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Cars & AV's are RP-shields
They're bad for health and family.

There's quite a number of problems with the implementation of vehicles as it stands now in SD. Long post inbound.

-They're readily available for use by pretty much anyone.

-You can (fairly) easily get them without paying the sticker price in some areas of the game.

-Their use DOESN'T require any kind of GM moderation. You can just hop in, do your business, drive all over, and be good.

-It DOES require GM moderation to meaningfully interact with them. Yes, yes, there's that one niche/rare item that can mess with cars, but let's just assume for the sake of argument that the driver is alert at the wheel and in control of the vehicle. That effectively negates the -one- item that exists to mess with cars. And if you -do- use that item, you again, still need a GM to meaningfully interact with a car in any way besides emoting smacking it with a baseball bat.

This is a problem. It's becoming an increasingly large problem as there seems to be more people driving around in cars for the express purposes of using them as invulnerability bubbles. This isn't simply a topside or mix problem, it's a game-wide problem.

Introducing corporate pilot jobs to ferry around corpies not only put SkyFox in this strange grey area of existence, it also effectively made it so a whole bunch of corporate citizens who previously were much more targetable for attack are now sitting in immunity bubbles as well, as they go from pad to work to pad and back. You don't need to grind away to buy an overpriced car topside, you have now have an additional job perk.

There's also an increasing usage of cars in the mix as getaway cars, spy devices, being used as mobile kill squad vehicles, etc. While these things are SUPER THEMELY! They also present problems because again, there's zero counterplay. If team A has a car and team B doesn't have a car, then team B is at a serious disadvantage. Insert gang/syndicate/clique/whatever in place of team A/B and you'll get my point.

The problem is exasperated when GM's enforce theme by cracking down on players who attack the people using vehicles to avoid RP and consequences. If the vehicle is owned by a corporation or business, then not only are you dealing with the players -inside- the vehicle, which are often problems in their own right, then trying to pierce the immunity bubble winds up getting you into the hot water with extremely powerful NPCs on top of what ever other consequences you're drawing on yourself messing with the driver/passenger.

Here's my suggestions as to how to remedy the situation both short-term and long-term, as it stands now.

Short-term solutions:

-'Executive' vehicles should be for management-level employee use, and not ferrying around rank and file employees. This still gives an avenue for SkyFox to operate (low/middling corporate citizens.) This also further provides further incentive for internal promotion strife.

-PC employees of NPC's/NPC corporations should be held responsible for the state of being of their 'company car.' If they're joyriding with it and it gets smashed up, it shouldn't be the problem of the people smashing it- it would instead make more sense if the pilot/driver was responsible for not taking their ride to bad areas of the city. This would also mean parking the car in the company garage or outside the HQ if they have a bunch of heat on themselves as to avoid getting their ride blown up due to their personal drama. (Think about it- how many players are going "FUCK CHEX!" instead of saying "FUCK THAT CHEXIE!")

-The total number of vehicles in the game should probably be a function of some % of the overall population of the game if it isn't already.

-AV's are really, really disgustingly powerful on so many different levels that I sometimes wonder if player ownership of them is even a good idea in the first place. The restrictions of perma-pads being placed on them (reserved for only certain job slots in the game, and that's it.) might not be a bad idea- but I can see arguments for and against this. There's already kind of a problem in game with owning and maintaining them due to how rare they are and also how skill-intensive they are to use and work on, and I don't want to further exasperate that problem with this situation.

Long-term solutions:

-We really, really need coded means of dealing with vehicles. Even if the coded solution is that there's a line of rocket launchers that can be obtained through rare/exclusive means and therefore staff can manage this in a way that not everyone's car is a burning wreck always.

---We still need to XHELP for messing with vehicles topside, just like we would for any other type of crime.

---We would not need to XHELP to trash vehicles in the mix, even if it's wayward corpies doing safaris.

-There also needs to be a way of handling vehicles in motion. Rocket launchers are cool to blow up a parked car, but a car screeching around the crowded streets of the mix? Not so much. This could be spike traps, land mines, magnetic car-disabling devices, something, anything. There's currently coded problems with attacking/targeting vehicles with a driver active and present in them- so I'd think that something static to deal with passing vehicles might do the trick here. You could even make them time-limited booby traps, as there's certainly a lot of ambpop that they'd go off on. Make people do their homework on when and where their enemies are traveling. And, to be clear, I have -zero- idea how you'd balance any kind of anti-AV item. Especially since they can transverse the entire dome from anywhere, to anywhere with a macro in seconds.

-There's been talk of vehicle-based combat to smash rival cars with your cars for years now, but with how cars work in the game, and the relatively low skill requirements to drive them very, very fast, I don't know how this would be implemented in a way that wasn't just something people had to use the @macros command to do basically all the heavy lifting on. Because the time a car is in a room can be so low that you're within the ping error of margin here. Talking fractions of a second.

TL;DR version:

- There's no real meaningful way of interacting with vehicles that are in motion, have people in them, etc. We're currently only able to interact with vehicles behind GM approval which can sometimes take enough time that the window of opportunity for often-used vehicles passes, and the car/bike/AV is no longer there. This promotes messing with people's rides during off hours or when they're asleep (not really ideal from a RP perspective.)

- There's increasingly more vehicle bloat (seemingly) over the years as the game grows and shrinks organically. Sometimes vehicles are gone for good, but there still seems to be many, many more active vehicles now than in years past.

- Cars make you damn-near immune to consequences when doing -all- kinds of stuff. Spying, stalking people, kidnapping people, smuggling, moving kill-squads around, & etc. In this way, vehicles are an investment that allow you to -evade- consequences of your RP, and make it, at times, extremely difficult to play around given the limited options for messing with them.

Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. I have wanted some meaningful way to interact with people's infrastructure in the same fashion you can directly attack them since I started posting here long ago.

Blow cars up, shoot aeros down with a potato gun and a frozen chik'n through the intake. Slash tires!

Moving vehicles have a way of being stopped already, or rather the method I am thinking of should stop them. I'm not going to spoil that though, find out on your own.

I'd also like to further agree with your points about vehicles. And aero's especially.

Aero's are insanely potent as a class of vehicle. And they should be big obvious targets that securing is difficult.

If you can currently store them in hammerspace garages?

Stop that. Pronto.

If secure landing pads for aero's currently accept more than 1 or 2... Stop that as well. Safe parking should be at a premium.

Perhaps make it a harder piloting check to land properly on a roof or roadway as well. This would give obvious routes of approach for Skyfoxes. With dedicated landing pads.

Another point I'd like to make about vehicles, particularly for corporate employee's. Is that it basically extends their apartment safety bubble out to where they basically only have seconds of vulnerability between home and work... And that is mildly lame. As it prevents any sort of physical conflict from reaching them typically. Especially as unlocking and entering a car is literally a near instant action with the right macro.

I very much agree with you Talon.

Topics like this pop up periodically and if I recall correctly the two usual counterpoints are; "cars are too protected" vs "cars are such an investment that they SHOULD be as protected as they are".

Both sides of the debate have merit in the current circumstances of the game so I will repeat what I am sure I have said in a previous discussion. I believe the price point on vehicles should come down somewhat, but vehicles should be made more vulnerable. The lower price point would bring some solace to those who buy in the future knowing their car is more likely to break down or be broken. The increased vulnerability would bring more opportunities for conflict role play and frequently overlooked mechanic role play. Maybe bring the price of parts down too if replacements are going to be needed more often? Just spitballing ideas.

Related topics have been discussed in this thread https://www.sindome.org/bgbb/game-discussion/ideas/wheels-need-some-love-1785/ and another I cannot for the life of me find. There was definitely a discussion on making vehicles more unreliable/vulnerable to boost mechanic rp at some point though.

Also HEAVY WEAPONS PLZ LORD JOHNNY AMEN THANK YOU.
@Rhea you bring up a good point.

The time it takes for a car entry macro to fire off doesn't leave any realistic means of attacking the person entering or exiting. Even if you know their description and are prepared, there's so little time to see the text on screen, realize what's happening, input your comman- oh wait they're back inside the bubble again.

There's a couple ways to handle it strategically. But yes. They are essentially a massive safety net. And every method of breaking that safety net, basically rely on hitting a command within a 1-3 second span.

I've witnessed a crowd of 13 players, fail to stop one person, purely because he managed to hit his entry macro precisely as he entered the room.

The gap between him entering the room, and entering his car, was... around 2 seconds. IIRC.

I think a similar timer to the 5 second wait timer you get when you close a house door might be warranted. Or perhaps prevent relocking the car within 5 seconds of entering it. There's no waiting on any of those commands right now... So you can literally automate the entire process of unlock, enter, lock, start, acc, acc if you want. And the reverse is also true, you can shutoff unlock exit and lock without waiting.

It's slightly ridiculous and gives you very little room to react.

I wholeheartedly agree about corporate transport jobs. I think it's good to have these jobs, I think it's important to have other roles for pilots and drivers that just aren't permanently stuck in service class. But I think it needs to be trimmed down on responsibilities for the drivers/pilots to reroute into something more profound and less beneficial to lower tier employees. Right now it functions in many ways as a significant topside erasure for Skyfox and CHEX fares plus other factors which have been brought up. I won't say a lot, but in some ways this is trying to be changed IC but I'm not sure it can be reversed without staff intervention.

I'd also like to see @macros allowing for unlocking, entering/exiting, locking be disallowed. I don't think these are fair. It's a macro that almost makes it guaranteed if someone tries to engage you or get in your vehicle they won't be successful.

I'm not a fan of vehicle damage/destroying, I think people can do a lot more to get around them with some creativity than is being realized. I would like to see more surveillance options against vehicles.

The metric of seniority for restricting corporate vehicle use is wrong and painfully so, as it turns upper management which are generally universally portrayed as competent into decisionmaking idiots that grossly misunderstand their company's interest, and blanket implementing it like that is extremely demotivating for people that want to be proud of their companies smart decisionmaking.

Here's an example of what blanket implementing seniority as the metric does:

(all of these are imaginary examples)

NLM has a Senior Requisitions specialist, does their job, been with the corp long, made Senior.

NLM also has a regular (non-Junior) media personality, which they're currently frontlining, promoting and have starring productions for.

Blanket rule says the Requisitions specialist gets rides in the Limo and the media star on which their product hinges doesn't.

See where that's wrong? See how it makes the management and NSEC look like absolute idiots that don't know what's good for their company? This also applies to other corps that have positions with different levels of security sensibility. Please address this as soon as possible.

A junior is a nobody who needs to prove themself; a senior provides value to a corporation.

But as for vehicles being power boxes, can confirm. Am practically invincible.

However, as most other means of safety and survival topside are illegal, vehicles are pretty much the only method of safety. I think heavy weapons and ramming cars need to be implemented to balance out this otherwise-invincible method of transportation.

A Junior cyberneticist working a lab at SK has crucial information on internal product development and specifications worth millions.

A senior Requisitions Specialist at SK delivers crates. They'd probably also get shot if they tried to gain access to the lab the Junior gets to just walk into.

But I'm sure the kidnappers will respect that they're just a Junior when they're taking the lev. Doesn't make SK security look like idiots at all.

I'm not saying you can't have strict company vehicle use policies, but for the love of god follow the money instead of thoughtless blanketing. This isn't a ganger structure with Bloods and pledges.

Faction A does thing that makes it harder for me to kill them. It should be removed. Signed, Faction C.

The term 'RP shield' sounds pretty disingenuous, because you're not trying to RP, you're trying to kill the occupants. An Aero or Car is an RP shield in the same way a locked pad door is an RP shield.

I can't say I am a huge fan of trying to get IC advantage in active conflicts by petitioning for OOC changes.

While broadly agreeing with 0x1mm I also want to expand on something else:

Skyfox and Chex aren't missing out on Corporate customers because of company cars. They're missing out because they're mixers. Hardcore, mix-living, gang-dealing mixers. Not bartending service workers that the mix hates, but honest-to-god theme-enforced garbage-people mixers with fantastic risk/reward ratio snitching on corpies whom you're meant to tell where you live, where you're going, be locked in a vehicle they have control over with and pay them for the privilege. No CorpSec Agent in the world is happy with you taking a Chex or a Skyfox, in addition to Skyfox having a history of making hiring decisions for individiuals that undermine their trustworthiness by Corporate citizens even further.

Unless the theme around service work experiences a massive shift, I don't see company policy changes affecting that, as the lev is an honest-to-god better alternative.

An advantage of opening up more ways to hurt cars would be an increase in RP for mechanic archetypes. I don't know how many people I've seen come and go from Kro's -- once you're a good enough driver, the likelihood that you are going to crash is low. New mechanics have the skill to get a car drivable, but they usually can't fix 'cosmetic' levels of damage.

That said, if there's a more frequent ability to immobilize vehicles, some tow truck balancing is going to be necessary; maybe automated towing for vehicles by the owner or something like that.

This is the first time I'm aware of this and I'm totally just speaking off-the-cuff here. On the subject of corporate employees and access to aeros, what do you all think of creating a perk that allows them to use the Sky Fox dispatcher for free?

Without having put too much thought into it, it seems like a good compromise to me. They get the prestige and convenience of flying in an aero. At the same time, they have to stand around and wait for it to show up.

I forgot to add that by making people use the dispatcher, it will address the complaint about corporate characters bringing their aero down to the Mix.
So a few things:

@0x1mm: Sindome is a player versus player game. RP can, and does include red texting people. Some places more often than others. It's not disingenuous to say that cars are 'RP shields' when quite literally- you can't hostile RP (including red texting) people speeding around in invincible bubble boxes.

Pads and apartments are also RP sheilds. However, unlike cars, you can just sit outside someone's pad to murder them. You can no longer drive around in your perma-pad after the community overwhelmingly agreed that vehicle pads were stupidly overpowered. See the distinction here? Locked doors and vehicles are both means means of being untouchable, and are RP shields.

@PCow: I totally disagree with your premise that people are somehow enforcing divide by not paying a SkyFox to cart them around topside as opposed to riding in the company car. I say this because the money crunch is real in SD and is one of the primary means of driving conflict, and not paying 5-10K a week in fares or risk being murdered on the lev when you don't need to is so obvious a motivator as to be self-apparent. Regarding blanket solutions to the examples you've listed: the point is that corporate AV school buses flying around are making it extremely difficult to target people and generate topside conflict. There's cries in other threads where people are saying 'I wish there was more topside action going on!' by topside citizens, and yet we have implemented immunity bubbles to safely shuttle around corporate citizens to and from work. This is obviously a situation where we can't have both. What's your proposal for how we increase risk for corporate citizens who are leveraging free rides in armored AVs?

@0x11mm

That's a really disingenuous deflection of the main thrust of this thread.

Which is that vehicles in their current state and proliferation, are relatively OP and that this is exacerbated by the ability they have to extend a safe zone bubble from corporate HQ to pad and back. Especially in the case of Aero's.

It's not even that it's harder to kill them... In most cases it's outright IMPOSSIBLE to kill them if they have an aero. Because the timings are just impossible.

You can fly to red from green, drop a kill squad off, fly up 4 levels, and then be immune from any active retribution, fly down 4 levels and pick your kill squad back up after combat is over. And be back on Green in probably less than 5 minutes flat. That's not a balanced advantage. And this goes the opposite way as well, mixers with Aero's or cars are incredibly advantaged by the nature of them as safety bubbles. Can accomplish riskier shit that would be outright impossible. And have near invulnerability from the consequences of it going wrong. Unless you happen to have the like 2 things that can fuck with them total in the game. It's something that... Doesn't make much sense at all from a balance perspective.

And I say this, being not a part of any faction presently... Just observing conflicts as a neutral party.

Usually if I want to attack a character but they hide in an AV or taxi all the time. I don't even bother. I'll go take my conflict elsewhere.
PCow,

I say this with respect. You're wrong about Skyfox and Chex. It has not been this way for the five years I've been here and I've seen nothing that has changed that from a theme and culture standpoint, only the addition of corporate driving/flying positions. If staff wants this to change where topside shouldn't be taking these services, then I suspect we'll see a calculated IC push for this. But we've seen quite the opposite over the last half decade.

There have been IC campaigns by players and staff alike to push the CHEX and Skyfox service on topside characters my entire time I've been in the game. While each may be designed to tilt towards one sector more than the other, they are not and have never been discouraged to use as a service on the whole.

Introducing corporate pilots and drivers in my opinion beyond just one or two roles like before is excellent. I'm happy to see it. What I'm not happy to see is what is essentially a free rideshare/uber experience within corporations that make it most people can get a ride under almost any circumstance. For free. I think we should be asking characters in these roles to have more substantial gameplay and RP given to them. They're support roles, not service roles.

For Hek's idea, there's already related perks in game. They should see more use. I don't believe any service that has a large percentage of roles filled by PC should ever have a discount that makes it entirely free. I think that goes against theme and also discourages the use of PCs in those positions.

The sorts of situations presented in this thread as impossible obstacles have all been solves through other avenues before. A hammer is going to view screws and screwdrivers as impediments to its job, but that doesn't mean everything should be nails.

Sometimes superior weapon skill and 'attack x' isn't going to solve every problem.

I'd say the problem here isn't vehicles, but PCs inclination to "optimize" as much as possible, and leave no avenues for attack. The same could be said about them staying inside, waiting for PCs they know to be after them to be inactive, and so on. By no means am I not looking forward to a vehicle combat update, but the onus should lie on players who aren't leaving any windows on themselves.

You'll see though, over time, the people who do go this route of supreme "optimized" safety? They will reach roadblocks, pun intended. If people are actively avoiding conflict by using vehicles or any other methods, things will not go their way.

I say this for aggressors and defenders in this issue. If you actively avoid conflict against you by all means, then the conflict you pursue will likely end up the same way. Dry stagnate dead-ends... while you remain perfectly safe.

Sometimes superior weapon skill and 'attack x' isn't going to solve every problem.

That's not at all what people are saying here, so please stop trying to strawman and derail this discussion.

People in cars can't be fucked with under any reasonable circumstances.

Years ago we didn't see significant portions of the game's population rolling or flying around in cars non-stop.

I'm not saying we need to -kill- people who are abusing the immunity shield of vehicles. I am saying that the immunity shield of vehicles is a known issue, and that it's becoming increasingly problematic over time. That's it.

We banned vehicle pads because they were stupidly overpowered and non-interactive. I think it's time we start taking a look at their smaller cousins, which suffer from many of the same problems. @HolyChrome is spot on with what they're saying. Vehicles have started to become this chase min/max take no un-needed risks ever thing, which is precisely why I'm saying here that they're 'RP shields.'

@TalonCzar As I've stated I'm perfectly fine with implementing strict(er) policies on company vehicle access, as long as the implementation itself doesn't make the company look utterly braindead by contradicting the security policy it applies to various departments in every other instance. Seniority is the wrong metric. Follow the actual money. Protect the at-risk groups that receive extra protection and security in other instances, too. Accurately reflect the company interest and let CorpSec players make judgment calls if they feel they can justify it to the company.

As vehicles are equally available to all player characters, I see them as no different than weapons or surveillance or armor or any other powerful tool. One difference being they allow strong counter-play for non-combat characters against combat-characters.

However the latter are otherwise the most powerful archetypes by a huge margin, I don't think they're particularly in need of overhauls to well-developed and fun systems in order to give them more of an edge than they already have.

Player characters with vehicles have been killed countless times, including those with AVs. Including those topside. Including those who were hyper-cautious and never left secure surroundings if they could help it. I've been on both sides of that arithmetic.

Generally this involved something more elaborate that just 'aim' and 'attack'. Often they came through skilled, intelligent planning and deception, or by cooperating with non-combat characters to counter them.

They're not RP shields if they require RP to defeat.

With the exception of staff regulating the PC-to-vehicle ratio- which, can totally appreciate the merit of- I was under the impression that everything proposed on your short-term list has already been rolled out or is actively being workshopped.

No one quote me on this!

staff regulating the PC-to-vehicle ratio

I don't appreciate the merit of this at all. PCs own vehicles? It's IC, get over it, this is just like the thing in the Town Hall where people wanted staff to regulate how much tech characters charge for their services. Staff said no fuckin' way.

Imagine getting told you cant get a car or AV because your job isn't good enough or there are too many already. Come on.

Forgive me if I'm being ignorant, but isn't the obvious solution here to make cars less safe? I mean, admittedly, I'm on a rather extreme side where I think pads shouldn't be as safe as they are, but vehicles, as many people explained, are safer than pads in some ways. And people say 'well it's a large investment so people shouldn't be able to mess with it willy nilly' except... Every other high budget item in the game is. Why are vehicles any different?

If you park your shitty, defenseless car in some random mix street, should you not expect it at least vandalized, or stolen? Of course you should.

Let cars be easier to break into. Why shouldn't I be able to take a sledgehammer to a windshield, or plant a bomb in it? Preventing these things with better cars, tech, rp with factions would make the car game much more interesting.

Imagine an ace solo standing outside your car with a handgun the size of your head, and you just honking and taunting him inside your cringemobile because somehow his 50 cal cant break that shitty aftermarket mix windshield you got.

I'd like to chime in that there is one particular item ALREADY IN THE GAME that would solve basically everything here with one minor change and increased availability.

If you were able to unlock the vehicles doors after picking them while it is still affected by this item, players with the correct equipment and skills could access any vehicle they needed to access regardless of the speed the vehicle may have been travelling at at the time.

@crashdown

I understand what you are saying about not wanting to make cabs and aeros totally free. I half agree with you.

I say half because while I think that I understand where you are coming from, there are a couple of mitigating factors.

The first is the dispatch process. I'm not sure how much more I can say about it, but there is value to having another character in the driver / pilot seat as opposed to an NPC.

The second is that CHEX and SF employees already get automated income through NPCs who need rides. They are not solely reliant on PCs.

@sly You've encapsulated some of my thoughts pretty well.

I wanted to post this as well, after considering this topic some more.

Please add a bulletproof glass upgrade that conflicts with mirrored windows, and make people pick and choose if they want to drive around a armored tank, or if they want a stealthy spy-mobile. Much the same as we do with chrome and other gameplay aspects in the game overall. I just think it's silly that your character can't break a glass window.. with a sledgehammer. Or that you can't just you know, shoot people out of cars. And you can't barricade a street with debris and shit that's supposed to be ever-present on the streets of Red.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think that every object needs to be a nail that solo Jimbob has a hammer for. But there should be some option for junking cars or causing serious financial harm to it's owner outside of simply stealing it. Stealing cars has an entirely different, and honestly, much more valuable role in the game that trying to damage them. You're causing large swings in the flash environment by doing so. Versus just dumping flash in the hope that you do more damage than what you spent.

I've seen a car get multiple high-end explosives planted on it and the total damage it took from being set ablaze for literally 30+ minutes was a bent fender. I don't want to argue that life should equate to gameplay, but just using this example that car would be a rusted steel frame and that's it. Depending on what was used as the accelerant, there probably wouldn't even be an engine block left, since almost all production vehicles in 2020 are aluminum now, let alone whatever carbon-fiber stuff AV's have to be made out of.

-There was absolutely zero impact on that car's owner as to the functionality of their vehicle. It had cosmetic damage. A toilet plunger and windex would have repaired it.

-The vehicle was bombed to try and start RP with the owner, very specifically.

-I'd hazard a guess that the owner felt no need to respond to such an attack, largely in part, because outside of extenuating circumstances, shit like rigging cars to explode is such a trivial issue for the owner as to not even be worthy of risking your life over. Oh no, my car blew up. I'll go to joebaka NPC and pay a token amount of flash and have it fixed. *Yawn.* When people are running 200, 300, 400K gear setups, it's questionable if they'd even go outside in the instance a cheap car was going to get destroyed. We're all here for the RP, and the game's not better for 'playing to win' but this is like, super basic economics here.

People should be, in my mind, running screaming out of their pads to rescue their pimped-out ride they spent a small fortune on, not tut-tutting and sipping a latte when their car gets exploded. Gasoline powered cars are bombs on wheels. Setting them on fire should seriously fuck them up. Electric cars are extra toxic bombs on wheels. Whatever magic mixture that Ethicol is seems to be extremely flammable/explosive, so again, bombs on wheels should still apply.

Trying to jack a car from someone when the unlock/enter, unlock/exit? Pray they don't know what the @macro command does. Because with the magic of network latency, you'll be somehow expected to respond in fractions of a second. Can it happen? Sure. Is it likely to, when the opportunity strikes? Not likely.

The fact that items exist that can disable vehicles, and yet they see virtually zero usage in this scenario is surely an indicator that something isn't quite right with the proposed scenario.

Proposals:

1) Can we alter the crafting system for 'certain' explosives to make them much more expensive to make (as in like, 10x current) and let them trash cars at the cost of not being all that effective outside that usage? Make them take a hand-wave accelerant or something that's super illegal & expensive. GMs can then do their GM magic and make cars have the big smash. Hell, make it a shape-charge, give it a arm/disarm skillcheck and a $script that emotes out tick tick tick BOOM and have it do no collateral damage. Blammo. Dead car. Get it towed because it's not going anywhere without major repairs.

2) Alternatively, can we have an item that requires GM approval (as in sourcing it, not using it) that just blows up or severely damages cars and will forgo the current solutions entirely? I.E. rocket launcher/SAM/etc. This allows doing mayhem to be gated behind RP, expense & staff approval without enabling the scenario of 'every car ever is blown up in the mix.'

3) I feel that all garages should be milking the shit out of car owners. Want to park your RP bubble mobile behind a locked door? Make users pay 10, 15K a week for it. It's a luxury to have a garage to stash million+ value vehicles in, knowing they'll be utterly safe from harm until your return. I'd also probably argue that perma-pads with garages are probably not something that should be a thing, too. From fortress, into car, out of fortress 1 to fortress 2. Park in fortress 2. As close to zero risk as is currently possible in-game. Let the owners get notified and get a room refund on the pad for whatever else.

And just to reiterate what @sly said, just because you paid X chynners for a shiny toy shouldn't mean that you're entitled to keep it. That's literally not how the game works in any other situation. And that should mean not simply stealing and recycling the same handful of cars, because cars are super easy to break. Just ask anyone who's crashed one! :-)

@TalonCzar,

I support all of the ideas. Just wanted to post in with my support. I strongly agree with you that vehicle mechanics are probably some of the most fucked up in the game and really need to be addressed.

That being said, I believe that a lot of the utility has been removed from vehicles because of how difficult they are to effectively deal with. I believe that if these systems were implemented to give more power to the solo, the vehicle user should gain some utility out of the vehicle to balance this out. This would be a -huge- meta shift, as a vehicle is no longer a substantial safety bubble, and is now an active tool of mayhem and justice.

For all we know, all of this and more is part of the vehicle combat expansion.

I am just hoping that staff are cooking up some wizardy when it comes to vehicle combat, because it's pretty wildly unbalanced in similar sorts of games. Hard to balance out having anti-vehicle weapons on a car, and being able to shoot players with them, or driving past so fast players can't reasonably be expected to respond when taking latency into account.

Vehicles can definitely be destroyed.

I've known it to happen twice. Every single part except a tire was destroyed in the second case from what I remember, and everything had to be replaced. I don't know the specific circumstances you describe with multiple explosives and a fire only causing superficial damage, but that has not been my own experience.

The destruction to a vehicle is 'rolled' by a GM, you cannot damage the vehicle without xhelping. So if an explosive was used to damage a vehicle and it failed to do significant damage, the roll was low for whatever reason.
Right but all systems in the game that involve damage rely on dice rolls, this isn't any different. If the roll was low, the explosion was weak, or badly placed or whatever other scenario would output low damage.

The point is that vehicles can be damaged and destroyed. This is not some impossible scenario that people never encounter.

0x1mm I was not disagreeing with you, i was more explaining why that mentioned scenario happened. I've personally witnessed a few vehicles completely destroyed as well without needing excessive item useage.
The Tiger Auto Cannons are part of a system of mounted heavy weapons we mean to be mountable on some kinds of vehicles (including aftermarket mods enabling civilian vehicles to have the required mounting attachment points.).

We do intend for vehicle-on-vehicle and environment-on-vehicle (essentially PC-on-vehicle) ranged combat at some point. :)