Capacitance wire makes it's appearance in SOTA2063 (I think), basically says that it detects the electromagnetic signature of a metahuman within 2 meters. So if you come within 2 meters of this stuff, the alarm goes off. Now if it's that touchy, it stands to reason that if you break the wire, therefore killing the circuit, that the alarm goes off to.

So short of making a custom spell, or going around, how do you beat this stuff?

Say every door and window in the building has this, and they turn it all on at night. Barring putting a hole in a wall, or crawling through vents (which is damn hard), how do you get passed it. Basically, is there a way to take this one head on?

MOtion sensors have the ultrasound emitter/detectors, and stealth spells. Camera's have inivisibilty. Maglocks have pass keys and electronics skills.
How do you beat this? On another note, it's like a 12 on a perception test to notice a pressure pad. WHat exactly are you noticing? I seriously doubt that any decent security system is going to have a bulge in the carpet that you can spot. Yes 12 is hard, but what is it that gives it away on the 12?

Or it could simply be the voice of experience... "That looks like a completely obvious place to put a pressure pad. Hrm."

sotting pressre pas is tricky, but generally its the outline thatgives them away. unless you recess the flor underneath, theres gong to be a 2 or 3mm thick pad you can just about see. large (2x3 feet) ons are *really* trcky to spot. smaller ones are easyer as re ones that have ben there a long time. yo still dont see them, but you do see the lines in the carpet where the pile lays in a slightly differentdirection.

as for capacitence wire.. the basic premice is that any wir with current flowing thru it has a magneticfeild arround it. anything moving thru ha feild causes induction in the wire, changing th current. you monitor the current, and if itchanges above or below a certan limit, ou setoff the alarm.
you can get arround it by either having no magnetic fild (a spirits oncealment power, improved invisibiliy, or simply wraping yourself in aluminium foil (faraday cage), if yor lucky, itmay only look for chnges over time, so moving rally slowly may help.

from the limited exposure i've had with the stuff (bilt to a window where i used to work, its not the most sensitive of things, as if it it, a light breeze can set it off.. the control we had went from "you look at and the alarm goes off" to "you actualy have to press hard on the glass to activate it". we kept it about two notchs above of.. ther wise it was ging off 3 or 4 timsa day..

(fyi it was on the window in the door of an o2 store for a hospital. we gotit tuned to the poit that it set off the alarm if anyone touched the door.. after several week of tweaking. of course a week later some one lit an instant barbeque and threw it in... but that annther storey)

I'd have to go with the diversion tactics as well. If an entrance point is inpenetrable, personally I think I'd look for another way in. If its the only way in, then you're left with little else to do. Either smoke & mirrors or gun in.

If you have the time, starting a week or so before your run, use animals or the like to set it off at random locations and times. That way if you set it off, it'll already be old hat.

Capacitance wire, eh? Electromagnetic field, eh?

Try your trid phantasm NOW, fox!! BUA HAHAHAHAHA!!

An alarm system that senstive is bound to have many false alarms. Lose some animals nearby once a day for a week or so, and the response time of the gaurds is bound to go down as they get sick of the situation.

JaronK

I just want to play up the moment one of my players tries this and is belly crawling along the grass to some facility in tinfoil, and crawls up to three sec gaurds that have been watching him the whole way, not knowing whether to shoot or laugh.

Just add a metalic mylar layer to your sneak suit. cuts down your heat sig a bit, (exept for the trail of sweat) or get an FM transmitter and over time set the alarm off from a long distance untill the guards crank the sensitivity down so you can walk past. any electomagnetic fields are going to mess with the stuff.
just me, but why have a hyper sensitive system rigged to the main alarm, just have it turn on the cameras in that area or something, and give a passive alert so you can cut down on you FAR (false alarm rate). most high end alarms have a FAR of 85%, think about that when the guards come running every time your runners trip a little alarm. I mean the guy who broke into buckingham palace just walked in, the guards ignored the alarms becasue the FAR was 100% untill he broke in, and the alarms were going off an average of once every few hours. plus not having guards show up right away makes for paranoid runners, my favorite

a null suit ought to provide some protection, not to mention the average noncybered metahuman's inductance is fairly low. The psychotic infeasability of trying to use an inductance field to find living organisms at a range of 2m is staggering. I'll look up the rules, but as far as tech ways to defeat such a setup, all you would need to do is map the field the set up a metallic or magnetic to bend the field around any intruding characters. An electronic B/R of 4 or better should be adequate to the task.

Build an RF interference device. (think a coil and dinky parabolic disk or waveguide, powered by a solar cell wired to a battery for energy storage and a high-powered capacitor for a short burst of RF, and a smaller capacitor to give the output a square wave. This is something you can build with about 5$ worth of electronic parts from RadioShack and a properly sized cofeecan.) Put it in a tree a few feet out of range, pointing at the wire, and connect it to a timer set to go off at 11 p.m. every other day. It'll cause a large disturbance in the field (it would register somewhere between "elephant" and "oil tanker"), causing the security staff to run out and look for the problem. Eventually, they'd get tired of looking for the nonexistent intruders.

Then, when you need to enter the complex, wire the setup to a large battery pack and remote, and set the timer for about five seconds. Security will assume it's just another glitch, and the characters would be all but invisible amongst all the interference, allowing them to enter the complex near the other end of that segment of capacitance wire. As the PC's leave, they hit the button again, creating a 5-seond burst in which the PC's may exit without much risk of detection.

Another option would be to simply set a high-voltage nonferrous AC inductor(a big copper coil) around the wire using a long plastic stick, and pump a few hundred volts at a few hundred hertz through it. The resulting current would likely fry all the connected electronics.

Both of these are low-tech solutions that could be made by any PC with electronics skill. Although the latter sounds complex, it's pretty similar to the circutry found in almost every flourescent light availible today, and could easily be powered by a standard car battery.

Some people have brought up the fact that such a sensitive system will get false returns and after some false alarms, the guards manning the system will inevitably assume that the system is crying wolf once again. This method is very useful. If the detection system is a old-fashioned Matrix system, then the team decker should be able to subvert it. If it is on a CCSS, then it will depend on the rigger's Perception. You might have a superb security system, but the human behind the system is inevitably all the weakness you need.

Directional radio transmitter. I'd imagine the frequewncy of th wire would be a simple electronic warfare test, then set your jammer or something a little more directional to point at the spot you want to enteras well as a few other areas at random, then transmit at random times. It should set off the alarm because the radio signal is interacting with the wire and changing the impedence, like a metahuman body would. (Same basic concept as RFID, the radio wave adds to the current being received, pushing it past the tolerance into alram). Have this happen over the course of a day or so, most security companies should turn off the troublesome device, log the issue and add an extra set of eyes on the area to compensate for loss of a sensor. Another fun this is several low power (2 or 3) jammers in the various areas. Shutting out the guards ID badges, thus the system won't know to ignore them when they walk through.