After a few frustrating tries of trying without tornado, and then looking up on line and them saying you pretty much need it. I'd say it's a definite need. In order to gold those ones that only allow rifle and stomp, you need tornado plain and simple, which kinda sucks...I agree 100%. I really dislike this upgrade, and it's almost necessary to have a chance at completing the harder tk and stomp mayhems.
It doesn't actually cause notoriety at all, you can safely tornado past even cops/copcars and nothing will happen, it's only when you get to close and you touch the cars that the notoriety rises.Came here to say this. Not only is tornado useless, it brings a ton of aliens down on you for simply traveling.
I'll probably give it a shot after i play the game, but that could be a while. Of course, the code for the SR3 one is on BitBucket, if anybody wants to fork it. Assuming the save files work similarly (and there's no guarantee of that), it shouldn't be too difficult to support a SR4 version of the save structure.
Ideally, we'd get Lua access (in either the interface or city/mission environments) to toggle upgrades/powers on the fly. Then a mod could use keybinds or phone stuff to toggle them.