[Mirikon]

no guys you have it all wrong, we implant Ray with a simsense recorder and then give him a cut of the profits for the new line of horror films.

Before, or after we find people with their eyes clawed out by themselves?

The eyes are your cut.

[Patrick Goodman]

Andyou thought they didn't care, Ray....

[CanRay]

Andyou thought they didn't care, Ray....

They don't, they just want the money.

[Mirikon]

Andyou thought they didn't care, Ray....

They don't, they just want the money.

Aw, you know us so well!

[CanRay]

Andyou thought they didn't care, Ray....

They don't, they just want the money.

Aw, you know us so well!

More like I know myself.

[beowulf_of_wa]

Ray, before.

mara, both.

[The Wyrm Ouroboros]

Mmmm, Queen Euphoria.  Only adventure I know of in which, if you're paranoid enough, you can completely shortcut 95% of the nastiness.  First adventure I ever wanted to run solo.

[DarkLloyd]

Slot that where is my pet Alucard when I need him, bloody hell, Nosferatu Mosquito Shaman ugggh....we need bigger guns!
Alexis
*smiles*

and chocolate!!

(someone guess the film)

I waded thru all that to see if someone did guess. So I'll give it away.
Split Second with the awesome Rutger Hauer!

[Lacynth40]

Yes, it was supposed to be a bigger bang. However, as told in Burning Bright, I believe, they launched it into the building the bugs had claimed as their new hive just before they completed a massively powerful barrier ward around the building. The ward snapped shut just before the blast, containing it and amplifying the radiation inside the Cermak crater. In other words, the tac-nuke should have vaporized the entire neighborhood, if not most of the CZ, but the ward kept things contained. Magic + Nukes = Strangeness Happens.

I like to think that all of the canon and novels and such only have ONE partially successful Nuclear weapon explosion, because it is just too easy to pull a Snow Crash, and roll around with a cheap nuke warhead bought from the Russians. I also like to think that the only reason that nuke did go off was because of a massive dump of temp edge by those involved. Basically, praying the damned thing blew.

All this is so GM's have a very good reason to have a nuke the PC's invested so heavily in getting is just another dud. Sixth World happened, and nuclear weapons just don't have the same chances of success anymore. And yes, I know the nuclear threat in the Third Shadowrun book with Twist was due to some sort of repeated Great Ghost Dance ritual. It's just another example of "Nukes don't work. Stop playing with them."

So, yeah. About the bugs, what DOES work against infested bug forms other than FAB III?

[Mirikon]

Actually, Lacynth, nukes do work. Winternight used a couple modified nukes during Crash 2.0 on fault lines. Israel nuked Libya, which is why there's a nice open space for Desert Wars. The fact is that nukes do work, but they aren't 100% reliable, partly because most of them are either old, made by people who barely understand the tech, or both, and partly because magic can sometimes interfere. The Cermak blast failed to destroy Chicago because a megahive of spirits combined their power to make an uber-powerful ward to keep people out while they converted the people they snatched, and the nuke went off inside that ward. What you got was the nuclear equivalent of the chunky salsa rules. Radiation is far higher inside the blast zone, and negligible outside.

The reason nukes aren't used more often? Well, Weapons of Mass Destruction, in all their forms, tend to be the kind of things that, if you use them, you better have a DAMN good reason, or people will gang up on you and go wild. Nuking people is bad for business. Cleaning up radiation is hard, as the SOX shows. And the PR flak you get from using one of the most horrible weapons known to man tends to counter any benefit. Thor shots are more tactical, with less long-term damage, but there's a reason why all the megas and several nations around the world still have nukes in their arsenals. But they are still in the 'last resort' category.

[CanRay]

My college had Nuclear Chunky Salsa once in the cafeteria.

Cleared out nearly the whole campus.

[Sichr]

Nukes are:
 not working properly, and mostly not because they are obsolette, but because something is influencing them. Some say Gaia. IDN. Even Czermak blast wasnt what they expect it to be. Otherwise no more buggies in CZ. And about that PR thing: do you realize, that when Chicago "Bug City" incident and Containment zone happened informations remain hidden and silent for more than 5 years before first info on real state of events leaked? And when it does, it hadnt caused any major powershifting, even Ares wasn forced to compensate anyone etc...PR is overrated a bit.

[Mirikon]

Actually, in the four instances where nukes have been actually used since the upswing of the mana cycle began, you've had:

Lone Eagle incident - Failed due to unknown causes
Libya - Worked like a charm
Cermak - Contained within a VERY powerful barrier
Crash 2.0 - Magically altered nukes didn't behave as they were supposed to.

In two of those cases, there wasn't any question about magic directly influencing the nukes. Cermak was literally buzzing with magical activity. In addition to the ward, there were all the people getting converted to bugs inside the building. In Crash 2.0, a bunch of crazies took some nukes, and started trying to magically enhance them. In both cases, there was magic directly in play trying to screw with the function of the bombs.

In the Lone Eagle incident, either no one knows why the bomb didn't go of, or no one is telling. It could be that there was magic affecting the outcome, either in general or consciously guided (remember, the immortal elves, at least, were active in the US back then, preparing for magic to come back all the way). It could also have been a dud. Yes, any machine has the possibility of a breakdown, sometimes even a catastrophic breakdown. It doesn't even have to be obsolete to break, either. Only restricting myself to the US space program, I'll give you three examples of SOTA tech that failed catastrophically because of minor problems no one caught: Apollo 1, Apollo 13, Challenger. All three craft were SOTA at the time. All three had major failures because of something minor. Apollo 1 had a pure oxygen atmosphere, and yards of velcro and other flammable materials in it. One spark, and it was a funeral pyre. Apollo 13 was critically damaged when a wire caused an arc in one of the oxygen tanks, which made it explode. And Challenger blew up because of a faulty valve smaller than a football.

Do you know why, at the height of the Cold War, the US had enough nukes to vaporize the USSR at least ten times over? Because they EXPECTED some of the rockets to fail or even be intercepted. You launch several missiles, so that you are sure that at least one will hit the target.

And actually, the Chicago hive was kicked over on August 22, 2055. The spin was a new wave of VITAS, yes. But on October 1, the Cermak blast happened. Nuclear detonations are quite distinctive, so there was no denying the blast. On January 21, 2056, the Bug City upload hit Shadowland, and was spread through the Shadow Matrix. From there, it spread to the public awareness, despite the UCAS government's attempts to silence it. There was some blowback against KE, but most of it was subsumed in the face of the fact that THERE WERE GIANT FRAGGING BUGS TRASHING CHICAGO! Kindof falls into the 'last resort' category, for most people. But someone using nukes for anything that wasn't so cataclysmic? Yes, there would be hell to pay.

[Sichr]

NUCLEAR WEAPONS
Nuclear weapons still exist in the Sixth World,
even if their dependability has been questionable
since the Awakening. Some postulate that the
Earth’s manafield effects rapid nuclear reactions,
while others believe that Gaia has some sort of
cosmic veto power over nukes, but the fact remains:
nuclear weapons have become unreliable.
The game-master is encouraged to decide for herself when and
where nuclear weapons detonate as designed, with
the general guideline that the smaller the nuke, the
more reliable it is—and a reminder than even a small
nuclear explosion can dramatically alter the land-scape
of a city or even a nation, so they should be
used cautiously.
In the case of a nuclear detonation, the forces
unleashed in a full-scale nuclear blast are beyond
the scope of the rules of a role-playing game. Small
“suitcase nukes” are more conceivable; in game
terms, the Damage Code for the smallest feasible
nuclear device would be over 130P, –6/m. Generally,
though, a nuclear device is mainly a plot device;
simply choose the area devastated (a minimum of
a 20m radius). Use the following guidelines to determine the
radiation effects of a nuclear blast. The area devas-tated will be an area of deadly radiation poisoning,
with a concentric circle of equal radius beyond that
is a severe radiation zone, another radius will have
moderate radiation, and the radius beyond that will
be an area of mild radiation poisoning (see Radiation,
p. 167, Arsenal).

My posts on this topics were inspired by highlited text. and weather is too damn hot for further theories, so I leave with that.

[Wakshaani]

is there a named Bug Queen arch villain yet? we could use a few I think considering how well the bugs can plan.

Well, if you go by SOME rumors, Damien Knight might fit the bill...