[mikestudiestheatre]

Hey Guys, I am going to be playing a hacker in my next SR4 campaign and I have been throwing around a few ideas. One of them is to play an AI Hacker who's home node is inside a stealth aircraft or possibly some sort of ground-based drone. Any opinions or suggestions about this? Thanks ahead of time.

[Kat9]

My AI uses a Stormcloud drone with ruth coating, the Battle Buddy Basic with a sat link is my home node. Looking to add a ruthed repeater drone as well to the mix, slap a solar cell on that to keep it up 24/7.

The second might be a bit hinky but the first works pretty well so far.

[Makki]

does it have to be a stealth aircraft? An AI that is the control node of a Budweiser airship would be awesome. And totally inconspicous.

[WhackedMaki]

It's typically considered best to have a home node separate from whatever you're taking into battle. I bought a rating 6 Nexus as a home node when I made an AI character. Sure, it costs high lifestyle to keep up with, but it's going to be hard to destroy, as it's never in the public eye (It lives with the AI's creator, a 4/6 contact). The stealth aircraft sounds like it would be cool for battle, but keep in mind that 1, it might be too restricted to get at the start, and 2, if anything ever happens inside, you won't be able to do any fighting.

[JustADude]

My personal idea of an "ideal" Home Node is a "Cyberspace Designs Dragonfly" drone, modified with a one-slot Special Equipment (Integrated Modular Commlink), Special Equipment (Hardware Toolkit), Chameleon Coating, and Improved Economy.

The IMC mod adds a separate, integrated commlink node to the Drone, like a micro-sized version of the mobile Nexus drone, which has the Modular Electronics mod (from the SR4A Changes Document) already installed.

The result is that you're mobile, almost invisible, can easily upgrade your Commlink all the way up to 13/13/13/13 (after Home Node Boost), and you've got the actual Commlink Mod-slots open to buy Optimization, Simsense Accelerator, and Custom Interface.

[Makki]

maybe the the gear modification Micro/nanoization rom Spy Games will help your idea JustADude

[JustADude]

maybe the the gear modification Micro/nanoization rom Spy Games will help your idea JustADude

Possibly... but the idea of paying 300% markup on the price of a Rating 10 System module... 

Thing is, by the rules a Commlink can easily fit, since it's definitely less than Body 4 and, therefore, takes up 1 Mod Slot. It would definitely add some noticeable bulk to the Dragonfly, if you examined it up close, but it works by RAW.

Fluffwise, I justify it as being able to strip out all the redundant bits, things like the power-supply, that are redundant in a Drone... or like speakers and a screen, which an AI just doesn't need... to get it down to the proper size.

[UmaroVI]

There's no point in getting above rating 6 base on an AI's home node. You can't afford Luxury lifestyle payments.

[JustADude]

There's no point in getting above rating 6 base on an AI's home node. You can't afford Luxury lifestyle payments.

Well, lifestyle spoofing should be able to take care of that.

Of course, when it's come up my group has always run Lifestyle Spoofing as a background task using bought hits, since it seems to be "fluffed" as a constant process. No actual money out-of-pocket, and it's fairly easy to get to Luxury, but you don't get the ability to "bank" lifestyle months or do fancy things with Advanced Lifestyles.

We felt that it rather fit, given that top-tier Hackers/Technomancers (and Mages, for that matter!) are already valuable enough that, generally speaking, they should only be Shadowrunning for non-financial reasons.

[UmaroVI]

Except that it's really, REALLY hard to spoof a Luxury lifestyle. A threshold of 100 is beyond most people's ability to pull off at all with the -1 per reroll rule. Even without that, the 1 day interval means you can easily be spending most of your time doing nothing but maintaining your lifestyle. AIs can't get the same dicepools that a mundane hacker or technomancer can; they're probably just rolling 6 spoof + 6 hacking, which is 12 dice. On average that's 25 of every 30 days just maintaining Luxury lifestyle! Buying hits makes it take more than a month to spoof a month of lifestyle. Even if you squeeze out a few more dice with stuff like specializing hacking in Spoof or taking Codeslinger, that's at the expense of being good at other things and it doesn't really fix your problem very well.

[JustADude]

Except that it's really, REALLY hard to spoof a Luxury lifestyle. A threshold of 100 is beyond most people's ability to pull off at all with the -1 per reroll rule. Even without that, the 1 day interval means you can easily be spending most of your time doing nothing but maintaining your lifestyle. AIs can't get the same dicepools that a mundane hacker or technomancer can; they're probably just rolling 6 spoof + 6 hacking, which is 12 dice. On average that's 25 of every 30 days just maintaining Luxury lifestyle! Buying hits makes it take more than a month to spoof a month of lifestyle. Even if you squeeze out a few more dice with stuff like specializing hacking in Spoof or taking Codeslinger, that's at the expense of being good at other things and it doesn't really fix your problem very well.

To clarify, when I say it was run as a "background task" I didn't mean it was an Extended Test.

I meant that, the way we ran it, you could pick Spoofed Lifestyle and get the highest lifestyle you could pass the threshold on with (Bought Hits * 30), and "excess" hits were either lost or funneled into backup lifestyle.

*waits for CanRay to plug Safehouses*

[UmaroVI]

Well, under those houserules, yeah, lifestyle is free.