Weaponry in Alt.War

[Username17]

A lot of weapons in Shadowrun have historically been completely fucked up as regards the real world definitions of those weapons. The weapons list can fix some of that. And further, the addition of the strength minimum can make a lot of weapons that were pointless be less pointless. But there are still going to be weapons player characters won't use. A slow mechanism revolver may exist, but player characters will not use it by choice (on account of it sucking ass through a straw).

But that brings us to the Assault Rifle and the Battle Rifle. Those are real things. But what eco niche they live in is certainly up for debate. An assault rifle can fire on full automatic, which potentially gives it a lot of extra dice. So if it has a base damage of 5, that's pretty damn brutal. Alternately, it could come in with a base damage of 4 and a -2 AP, making it only slightly better than a heavy pistol in base damage. I actually lean towards that, since the assault rifle can be given a very low strength minimum.

"The AK-98 is so simple a child could us it, and they do."

But next up we have the bigger weapons. The LMSID damage system makes bonus damage past the very basic numbers really large. So Battle Rifles and Sniper Rifles could seriously come in with 5 or 6 damage and command serious respect. There is no need for crazy bullshit like 9P weapons short of anti-tank shit.

And now: explosives. LMSID damage lets us make small numeric changes into big differences in destructive power. So I was thinking of having explosions get +1 Damage when they got twice as much explosive, and do -1 damage to targets twice as far away. Is that enough? Or should I throw in an additional scaler based on total distance to account for air resistance and gravity and such?

-Username17

[Orca]

Explosives: I think if you discount effects like nearby surfaces, you need a lot more than twice as much explosive to double the radius. Not sure whether that's 4 or 8 times (square or cube) though.

[Spike]

Many modern assault rifles only fire in bursts. Also, the AK-47 kicks like a fucking angry mule and is generally inaccurate. Its core strength is less simplicity of operation (most guns are dead simple to operate) but its durability.

The anecdotal story is that AK's have been covered with cola and buried in a desert pit for a year or two, then dug up and hosed off and fired (depending on the story the hosing is optional).

Battle Rifles are really just assault rifles firing a larger caliber shell, which coincidentally lines up with the low end shells in Sniper Rifles exactly. Low end being a relative term, of course.

On consideration I'd like to see in a weapon system (and Have seen) is that caliber is the arbiter of damage, not 'weapon class'. If you make a tiny little hold out that holds a big fuuken Heavy Pistol shell, it will do...at least as closely as to be modeled in game systems... heavy pistol damage, not 'light pistol plus' damage. Sniper rifles don't do extra damage because they are sniper rifles, etc.

Sorry... professional interest and all that...

[Username17]

Honestly, barrel length is a big deal. The same .22 bullet fired out of a snub nosed pistol will hurt a lot less than when it's fired from a rifle. Compressed gases get to push on the bullet much more when the bullet is going a long distance being pushed by the gas than when it is going a short distance while pushed. Longer barrels do not only make bullets fly straighter, they also make them fly faster. Simple caliber information is almost completely meaningless to how damaging a bullet should be.

Explosives: I think if you discount effects like nearby surfaces, you need a lot more than twice as much explosive to double the radius. Not sure whether that's 4 or 8 times (square or cube) though.

In space, the explosion expands as per the square, since the damaging effect is in essence the surface of a growing sphere. But of course, if you set off multiple explosives there would normally be some cancellation. I could get fancy and have a base multiplier to get +1 damage that was bad and allow people get the multiplier down to a minimum of perfect addition with Demolitions skill.

-Username17

[fectin]

Explosives are really inefficient though. as in, doubling your explosive amount doesn't double your volume, or even how much boom you get inside that volume.

I think you might be better off just writing up a short table and giving stuff a radius. If your detonation is good move up a step. If you double the amount, move up a step. Maybe if you use TEN times the amount, move up another, but I'm not convinced that's good. Otherwise, reference your explosive quality against that table, and get your result. You probably need fewer than ten rows (I'd say go with entries for 0-6, and the actual bombs only go from 0-4), and from then on, just say your explosive is "Strength 3" or whatever. Tables are a pain, but I think the edge cases work better. Then, mostly more explosive lets you hit more squares instead of overkill one, and runners have no incentive to carry stupid amounts of it.

[Neurosis]

Weaponry? This is a subject I enjoy.

A slow mechanism revolver may exist, but player characters will not use it by choice (on account of it sucking ass through a straw).

For me and my players, the increased damage of the Super Warhawk has made it worth using. I don't deny that any gun that can fire twice per initiative pass for one less base damage is mechanically better, but if you prefer it for flavor reasons, your slow but powerful hand cannon is a viable alternative.

But that brings us to the Assault Rifle and the Battle Rifle. Those are real things. But what eco niche they live in is certainly up for debate. An assault rifle can fire on full automatic, which potentially gives it a lot of extra dice. So if it has a base damage of 5, that's pretty damn brutal. Alternately, it could come in with a base damage of 4 and a -2 AP, making it only slightly better than a heavy pistol in base damage. I actually lean towards that, since the assault rifle can be given a very low strength minimum.

Technically full auto fire gives the defender less dice to defend with or makes them soak more damage, it never gives you more dice, but I'm gonna guess that's what you meant.

I like the idea of assault rifles doing 4P with a -2AP. That seems to be a pretty accurate Shadowrun model of the standard 5.56mm round. If your AK in SR is still firing a larger round than its counterparts (just like the AK vs. the M16 family in real life) then you could up it to 5P for that (and maybe drop the AP down to -1). That could be your assault rifle/battle rifle distinction right there, or just more granularity in your assault rifles. Whatever.

But next up we have the bigger weapons. The LMSID damage system makes bonus damage past the very basic numbers really large. So Battle Rifles and Sniper Rifles could seriously come in with 5 or 6 damage and command serious respect. There is no need for crazy bullshit like 9P weapons short of anti-tank shit.

Okay, I wouldn't be surprised if I missed a step or two here, but what is LMSID? Googling returned nothing. Assuming we're still basically talking about RAW here, I see no harm in letting Sniper Rifles have 7P or 8P base damage since they are generally only Semi Automatic, more than that if they are only Single Shot which (as we've established) is mechanically inferior. I agree that 9P and higher should probably be reserved for anti-materiel class weaponry.

Nevermind, I just caught up on alt.War. I didn't know that we were reinventing the wheel as far as the damage system goes. Oops.

Anyway, so this post is not a complete waste: I really, really like what you did with hardened armor.

[Spike]

Honestly, barrel length is a big deal. The same .22 bullet fired out of a snub nosed pistol will hurt a lot less than when it's fired from a rifle. Compressed gases get to push on the bullet much more when the bullet is going a long distance being pushed by the gas than when it is going a short distance while pushed. Longer barrels do not only make bullets fly straighter, they also make them fly faster. Simple caliber information is almost completely meaningless to how damaging a bullet should be.

-Username17

Barrel length is important for gas expansion up to a point. This isn't a point of diminishing returns but a full stop thing. However, while velocity affects penetration, in the sorts of bullets we are talking about that isn't that much of an issue. Unless talking about an exceptionally obese man or a Shadowrun Troll, its something like four inches in to reach any vital organ, something almost every combat round can easily accomplish.

Now, the FBI recommends a penetration depth of about 12 inches to account for the 'odd' fact that in combat shooting the bullet will frequently pass through arms before it hits body mass.

But aside from 'did you go deep enough to hit vital shit'... which, as I just said, isn't really an issue for most rounds, the real important consideration is shot placement: Did you hit something vital. The bigger the hole you make, the less precise you have to be.

Now, you might be thinking of the Cavitation effect, but I've seen that pretty well debunked. Human flesh is pretty elastic and fluid, excepting the contents of the skull really, and will just move out of the way of a cavitation tunnel... so you still need to punch a hole into the organs you want to affect, and bigger bullets do that with less margin of error. Logical.

The .22 you mention is an edge case anyway. Most rifle rounds are pushed by a much more massive charge than a similar caliber of pistol round. They have to be, as the typical rifle bullet is much longer for its diameter than the equivalent pistol slug (a... memory fail... 5:1 ratio vs a 2:1 I believe?), meaning it is also more massive (and thus has more inertia, etc...), thus barrel length is typically only going to be considered between similar 'classes' of firearms. You are rarely going to compare a pistol's barrel length to a rifles when taking into account ammuntion, and within a 'class' of fire arm the barrel lengths may be close enough that only a physicist will care about the changes to efficency of the gas expansion and its effect on final velocity of the slug at the muzzle.

Now, it is massively true that pistols tend to have very ineffient barrel lengths vs their potential, and Rifles tend to be much closer to the optimal lengths, yes. And if you really want to include a bonus damage for carbines (in the traditional sense of a gun firing a pistol cartridge from a rifle frame), I won't complain.

[mean_liar]

My impression is that the damage numbers shouldn't be that far off from each other - against unarmored folk, I think a 9mm does just about as much damage as a single shot from a rifle. The real difference should be in AP.

[TheFlatline]

My impression is that the damage numbers shouldn't be that far off from each other - against unarmored folk, I think a 9mm does just about as much damage as a single shot from a rifle. The real difference should be in AP.

That's not even close to being realistic in the real world, otherwise the military would have only fielded pistol ammunition, since most soldiers traditionally didn't wear body armor.

9mm military rounds aren't considered "man-stopper" rounds. Only a handful of pistol rounds are in fact. The difference in stopping power between a .45 and a 9mm is significant for various reasons. The .223 bullet (5.62mm rounds) used in the M-16 are/were nose-weighted and tumble in the target due to weight imbalance (not the shallow rifling, which increased inaccuracy) and then would typically fragment, causing massive tissue trauma not seen in pistol ammunition.

The shape of the bullet, the charge of powder driving the bullet, and a few other factors differentiate "stopping power". Barrel length does increase muzzle velocity, as well as accuracy, but there's more to the damage output than that.

Given a choice of having to be shot, I'd rather get shot with say a 9mm pistol round than a 5.56 NATO round or something truly massive like the 30-06 round.

[Spike]

The 'deliberate tumble' thing is a myth. All rifle bullets will do a 180 flip after hitting something solid (a tree branch, your ribs, whatever) due to the fact that the are comparatively long and thin, and... you know... spinning. This isn't a design feature by any means, though it is useful for increasing wound trauma, it actually hinders accuracy in places with lots of little shit in the way (like brush, chickenwire fencing and so forth).

Similarly, lots of high velocity bullets fragment. This, like tumbling, is generally not deliberate, but can be useful in expanding wound trauma, at the expense of depth (which, as I was discussing with Frank a post ago, is useful to ensure you go deep enough into the meat to hit vital organs). Fragments, being very light, tend to shed velocity much quicker, meaning they don't penetrate as deep as an intact bullet.

As an interesting tidbit: Military rounds tend to be made of steel rather than copper jacketed lead, for cost reasons. They are lighter, which I think we can safely say is a neutral factor in battlefield performance (higher velocities offset lack of mass for inertia purposes, etc...), but more importantly they don't mushroom and deform the way a soft slug would. This is important, because mushrooming leads to increased damage, and thus lethality. Milspec rounds are actually LESS DANGEROUS than civilian rounds. There was a school shooting in... California I believe, where an adult shot up a pre-school yard, hitting 32 people (one adult) but only killing one child. His weapon of choice was the AK-47, but the milspec bullets passed straight through the children with comparatively little harm.

Interestingly, I did discover that a 'geek fallacy' regarding shotguns with obscene damage is actually supported by the statistics from the FBI, where combat injuries from shotguns have something approaching a 90% fatality rate, by far surpassing every other small arm used.

[Sir Neil]

But that brings us to the Assault Rifle and the Battle Rifle.

The numbers you throw up for those two are good (4-2 & 5), but don't neglect the range. Assault rifles are good to 500m, while battle rifles are ... double that, maybe?

The Army can never decide if they want assault rifles to fire full auto or preset bursts -- they go back and forth every time they order a new model.

Should the battle rifle have -2 as well?

I have some thoughts on machine guns. A LMG is 4, MMG 5, HMG 6, like their parent cartridge. Or it could go one higher, if you're comfortable with a .50 cal sniper rifle doing 7 damage. Don't have any idea how to rate AP. All -3, or steadily increasing?

[Username17]

Most Assault Rifles in SR are select-fire - SA/BF/FA. That seems very plausible to me as a thing that future armed forces would do. As the mechanisms get cheap and reliable enough, people would just let the user decide whether short bursts or fully automatic streams came out when you pulled the trigger.

I have some thoughts on machine guns. A LMG is 4, MMG 5, HMG 6, like their parent cartridge. Or it could go one higher, if you're comfortable with a .50 cal sniper rifle doing 7 damage. Don't have any idea how to rate AP. All -3, or steadily increasing?

Differentiating a light machine gun from an assault rifle is fairly important but also difficult. I mean, they use 5.56x45mm bullets. I think I might have them walk in at the same 4-2 as an assault rifle and have better auto-fire characteristics (HV options, bipods, belt feeds).

But of course, some things don't need to be updated. We call magazines "clips" because that's what people call them, even though that terminology is technically incorrect.

-Username17

[Lokathor]

How high up can the damage scale thing be scaled?

If you wanted to have an RPG like DnD where higher level things are tougher, and you also sometimes fight more and more huge foes (more hit boxes for bigger creatures is actually kinda okay, right?), can you keep adding hit boxes, attack, and soak; while you also keep scaling up the number of damage boxes per wound level (1,3,6,10,15,21,...) and it all kinda figures itself out?

[TheFlatline]

The 'deliberate tumble' thing is a myth. All rifle bullets will do a 180 flip after hitting something solid (a tree branch, your ribs, whatever) due to the fact that the are comparatively long and thin, and... you know... spinning. This isn't a design feature by any means, though it is useful for increasing wound trauma, it actually hinders accuracy in places with lots of little shit in the way (like brush, chickenwire fencing and so forth).

Similarly, lots of high velocity bullets fragment. This, like tumbling, is generally not deliberate, but can be useful in expanding wound trauma, at the expense of depth (which, as I was discussing with Frank a post ago, is useful to ensure you go deep enough into the meat to hit vital organs). Fragments, being very light, tend to shed velocity much quicker, meaning they don't penetrate as deep as an intact bullet.

As an interesting tidbit: Military rounds tend to be made of steel rather than copper jacketed lead, for cost reasons. They are lighter, which I think we can safely say is a neutral factor in battlefield performance (higher velocities offset lack of mass for inertia purposes, etc...), but more importantly they don't mushroom and deform the way a soft slug would. This is important, because mushrooming leads to increased damage, and thus lethality. Milspec rounds are actually LESS DANGEROUS than civilian rounds. There was a school shooting in... California I believe, where an adult shot up a pre-school yard, hitting 32 people (one adult) but only killing one child. His weapon of choice was the AK-47, but the milspec bullets passed straight through the children with comparatively little harm.

Interestingly, I did discover that a 'geek fallacy' regarding shotguns with obscene damage is actually supported by the statistics from the FBI, where combat injuries from shotguns have something approaching a 90% fatality rate, by far surpassing every other small arm used.

Fair enough, and I was sort of saying the same thing about the tumble that you were, but in a mucky, roundabout way.

Didn't know about the steel core rounds though. That's interesting.

I'm not surprised about shotguns. Combat shotguns especially can be nasty. 00 buck fires something like 9 .33 inch pellets. Nasty stuff I wouldn't want to be on the other end of.

If memory serves, birdshot isn't that great of a stopper though. At point blank range it probably will do pretty well though (and make a mess).

They're relatively short range though. Thing is, most combat takes place within their effective range, so that's alright.

[Username17]

Hit boxes don't scale. You have 10 boxes, the tank has 10 boxes. And four hits separates dropping someone and bouncing. So if you have a gun that does 8 damage, it will one-shot drop something tough enough to bounce a heavy pistol without noticeable damage.

So a weapon at 12 damage is in serious "fuck you" territory. Like, that'll blow up the things that laugh at the things that are used to blow up the things that laugh at metahuman scale weaponry.

-Username17

[Sir Neil]

Most Assault Rifles in SR are select-fire - SA/BF/FA. That seems very plausible to me as a thing that future armed forces would do.

Works for me.

Differentiating a light machine gun from an assault rifle is fairly important but also difficult. I mean, they use 5.56x45mm bullets. I think I might have them walk in at the same 4-2 as an assault rifle and have better auto-fire characteristics (HV options, bipods, belt feeds).

Also recoil compensation and increased range.

[Spike]

Differentiating a light machine gun from an assault rifle is fairly important but also difficult. I mean, they use 5.56x45mm bullets. I think I might have them walk in at the same 4-2 as an assault rifle and have better auto-fire characteristics (HV options, bipods, belt feeds).

But of course, some things don't need to be updated. We call magazines "clips" because that's what people call them, even though that terminology is technically incorrect.

-Username17

A M249 SAW doesn't ballisticaly out perform the M16/M4 family. Performance wise it carries a lot more ammunition, has a heavier barrel (absorbs more heat for better sustained fire), and since its about half again as heavy it is a lot more stable even under sustained fire.

So... yeah, you're on the right track.

Now, an M60, firing the heavier 7.62mm bullet is a different beast. The effective engagement range is something like 3 times that of the M16 (1600 meters, where the M16 can be used out to 600 meters, but is more practical at half that). Of course the M60 weighs more than double the M249 and is about a foot longer, and unlike the SAW is not really usable while standing (Unless your name is John Rambo, then you use two...). For armies, standing while shooting isn't really a consideration, but for Shadowrunners and action movie stars...well...

[RiotGearEpsilon]

Shadowrunners who fire heavy machineguns are likely going to have augmented strength, either due to cybernetic enhancement, mystic augmentation, or both. So it's completely reasonable to be absolute hardasses about how strong you have to be to fire an LMG/HMG standing up without getting knocked on your ass, because this is a setting where trolls with titanium bones exist, and giving said trolls a reason to leverage their immense strength and mass to use big guns (as opposed to, say, bows and arrows) is cool.

Duke Nukem is a Troll Adept with an M60 in each hand and a huge cigar woven with mystic herbs.

[Ferret]

So I jotted down some notes while I read the thread...I hope I can make this coherent.

I like the idea of damage rating by caliber. To make it really work, though, I'd have the damage code modified by the platform the caliber is used in. You can further tweak things by adding some of the traditional modifications to the platform.

Let's trot out a couple of examples:

Shadowrunners like their big ass sidearms, so let's look at something hillarious like a modern day PDW sized 5.56; something like an SBR'ed sigarms 556 or something.

We give 5.56 ammo a damage code of say 4. This requires a minimum platform of Rifle, which gives it a +1 damage code. Because this is a Rifle platform, we know that it's Rifle sized, but we want to trenchcoat it so we apply the No Stock (+1 STR minimum, + recoil, -full auto capability) and Short Barrel (+better concealment category, -1 damage code).


We end up with a PDW/heavy pistol sized weapon that's now able to be concealed under a jacket or coat, deals 4 damage, has Rifle-based burst and autofire scores. (modified by the changes we made).

Conversely, if we want to make a 'sniper' rifle, we could do the following:

Take our same ammo class, for consistency's sake.

Ammo: 5.56 (4 Damage, Recoil A, platform: Rifle)
Platform: Battle Rifle (Size: rifle, Damage:+1 Burst X, Auto 2X, Conceal: <somescore>, Recoil: Y, Range: 300m)
Modifications:
- Long Barrel ( + accuracy, +25% range)
- Bipod ( + accuracy, -conceal)
- Optic
- (+ accuracy, +Thermo, +starlight)

etc etc etc

I feel like this would be pretty flexible, particularly in allowing for lots of mods to platform and caliber. I'm torn on whether or not to stop giving specific weapon descriptions and just letting everyone 'build' their own guns from scratch, though. I'd probably hardcode the basics and just release the mods for players. Use this as the background to build all the weapons, maybe?

As far as battle/assault rifle/LMG splits, I see it as the following:

Assault rifle: medium caliber (~ 5.56), range around 300 meters; generally damage code 4-5 before modifications. Burst fire

Battle Rifle: Heavy Caliber (~ .308 ) range around 800 meters. Damage code 5-6 before modifications. Burst or Autofire-with-short-duration

*MG: Heavy caliber, +++++ duration for sustained autofire fire, +++++ammunition capacity. Range dictated by barrel length.

[RobbyPants]

As an interesting tidbit: Military rounds tend to be made of steel rather than copper jacketed lead, for cost reasons. They are lighter, which I think we can safely say is a neutral factor in battlefield performance (higher velocities offset lack of mass for inertia purposes, etc...), but more importantly they don't mushroom and deform the way a soft slug would. This is important, because mushrooming leads to increased damage, and thus lethality. Milspec rounds are actually LESS DANGEROUS than civilian rounds. There was a school shooting in... California I believe, where an adult shot up a pre-school yard, hitting 32 people (one adult) but only killing one child. His weapon of choice was the AK-47, but the milspec bullets passed straight through the children with comparatively little harm.

This is probably a bit of a tangent, but my understanding is that those types of rounds fare better against armor (in that they can penetrate it), but they have less stopping power because a through-shot will put less energy into the target. It will leave a hole in them all the way through, but less energy is transfered to them. I don't know how you'd represent that abstractly in terms of "damage". I always figured that it was better to have a bullet go all the way through rather than mushroom or fragment inside, assuming no organs are hit in either case.

I seem to remember seeing some 3rd party d20 modern stuff that had hollow points and other fragmenting rounds do something like +2 damage and -2 to hit against armored opponents, and AP rounds would get +2 to hit against armored opponents but do -2 damage regardless. Is that the sort of detail you'd want to get into in this system?

[Ferret]

I seem to remember seeing some 3rd party d20 modern stuff that had hollow points and other fragmenting rounds do something like +2 damage and -2 to hit against armored opponents, and AP rounds would get +2 to hit against armored opponents but do -2 damage regardless. Is that the sort of detail you'd want to get into in this system?

Yeah, I wonder if that would be below the fuzz line of the system. But then, if you're looking at the kind of idea I posited above, that just means mods for ammo; Military/AP rounds vs frangible or expanding; you could also get into saboted/jacketed bullets, fragment, incendiary, tracer, etc all as available mods to the ammo package.

[Spike]

As an interesting tidbit: Military rounds tend to be made of steel rather than copper jacketed lead, for cost reasons. They are lighter, which I think we can safely say is a neutral factor in battlefield performance (higher velocities offset lack of mass for inertia purposes, etc...), but more importantly they don't mushroom and deform the way a soft slug would. This is important, because mushrooming leads to increased damage, and thus lethality. Milspec rounds are actually LESS DANGEROUS than civilian rounds. There was a school shooting in... California I believe, where an adult shot up a pre-school yard, hitting 32 people (one adult) but only killing one child. His weapon of choice was the AK-47, but the milspec bullets passed straight through the children with comparatively little harm.

This is probably a bit of a tangent, but my understanding is that those types of rounds fare better against armor (in that they can penetrate it), but they have less stopping power because a through-shot will put less energy into the target. It will leave a hole in them all the way through, but less energy is transfered to them. I don't know how you'd represent that abstractly in terms of "damage". I always figured that it was better to have a bullet go all the way through rather than mushroom or fragment inside, assuming no organs are hit in either case.

Certainly a lack of deformation will aid in penetration, but against modern armors you really need something heavier and harder than the cheap steel. Tungsten is popular for this, I believe.

Blow through, or overpenetration, isn't really useful from a damage dealing perspective... once you've accounted for hitting arms first as noted earlier. Even if you buy the 'energy transfer model'... which I don't based on my readings (I am not a doctor, but the kinetic energy of a small arms slug is insubstantial from a damaging aspect)... overpenetration would actually take energy with the leaving projectile. That energy would be lost. This is a real debate in the world of ballistic wound trauma studies, however. Tissue disruption is the killer, and mushrooming and fragmentation do increase disruption dramatically. Consider that a 9mm hollowpoint will expand to 20mm easily, doubling the size of the hole it punches through the target. Logically, bigger holes hurt more, right?

[RobbyPants]

Yeah. I've never played Shadowrun, let alone read much of Frank's Alt.War stuff, but this thread jumped out at me. I'm not sure exactly how much detail he wants, or what's even appropriate.

Hell, I've never played d20 modern either, but I liked that book. I just find the topic interesting as hell.

[Sir Neil]

A light machine gun can be fired in bursts from the hip fairly easily by trained soldiers. I have seen video of a medium machine gun (the 7.62 M240b, not the retired M60) fired from the shoulder in bursts into a printer that had failed the shooter for the last time.

This is how I'd stat out the weapon classes
AR: 4, 300m range
BR: 5, 800m range. Sniper rifles would be represented by this class, too.
LMG 4, 800m
MMG 5 1800m
HMG 6 2000m

As far as explosives mentioned in the OP, I think the simple +/- 1 should be enough.

[sabs]

How do you explain the Sniper Rifle record which is currently a double shot for 2400 m each, killing 2 men.

If you put the Sniper Rifle at 800m. Modern day sniper rifles have an extreme range of much higher than 800m.