Not if he/she had initiated some and had Magic at 12...

Besides, if you really need to get away, 8M physical is a small price to pay.

No, for that everything has to be geased to either "strike a pose flexing muscles" or "shout incoherently" with some spells geased to "shout the custom name for the spell."

Wherever there are physical mages with force 12 levitate spells speeding between islands in the Pacific without being torn apart by wind drag, the rest will follow.

You had a magic of WHAT?! My God, I played my mage for three years and never got over grade 6.

Hmm i smell a horse shaman

never believe anything wk says. i know for a fact that his most powerful mage's Magic is not 20 at all. it's much, much higher--20 is just the number of points he's put into the Magic Power adept ability.

In SR3, a Power Focus only adds to your Magic Rating to determine whether Drain is Physical or Stun, and determining the maximum Force of any summoned Spirits. It does not add to Magic to determine spell effects.

Darn, you beat me to the punch. Oh well.
As long as we've established methods for PhysAds to outrun any other land vehicle in existence, we might want to determine exactly what happens when he/she breaks the sound barrier. Due to some interesting properties of aerodynamics, your drag is much lower at supersonic speeds, making the difference in energy required between 1,100 and 1,200 kph equivalent to the amount of energy needed to go from 1,080 to 1,100.
(1,100 kph is approximately the speed of sound, although this is not an accurate figure and varies with the air pressure). In fact, you will likely accellerate a great deal once you've breached the sound barrier without any additional effort.
Of course, this leads the problem of sonic booms. Although the character may be able to withstand a sonic boom (shield+the fact it's originating on you=low force), all the glass in a kilometer around will shatter instantly. Anyone in the close vicinity will be rendered deaf instantly, not to mention be thrown a few yards in the process. In fact, at short range the impact is high enough to do Stun damage equal to 15( four levels above Deadly; you're dead if you don't resist damage), with the power decrasing by 1 for every 5 meters away from it you are. This is enough to reduce troll street-sammys to nearly-dead lumps, and blast a low-toughness decker off the face of the planet. It will also leave a nice big crater.(Although this would, in theory, do even more damage if the 'runner managed to hit someone at such an absurdly high speed, the end result would leave you with something like 342(five categories above Deadly), making it a moot point that you're dead without a Hand of God or orbital cow sent to save your behind.)
And, if the sonic boom is'nt enough of a problem, you have to consider the problems with drag. Although shield will keep out the wind, the air around the shield will be heated up to several hundred degrees celsius, turning the shield (if used) into what appears to be a fireball. Although a PhysAd with a few points in Heat Resistance could deal with this, if the shield were to collapse sheer friction would likely burn the character to charred ashes instantly.
And, of course, consider the problems with colliding with something. Although a barrier or whatever would protect the character from whateve he/she hits, the estimated 20+ G's caused by such a rapic decelleration would kill you anyways. If the character were to roll, say, a bowling ball at this speed, it could easily punch a hole right through a steel barricade and destroy whatever's on the other side. A brick would go right through someone, leaving a neat little rectangular hole. And a gun fired at this speed would not only kill your target, but the guy behind him as well.

Try 300+ Gs, assuming constant deceleration over 1 second. If you actually run smack into something, the deceleration would be closer to 3000+ Gs. Doesn't really matter because, as you described, the character in question would go *splat* immediately.

Umm, no? Ever seen fireballs forming around the leading edges of aircraft moving at supersonic velocities? Didn't think so.

I'll have to go with "no" again. You can see a video of an F-14 breaking the sound barrier here. It seems the distance from the crowd to the F-14 is about, what, 100 meters? 200 meters max? The crowd doesn't budge, and there is obviously no damage to equipment whatsoever. You can see a very strong wind forming, however, especially on the water. Probably not enough to throw a human around unless he's right next to (within a meter or two) of the (large-ish) object breaking the sound barrier.

At 100 meters, a sonic boom would have been reduced to zero damage according to my oversimplification of physics I do'nt have a thourough understanding of. However, the resulting boom is at least as powerful as a big lump as explosives, and you're pretty much dead if you're within 10 meters or so.

On the issue of fireballs, you might want to look at a picture of almost any spacecraft during re-entry. You can see a glowing corona around the thing from a mile away. Although you'd have to be moving faster than mach 1 for air to heat up this much, hydrocarbons and other impurities start glowing at much lower temperatures, if not burning outright.

On the issue of gravities, you might want to consider that protection spells tend to be able to absorb some impact. A bowling ball thrown by a troll PhysAd can easily be carrying a few thousand newtons of force, but a mage protected by a high-power barrier spell will not be budged an inch. That said, even if it did cushion the blow, the g-force would cause all the blood vessels in your brain to burst.

Which has absolutley no relevance to this discussion. Orbital vehicles are going many, many times faster than the speed of sound. Maintaining orbital velocity requires a speed of around Mach 22, if I remember correctly.

I don't know where you're getting this from, but it's pretty much bulldrek. At point of origination, a sonic boom is about 200 decibels. 130-140 decibels is the threshold of painful noise, so if you were right on top of sonic boom (and not run down by the source) you could expect at least temporary deafness. I'm not sure about the shockwave, but since it doesn't blow aircraft skin apart, for cinematic effect, I might have it take someone off their feet, but certainly not turn them into chuncky salsa.

Um, no.

A sonic boom is just air pressure waves colliding with one another. As such, the force of a sonic boom depends on the decibel level of the original sound waves. When you snap your fingers, or crack a whip, or fire a gun, the resultant "Crack!" is a small sonic boom. Since I don't see people getting pulped by snapping their fingers, simply exceeding the speed of sound doesn't cause the nasty effects you describe.

200 Db will kill people. I believe 180 is the limit for that, IIRC.

Also, if a mage jumps a kilometer straight up, he's going to either die from oxygen loss, the mana warp as you get closer to space, or depressurization problems.

Not that said mage would be that stupid...

I meant a kilometer distance-wise. You would'nt go more than a meter or so off the ground, but you'd go a long way. Think along the lines of shooting a pistol three inches off the ground as opposed to at a 45 degree angle.
Of course, the mage could always hit a tree halfway through the jump...

At a kilometer he won't be having any of those problems. IIRC low-earth orbit's around 100km up, and the manasphere goes up to 80km or so (don't have books handy right now, I could be wrong. But it's most definitely more than a kilometer). At 1k up he'd have to deal with some lightheadedness and shortness of breath, he might even pass out if he's got a body of 1. Remember kids, it's not the going up that's the problem, it's the coming down bit.