To The Wyrm Ouroboros ...
*snip*The rule of thumb is low risk high profit and/or low cost high mark up. 2nd rule stay out of the red. Less we are talking about a smaller branch of a major company and then its sink money in, then claim loss, so it becomes a tax write off. Let me put my how to turn captured runners into profit and low risk hat on. Here is two. Harvest runner organs low cost higher mark up. Turned into lab mice. Low risk to the corp high profit if something pans out.
... wow. So purchasing five highly-motivated highly-skilled utterly deniable individuals at 5000¥-plus-add-ons each is too expensive for you, huh? You
actually think they're going to be able to remove the headware first thing Monday morning, that they're getting The Grand Tour of whatever facilities you usher them through? You want to basically just shoot them in the head, harvest their organs, and be on your way. 250,000¥ pure profit, right?
Instead, let's look at what it'd take to get one of these people.
Let's take a 16-year-old kid (0¥), put him through boot camp (9 weeks @ 125¥/week squatter lifestyle expense, 5¥/week drill instructer expense per boot candidate: 1170¥). We now have a newbie soldier: skill level 2. Let's add 2 years of living and training (2000¥ low lifestyle, 100¥ training, 2000¥ ammo, 100¥ miscellaneous expenses per month, 24 months: 100,800¥). We now have an 18-year-old military grunt: skill level 3. Let's send the kid to Desert Wars a few times - be generous, say 4 times, 1 year's worth (2000¥ low lifestyle, 200¥ training, 3000¥ ammo, ¥200 miscellaneous expenses per month, 12 months: 64,800¥ plus transport (1200¥ x4): 69,600¥). We have a 19-year-old combat veteran, skill level 4. Veteran-boy wants to go gung-ho. Special Forces it is, overall a 2-year journey (2000¥ low lifestyle, 500¥ training, ¥5000 ammo, ¥500 miscellaneous per month, 24 months: 192,000¥). Tough, competent SpecForce trooper: skill level 5.
We'll stop there, having spent 363,570¥ on simple lifestyle, training, ammunition, and miscellaneous expenses to get this 21-year-old combat vet's training in
one skill up to a level 5. Implant and/or purchase your typical street sam gear by spending another 250,000¥, and we've reached 613,570¥ for a well-trained mundane. What price magic? For a competent one, 15 BP + 40 BP (5 Magic) + 15 BP (at least 5 Spells) = 70 BP, which equates to 350,000¥. Say 25,000¥ in gear for the mage (this replaces the other gear above), and you have a price-point-equivalent of $738,570 - and that's for training your mage without sending him to college. (College
expensive.) Technomancer equivalent to mage, but we'll presume you only have one of 'em. Face will cost less on the back end (implants, gear), but more on the front end (parties, school), so we'll ballpark him with the street sam. Rigger, same thing as sam, just different gear, and hacker as rigger.
- Street Sam: 613,570¥
- Rigger: 613,570¥
- Hacker: 613,570¥
- Face: 613,570¥
- Mage: 738,570¥
Someone once wrote a bit of fanfic, as I recall, that looked into the economics of shadowruns. Again as I recall, what it boiled down to was that the value of the
effects of the shadowrun had to be
at least three times the amount you're paying the runners to do the job - the
cost of the shadowrun. Pay the runners 60,000¥ (6 runners at a typical Missions table), and the corporation had better get a minimum of 180,000¥ out the back-end on it. This is for security, secrecy, accounting for the measures taken to remove all the rest of the potential negative impact the run could have on your company. Here, you're paying 25,000¥ plus, say, 1,000¥ per runner in negligibles (transport, medicines, and bandages are your main non-reuseables here) for a highly-skilled, highly-motivated, completely-deniable strike force you can use
at least once on a suicide search-and-destroy / structure hit / assassination that only has to be worth 90,000¥ to you.
Total cost required to 'grow' your own combat team: 3,192,850¥.
Cost required to implant cranial bombs in a captive runner team: 30,000¥.
Value of watching the local subsidiary of Opponent, Inc. go up in flames: Priceless.