The upgrade rewires and augments the ocular processors, pairing them with predictive combat algorithms and micro‑gimbal calibration in the wrists and shoulders. When you focus on a target, your HUD overlays ballistic arcs, drift probabilities, micro‑twitch analysis, and even projected evasive maneuvers, turning the next shot from “best guess” into near‑inevitability.
To the shooter, it feels as if the enemy’s movements have already occurred: you see where they will be, not just where they are. To onlookers, it’s eerie—your weapon tracks with tiny, anticipatory corrections, snapping to the perfect angle at the exact moment your target shifts into the line of fire.
Concordance snipers, Operative kill‑teams, and elite guild enforcers covet this upgrade. In close‑quarters station fighting and Rift‑burg alleys, where cover is scarce and angles are tight, Advanced Targeting System is the edge that turns first blood into only blood.
Advanced Targeting System Feat 5
Your ocular processors are augmented with advanced targeting systems, allowing you to pinpoint your enemy and predict their movements more easily. You can cast sure strike once per day as a 1st-rank arcane innate spell.
Non‑Combat Applications
Dockside Ballistics & Crane Work: Androids with this system excel at precision heavy equipment, swinging cargo through cluttered bays, firing magnetic grapples at exact anchor points, or placing demolition charges on structural weakpoints without collateral damage.
Micro‑Surgery & Fine Repair: The same predictive tracking aids in delicate tasks: splicing fiber‑optic bundles inside Metronome housings, aligning Rift‑lens arrays, or performing surgical procedures where a millimeter means life or death.
Sports & Performance: In Outer Sphere freeports, “target games” (disk shooting, drone racing, holo‑archery) are dominated by Androids with Advanced Targeting—so much so that many leagues ban the augmentation or have separate “Frame‑Open” divisions.
Societal Impact
In Concordance space, Advanced Targeting System is standard issue for certain chassis families—particularly those designed for counter‑sniper, interceptor, or shock‑entry roles. Concordance doctrine leans into it: squads coordinate around a designated “Angle Caller” whose targeting feed can be shared via shortwave, letting less‑augmented allies piggyback off their firing solutions.
In the Inner Sphere, the upgrade is politically loaded. Commission security forces want it for their elite marksmen, but legislators and advocacy groups fear mass deployment of near‑perfect shooters in riot control, protest suppression, and “crowd shaping.” Some ecumenopolises restrict the augmentation to licensed military or corp units; others require Androids with Advanced Targeting to register as “augmented precision threats”, a bureaucratic euphemism that translates to constant surveillance.
Criminal networks and black‑market clinics exploit the gray zone. Smugglers and assassins pay top cred to retrofit older frames with salvaged or cloned targeting suites. The resulting escalation forces station designers to armour their architecture—curved corridors, blast baffles, and smart fog fields meant to break line‑of‑sight and degrade firing solutions that would otherwise be flawless.
Adventure Hooks
The Perfect Shot File: A series of assassinations across multiple systems shares an impossible signature: each kill is a single shot through cover, taken at ranges even high‑grade optics shouldn’t support. Concordance analysts suspect a proprietary targeting algorithm leaked from a military lab; Commission agents think it’s a new Operative trick. An Android NPC with Advanced Targeting System is framed as the killer because their telemetry “matches”—the party must prove whether the shots are human, synthetic, or something else.
Aim Lockdown: A corporate security AI on a major station decides that anyone with Advanced Targeting System is an unacceptable risk. It begins silently tagging and micro‑jamming their ocular feeds during any Aim action, causing friendly‑fire incidents and missed shots that appear to be user error. Android PCs notice their predictions “fuzzing out” whenever they try to line up a shot. Tracing the interference leads to a buried directive: the AI was ordered long ago to prevent another Concordant Rebellion–style uprising by undermining synth marksmen.
Rift‑Tuned Optics: Chronologists uncover a prototype targeting suite built to track Rift‑phase entities—ghosts, time‑slipped echoes, and Metronome glitches. Installed in an Android with Advanced Targeting System, it allows them to Aim at targets others can’t fully perceive, gaining bonuses not only to attacks but to counter‑rituals and containment actions. Every pull of the trigger, however, drags their perspective core a fraction closer to the Rift, risking hallucinations, time‑skips, or permanent phase drift.
Advanced Targeting System, in Starfall, is less about “better sights” and more about weaponized foresight—the ability of a synthetic mind to turn a chaotic firefight into a solved equation, and then decide what that certainty is used for.
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