Okaaaaayyyyyy.... lets looks at the "Dumber of the 2 dragons that street legends gave us stats for: Hestabey: with a logic of 19 and an inituition of 20 only makes her 3 times smarter then the SMARTEST human. EVER. So you know your plan? That great one I just linked up top? She sees through that. Last decade. Before lunch. And she thought it was pretty typical of a moronic Human... very unimaginative. And has thrown out at least 2 dozen counter options. Before settling on the half dozen or so that she randomly picks through to counter this silly, unimaginative plan. Before breakfast.
True... but only to a certain extent. A dragon may be smarter than any
single human, but so can be a group of humans. The Pentagon has several hundred or thousand times more brainpower than the smartest human ever (it's just that it's not focused on winning wars, but also on things like spending cuts, election yearS and advancing their own careers). Dragons, on the other hand, rather work alone (though I guess they could use those Force 20+ spirits for the purpose of councelling).
So yes, Hetaby is rolling four times more dice than your average RPG players, and is thus likely to achieve four times more hits. But planning has never been stated to be an Opposed Test (and, it was, what the modifiers are for the attacker and defender).
More important, awareness of a risk never meant it could be avoided. During WW2, the German knew something like the Invasion of Normandy was a possibility. But they simply did not have enough resources to keep ready for an option they (wrongly) thought was unlikely to happen, while trying to slow down the Soviets in the east.
Sure, a great dragon is likely to expect someone will try to kill him in the future. That list starts with Verjigorm, followed by a handful of immortal elves, the other dragons, and the megacorporations, governements and private persons with competing interests, plus Alamos 20,000 and similar anti-Awakened groups. Mathematically, one great dragons cannot have enough agents to watch over all the other great dragons' own agents, let alone all its other enemies.
It's one thing to spy on one specific space program. It's another to spy on every space launch by every space power and their clients for over fifty years, and determine which ones want such weapon only to kill you and which ones have a broader strategic motivation, and among them those who may turned that weapon against you at a later point.
Detect Enemy is a good spell, but it doesn't say how prepared people are, and thus cannot discriminate closet dragon haters and fields ops in the final stages of preparation for an assassination attempt. That's one problem of being a public figure.
And even if it did allocate enough resources in the good place, there's no such thing as a perfect plan, offensive or defensive. Part of the answer for great dragons would be to prepare for certain type of attacks, instead of trying to detect actual threats early. It works even better from a gaming point of view since this can be solved mostly with lots of dice.
It's somewhat telling that
Street Legends is basically an errata to the great dragons stats provided in the rulebook (Body 25, Agility 10, Reaction 11, Strength 40, Charisma 13, Intuition 13, Logic 13, Willpower 13, Edge 6, Conjuring 8, Sorcery 12, even when accounting the possibility given to the gamemaster to adjust attributes "up to three points in either direction").
Street Legends didn't give stats, it gave a statement.
And did your reading also tell you why Bio weapons are a serious 'No-no' for all but the mentally retarded? Bio-logical weapons have a nasty habit of mutating when in the wild. look at the common cold virus, or H1N1 or H1N7, or Anthrax... There are lots of viruses out there that only affected ONE species.. until they did what all good viruses do, and mutated.
Well, I didn't know Franklin Roosevelt was mentally retarded.
Biological warfare programs were dropped because it had the bad habit of infecting soldiers regardless of their uniform, along with civilians.
Research in biological weapons rather avoided fast-mutating virus like Influenza because of the risk they could mutate and become less potent during the weapon production process. I don't think anyone try to make a weapon of one the hundreds of different virus involved in "common cold" as none is even remotely deadly enough to start with. Anthrax is a bacteria, which mutate a lot slower than virus do.
YEEAAAA.... where to begin on this one.... first off, the most powerful militaries out there in the SR universe are actually in the corporation's hands. the FEW superpowers that remain still have sizable military might, but not enough to wave a middle finger at the combined force of even two or three megas... let alone 5 (SK, NEONET, MITs, Renraku, Wuxing all have dragon allies... and those are just the ones we know about. AZT has several dragons, but they are the only Corp I actually consider wacky enough to remotely try something)
Not even close to. In California, Ares Macrotechnology sent two regiments. There were two
divisions of rogue Japanese troops that stayed with Saito. Aztechnology entire special force is a single battalion of 400 soldiers. It has fairly more line troops (the largest of the megacorporation), but those actually are the reserve units of the Aztlan national army. In a given battlefield, even a middle-of-pack national military could take on a big corporation.
In a war, the corporation would get the benefit of a much larger "strategic depth" as the Business Recognition Accords give them the opportunity to have troops, logistic lines, intelligence collection activities and command centers within the border of a large number of countries. However, a corporation would never take the full benefit of this since the Corporate Court specifically forbade megacorporations to go at war or try to overthrow governments, with the threat of an Omega Order. Corporation would be able to shrug off a military aggression, they would equally unable to cause significant damage to a country armed forces. The Corporate Court rules the world with money, not military might.
The truly sad thing is that versus a Country, the Corp Court wouldn't issue an Omega Order.
Actually, the Corporate Court wouldn't, for the reason given above, and
couldn't legally issue an Omega Order against a country (or a private person for that matter). It's a sentence that can only be called upon member corporations (meaning here membership at large, A, AA and AAA, not the election of a candidate to the court that goes with AAA status).
