First off, Shinryu, you need to smoke some deepweed and chill out.
0. alchemy that takes several minutes and doesn't work half the time isn't vastly inferior to summoning an invincible kill-tank from nothingness in three seconds or a computer-guided machine gun? you have an interesting definition of not sucking. i am not sure it is the one customarily used in english.
Alchemy takes several minutes to set up
in advance, but has the same success rate as a spell would, for what its trying to do. The problem you're having here isn't with alchemy, but with you trying to do things that alchemy isn't supposed to do. Alchemy != grenades. And, to be fair, most combat spells aren't that great as preparations, except as traps. Where alchemy really shines is in setting up a Physical Barrier spell on the wall, so as you're running past on your way out, you give the command, and a wall pops up between you and the corpsec, or other such things.
1. common sense says the shaft is not the arrowhead and the blade is not the handle. there's no soul connecting those two things together to make them into an organic whole with an aura like a metahuman, because they're not living objects. and, yes, you could target the handle separately from the blade in my opinion. i'm reasonably sure one could interpret pouring mana into a single plate of a camera and making it melt as causing secondary damage to the rest of the camera, so i don't really see how you have a case there.
Sorry, but hair-splitting gets you nowhere. Demolish Guns works just fine on the whole gun, not just the barrel. Shatter hits the whole camera, not just the lens. The arrow is a single unit. The bow is a single unit. End of fragging story.
2. contact trigger is skin contact. easy enough. otherwise we're carrying contact preparations around with tongs all day or wearing foot-thick wetsuits to keep them just far enough outside of our auras not to go off. stupid.
See, this is why I say you need to readjust your thinking. For contact preparations, you either carry them in place, or you keep them in a container. A bottle containing a potion of Armor, for instance, or a bag containing an Improved Invisibility charm. Your clothes are considered part of your aura. A bag you're carrying is not. Contact trigger preparations are best done in place. They are extremely inconvenient compared to other preparations, which is why they impose less drain than Command or Timed preparations. Remember, that anything without an aura of its own can be made as a lynchpin, so taking a piece of chalk and spending a few minutes doing a magic circle on the floor along your escape route will allow you to leave a surprise for the corpsec who may be following you, provided everyone in your team remembers to jump over it. Step on the circle and boom!
3. so i resolve the throw as a touch attack. i'm not trying to do damage, it just needs to either pierce skin (for contact) or get close enough (for command). if that's not kosher, then that's frankly bullshit.
A contact preparation would go off when you tried to throw it, unless you still had it in a container of some sort, so unless the person took it out of the container, that's not happening, regardless. If you, say, had a soccer ball with Fireball prepared on it, and tossed it to the target character (simple action) you could then conceivably set the spell off with a second simple action and the Command trigger, yes. My personal favorite, however, would be to prepare an arrow with a spell, shoot it, and then trigger it your next pass. Works especially well if you have passes left, and they don't, or if they aren't expecting it. But no, you couldn't do both in the same pass.
I won't even comment on the rest, because it isn't worth my time.
1: There's a difference between a temporary joining and the parts combined being a whole. Otherwise tossing a physical spell at a camera wouldn't damage the camera but just the one outside metal plate that you happen to be targetting. An arrow is an object. A bow is an object. A commlink is an object. A bow+arrow is, however, not a single object.
For the sake of clarity, I have a question regarding order of operations: Per your argument, what happens if an alchemist uses an arrowhead as a lynchpin, and then uses Magic Fingers to attach the arrowhead to the shaft?
I would say that would disrupt the preparation, unless it was designed to be removable (some modern arrowheads are threaded so you can switch them depending on what you want to do, IIRC). Magic fingers isn't so great with the fine control, so it would be difficult to make an arrow with it, IMHO.
