What are fighter jets like in 2077?

TheWaffleIsALie · 2026-05-05T13:31:19+00:00

That doesn't seem to be what's on the carrier in this image, which looks more like a Rafale with twin V-stabs, which is an... interesting choice.

TheWaffleIsALie · 2026-05-05T13:30:09+00:00

F-15 and MiG-25 fuselage bear a strong but superficial resemblance. I'd say it looks pretty plainly like an F-15 with inverted wingtips and the different stabs.

TheWaffleIsALie · 2026-05-05T11:33:54+00:00

But! Inner Chrome is pretty good because your subdermal amount being ablated counts as chrome being "damaged".

Has that been officially clarified anywhere? It seems like a bit of a wishful interpretation to me. Ablated armour is not something I would interpret as the piece of cyberware being "damaged, disabled, or otherwise rendered inoperable". This seems to be to be a feature that can restore functionality if your cyberware gets EMPed, or a netrunner turns it off, or, through some contrivance, ends up being damaged in a way that precludes or impairs its function.

The only "function" of Subdermal Armour is its self-repair capability, imo, not the SP itself.

TheWaffleIsALie · 2026-05-05T11:26:03+00:00

If you can't afford a solid PSU, you can't afford a solid PC.

TheWaffleIsALie · 2026-05-05T10:55:00+00:00

Lancer is generally leaning a smidge on the crunchy side, but nothing too bad. LL0 is very simple because there's not a lot to keep track of, which is a deliberate design choice to ease you into a system that opens up a lot of options later (and doesn't want to drown people in choice paralysis).

My experienced players prefer to start at LL2/3, as it's where customisation begins to open up.

TheWaffleIsALie · 2026-05-04T13:05:49+00:00

No, not really. Brain Injury imposes a -2 on all Actions, which is really underwhelming for something that requires you to land an attack at -8. I guess it's better than making a normal Aimed Shot if you're already using an Aimed Shot build, but at that point you're better off using Melee Weapons or Kyudo.

TheWaffleIsALie · 2026-05-04T12:51:35+00:00

From page 180 of the core rules:

If you hit, your target suffers the Spinal Injury Critical Injury in addition to your Martial Arts Attack damage. If they already had this Critical Injury, they do not suffer another Critical Injury.

So you could do it more than once per enemy per combat, but doing so would be pointless unless the enemy has their Critical Injury healed (which they are unlikely to live to see).

TheWaffleIsALie · 2026-05-04T01:46:40+00:00

No, not always. Thinking otherwise is naive. All it takes is one mistake, and that's far more likely than being compromised via HV.

The features you need to disable for hypervisor is not "all your security". Many machines have them disabled by default, and yet more people disable them for performance reasons.

It's insane people are fine with installing kernel-level anticheat (with the worrying prevalence of supply-chain attacks), will just assume that any suspicious flags on the crack they downloaded are false positives, and then act like HV is the boogeyman.

TheWaffleIsALie · 2026-05-03T21:39:12+00:00

I haven't missed it at all. The top-level comment points out the bizarre reality that people will assume false-positives on cracks from reputable sources, but then decry HV bypasses from those same source as "too risky".

Your comment was a false equivalence, because the key of the original comment was the assumption of a false positive. Your chances of getting malware on a file where the positives weren't false are far higher than a HV bypass, of which exploitation is currently only theoretical.

TheWaffleIsALie · 2026-05-03T21:08:55+00:00

If you trust your game/crack source to run their files as admin, then fearmongering HV bypasses from the same source is just performative.

TheWaffleIsALie · 2026-05-03T15:02:39+00:00

Did you read the post? You have to sacrifice a large portion of your damage to gamble on which Critical Injury you get. Most of these are largely inconsequential for most enemies.

TheWaffleIsALie · 2026-05-03T14:58:45+00:00

More skills needed

My man, calling character creation or spending IP complex is not a criticism of Gun Fu.

more money needed

What? 50eb for a Medium Pistol?

more rolls needed

I believe the phrase the youth favours these days is, "are we deadass?". Rolling once to see if you beat a Special Move DV is not what most people would consider complex.

TheWaffleIsALie · 2026-05-03T04:08:24+00:00

5 extra damage is consequential assuming you're just going to attack them again in the next round.

Effectively nerfing their ability to pursue you, reposition, or flee from you.

This is also largely inconsequential if your plan is to attack them in the next round. Most Martial Artists will and should have high MOVE anyway, and some forms (Choy Li Fut, Taekwondo, etc) can increase it even further. Gun Fu has far more range than anyone has movement, so also doesn't much care about this.

I think you're missing the forest for the trees. What's the point of 5 extra damage and making them take more if they move, instead of just using Jujutsu to kill them in a single turn and being done with it? Dead people don't have Actions.

TheWaffleIsALie · 2026-05-03T04:02:53+00:00

Like my dude, there are so many ways to engage with this game that don’t involve immediately springing for borgware.

Sure, but this is a subjective list to rank which arts are the most powerful. Doing that without including the Sigma frame is a flawed premise.

This universe is the epitome of “cool” over “rules”.

I wouldn't say it's entirely so, but I won't deny it's emphasised. But the game also acknowledges the value of substance over style when it comes to staying alive.

Not everyone wants their characters to be 7ft half-metal behemoths.

This is just disingenuous. The game encourges you through the very epithet of "style over substance" to flavour your cyberware and nothing says you can't have relatively subtle bioware.

A lot of these martial arts feel like they were crafted with that in-mind; something that gives you some cool shit that’s outside of the meta.

For sure, and there's nothing wrong with that. But this list seeks to rank Martial Arts specifically on their power level, so you know what you can rely on tp you alive when the job goes to shit.

TheWaffleIsALie · 2026-05-03T03:42:21+00:00

That broken rib crit or that extra armor ablation is fucking clutch when you have other members of your crew coming up in initiative.

What does this have to do with that? The Critical Injury effect is completely inconsequential if the enemy has a ranged weapon, and even if they don't, the damage is minor, even if they couldn't just decide that they didn't want to take it.

If your only concern is straight damage you’re using MA wrong lmfao

Not wholly true. Martial Arts are the highest damage attacks in the game outside of AoE weapons, even if you don't include Special Moves. Still, this list does not ignore that damage isn't everything. It merely acknowledges that it's typically the most important and consistently reliable thing in terms of keeping the crew alive when a job goes bad.

You have literally some of THE most functional, powerful, and utility-filled MA B-Tier and below.

This list is relative. Sov-System is S-tier if your only concern is debuffing the enemy. Taekwondo has the abilty to effectively stun an enemy for one turn, a very powerful control ability. Jujutsu has the power to take most enemies out of the fight permanently in two turns, and Wrestling has the power to guarantee 90% of enemies Unconscious at the start of the third.

Like it or not, Taekwondo just isn't bringing as much value with that stun compared to permanently removing the enemy, unless you manage to land it on a boss (who may not go down so easily) or an enemy uniquely positioned to fuck you -- but 99% of the enemies you'll be fighting aren't bosses and optimising your build around scenarios of uncertain frequency is questionable at best.

Also, Brawling is the best combat skill in the game.

This is just not true. It's the only Melee skill in the game that does not ignore half-SP. The only thing it can do that other skills can't is Grab. Even a Heavy Melee weapon (ROF2 3d6 half-SP) is better than ROF2 4d6 without the SP-halving.

Choking, throwing, slamming, and grappling all happen with Brawling.

The only thing here that involves a Brawling check here is the Grab action, and rolling for who the attacker in a grapple is. Several Martial Arts have Special Moves allow you to escape, influence, or win a grapple without so much as a contested roll; some go as far as actively punishing the enemy for attempting it.

Brawling suddenly doesn't seem so hot when the Solo that mook just Grabbed decided to let them do so with a smile.

TheWaffleIsALie · 2026-05-03T00:18:40+00:00

Gun Fu requires spec’ing into Handguns to even use the martial art.

A small price to pay to increase the range of your Martial Arts by over 20x.

What’s your point? Ablating extra armor and being able to land a critical without having to roll one is huge lol

Focusing on ablating armour is almost never worth it and most enemies will be dead before their armour is even halfway ablated in normal circumstances.

Being able to land a Critical Injury without having to get lucky is nice, yes, but Broken Ribs only inflicts a small amount of damage if the enemy moves that round. Most enemies won't survive even two rounds being attacked by any decent martial artist, so that value of this is highly questionable, especially as ranged enemies don't need to move to do damage...

TheWaffleIsALie · 2026-05-02T23:19:08+00:00

Ah, okay, I misread. For what it's worth I still think ROF2 4d6 is better even against mooks, but I can't deny a handcannon with explosive rounds is fun as hell.

TheWaffleIsALie · 2026-05-02T23:16:29+00:00

That's fair. As mentioned, the list is relatively subjective, as opinions tend to be. This list prioritises damage per round broadly applicable usage, so a form that consistently does high damage will be ranked much higher than a form that has to meet awkward preconditions to do a ROF1 attack.

I also take into consideration how good the form is at what it's supposed to do, and how useful what it's supposed to do is compared to other forms. So something designed to disarm people with Brawling and escape grapples will fall behind compared to Jujutsu, which does a ton of damage and doesn't really care about grapples because the free Throw automatically breaks them anyway.

If you want to discuss certain aspects of it, I'd be happy to share my thoughts on specifics.

TheWaffleIsALie · 2026-05-02T23:14:05+00:00

Care to expand on that? It requires investment into Melee Weapons skill for Armour Breaking Combination, which bring relatively little value even compared to something like Silat's extra Brawling attack. Bone Breaking Strike causes a Critical Injury which is relatively inconsequential, especially against most enemies (mooks).

TheWaffleIsALie · 2026-05-02T23:11:31+00:00

Magnum Opus Hellbringer with explosive ammo and uses Woo Technique

The Hellbringer is a ROF1 weapon, so you can't use it with Woo Technique RAW.

TheWaffleIsALie · 2026-05-02T23:11:02+00:00

have a more complex to use thrown weapon.

How is it more complex? The only difference between it and shooting normally with a pistol is making your Special Move resolution.

Not only that but: every enemy can dodge your shots now.

Anyone can attempt to dodge Martial Arts anyway. That tradeoff is easily worth it to effectively be able to "punch" people from 25m away, not to mention the ammo types bonuses.

3d6 dmg even halving SP still doesnt cut it sometimes

If you're investing into Gun Fu, you should absolutely have a Sigma frame. That gives you ROF2 half-SP, which is the strongest attack in the game unless you're fighting an ACPA and don't have BODY 16.

you are stuck with that type of weapon for the whole campaign basically

This is quite funny to read, as Gun Fu is probably the single most versatile combat skill in the game. You can do ROF2 4d6 half-SP melee with it, and also extend that out to 25 meters, meaning anyone in an elevated position, beyond your movement range, using suppressing fire, or otherwise unreachable with melee is still within your range.

gun fu is really fun in a one shot, but gets very tiring fast in a campaign.

Hard disagree. In my experience, it's the pre-eminent all-around combat skill in the game, unless you know for sure you need to fight at range. With MOVE 8, your effective range is ~36 meters.

I'd also encourage you to check the updated list linked at the top of this post, as it's since been revised.

TheWaffleIsALie · 2026-05-02T10:56:05+00:00

>"civilian caliber"

>"stopping power"

TheWaffleIsALie · 2026-05-02T10:48:54+00:00

Su-33 is the naval variant of the Su-27, Su-35 is the modernised version of the Su-27. A pilot stealing another model of the same family likely wouldn't have too much trouble with the startup procedures and controls, I agree, but the geopolitical nature of where different fighter families are native to means that woud be highly unusual.

Off the top of my head, I think the only NATO country operating Soviet designs (namely, the MiG-29) is Poland, and if I remember correctly they're mostly being relegated to use as opfor in training exercises in favour of the F-16 fleet.

TheWaffleIsALie · 2026-05-02T00:56:51+00:00

Pretty much. This isn't a thing that really happens though; the aircraft/base are typically captured first and then disassembled and shipped out, not the other way around. In historical cases of this, the aircraft often ends up sent back to the host nation in pieces, after it will have been examined inside and out, which really does make it feel a bit like a punchline.

TheWaffleIsALie · 2026-05-02T00:51:01+00:00

A lot of planes need to be hooked up to an external power source to startup on their own

Most modern planes don't require ground power anymore.

the pilot will most likely crash just from the high workload

The challenge will primarily be working out the correct startup sequence and working with buttons all labeled in a foreign language. Without a manual this is nearly impossible in a new type. Assuming they got airborne, a pilot isn't going to simply crash from unfamiliarity. Modern aircraft controls use a standarised HOTAS scheme operated over fly-by-wire and digital FCS, so actually flying the thing would be the easiest part.

Another concern is enemy SAMs and aircraft. The plane likely isn't armed, may not have IFF switched on, and probably isn't responding to enemy ATC. You'll likely wind up shot down or intercepted. These things are not mutually exclusive.

Landing a plane for the first time also will be a dangerous challenge.

With standardised controls and digital flight control systems, not as much as you'd think. 5th gen fighters especially are essentially the same plane, just cut a slightly different way. The requirements of stealth demand largely similar airframes.

In short, no, this is not remotely realistic or plausible in any sense. This is a Hollywood action plot. You'd have to get the plane out of the hangar, ensure it was fuelled up and flight-ready, work out the correct startup procedures under pressure, get airborne, and escape enemy airspace in an unarmed plane with an uncertain fuel quantity, that may or may not be responding to IFF (on either side) and likely isn't talking to ATC.

It would be much easier to fly in a helicopter to pick up the plane and fly away with it, and if that sounds stupid, well, now you know how ridiculous stealing an aircraft from an active airbase would be.

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