[Nath]

Page 23 : "Because the Olaya and Andres cartels were cultivating tempo in and around Bogotá"
It should be the Andes cartel.

Page 28 : "Heroes (or villains) of the war" box reads "continued page 28" at the bottom, on page 28. It does continue on page 29.

Page 40 : "The corporate interest" title is one level off. It shouldn't be part of "Political Fervor: the Colombian liberation movement"

Page 53 : "We worked with Amazonian forces to extract Rafael Espinosa, the man responsible for the bombing of the Pemex archeology and the deaths of innocent civilians"
It should read arcology.

Page 99 : "Jamie Salazar"
It's Jaime Salazar.

Page 109 : "But on March 21, 2058, a street riot organized by Bogotá Libre! and the True Brazillians got out of control, and hundreds of local citizens stormed the archeology"
Same thing.

Page 163-164 and 183 : Emergency Field Dressing does not appear in any table, and thus lacks availability and price.

Page 170 : "Esprit Foque Amphibious Assault Craft"
In SOTA:2063, page 76, the Esprit Phoque was a model similary to the YNT Vodianoi assault hovercraft. "Phoque" is the French for a seal. "Foque" or "Foc" is the jib sail.

[FastJack]

Not sure if it's just my copy or what, but there's two Jackpoint comments that don't show who made them.

If their numbers keep growing, Aztlan’s going to take more direct action against Bogotá Libre!, and then you’ll see the membership drop like a stone down a deep, dark well. People who sign up for protest often don’t want anything to do with actual combat. And I can’t say I blame them.

No one has better intel then the cartels, and the petty criminals on the bottom of the food chain are the main reason for that. Shit rolls down hill, after all, and if you’re at the bottom of the hill, everything gets filtered through you sooner or later. People talk to hookers—prostitution is a great way to get intel from people who otherwise don’t talk. Drug dealers aren’t exactly like bartenders, but they can tell when things are happening based on shifts in their sales patterns, and data on who’s buying what from whom is always handy to have.

[Chaemera]

FastJack, I'll second that. Checked my copy, both are missing their author.

Chapter 1 Comments
Note: I recognize that this is an "in character" chapter, as such, it is not written to strict technical grammar guidelines. However, the grammer / spelling comments below are things that break the flow or otherwise disrupt immersion. Maybe I'm picker than others, I do right technical documents )with rather picky audiences) for a living.

Problem 1

I make it quick, I made it simple, and I kept it to the things you might want to know.

Problem: Inconsistent verb tense.
Analysis: While the rest of the paragraph is written in the present tense, this particular sentence refers to actions taken in the past, as such, the verbs should all be past tense.

I made it quick, I made it simple, and I kept it to the things you might want to know.

Problem 2

... there's no government to speak to enforce what little pollution regulations there are.

Problem: Doubled up infinitive verbs, lack of conjoining prepositions
Analysis: While the technically correct resolution would be "...there's no government of which to speak to enforce...", this is too formal for Hard Exit, another solution could be "...there's no government to speak of to enforce...", which is generally accepted, even if still grammatically incorrect. The best solution may be to simply eliminate the phrase "to speak", this is a simple, clean, and clear way to resolve the cumbersome wording.

...there's no government to speak to enforce what little pollution regulations there are.

Problem 3

... they're a great symbols of peace.

Problem: "a" is singular, "they're" and "symbols" are plural; therefore, delete "a".

Problem 4

Nothing like seeing your lover's body lit up be the flash...

Problem: Simple typo, should be "by".

Problem 5

...if you see a block without somewhere where there's no dancing going on...

Problem Effectively, a double negative.
Analysis: This part of the sentence is fairly cumbersome, even setting aside the double negative. The easiest solution to correct both the double negative and the cumbersome nature would be to delete the words "without somewhere". Alternatively, it could be rephrased "if you see a block somewhere without a place to go dancing", but I prefer the first solution, as it keeps the general flow and doesn't imply that a particular location is required, simply that dancing is required.
[quote Recommended Correction]
...if you see a block without somewhere where there's no dancing going on...[/quote]

Problem 6

the gangs, of course, get a five percent cut of any deal on the list, of course.

Problem: Unnecessarily repetitive, delete an "of course".

the gangs, of course, get a five percent cut of any deal on the list, of course.

Problem 7

...since there's some rich snob willing to pay more for the limited resource cyberwear.

Problem: Word choice and spelling.
Analysis: Is "limited resource" suddenly an adjective? I see it used rather formally in this document by Hard Exit (particularly on page 12, "The Black Market"), and it almost seems like an attempt by the author to bring the RAW concept of availability into in-game language. I get what the author is after, but this is kind of cumbersome and hurts the fourth wall, in my opinion. The author could just as easily have said "... willing to pay more for that same cyberware, given its scarcity in war-torn Bogota." Also, every other book I've got spells it "cyberware", not "cyberwear".

...since there's some rich snob willing to pay more for that same cyberware, given its scarcity in ware-torn Bogota.

[FastJack]

The grammar issues I can forgive because a) like you said, they're in-character and b) that character's (in my opinion, at least) first language isn't english.

[Chaemera]

The grammar issues I can forgive because a) like you said, they're in-character and b) that character's (in my opinion, at least) first language isn't english.

Understood, I'm not trying to blame, just offer up my 2¥ on errata to improve the book. The items I list & offer corrections for are items where it literally threw me out of the story. In other words, if these were meant as "in-character grammatical mistakes" for flavor, they were overdone, as instead of reminding me that I'm reading a posting by a non-native speaker, it broke the illusion of the story.

I specifically left out corrections to Jackpointer commentary for exactly the reason you state, it's in-character. But, unlike a comment, an article should be proof-read and corrected, even when done expeditiously, as Hard Exit suggests in her intro.

[Bradd]

... the Damage Value is half the base damage for the weapon, rounded up; add +2 DV to the base weapon damage if using burst fire.

Burst fire damage is ambiguous. Is it ½(DV+2), (½DV)+2, or DV+2? I think it's the first one, but I'm not really sure.

If the attack misses, roll for scatter (with a reduction for net hits) to determine where the grenade detonates, resolving the blast as normal.

If the attack misses, there are no net hits, so the parenthetical note doesn't make sense.

[Critias]

A "miss" with a grenade is handled per the rules on p. 155 of SR4A, I'd say.  I'd think that you still get to count the hits you rolled, for scatter reduction purposes -- even if the target of a direct-contact triggered grenade managed to Dodge, for instance.  I'll certainly agree that "net hits" is a misleading term, I'd think "hits" would be more appropriate there

My overall reading is that if Player A rolls to blast NPC B, but the NPC rolls better on the opposed test...1)  Player A obviously won't be staging up any damage against NPC B (which is the big benefit to firing it directly at NPC B in the first place), but 2) NPC B might still be caught in the blast radius, based upon the results of a normal scatter test, with 3) Player A's hits still being used to calculate the final amount of scatter.  Even though the attack itself is a "miss" (in that the launched grenade doesn't ping right off the NPC's gut), if it's othewise an accurate enough shot, the explosion might do the messy work for you anyways.

"Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades," so the saying goes. 

[Bradd]

I considered that solution, but it's equivalent to the old trick of targeting somebody's location instead of their person, so that they don't get a defense, plus you get to add damage if you actually hit. It makes contact mode a lot better than airburst mode, which is imbalanced, plus it doesn't make a lot of sense physically. Why is contact so much more accurate than airburst when you miss?

(The whole people versus location thing is problematic to begin with, but this exacerbates it.)

[Critias]

At this point we're discussing rules interpretation instead of errata -- and like I said, I freely admit that even with my interpretation "net hits" is still be a poor phrase, because if the target Dodges successfully you've only got hits, not net hits, so I'm all for some sort of errata to remove "net" from the sentence -- but if the mods think this is too much of a derail, I'm sure they can shuffle our couple of posts to a new thread or something.  

Personally, though, I still think airburst and contact grenades are about even.  With an airburst or a regular grenade you're giving the target -2 dice if they try to Dodge (compared to a direct contact attack), for one thing.  For another, airburst vs. contact grenade, airburst still has 1d6 less scatter if you miss (or if you target the location instead of the character).  For those with higher skill, contact is probably worth the trade-off to get the chance to hit a specific enemy and stage damage up (keeping in mind that you ONLY get the extra damage to that single target, not the whole area, and not if you target the ground at their feet).  For those who are more worried about just blanketing an area with fairly accurate area-effects, though, airburst is still the way to go (no phenomenal damage to a single target, but more reliably moderate damage to a whole bunch of enemies).

It's possible that I'm missing something in the contact grenade write-up that also modifiers scatter (my pc's on its last legs, and reading pdfs has been slow going, so I haven't been scrolling through the gear tables at the back of the book yet)...but I don't see anything like that in the couple paragraphs about them, so if it's there and I'm missing it, I apologize.

[Bradd]

Personally, though, I still think airburst and contact grenades are about even.  With an airburst or a regular grenade you're giving the target -2 dice if they try to Dodge (compared to a direct contact attack), for one thing.

The defense penalty doesn't balance things out here; ignoring the defender's hits entirely is even worse than subtracting two dice. Here's a concrete example. To make the comparisons more direct, I'll ignore airburst link for now and just focus on contact versus standard mode. (All dice results are the average result, rounded down.)

Alice fires a HE grenade at Bob in contact mode. Alice has Agility 6 + Heavy Weapons 4 + smartlink 2 = 12 dice to attack, and she rolls 4 hits. Bob has Reaction 6 + Dodge 4 to get out of the way, and rolls 3 hits. Alice nails Bob for 10P + 1 net hit = 11P damage.

If Alice had used timer or command mode, then Bob does get a –2 penalty for the area attack. Alice gets 2 net hits instead of one. She rolls 10 on 3d6 for scatter, minus 2 meters per net hit, and the grenade lands 6 meters away. That leaves Bob entirely outside the blast of an HE grenade. Contact mode is clearly superior on a hit.

Now let's see what happens on a miss. If you use net hits like the RAW say, then the grenade scatters the full 3d6 meters, regardless of mode. Alice rolls 10, and the grenade lands uselessly 10 meters away. Contact mode is strictly better on a hit, the same on a miss.

If we let Alice use her 4 gross hits for scatter, instead of 0 net hits, then the contact grenade only scatters 2 meters, dealing 6P damage. That's not just better than a miss with the standard grenade mode, it's better than a hit! That's because instead of giving Bob –2 defense, we've ignored his defense entirely, which puts the grenade even closer.

OK, now what about airburst mode? Alice rolls 4 hits, Bob rolls 2, for 2 net hits. Scatter is 2d6 meters –1 per net hit. Alice rolls 7 and the grenade lands 5 meters away from Bob, barely too far to hurt him with a HE grenade. Again, contact mode is better on a miss than airburst is on a hit if you use gross hits instead of net hits. Using gross hits gives a huge advantage to the attacker. That's why people cried foul about firing at your location instead of at you personally, it makes a huge difference.

(All that noted, I don't think contact mode is unreasonable. On the contrary, I think grenades are unreasonably useless under the standard rules. With an average scatter roll of 10, you need at least 3 net hits to do any damage at all with a HE grenade. That's ridiculous, given that even a light pistol will do 4P + net hits. Sure, you have the chance of 10P if you get really lucky, but in practice I've only seen it happen in small spaces where there was nowhere for the grenade to scatter. Or where there was a big enough group of targets that it didn't actually matter where you put the grenade. Honestly, if you hit the grenade should land where you're aiming! It might not stay there, but that shouldn't matter if you're using airburst, command, or contact mode. But as you said, this is getting far afield from errata, so maybe I should bring this up in Rules.)

[Critias]

Bradd, PM sent.  We're wandering pretty far from an errata suggestion, here, and I don't want me misunderstanding you (or vice versa) to muddy the waters about how any of us understand the book.   

ETA:  PMs resolved, and Bradd's pretty much spot on.  My own half-assed "gut" reaction to how they'd work, in terms of using hits for scatter, would make 'em perform pretty strangely.  Seems like on a miss with a contact grenade, no hits at all should be applied to reducing scatter.  That makes 'em riskier to use (because you're either going to drop it right in the bad guy's lap, or wing it pretty far away from him), but for crack shots it can still be worth it.

[Bradd]

I agree. From what I've seen, grenades perform much like bocce balls: You can skip the ball to a resting place, or you can aim directly for a target. You get scatter either way, but it's generally much worse when you miss a straight shot. Therefore, I think a contact grenade should be all or nothing when it comes to scatter. Instead of the current note, "(with a reduction for net hits)," it should read "(with no reduction for net hits)."

[Bradd]

A commander whose unit employs tacnet gains +1 die to all of the effects listed here as long as the unit is in a situation that could benefit from the use of the tacnet. [This] is a bonus based on the unit’s faith in the leader and her tactics, not on their skill in working together.

It's unclear whether the commander gets +1 die to his Leadership test, or the subordinates get +1 die to the benefits.

Grammar indicates that the commander gets the bonus.
"Faith in the leader" also suggests that the commander gets the bonus.
Bonus "to all of the effects" suggests that the subordinates get the bonus.
But not all of the benefits affect dice pools, so that doesn't totally make sense.
Overall I think it's supposed to be +1 Leadership, but that seems a bit weak.

Also, just FYI, it looks like leading other PCs is very easy because of social modifiers. In a non-dysfunctional group, you should usually qualify for Friendly +2, Advantageous to NPC +1, Subject is a fan or devoted to character +2, plus Street Cred. For most leaders, you'll easily hit the Skill+Attribute cap on social modifiers, effectively doubling the dice pool, and that's easily enough to beat the DCs for the size of a typical runner team.

[Damnyankee]

Every single Naval vessel has Ballast tanks 2.  While some are obviously submarines, I find it hard to believe that that are all capable of diving deep. Looks like a C&P error.

Damnyankee

[Dakka]

The HVBR has no full auto mode, can not legally fire a short burst, so is currently the most expensive sport rifle in existence.  Also if they WERE taking their cues off the Ares HVAR from Arsenal the damage code for the HVBR should be 6P not 7P, reduced damage to compensate for the build in High Velocity mode.