have one or two top-notch riggers in their headquarters? They can be supervising the horde of VCR1-equipped lower riggers sitting around managing their pool of vehicles remotely. Whenever the lower guys run into more then they can handle, they can a) call in one of their superiors or b) the superiers see that the lowly grunt has troubles and jumps in or just think it'd be fun to vent their anger by demolishing that pesky runnervechicle with their huge roadtrain.

If they are controlled via satlink, why not? It's not like the top-notch guys needs to be in place then.

And on the question of beeing willing to sacrifice most of their essence... hey, it's a megacorp they're working for. you really think they'll take no for an answer when they find a suitable applicant? Not in *my* games...

A disgruntled employee with a VCR-3 and the skills to back it up is orders of magnitude more dangerous to the corp than the runners.

I'm not saying that people wouldn't be willing to sacrifice the Essence, it'd just be extremely costly.

~J

Ofcourse it is. Company wants PC to get VCR3 (it's not like he could afford it by himself...). PC refuses on base of humanity, free will and whatever. Corp implants anyway. PC escapes to the shadows along with his new, expensive implants.

And that's just one way...

One of the drawbacks to remote rigging or drones - flux and signal interference. It would really bite to lose that 100k shipment because of an electrical storm.

(Meta)Humans can also respond to new situations and are (at present) capable of responding to complex stimuli and making decisions that a drone could not.

Even a VCR 1 rig is pretty Essence intensive and represents a massive investment by the corp, mega or not. Which is an unnecessary expense when the motivating force behind every corp is "maximum profit, minimum cost" or a variant thereof.

-Siege

siege lost shipments come in under the category of "cost".
so minimum cost mey include installing VCRs on people if they reduce the rate of lost cargo enough that the saved cost on lost cargo is more than the cost of VCRs

also including it in the salary package is a tax write off and can be used as an excuse to lower p ay for the first two years of contract

Depending on how the GAAP standard applies in 2064, that's possible.

We gloss over a lot of the details that may or may not impact the decision to implant (N)PCs with cyber - surgery, employee issues, complications, recovery, prolonged health risks and so on.

Certainly special cargos are transported with riggers - cargos that are too valuable or too dangerous to entrust to an automated system. But do the costs involved in outfitting your entire transport service with VCRs outweigh the benefits involved?

The GM can certainly tailor the particular variables that would affect such a decision to suit the desired outcome - I am reminded of one GM who swears that drones will be used in all facets of life, from manufacturing to serving food at the local Stuffer Shack.

When asked what the now displaced human laborers will do, his reply was, "something else."

If that's your world vision, go for it - the consequences are what you want them to be.

-Siege

Top notch rigger is a highly skilled position. It pays well. People will be as likely to do that job as wage slave. Essence is just a measure of how much cyber you can have. Corps will pay big money and fringe benefits to keep there high end riggers happy. Being a security position there will be minimal threats. Security and upper middle management arte the worst places to let your employees get disgruntled.

The contract for a high end rigger probably includes we send you to tech collage and give you a VCR 1 ion a 3 year contract, if you work out we give you a 3 month advanced driving corse or building control instruction and a VCR 2 and another 3 years on your contract. If you prove reliable you get another few months training and a VCR 3 and another 3-5 years on your contract. The pay is excellent it includes compony housing and education for your children. For the low low price of half your essence (witch isn’t really good for anything anyway) you get a secure job until retirement age ant the ability to give your family the best of care. It is true there are many that would not take this corse but many will and cooperative employees are far more valuable to a corp. than uncooperative ones especially in security.

Edward

That does beg an interesting question - and one that has been raised before on military threads.

Are there still military pilots (tankers, or vehicle operators) and not riggers?

-Siege

In a single crash test in a fighter jet a VCR 1 reduces the chance of failure by maybe 50% (between reduced target number and control pool). It also allows dodge tests for the vehicle using control pool and can help break a missile target lock. The cost of a VCR 3 is small compared to the value of training a fighter pilot and the aircraft he will fly even before you consider chance of mission success. Flying combat aircraft is probably a mater of “if you want to use our toys sign on for a 3-6 year stint and go under the knife” don’t worry there will be plenty of takers.

Light tanks might still be manually operated but medium and heavy tanks are valuable enough that giving them a rigger is economical. In fact I would have expected every vehicle over 1-2 mill (possibly cheaper) to feature removed manual controls as a security feature.

Edward

Security feature maybe - but do you really want to be in the field and not be able to work a tank because of a system malfunction?

-Siege

I think an aircraft is almost the exception to the rule - the damned things are so technologically advanced, the entire plane is one giant motherboard for all practical purposes.

But a tank, if you lose all the other electronic frills, is a really big bull dozer and fairly simple cannon on the top.

This is a larger scale example of why I cringe every time a smartlink is described as "not having a trigger."

-Siege

A lot of good input for me in this thread, thanks. I haven't been involved in the military pilot/rigger discussion, but I would guess that a VCR offers such a huge advantage for any pilot in combat that by the 2060s, I believe that every military pilot that can get his employer to outfit him and his vehicle will have one. That means, all big countries and megacorps. It's just too big an advantage, and military vehicles are expensive as it is - no need loosing them due to inferior piloting (inferior compared to the opposition).

I guess countries and smaller corporations still would have some qualms based on essence/humanity/the will of the pilot. Training would most likely come first in alla cases. Then, if they see a pilot has potential, they offer a VCR. If he says no... well maybe they'll use him anyway, his training did cost after all.

What does a VCR1 cost? 60k ? Not that much for a corp. The day job flaw hints that a job can net you 5k per month, thats 60k a year. So for a corp, thats not a big expense. I would guess every vehicle worth more than half a million, including cargo, would be piloted by a 'small' rigger. They are the vehicle, they are less likely to bump into things on accident etc. Atleast I assume that...

Now, I'm going to sthink about a transportation-corp, that lays fiberoptic cable along all roads to make sure there's always a link to the vehicle, and then have them remotely controlled from a central somewhere. I like the idea...

How many remote networks are running in Seattle.

Between delivery drones, home and office cleaning drones and security systems the frequency bands used by riggers have a lot of traffic. Now with narrow band transmitters and smart frequency swapping programs it isn’t hard to believe that they can avoid stepping on each other but when performing electronic warfare how do you tell witch frequency your enemy is using, especially seeing as they should all be encrypted.

Rigger 3, page 36, remote control network infiltration, second paragraph.
“A rigger cannot conduct electronic warfare against a remote-control network unless he had intercepted the radio frequencies (and determined their frequency-hopping patterns) used by his target”

How do you do this? I can’t find any rules for it anywhere. The scanner shows how to locate a single frequency but the rules there don’t help with a frequency-hopping pattern and when you have hundreds of encrypted signals to choose between all changing frequency every few minutes your never going to find the one you want.

Edward

I doubt there would be that many signals in a given area, and they probably wouldn't be encrypted for the most part (even if you encrypt a cheap drone at vehicle creation and save money that way, it's still 5k for a very weak encryption module for the deck).

Keep in mind that a lot of drones probably aren't actively receiving signals most of the time.

~J

If the networks active they are sending data. Medium to long range delivery may not be monitored but other things are. SSG lists household drones as being common in, high and luxury lifestyles and I think the fluff mentioned that they are usually encrypted for security. There is a program on the home computer that runs them so the network is always active. Such drones are also common in corporate facilities. Even with flux 1 your going to be listening to the signals for a couple of blocs worth of apartments.

Everybody that can manage the range will be monitoring their networks just so they know when somebody tries to carjack a drone. This includes most short-range deliveries and automated cabs. Then there are all the security systems that run at max flux all the time to reduce the chance of successful MIJI attacks thus having there signals flooding half the city.

But even without the other networks to confuse you what are the mechanics to “find the frequency-hopping pattern”. There are pages on how to infiltrate a network and what you can do once your in it but its all conditional on that line witch there are no mechanics fore.

Edward

Well, if the fighting gets really serious you could always shoot down the satellites and leave the Bangalore Bombers high and dry

The rules for jamming and hijacking drone signals are complex enough that I don't understand them one bit. But shouldn't that risk play into the decision to use a drone/remote operated vehicle vs a human driver? Obviously, it's just one factor out of many.

Siege, can't a vehicle be set up for Rigging and have manual controls? What about an umanned turret for armored vehicles? Seems like it could be quite an advantage for tank designers to be able to hide the whole crew down in the hull where it's easier to use terrain to protect them from fire. . .

Look further up - someone suggested that vehicles would be rigger-controlled only as an additional security option.

Which is fine, but in the middle of a battlefield the last thing you want to happen is to be locked out of a tank because your 'ware is on the fritz and can't interface with the onboard control system.

-Siege

in real life, freq-hop patterns and broadcast encryption are stored in specialized devices whose only purpose is to store that data, and feed it into radios via cable connector. of course, if you're able to get ahold of a radio that's been loaded with current data, you can extract it with certain other, highly illegal, devices.

realistically speaking, there is no fucking way you can determine freq-hop and encryption data from broadcasts. if necessary, i will repeat that statement every minute of every day until either someone believes me, or my fingers fall off.

*sigh* that said, all you need to do in SR to break someone's hopset and encryption is to employ your own decryption. the rules for doing so are on page 289 of SR3.

please understand that these rules put fire into my brain, and talk about them as little as possible.

I wouldn’t be terribly confident going into battle with drone aircraft. It is 2 easy to jam or infiltrate the network true the fighter UAV can pull a sustained 10G maynover but if the enemy takes control of it then it wont do us a lot of good. I would probably sit a rigger with a VCR3 in each aircraft. A robotic pilot of high rating may do the job if it could operate without constant input from control. Give it a mission plan the same as you would a human pilot.

Edward

Crank up the flux rating, run as low as you can but jack it up when you hit jamming. A few slower but still maneuverable, more heavily EDed and armored planes in the middle of a wing of fighters, one of them with the rigger. An advanced drone pilot or robot for when the connection does get lost.

Oh, and the enemy taking control is a nonissue. For a (militarily) paltry 25k a drone you can have an encryption system so tight that the most advanced decryption and most skilled decrypters have about a snowball's chance in hell of breaking it (three successes against TN 9 needed on a maximum of ten dice and then complementary dice, which will almost never get above 10). For 50k, the opposition suddenly needs five 14s on the same number of dice.

The base time to do this is twenty-five and fifty minutes, respectively.

~J

i'm not sure i'd call infiltrating a rigger network "easy". and jamming makes you a big, fat target that's damn-near impossible to miss. standing order for all drones: if jammed, target the jammer.