im looking at cybereye mods, and what gives the best vision mods. with the 1.2 per eye limit, its hard to fit everything in, even with alphaware.

ive got thermo, low light, flare compensation, unltrasound (with the high frequency hearing), electric magnification, microscopic vision. thats .88 essence alpha ware there.
image link can be one eye. as one eye alpha ware, its only .12 essence.

the rangefinder (.08 essence) is an eye mod as well. but can it be one eye? if it can, then i can fit in eyelights (.16) as well. if not, then i have to wait a long time for a betaware upgrade. one-eye compatibility depends on how it functions, which has not been mentioned in cannon. also, rangefinder being an eye-mod is from SR2, with no real details on it in SR3.

what else is good as one eye without penalties? can the microscopoc be one-eye without a problem? everything else needs 2 eyes to work properly.

also, has anyone gotten/made non-cyber eyelight headbands? it seems like a usefull item to have, you just need to turn your head instead of moving your eyes to illuminate something.

a one-eye eyelight may still be usefull, but would only give -3 with low light, eliminating the partial light penalty, and dropping minimal light to +1. not really usefull in full darkness, unless you need to read something.

whats weird, is buying a one-eye mod twice (getting it for both eyes effectively), would let the eyelights fit with everything else in the eyes above. It would be a lot more expensive (both money and essence), but it looks like a workable loophole to the cybereye rules as written. technicaly you could fit 2 essence of standard gear into the eyes with single-eye alphaware, which is comparable to betaware for how much can fit in the eyes. (the essence cost would be 2.06 though)

2.06? Where did you get that number... as a pair of cyber eyes can hold up to 1.2 essence worth of stuff, and the first .5 of that is free... thats still a MAX of .9 essence for cyber eyes...

2.06 because of the single cybereye rules on p. 44 of M&M. its .16 for the alphaware cyber replacement, and then .95 per eye as a single eye only reduces essence by .25

*blink blink* wow... thats screwed up... but then the question is, when it boils down to it, is it REALLY cost effective? Especally as seeing the rance finder (A isnt compatible with other vision magnifications and B) can be gotten as a smartlink mod instead. Or as a little thing you carry around.

In SR3, the rangefinder smartlink accessory is not an eye modification. Check the references to it in M&M. Note that it is not listed in the senseware section, nor does its listing in the smartlink subsystem section mention that it is an eye mod, nor is it listed as an eye modification in the cyberware table in the back of the book. Apparently it was described as an eye mod in a previous edition, but this is no longer the case.

Actually IIRC those are two different pieces of cyberware, as the eye mod can be used without a smartlink, and vice versa.

Nope. If there exists a 3rd edition reference to an eye-mod rangefinder, I have never seen it and would love a page reference.

By the power of NSRCG ViewDAT!

Name: Range Finder
Book.Page: mm.32
Availability: 8/48 hours
EssCost: 0.10
Cost: 2000
Mods:
LegalCode: 5P-N
Capacity:
Category: E
Street Index: 1.00
Notes: w/SM2 Shows range to target. -1 TN to targets at Long range and -2 TN at Extreme range. Not compatible with other vision magnifications.

There is no comment about that cyberware being an eye modification in the book. It's probably a recording error (or old edition leftover, whatever) that didn't attract enough attention to get fixed yet. Considering how much else seems to be going on with that program, one old data entry error can easily be missed.

No, it's not listed as an eye mod there, sorry for the confusion. I'm just posting the page for those trying to keep up.

I'd reccommend keeping low-light and thermal and dropping ultrasound and just get them in goggles. Having ultrasound implanted makes them vulnerable/useless against the Invisibility spell. Goggles on the other hand have you covered against both Invisibility and Improved Invisibility.

Its the whole paid for by essnece thing.

But the method of sensing is not actually sight. It's technically hearing.

But it's still being translated into a visual image directly to your brain, and thus is vulnerable to the mind affecting/altering nature of the Invisibility spell.

While with the goggles you are looking at a visual image as projected on a view screen, (not your brain) and is thus not affected by either spell.

Well, if you feel that invisibility affects light, then cybernetic ultrasound should work fine. If you believe invisibility affects the mind of the perceiver, and since cybernetic ultrasound puts an image into the visual center of the brain, it would be fooled.

This goes back (AGAIN) to the problem that improved invisibility, the physical version, should've been a manipulation spell. Either that or the definition of illusion spells needs to be revisited in the books.

I'll cast my vote that invisibility or improved invisibility would not work against goggles. The goggles detect sound, which is not affected by either spell, and would produce an image of a person, which is a thing wholely separate from the person (who is invisible) that could be seen.

As for the question of cyber-ultrasound, well, I already said my bit regarding that above.

ultrasound gives a +4 mod to taget something by ultrasound alone, such as an invisible mage. you need silence or sound-based illusion to affect ultrasound vision. ultrasound divides all your vision mods by half, round up. the question is, would the spatial recognizer+high frequency hearing apply a -3 to that? i suspect that amplified hearing would increase the effective range of ultrasound (not sure what it would be. how far before sound takes a combat turn to get there and back at high frequencies?)

with thermo, lowlight+eyelights, ultrasound, and a flare compensator, vision mods drop to +1 for full darkness and heavy rain/fog, +2 for thermal smoke, and +4 for invisible foes. thats it.

the advatage of goggles is that they need an improved version of silence to get past the ultrasound. the downside, is most goggles only give one type of vision.

of course, ultrasound is vunerable to white noise, but if you have a good select sound filter then it needs to be a really high rating white noise to affect you.

heres what i have for my cybere-eyes now:
Alpha Cybereyes (Thermographic, ultrasound, image link[one eye], flare comp, E Mag 3, Micro, low light, eye light system)[.82 essence]

Guys, guys. Woah. First off, youre making the puppies cry with the abbreviation. UV is Ultraviolet, a type of electromagnetic radiation. We're talking about Ultrasound here, which is completely different. As for the ultrasound goggles/eyes:

page 18 MM: "Indirect illusion spells that affect sight do not affect this system."

...thats pretty cut and dry. If you want some justification, I provided one back during the bit debate about how invisibility works. I'll go ahead and provide that here... I hope it helps, conceptually.

Man and Machine (revised Whiz Kids/FanPro edition) pg 18
"Cybernetic ultrasound sight is affected by mana-based indirect illusion spells, because it hs been purchased with essence."

It's effected by mana based illusion spells, but not necessarily visual ones. In other words, Silence and related sound dampening spells would work against Cyber Eyes.

JaronK

Or silence for that matter.

Catsnightmare: that is not a new addition to M&M, it has existed since the first printing of the book. You seem to have left out an important parenthetical clarification, however: "...spells (in addition to Physical spells), because..." While, admittedly, I do not possess the new printing, I do have access to the errata, which makes no mention of any changes to the wording of that section. As others have mentioned, and as is made clear with the inclusion of the words in parentheses, it is referring to the fact that spells such as mask, phantasm, and the theoretical mana-based silence spell (which, for some strange reason, does not actually exist save as a possibility with the spell design rules - the existing silence spell is physical) can still affect cybernetic ultrasound vision systems. It is not intended to override the clarification regarding sight-affecting illusions.

In case anyone has the impression that I'm attempting to be misleading here, I'll expand the quote I provided.

Why would the cybernetic ultrasound system work against invisibility and not phantasm or mask? (I'm not saying thats not what the book says, only that the distinction eludes me.)

Not commenting on Phantasm, but Mask isn't trying to hide the subject, or make someone invisible, just change their appearance. How would Ultrasound Vision make this any less efeective?

Phantasm is a mutli-sense illusion (all five senses are affected), and I though Mask was as well, though now I doubt myself on that. Look in MitS under the spell design example for Phantasm since SR3 is misprinted as single sense, IIRC.

Because those spells affect other physical characteristics besides vision. Mask clearly describes this - using mask to make someone appear to be a troll will grant them the (illusory) physical characteristics of a troll, including sound signiature.

Phantasm is a little trickier, because SR3 describes it as being a visual illusion. MITS, however, clarifies that both Phantasm and Trid Phantasm are multi-sense illusions - again, this includes sound signiature.

They really should errata the SR3 description of Phantasm/Trid Phantasm to mesh with the MITS description of those spells.

Edit: to help Kanada Ten get past his doubts: