[ProfessorCirno]

It most certainly is. Where do you think the term brand loyalty comes from?

Marketing departments.

Bingo.

Again, look at the ACTUAL large contracts.  Colt?  Beretta?  Those are peanuts.  KBR, Lockheed Martin, these are the guys with the hefty contracts.  And you can guarantee they've made no small number of horrible mess ups that in no way hurt their "reputation" in any way.

Again, this vaunted ideal of the free market eternally watching for those who mess up and punishing their reputation accordingly is not a thing that actually exists in real life.  And it CERTAINLY isn't going to exist in a genre intended to amplify such things.

Also for what it's worth, deckers are supposed to be notably rare.  GOOD deckers that can penetrate a Firewall 6 would be even more rare. 

[WellsIDidIt]

Except they aren't rare. Anyone that's gotten training in the field (whether traditional security training at a school, on on the job training through a corp job) can penetrate that Firewall 6. Remember that the skill rating 6 is merely a professional level. An actual good decker (say 8-10) is going to have an even easier time.

Rarity in the world isn't the important aspect here though. What you're ignoring is the target audience. What is security being targeted toward? For corporate and military concerns, deckers are a major threat. Rarity among the populace, yeah that's pretty high. Rarity among people targeting them? That's not nearly as high. A military can bet pretty safely that enemy forces will have deckers in their employ with at least professional training.

[RHat]

At average intelligence, you are in fact not getting through that firewall without some difficulty - and part of the rarity is that the gear isn't at all freaking common.

(Edit:  I've corrected a typo, but I just want to leave this here as a monument to the irony of my misspelling "intelligence")

[Agonar]

. A military can bet pretty safely that enemy forces will have deckers in their employ with at least professional training.

Which is why, if you really don't want enemy hackers shutting down your forces, you go non-wireless.  You get throwback weapons, run with all wireless stuff off.  You're elite, you're professional, you don't need your weapon uplinking with weather satellites.  And as such, you won't ever have to worry about enemy Deckers.

If you really have to have that +1 die pool bonus for wireless, then you face the risk of the Deckers. 

I mean, seriously.  If manufacturers could forsee every thing that could bring them down, you wouldn't have mass recalls of various products every year.  The whole point of these is that they are unforseen, and shit happens.  I am not aware of anything that is 100% reliable (knives come close, but even they dull or break)...  which is odd, since the basis for the argument is that it is so easy for manufacturers to track down every potential fail point and safeguard against it.

[CanRay]

More like it isn't profitable.

[Michael Chandra]

Non-wireless troops sounds pretty insane, since it means they don't have communication running. So unless they're black ops...

[Agonar]

Non-wireless troops sounds pretty insane, since it means they don't have communication running. So unless they're black ops...

You take your risks..  they might have wireless communications, and just risk their chatter being overheard, or maybe there's one Decker on Overwatch for each unit of (however many devices can be slaved to his Deck)..  But the Special Forces idea can probably operate very efficiently on Hand Signals.

So, it comes down to how much do you need to risk certain things to function.  Military with non-wireless weapons and gear should be just fine.  This was mostly about the weapons.  Having your weapons hacked can really screw you bad.  Having your comms hacked..  well, they enemy might learn something, until the squad decides to reboot, change frequencies, whatever.

[Michael Chandra]

However, Military would very likely be running with Advanced Safety, which requires wireless communication.

[firebug]

When is a device not a device? When it’s a persona!

I noticed people mentioned formatting a commlink a few times in the earlier pages.  That's actually not possible.  The "Format Device" option only works on devices, which Aaron has clarified, does not include commlinks and cyberdecks when they're in use, because they're now a persona.  The book isn't too vague about it either.

When a person uses a device to connect to the Matrix, the device’s icon is subsumed by the persona’s icon, so it’s basically gone from the Matrix until the persona jacks out.

If you're using the commlink at all, you're logged into it, thus it is now a persona.  If it's the master of a PAN, you're likely using it (you're logged in, using your fake SIN and having your Owner mark on stuff) to communicate, see AR, and all kinds of thing.  So the Format Device action isn't an end-all response in hacking.

. A military can bet pretty safely that enemy forces will have deckers in their employ with at least professional training.

Which is why, if you really don't want enemy hackers shutting down your forces, you go non-wireless.  You get throwback weapons, run with all wireless stuff off.  You're elite, you're professional, you don't need your weapon uplinking with weather satellites.  And as such, you won't ever have to worry about enemy Deckers.

If two battalions are facing against each other, and using the same gear, but one side has a full tactical network going, wireless smartguns, sharing live video feed with each other, painting targets with AR, communicating with each other silently without needing to use their hands, with everyone having a live stream of the ammo count, heart rate, bio signs, and more of everyone else in their team?  That team is going to have an edge.

The idea is that both teams want to be the ones with that edge, so both teams also employ a decker to simultaneously sabotage the enemy tacnet while protecting theirs.  Under no circumstance would one team just remove the huge edge that kind of communication provides and just hope the enemy does the same.  Even if the non-wireless team has a decker as well who's trying to fuck up the opposition's tacnet, unless he stops it immediately, across the whole network, the opposition still got some advantage, and any advantage that is given early enough can completely set the tone of a confrontation.

[Sendaz]

Geek the Decker!

At last they serve a useful function, drawing fire away from us mages.

[firebug]

Geek the Decker!

At last they serve a useful function, drawing fire away from us mages.

I just imagine a corporate sniper sweating profusely as he moves his crosshairs over each team member.
"They're ALL priority targets...!"

At that point the only option is an air strike.

[WellsIDidIt]

I can't really agree entirely, firebug, because we have actually seen the exact opposite in the past years.

Part of the reason the current Land Warrior/Future Force Warrior system hasn't been widely implemented is its vulnerability to sabotage. The main design principle behind the current phase of it is separation of critical parts from tactical parts, so that wireless sabotage cannot remove a soldier's ability from the field. In other words, they are designing it intelligently. It's last field tests went extraordinarily well, but we still don't field it in force, despite it's major advantages, because of these few flaws that it has.

The system is designed to keep as much information localized to each soldier as possible, while transferring only what it needs to wirelessly. Keep in mind, it's still not considered viable for anything other than field tests even though it doesn't destroy a soldiers weapons when hacked.

What can the Land Warrior/Future Force Warrior system do:
-Shoot Around Corners
-Target Acquisition
-Thermographic/IR Capability
-Video Feed (Wireless Transmit)
-GPS transmitter/Dead Reckoning Module (essentially and Orientation System)
-Combat Identification to Reduce Friendly Fire (two versions, one scans the video feed to analyze uniforms with no need for wireless information, one reads the GPS transmitter and checks against the scanned video)
-Eye Display for tactical information (maps, troop placement, weapon viewpoint or wireless information from other soldiers with system)
-Health Monitor (Wirelessly transmits health conditions to nearby soldiers and/or officers)
-Subvocal Mic and Eye Tracking Operating System for hands free communication and computer management

That's just what it can do today, and by that, I mean three years ago when the last field test was released (which was probably done a year or more before that. The plans for 2032 literally blow the combat gear in SR out of the water.

The point here is that only a few of the current systems use wireless capabilities, and it's still not considered viable because of it's wireless vulnerabilities. Transmitting video feeds (which can be shut off), soldier location (which can be shut off), one form of Friendly Fire ID (which can be shut off without negating the entire system), a bit of the tac display (most mission information is loaded to start with), and the Health Monitoring (which can be shut off), those by themselves make the system unfeasible because of the information they give the enemy.

In 2007 they almost scrapped the program entirely because they were having issues getting the weight down. They were two pounds over their goal. If two pounds of weight makes them consider scrapping it, I can't imagine what telling them, "you can use this, but it opens up your guns to being destroyed by hackers," would do. That's multitudes worse than their current issues with the system.

It's not that they would never use this system, it's been field tested many times. It's that this system would never go into full production with gaping design flaws like SR has.

Some people say that soldiers wouldn't need the extra edge from a Smartgun, but who exactly is that Smartgun designed for? These are combat systems. They're designed for police forces and soldiers and security teams.

[RHat]

Wells: Modern militaries get influence on design and so on that they don't get in Shadowrun.  In SR, they're stuck choosing from what the corps want to provide.

[Namikaze]

Wells, I can't help but get the impression that you're too focused on semantics to really enjoy the current system.  It sounds like you want/need a system that's far more realistic and gritty, and Shadowrun has never really offered that in one package.  There are lots of ways to houserule the things you seem to want, but the cold reality of the situation is that Catalyst's largest consumer base doesn't really care about that level of reality in their games.  In fact, if you look at this excellent blurb in the Run & Gun preview 3:

REALISM VS. COMBAT ABSTRACTION:
STRIKING A BALANCE
Not all gamers like the same kind of game. Imaginations run at different levels, and while some people are firmly grounded in the real world and like their games to mirror reality as closely as they can, others want quick and simple rules to provide groundwork for their storytelling descriptions. Still others want to find a way to balance it all as best one can and still have a game that is fun to play for everyone.

Shadowrun, Fifth Edition tried to follow that middle path, striving to balance the rules for supermetahuman-combat-monsters and socially oriented characters alike. Combat is one of the hardest places to strike that balance.

We all know how long combat can take when we’re sitting around the table trying to stay focused on the action, especially in this fast-paced world with computers on our hips that make the devices of Shadowrun’s birth era look like the stone tools of the Neanderthals. Everyone has heard the classic Shadowrun complaint about going out for pizza while the decker does his thing, but what about the other side of the coin. What about going out for pizza while the street sam does his thing? It’s all about balance.

Ask anyone who has ever been in a real firefight—whether military, law enforcement, or otherwise—what it was like, and you are likely to get a description that comes nowhere close to your gamemaster’s last description of the firefight in your game. Lining up the sights is a luxury of the sniper; taking down an opponent with a single shot happens, but not usually in the midst of bullets flying everywhere; the awful click of an empty chamber is far more common on the mean streets of the real
world; and sticking your head out to enter the fight and even the odds for your side takes either courage, stupidity, calculation, desperation, or some combination of those. Playing a roleplaying game with rules to cover all the realistic difficulties of combat would probably require a series of mental tests to simulate your character getting up the gumption to act, then another few to decide on whether it’s the best idea, a few more to judge the morality and overcome the fear of potential repercussions, then some rolling to hit the target (a lot if we were rolling for each bullet), some damage-checking rolls, and then after it’s all over some rolls to see what
kind of damage has been done to your psyche for injuring, maiming, or even killing another sentient being. While a degree of realism in role-playing is good, taking it to that level takes away a fair amount of the fun.

Instead, many aspects of combat are abstracted, and some of the psychological aspects show up in how a player role players their character rather than in a series of dice rolls. There are also certain aspects of realism built into the rules, things that are sometimes overlooked. Get injured and knocked down, and you need a roll to get back up and get back in the fight. Bring someone into a fight who isn’t accustomed to being in the middle of flying bullets, like a mild-mannered newbie face, and you can use a Composure Test to see if he freaks out when blood from one of his teammates splatters all over him. The basics are simple enough and easy to use that sometimes we just stop there, but digging a little deeper pulls out those gems that really get the players thinking about grabbing some cover instead of standing out in the open. Once you have some of those gems from the core rulebook integrated in to make things more fun, you have this book to provide more ways to bring in challenges and realistic touches while keeping the game fast-moving and fun.

I think the developers really tried to find the balance between realism and abstraction, and they tried very hard to make a system that's fun for the majority of players.  As with any system that involves real-world physics, science, etc. the abstraction bit can be a bit too strong for some people.  In a game like D&D, the answer can always be "it's magic!" and everyone moves on.  In Shadowrun, there are realistic physics involved, and not everything can be realistic to make a game like Shadowrun work.

[Sendaz]

Geek the Decker!

At last they serve a useful function, drawing fire away from us mages.

I just imagine a corporate sniper sweating profusely as he moves his crosshairs over each team member.
"They're ALL priority targets...!"

At that point the only option is an air strike.

Nuke them from orbit, it's the only way to be sure.