>>6165199Some operations are naturally a little more complicated or large scale - I'm sorry to have to tell you that team-wide agentic tactical integrated meshnets fall under the "complicated to work with" category. It's good to get some proper hardening on there, it's just hard to increase on a field-team wide basis. Too many angles to cover, so there's some extra upkeep to manage to account for it. Then you gotta pay for the 'always on' aspects and make it redundant and a few other tidbits. And the systems we have at present can only really sustain so much enhancement before they fritz out - 7 hits is actually past that limit, Agent! So we used 3 of them to get some hardening and I've banked the other four for something else (I'm using it for some signal filtering you'll need later).
As for: "Does Hardening make it so that any mesh attacks against us need an extra success to have any effect?"
You are correct - standard counterintrusion defenses tests their incoming against your Processing + Modifiers. Like how being attacked usually tallies their strikes against your flat React. With Hardening you've got a permanently drawn line in the sand between the links you accept and the links you don't, on a tacnet wide basis. Enormously useful stuff - even if it seems small to you, protocols for it radically enhance the level of security. 4d10 vs 1+2d10 is very, very different than 4d10 vs 2d10. If the attacker is filtered out by the reactive feedback defenses before anything happens, the danger of their attack is mitigated without any need for advanced shielding or system security.
And we might all dream of Hardening 3 or 4 or more, but it's what we call an 'advanced' quality, it takes a little extra juice to get off of the ground. Not to mention edge-of-state-of-the-art augmentics and integrated multi-mesh tactical nets. I hear the Red Crane Dive Units have those.
I bought your headset in an electronics shop and then hotsoldered in a few extra chips, Agent.
>>6165179I can get you some environmental plastic wrap with a fritzy AR overlay that sometimes display rainbows or scenes from Kuwait?
>>6165168I brought you sandwiches! And an armory full of grenades, Agent. And I smuggled in two crates of non-regulation Chirni in the agent bedroom *and* got you fresh pillows and signed out a crate of experimental nanocytic system-wide boosters!
Which is all part of the job, and now we're doing it together. This is what being a proper professional is all about. Now can you bring the crate of spare parts down to the workbench in the corner Agent Rafflesia is hot-gluing programmable LED film displays to plastic bags and we need you to...
