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Message no. 1
From: shadowrn@*********.com (Bruce)
Subject: Seattle Airspace
Date: Fri Mar 30 06:05:00 2001
The rigge rin out team wants to know how difficult it would be to loft
two Condors above the Downtown area of Seattle to assist in controlling
a high speed escape from a particularly sensitive area the rest of the
team will be intruding into. He plans to get the drones to send data to
his vehicle in regards to other traffic that is present. He plans to
interface this data with his vehicles sensor data to enable to avoid
collisions and other unplesantness. What I want to know is how long the
Condors could stay up there undetected and who exactly would be looking
for them and what would "they" do to bring them down?

Many thanks

Bruce
Message no. 2
From: shadowrn@*********.com (BD)
Subject: Seattle Airspace
Date: Fri Mar 30 14:55:01 2001
> The rigge rin out team wants to know how difficult it would be to
loft two Condors above the Downtown area of Seattle to assist in
controlling a high speed escape from a particularly sensitive area the
rest of the team will be intruding into. He plans to get the drones to
send data to his vehicle in regards to other traffic that is present.
He plans to interface this data with his vehicles sensor data to enable
to avoid collisions and other unplesantness.

You know, a decker's your man (or woman) for this job. They can hack
into GridGuide and not only read the traffic data but change it...
alter traffic lights so the team doesn't have to stop, cause accidents
so Lone Star has to divide its attention, put up phantom detours, etc.
It's all in The Matrix.

> What I want to know is how long the Condors could stay up there
undetected and who exactly would be looking for them and what would
"they" do to bring them down?

Well, I'm not sure what Seattle's laws are about drones in a downtown
area :) First of all, make sure they're not in any extraterritorial
airspace to avoid some corp popping them for fun... or conversely, make
sure they _are_, and preempt a Lone Star strike on them for that
reason. I think the Star would be the ones to watch for, and they'd
likely respond not with weaponry (who wants burning debris raining down
on commuters?) but with jamming and an attempt to trace the signal (can
they do that?) or override it and steal the drones. I'm real fuzzy on
rigging, but I know that some of that stuff is available to them.
Alternately they can pop their own drones and simply follow yours home
:) They'd avoid a costly chase downtown and maybe catch you napping.

But as for noticing them, I'm not real sure how that would work... it
might be a low probability. You're gonna need others on the list to
help you with that...

====-Boondocker

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Message no. 3
From: shadowrn@*********.com (Damion Milliken)
Subject: Seattle Airspace
Date: Sat Mar 31 13:20:01 2001
BD writes:

BTW, Boondocker, it would be nice if you'd at least attempt to follow the
formatting guidelines for replying to posts (ie quote the posters name, and
try to "> " all of their text, not just the first line).

> Bruce writes:
>
> > The rigger in out team wants to know how difficult it would be to loft
> > two Condors above the Downtown area of Seattle to assist in controlling a
> > high speed escape from a particularly sensitive area the rest of the team
> > will be intruding into. He plans to get the drones to send data to his
> > vehicle in regards to other traffic that is present. He plans to
> > interface this data with his vehicles sensor data to enable to avoid
> > collisions and other unplesantness.
>
> You know, a decker's your man (or woman) for this job. They can hack into
> GridGuide and not only read the traffic data but change it... alter
> traffic lights so the team doesn't have to stop, cause accidents so Lone
> Star has to divide its attention, put up phantom detours, etc. It's all in
> The Matrix.

This is an excellent idea. It has a couple of potential drawbacks, in that
it doesn't exactly solve enverything, IMHO. Firstly, hacking the gridlink
system, for very good reasons, is extremely difficult. Secondly, vehicles
that are not a part of the gridlink system will not be able to be detected
though it (although they may, of course, be affected by it).

> > What I want to know is how long the Condors could stay up there
> > undetected and who exactly would be looking for them and what would
> > "they" do to bring them down?
>
> Well, I'm not sure what Seattle's laws are about drones in a downtown
> area :)

Good question. I don't think that there is an answer. AFAIK, there is
nothing illegal about having drones, per se. Having drones with weapons, or
owning a Steel Lynx might be problematic, due to the military nature of the
things, I would imagine. Owning drones with sophisticated surveillane
equipment is suspicious at the best, and likely to get you rather
investigated.

> <Snip excellent ideas for use of extraterritoriality, and appropriate LS
> responses>

Top ideas!

> But as for noticing them, I'm not real sure how that would work... it
> might be a low probability.

I think that there are two ways to approach this. The first is based upon
the Signature of the drones in question, and how likely they are to be
picked up by vehicle sensors. With a signature of 10, they are pretty darn
difficult to notice, so unless someone or something is actively scanning,
they probably will not be casually observed. Even if active scanning is
taking place, it will probably take a while to spot them.

The second option relates to picking up the remote control rigger network.
With the massive bandwidth that multi simsense channel rigger networks use,
it is rather simple to determine if a drone network exists in a given area.
Of course, there are likely to be a number of drone networks in any area
(LS, a couple of corps, a pizza delivery place, a news feed, and so on).
Also, people tend to encrypt their networks. LS would likely have a passing
knowledge of what networks to expect in an area, and so may be able to spot
unusual networks popping up. Mind you, with the new rules in R3 everyone
can forget about hacking into other peoples networks or even sneaking a peak
at their feeds, as cracking any decent level of encryption takes about 16
karma pool to do, even for someone well equipped and quite skilled.

LS response would be unlikely to be some sort of jamming, as broad spectrum
ECM affects all drone networks and other radio communications in the area.
If they were able to ID the network in question, then they could launch
directed ECM against it - they effectiveness of which I am not entirely
sure. Snooping of the drone network to see what it's doing is either really
really simple, if it has no encryption, or downright impossible if it does.
The same goes for hijacking it. If they really had to stop some Condors,
then I'm sure Strato-9s could more than easily handle the job, and raining
debris would be a minor issue. OTOH, they have to find the Condors first...

--
Damion Milliken University of Wollongong
Unofficial Shadowrun Guru E-mail: dam01@***.edu.au
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Message no. 4
From: shadowrn@*********.com (BD)
Subject: Seattle Airspace
Date: Sat Mar 31 22:20:00 2001
--- Damion Milliken <dam01@***.edu.au> wrote:
> BTW, Boondocker, it would be nice if you'd at least attempt to follow
> the
> formatting guidelines for replying to posts (ie quote the posters
> name, and
> try to "> " all of their text, not just the first line).

This is the result when I do that. It's choppy and breaks up the
sentences. Plus, when you get multiple replies including old text, you
end up with really ugly formatting, '>' symbols in the middle of
sentences, sentence fragments... ecch. Read on:

> > Bruce writes:
> >
> > > The rigger in out team wants to know how difficult it would be to
> loft
> > > two Condors above the Downtown area of Seattle to assist in
> controlling a
> > > high speed escape from a particularly sensitive area the rest of
> the team
> > > will be intruding into. He plans to get the drones to send data
> to his
> > > vehicle in regards to other traffic that is present. He plans to
> > > interface this data with his vehicles sensor data to enable to
> avoid
> > > collisions and other unplesantness.

This (the above) is ugly. So I go through and manually clean it up.

>> Bruce writes:
>>> The rigger in out team wants to know how difficult it would be to
loft two Condors above the Downtown area of Seattle to assist in
controlling a high speed escape from a particularly sensitive area the
rest of the team will be intruding into. He plans to get the drones to
send data to his vehicle in regards to other traffic that is present.
He plans to interface this data with his vehicles sensor data to enable
to avoid collisions and other unplesantness.
>>>

_I_ think it's more readable. I can see how you might have issues
when you reply to it, as it leaves less '>' symbols than it should.
But I think that's a low price to pay. So even if it would be nice for
you, I'll wait to change my redneck ways until GridSec comes a'knockin'
on my door ;)

I will give you this: I'll put an extra set of '>' symbols at the end
of quoted text. Just for you :)

> This is an excellent idea. It has a couple of potential drawbacks,
in that it doesn't exactly solve enverything, IMHO. Firstly, hacking
the gridlink system, for very good reasons, is extremely difficult.
Secondly, vehicles that are not a part of the gridlink system will not
be able to be detected though it (although they may, of course, be
affected by it).
>

You're right about the difficulty; Red-Hard is what R3 says
GridGuide's sec rating is, including deckers, IC, and back-up hosts.
So that's a pain. However, the only vehicles that won't be detected by
GridGuide are vehicles with disabled transponders; illegal rides.
That's the runners, and probably (but not definitely) only the runners
:)

> AFAIK, there is nothing illegal about having drones, per se. Having
drones with weapons, or owning a Steel Lynx might be problematic, due
to the military nature of the things, I would imagine. Owning drones
with sophisticated surveillane equipment is suspicious at the best, and
likely to get you rather investigated.
>

Good thoughts. I'd add that some of the electronics and ECM stuff is
illegal at higher ratings, IIRC. That's another downside to floating
top equipment.

<snip everything that proves Damion read R3 and I didn't :) >

Good stuff. I should go back and read that book more carefully...

====-Boondocker

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Message no. 5
From: shadowrn@*********.com (Gurth)
Subject: Seattle Airspace
Date: Sun Apr 1 05:25:06 2001
According to BD, on Sun, 01 Apr 2001 the word on the street was...

> --- Damion Milliken <dam01@***.edu.au> wrote:
> > BTW, Boondocker, it would be nice if you'd at least attempt to follow
> > the
> > formatting guidelines for replying to posts (ie quote the posters
> > name, and
> > try to "> " all of their text, not just the first line).
>
> This is the result when I do that. It's choppy and breaks up the
> sentences.

Which means your line width is probably set to a lower value than that of
the person you're replying to. Set it to 76 characters, that should solve
most of these problems unless there are a large number of >-marks before a
line.

> Plus, when you get multiple replies including old text, you
> end up with really ugly formatting, '>' symbols in the middle of
> sentences, sentence fragments... ecch.

And here, the solution is simply to cut the much-quoted material. You can
assume that everyone following a thread is familiar with the stuff that has
three or four >'s before it. And if you think it still needs to be
included, it's also easy to cut as much of the fluff as possible and clean
up the remaining couple of lines by formatting them by hand to look better.

> I'll wait to change my redneck ways until GridSec comes a'knockin'
> on my door ;)

Not yet, just giving you some advice (for now :)

--
Gurth@******.nl - http://www.xs4all.nl/~gurth/index.html
If there are vegetarian hamburgers, why isn't there beef lettuce?
-> NAGEE Editor * ShadowRN GridSec * Triangle Virtuoso <-
-> The Plastic Warriors Page: http://plastic.dumpshock.com <-

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Incubated into the First Church of the Sqooshy Ball, 21-05-1998
Message no. 6
From: shadowrn@*********.com (BD)
Subject: Seattle Airspace
Date: Sun Apr 1 14:05:06 2001
> Which means your line width is probably set to a lower value than that of
> the person you're replying to. Set it to 76 characters, that should solve
> most of these problems unless there are a large number of >-marks before
> a
> line.

Heeeeey, whuddya know, that guy with the strange nick is right!
There's a little chop here, but I can deal with it with just one or two
deletions, instead of every line... s'funny, 'cause I always thought we
were supposed to set our line widths at 72, so that's how I had 'em.
Thanks, Gurth.

Actually, checking the FAQ, we're supposed to have them set at 70
characters per line. So what's up with that, huh? Huh? What's the
official word, oh Sec o' the Grid?

====-Boondocker

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