From:	Mongoose m0ng005e@*********.com
Subject:	SOTA
Date:	Mon, 8 Feb 1999 15:44:46 -0600

:So I agree. SOTA should be used sparingly on vehicles. ;-) They're not
like
:computers. You can still go down the same roads to get to the same
:destination pretty much as fast in a car that is many years older. That
:doesn't happen with a computer. :-) [I've had this argument wth my
mother].


The bigger advances are in sports / performance, military, and
industrial or other special purpose vehicles, not ordinary civilian
models. Civilian vehicles today do almost universally handle better than
in the past, and produce less pollution, but the changes are obvious in
other fields.
Old vehicles do not get WORSE, however. Since vehicles and characters
interact, you can't make a old vehicles stats worse without making them
worse compared to human average. So unless human average advances (which
happens slowly if at all), most vehicle stats would not be affected by
SOTA.
Where SOTA does apply is when an item operates in a technological
environment- decks in the matrix, electronic equipment in a more crowded
frequency spectrum, and tools in relation to materials and tasks. This
was a problem with the SOTA rules in the SRC- many resulted in reduced
effectiveness for old items, when in fact it was just that new items would
be even MORE effective. SR stat changes are also not often well suited to
modeling advances.
One likely result of SOTA advances is that tasks would take less TIME-
for example, a SOTA medkit would make first aid treatment faster, but an
old one would still heal wounds just as well. One problem with non-SOTA
vehicles might be that parts for repairs would be hard to find.
Similarly, non-SOTA cyber would still work just as well (unless it
interacted only with other tech)- but old wired reflexes, while still
fast, would be hard to get maintenance and repair work done on, and might
even interfere with certain new medical treatments.

Mongoose