You have to do a quick cost-benefit analysis. Of course, so do the corps, and they probably have a response AI which runs it immediately and keeps running it. Essentially, will the cost of taking them alive exceed the benefits of taking them alive? Remember, if they kill you and you didn't have an emergency farcaster/stack with a killswitch, they get your cortical stack, which means they can interrogate you indefinitely [i]anyway[/i]. Just not having a stack might or might not work, since they might be able to inject medichines right away and keep your brain fresh long enough to put you on an ego bridge and get a postmortem upload, which is just as good (for them; not for you.) In Eclipse Phase, shooting first and interrogating the corpses [i]is[/i] a valid investigatory technique, and it's much easier to torture an instantiated informorph reinstantiated from the stack than it is to torture someone in a physical body. So unless you know [i]for sure[/i] that they don't have a stack killswitch/emergency farcaster, capturing them alive for interrogation is less cost-effective than shooting them and interrogating their stack. (And if they do have an Emergency Farcaster, you can probably forget about taking them at all, since even while stunned they can probably muster the willpower to order their muse to trigger it, assuming the muse doesn't do so autonomously.) So, what benefit is there to taking them alive? First off, the bad P.R. if you shoot to kill and wind up slaughtering a bunch of angry young people with spray paint and AR graffiti taggants. Sure, the hardline assholes in CivicNet will likely ping you for taking no shit from the hoi polloi, but the deluge of angry familial dings who can easily see it having been their family's asshole who got slaughtered will drown it out, and then some. Secondly, if you take them alive, you can forcibly upload them and confiscate their bodies for re-sale, which will likely be quite profitable if they aren't like, Firewall Sentinels or the setting's equivalent to professional Shadowrunners and able to make things very, very dangerous. Lastly, it should be pointed out that EP has the same problem with stunning that the RCR edition of the Star Wars d20 RPG has, and which the Second Edition of Exalted has with Grappling - if you Stun somebody, they're helpless. You can then walk over and shove a lightsaber through their skull. They can't fight back whatsoever. (Or if you Grapple someone, your buddy can walk over and stick a daiklaive through his ribs.) Therefor, I'd expect to find stunners deployed as the first resort against biomorphs and pods, [i]every single time[/i]. Hell, even in the core book combat example, the character Stoya did a stupid, despite having [i]won[/i]. "Having disabled her opponent, Stoya takes the time to make a hasty getaway." Her enemy was completely incapacitated for three action [i]turns[/i] - far more than enough time for her to float over to him, put the stunner against his head to zap him some more, then stick a knife through his eye and administer the coup de grace. Or to slap him in manual restraints, if she were so inclined, for instance, because she wasn't a Sentinel on the run but a corporation taking an intruder prisoner, and she wanted to seperate him from his biomorph so as to re-sell it. And as for synthmorphs? Well, hell, EMP grenades aren't that expensive.