Really? Since When?

Yeah, that conclusion is quite a stretch.

Back in the '50s, everyone loved imitating the Tribals. It was in style back then!

*Sigh* I wish I had been able to get in on those days...

Actually, that was sarcastic. A reference to the plot allegedly planned for the Horizon adventures.


Oh, back in E1, they wanted to. But then the USA told them about their trident fleet and that thay'd gladly blow up the other half then, and people talked and signed the Treaty of Denver which threatens harshest military actions on anyone seizing anything anywhere in North America, a treaty that since 2061 has been resoundingly ignored.

Gamemasters and some authors made it that way because they did not want to handle more than a dozen of corporations, well enough for even a years-long campaign, and keep using the same corporations again and again. These were not established as the Big Eight Corporate Court members, but much earlier, with the ten major corporations in SR very first sourcebook Seattle Sourcebook. Since most adventures were set in Seattle, area, those corporations were also the most commonly used.

NAGNA, NAN, London Sourcebook, Tir na nOg, Tir Tairngire and Deutschland in der Schatten nonetheless introduce a large numbers of other corporations that rarely came into practical use in other books and adventures (Nippon United ? Texas Instruments ? Yokogawa-Honeywell ?). In the meantime, all Sader-Krupp got in North America is a seat on Manhattan, Inc. board and a mention that it is not present in Tir Tairngire.

The Bigh Eight list only appeared in Corporate Shadowfiles, and six of them were in the Seattle top ten. The same book also says "only" 25 true megacorporations exists, which is more than 8. Portfolio of a Dragon: Dunkelzahn's Secrets and Blood in the boardroom introduced Cross and Wuxing, and used a lot of second tier players (Yakashima, Monobe, Transys Neuronet and Pacific Prosperity Group members)

Then Corporate Download clearly set the difference between AA extraterritorial megacorporations and AAA Corporate Court members, and had the infamous line "Right now, the Big Ten control more resources than all the other corporations in the world put together." Though there can be a world between "influence over 50.1% of the world resources" and "ownership of 99.9% of the world resources".

Yet, it was the beginning of that short list domination over SR background, mainly in Year of the Comet, Shadows of North America and Target: Wastelands. And it was over in Shadows of Europe.

Part of the problem is that it is not that easy to characterize a corporation past "cop corp", "big guns corp", "blood mages corp" (even when Corporate Download was saying this era was over), "cyberdeck corp", "Yakuza corp" and "dragon corp". Most people could not actually what would be the difference between Shiawase and Yamatetsu before the metahuman policy shift in Blood in the Boardroom.


I would add, regarding this topic, that in its previous incarnation, Esprit Industries had Saeder-Krupp as a shareholders, a joint-venture with Mitsuhama Computer Technologies and a chairman of the board with an Aztechnology connection. That's "having tie to somewhere", and yet it is different from a 99.9% ownership.

Bah, it's not like you can tell the difference between the RL corps that easily, not without working for them, at least.
I feel that having As and AAs available for the plot surely gives a lot of creative freedom, just by giving more space to manoeuvre. And when a runner, say, is looking for someone interested in some agenda or willing to buy certain paydata, you don't need to answer "sure, there's this faction in that megacorp", but rather "there is this faction in this megacorp, that AA corp which is all bent on just that, and that bunch of A players who want a piece of action, too - choose wisely".

And yeah, apropos to Espirit - CGL is still CGL to the max, pah.

So, finally and as peromised, my feedback on the feedback



No I'm not (yet). But every post should begin like that.



I'll admit that I deliberatly ignored the sun cell upgrade, as I thought it rather stupid to cover a flying drone with a mirror-like cell coating: that thing would blink and shine from miles away. So either they have developed a sun cell that doesn't look like our RL current day sun cell anymore (stranger things have happened) or the sun cells "fold out" when recharging (the two little hatches on the "back" of the head were put there for just this eventuality).

The landing gear should rise eyebrows – and I love it. Granted: It's not detailed in the description or statted out, but the thought of seeing this drone "crawl" towards a target or hide underneath a cliff or land in a tree ... NOW we're talking sci-fi



You are right in that the primary thrusters extend backwards so that they are a the same position as the stabilizers when rotated correctly – however, if you observe closely you'll find that the distance between the thrusters is larger than the distance of the stabilizers towards each other, so that the stabilizers will pass between the rotating primary thrusters (maybe I should have rotated the whole vehicle a little more to provide a more "frontal" view).



I wondered about that, but since I have NO idea how smart armor actually looks or is supposed to look, I went the Battlelords (www.ssdc.com) way where you have self-repairing smart body armor that basically looks no different than "old tech" armor.

What I do not like about the Centurtion is that I botched the perspective a little (tail/drone plattform).



Now that you mention it



I doubt that the landing gear is hidden in the wings here. The design is based on a RL drone, so I imagine that there has to be a landing gear SOMEwhere



That would depend on the distribution of mass inside the hull. As it is, the tail is most liklely way heavier than the "head" of the submarine.



I'll not defend the turret form, as the half dome form was in the briefing Personally, I would have loved something more alien/Sci-fi looking, i.e. a low turret with two independent (and freely moving) "arms" carrying miniguns and rockets.

Plus, I would have loved to introduce a power armor/AP suit/mech to SR. Given the Amazonian war theatre, the lack of roads and a possibly tight air defense network (i.e.: lone soldiers with AA rocket launchers camping in the jungle – erh, and feathered serpents) a "mech" with a huge chainsaw and a flamethrower would be the natural pick for "making ways" through the jungle – possibly accompagnied by a set of two mech troopers with mission weaponry (hands, remember?), i.e. a "sniper" firing depleted uranium shells at armor in a village while camping in the dense woods of a mountainside some klicks away.



Yay for creative freedom!

AAS

Well, there's nothing about being visibly reflective in the Arsenal description of the upgrade; besides, minding that the sun cells are supposed to absorb as much of the rays falling as possible, that makes sense.
But yeah, I see.

See the bricks of explosives on the armor? That's what smart armor looks like.

Well, the head most often houses the torpedoes. But yeah, there's no arguing about the density influence - it just looks weird to the first glance.

Military armor suits are always power armor, with servos helping to haul their bulk, and Strength upgrades available.
And looking at the indigenous peoples of Amazon basin, it looks like being small pays off more in the jungle

Actually thats ablative armor...

Nope think he's pretty close on that one

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ablative_armor

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactive_armor

Reactive sounds a lot like the smart armour in shadowrun

Smart armor cannot be concealed, but is superior to normal
armor in that it has armor-piercing defeating properties. Small
explosives spaced throughout the exterior of the vehicle prematurely
detonate/deflect incoming fire, reducing the AP value of
attacks by the smart armor’s rating.

Some male Street Samurai have the same problem with prematurely detonation as well.

Well, that sort of is their thing.

That's what retrofitted Smart Armor might look like.

Smart Armor that's integral to the design might not be so obvious.



-k

Well, the reactive armor I've seen so far on the photos of RL vehicles looks more or less like this.
Frankly, I can't imagine how those explosives can not be obvious (when it's even said they can't be concealed).

Also apropos to MilSpecTech and Smart Armor. It's said in Arsenal's Errata that whatever armor you install as a mod replaces the default vehicle's value. In my book, that means that if you install Smart Armor, you only have Smart Armor, and not whatever else armoring your vehicle initially had. However, in MilSpecTech the Stonewall is said to have both 36 Armor and a standard mod Smart Armor (Rating 15).

Well, I honestly have yet to see in real life where a tank has been designed from the ground up to have reactive armor.

They pretty much all have it added on later.

I'm just speaking from a design point of view, that base-integrated components of any sort tend be a bit more, well, integral looking.

I mean, at it's base it's just sheets of explosive sandwiched between two layers of metal. There's no good mechanical reason it couldn't be concealed if you designed it to be so, despite what the rules state.


-k

You know, I'm getting pictures in my head of Schurzen-equipped Panzer-IVs. I don't know why, I just am.

Far as I know, most modern-day designs are developed with reactive armor in mind, be it, for example, T-80 (pictured above), T-90, some of the new BTR designs, or what have you.
You see, the idea behind reactive armor is not "explosive sandwiched between two layers of metal", but rather "explosive strapped over the armor to explode and throw incoming projectiles away, while not punching through said armor and generally doing as little damage to the vehicle itself as possible". You can't put it under armor (because under-armor explosions are doing you no good) - or, arguably, under any non-segmented cover (because even if said cover is thin, it's intervening with the reactive armor reacting in just the place the projectile hit, dispensing the energy and limiting efficiency; and after the first hit, anyway, the reactive armor present becomes really apparent, with the cover torn).
So, in the end, you're still reduced to a thin layer of explosives spread over the bulk of vehicle's armor in bricks - how can it not be obvious?

That's where my idea of Schurzen came in. You have the main armor, reactive armor, then Schurzen, or a thin metal plate just over that. If designed from stage-one to be like that, you wouldn't know about the reactive armor until it's gone off and blown a few holes in the skirt.

I assume that to mean that if a vehicle has 10 armor, you can't spend the equivalent of 1 armor to bring it up to 11, you have to buy 11 armor. Later if you want to upgrade that 11 armor to 16, you can't buy 5 more armor, you have to strip off the 11 and add 16.

means just that. Normal armor + smart armor.
Smart armor exists only to reduce AP of attacks, it does not soak damage.

Disregarding all of that, none of these vehicles is having Smart Armor installed.
They come with smart armor.

Yeah, that's how I understand that bit, too.

Still, I can't see anything on you being able to combine two types of armor. On the contrary, the errata, as mentioned above, clearly states that one Armor mod replaces the other (and replaces the default armor the vehicle has).
Can't see anything on Smart Armor not acting like vanilla armor in regards to soaking damage, either.

Uh, don't you think that the stats provided in the official pdfs should follow the rules?
Like, I don't know, when Arsenal states that you can't combine certain mod, they shouldn't come as default mods together, unless a very good reason for that is given?
Same thing applies here, I'm afraid.

Emphasis mine.

Hmmm. Yeah, ok, that makes sense.
But then why the hell does War! list Armor(Smart) among the standard upgrades for vehicles, without the rating?

Because the book has a number of errors in it this being one of them

Ding!

Yeah, but the rules proofreaders should have caught that.

Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight. Never mind.

We still don't know the vehicle sizes for some of the featured items.

This drone, is it micro, mini, small, medium, or large? We don't know! It doesn't say!




-k

Eyeball it. It's not like they're all that hard to figure out. The write ups tend to give you a pretty good idea don't they? I mean noone's mistaking a bug sized one for large or a large one for a micro?

Can be seen from the drones body attribute as per the following table:
BODY Drone size
0 Micro
1 Mini
2 Small
3 Medium
4 Large

Yeah, I know, but seriously it's a significant rules mechanic that determines a number of other stats and options for a given vehicle. It should have been part of the damn book.

Also, actually mentioning what sort of propulsion system the vehicles have, which on some of them isn't immediately obvious even from the artwork.



-k

Yes it should have been mentioned in every entry, but as you can see it from the body attribute, it's not such a big problem for me.