I sent a note off to the SR website to ask for clairification in Rigger 3, on page 102 where it specifies that the vehicle design rules are not to be used for NPC vehicles or PCs unless they have access at the very least to a vehicle factory. I asked if the factory and facility were the same things. Here is the response.

Yes, they are the same thing. Sorry for the confusion in the wording. If you
give me a page number where it says "vehicle factory" I'll see about getting
the wording changed in a future printing.

A vehicle facility, as the words are used in the game, has the capability of
working on only a couple vehicles at a time. Large vehicle factories produce
many vehicles at a time.

Thanks for pointing this out.

-- ShadowFaq

I don't see where its been added to the FAQ or errata for Rigger 3 yet though. Just thought I'd pass this along.

The way I read it. Vehicle factories are actual full factories like what the corps use for making a vehicle.

A vehicle facility is a building which has the nessesary requirements to actually make a vehicle from base parts, but not many and not in short order.

The wording there, the way I read it, says: You can't make a custom vehicle unless you have access to a factory. This would be after character creation and if you're wanting to design a one of a kind vehicle from the ground up.

What you can do, is after asking your GM, design a vehicle that a company has for mass production, as the company obviously does have access to a factory, and then buy it through that complete with street index.

What Taratula said.

Vehicle Kit - something you can carry around.
Vehicle shop - something you can pack in a truck.
Vehicle facility - Car-X.
Vehicle factory - A corporate assembly plant complex, with thousands of workers.

Bacicly if you can pack a shop into a van, you can pack a facility into a pair of tractor trailers. Most of it at least.

Indeed, I'm going to have to solidly disagree with ShadowFAQ on this one.

~J

I am squarely in ShadowFAQs corner on this one. A facility is capable of making a vehicle from scratch if necessary, it is just usually prohibitively expensive. Think about the custom choopers on that TV show. They mill and machine all their custom parts in their facility, so why not in SR?

Because those custom choppers don't come with advanced computers, sensor systems, drive-by-wire controls or smart materials.

~J

Yeah, but in the world of 2064 you need to be able to do those things in a facility, or are you saying every time a high tech component gets fried on a run you have to send your highly illegal vehicle to a corp factory to be repaired?

If you can fix it in a facility you can build it from parts in a facility is all I'm saying.

I agreed with R3r on the "facilty" vs. "factory" issue. I think there is a big difference.

PCs aren't going to design frames, build engines from blocks of steel or ceramics, hand-craft transmissions, build their own custom shock absorber systems, etc. Tool existing ones yes, build new ones from raw materials, no.

Instead, they take those existing and desinged components and create something new. If you notice in the custom shows, they take existing frames, purchased engines and pre-existing carburators and install them on-top of existing design.

I'd wager it's very rare (near non-existant) to see a car built from raw materials to a running model, that's where the factory with all the workers comes in.

Same goes for Computers, you don't design your own CPU or RAM, you use existing parts to create something new. Designing and manufacture puts *huge* demands on time and resources.

Grinder, dont use the computer compairson, as you can build a heck of a cyber deck with a shop. You just need a chip burner.

Facilities just slow you down.

That is ALL they do.

You can order all the base components you need from COMPANIES that have FACTORIES to make base items for FACILITIES.

hmm...what a concept!

If you need computer systems, ORDER THEM!

Do you think that FORD makes the RADIO systems in it's vehicles?
NO! That's why it says SONY on them!

Why is this hard to grasp?
Have none of ya guys seen a shop or something?

They can literally build you anything you want!

I knew a guy who had a barn converted into a car shop.
He'd go buy some real basic parts and start welding the crap out of them until the frames were completely custom jobs, then he'd go to work on it, from the body to the engine, right down to the wiring and everything.

You can literally build any car you want in a shop.
Look at BigFoot. It was originally built in a shop, and still is.

Most race cars are built in shops, not factories.

The only thing that a shop (facility) does is SLOW YOU DOWN.

The entire reason that FACTORIES were invented was to SPEED UP SHOPS (FACILITIES).
They weren't invented because the shop couldn't build the item.

Henry Ford didn't make the factory to make a Model T, he built the factory so he could make LOTS OF MODEL T's.

Working with the abstract nature of the SR rules and with the new wording I see a facility as being able to design a vehicle from scratch engine, frame, and all. A factory is just a larger operation and capable of working faster, but both a factory and a facility have the same components, the only real differenceI see it is a factory has an assembly line with drones where a facility doesn't. Just my take on it though. In reference to things like radios, tires, and various other non-key items required to make the vehicle work, I would toss them in under their respective tool categorties be it electronics, computers, chemical or whatever.

Prototype cars are built in facilities. Production cars are built in factories. It may take an electronics facility and some outsourcing, but that's how it happens.

No argument there. A lot (in fact most) of the stuff in a "custom" car is stock, but tweaked and modified as needed. And even the hottest concept cars have Bose or Sony stereos. Most of the "custom" cars in SR are cobbled together from stock components.

Ok...the Rules guys are saying "this is what it was supposed to say."

That pretty much clears it right there.
Any alteration from that, even playing it as a factory as per pre-errata, is simply a house rule.

*shrug* It's what it is.

A facility can build you a vehicle.
A factory can build you vehicles.

Really if you look at outfits like OC choppers they don't really do anything special in their shop besides come up with the designs (which doesn't require the shop). They just subcontract out almost every part of the bike, order it, then put it together with some minor modifications to make everything work. Hell they don't really have anything in their shopt that me and my buddy don't have save for possibly a CNC machine but you could farm that out to another place easily. It's all about coming up with the design and the knowledge/skill to put all the prefabbed parts together.

So this brings us to a new question, using a facility to use the design options, how does a character do it? I mean there are not rules for building your own cars only customizing. And the design rules only give you the rules to calculate availability based on total cost, I don't think a character with a facility should be able to just cook up a new car and figure availability, and says "I can have this is 21 days". Also can a Vehicle Facility build/work on all Vehicles? After tossing this around I came up with the following.

A Vehicle Facility is capable of only building one type of engine and one type of vehicle when it is purchased. (the engine types as listed in Rigger 3, and the type of vehicles are restricted to ground based, air based, or waterbased.) The construction process is split between the Design process and the B/R process much like the programing rules in the Matrix book. The process is then split again between Chassis and Engine, so thats four test to successfully build a vehicle. The design options are then sorted between the chassis and engine for whichever statistic they augment. Restricting the rating of the option by the characters B/R skill rating. The base target numbers for the engine test are as listed under the engine customization option, and the chassis would probably use a similar set of rules. Each design option has a modifier based on the rating of the option and adds to both the design test and the B/R test. The design test time frame is equal to the avaialbility as calculated normally. The B/R test is split between the availability. Successes from the design test reduce the TN for the build test by 1. Successes from the build test can be split between reducing time, and/or reducing cost by 5% per success.

How that for starters?

i think a factory, as in a large complex that mass-produces stuff, is--in game terms--a bunch of facilities stacked on top of one another. R3R probably isn't intentionally referring to factories in this sense; ergo, factories and facilities are, for the purposes of R3R, the same thing.

No, facilities are capable of doing a lot of things in a smaller amount of space without retooling. Factories, otoh, have robots/drones and do one thing very repetitively on a massive scale (typically). One of the guiding factors for the economics of using factories versus mothballing them and laying off potentially hundreds of people is what is the retooling cost, and how may units must be produced and sold before the retooling is no longer prohibitive.

So the biggest difference between a facility and a factory is then the retooling factor. Facilities are capable of doing a lot of things without significant retooling and a factory can do a lot of things to a lot of things, but if the use/design/engineering changes even slightly a significant cost due to retooling is incurred.

I figure it this way ...

Detroit has Factories.
Tucker had a Facility.
My garage has a Shop.
My car has a Kit.

that's one definition of a factory, yes. it's not the only one, though. regardless, it's doubtful that R3R is referring to anything like that; it's safe to assume that when R3R says "factory", it probably means "facility".

Oh, sure, shine the light of reason on a good nitpick.

Spoilsport

For facility think:

Manufacturer prototype development building.

Race car team headquarters.

Really top end mod/restoration shop.

Any of those can build a whole vehicle almost from scratch including things like engine blocks, however when they can they will buy parts, modify, and attach them together because it is way way cheaper than building everything by hand. They are optimized to make unique or very limited numbers of special vehicles.


A factory is going to be the opposite in some ways. A factory can make a particular vehicle, or set of very similar vehicles but cannot make a different vehicle without months and many millions of newyen in setup. It is optimized to make hundereds or thousands of one vehicle before changing much. It is actually less likely than a facility to be able to build anything from scratch, instead relying on parts from other factories many of which are relying on parts from yet other factories.


Of course there really would be a continuous spectrum, a more typical mod shop or a cheaper racing shop would be somewhere between a facility and a shop whatever they could afford, and a small volume vehicle producer like ferarri would work like something between a ford factory and a race car shop.

Maybe Facilities should just be modified to have ratings like medical clinics and such do. You can have rating x 10 mechanics working on a car, and a facility can produce rating vehicles at a time. A factory is a rating 25 facility. Obviously a quick thought on houserules, YMMV.

I thought about adding a rating to the shop and facility too, but decided against it. Since the programming rules are the only thing that are really detailed for building something from nothing as far as B/R is concerned I thought it would be best to mirror something that was already published as canon.