Weaponry in Alt.War

[RiotGearEpsilon]

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

Extreme-range shots probably need slightly different rules than normal beyond-optimal-range rules anyway.

[sabs]

it's true.. I'm not sure agility+longarms really reflects what's appropriate for a sniper shot.

willpower+longarms might be better

[Ferret]

Sniper rifle gets a Long Barrel mod, giving a base range of 1000 meters.

Range penalties kick in past that, but 2.5 categories worth of penalties should appropriately designate a world record shot, no?

[kzt]

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.

This is true for a .22LR, (which fires a .223 caliber bullet) but not true for the .223 bullet fired out of an M16.

The size of the hole on the end of the barrel isn't the same as the caliber.

A 5.56mm Nato round is hugely more deadly than a .22 short.
A .45-70 rifle round is preposterously more deadly than a .45 ACP round.
A .32 ACP is larger in diameter than a .30 cal rifle round, but the .30 cal rifle round is hugely more deadly than a .32 ACP.

Rifle bullets are longer, much heavier and have vastly larger powder charges and operate at much higher pressure than the same caliber pistol round. A short barreled AK is enormously more deadly than a .32 ACP pistol or a 9mm SMG shooting pistol caliber rounds.

[kzt]

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?

Most of the "battle rifles" sights suck, FALs were the only one that could actually hit at 600 meters according to some tests. The bullets are effective far past that. Often the overall quality/design of the rifle limited the accuracy even if you put a scope on it.

And people do 1000 yard shooting with 5.56mm rifles. I've met some.

[kzt]

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.

An LMG and a HMG are totally different beast, it's like saying a chihuahua and a tigers are both predators. An average person with training CAN shoot an LMG standing up without any problem. Extremely few people can CARRY a HMG and nobody can fire it. The recoil is crazy huge.

[kzt]

If you are going to start from scratch (more or less) my first suggestion is to make long-arms a LOT more deadly than pistols. Going to long guns should be a serious escalation in force and lethality, and machine guns (not automatic rifles, but belt fed MGs) another level.

Generally, pistols suck as weapons. Reducing the light pistol to 2, the pistol to 3 and getting rid of the heavy pistol would help. ARs should be as effective as 2-3 pistol hits, so say 6. HMG bullets should do enough damage to kill an average person without armor, so 10-12. Shotguns against people without armor should result in people dropping with each hit.

[Spike]

Well, technically we are talking about a whole 'nother beast in HMGs. That's your tripod or pintle mounted .50 BMG. The barrel alone weighs as much as an M60 (23 lbs vs 27 lbs, if memory serves). Even if a troll can lug one around as a sidearm, the design is based purely on being fired from a mount... the cost to put a grip and proper trigger would be prohibitive (though, compared to what the damn gun costs... never mind the ammo...)

Recoil is a problem, even for a troll. You can see ripples in the ground in front of a Ma Deuce firing, and after even a reasonably short sustained fire, the front tripod leg tends to need to be dug out of even hard packed ground to keep the entire system from dipping.

But the bigger problem is heat. I'll ignore the 'six feet long and horribly unbalanced', as... well... Troll. But last I checked Trolls aren't fireproof. I've seen hot barrels ignite grass and careless people get 3rd degree burns.

Mechanical problems can be assumed to be overcome by purpose designing. The Browning 50 was designed as a mounted system, so it would be a problem as a 'sidearm' regardless of size or strength of the user. The OTHER problems, however, are inherent to the fact that you are tossing an ounce and a half of metal hard enough to punch through sheet steel at ranges of a mile or more, and doing it a lot.

[Sir Neil]

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

I explain it as a highly skilled soldier with Edge dice and really good rolls overcoming the "beyond effective range" penalties.

I'm using Wikipedia for gun range estimates, since HQ tells us that the actual capabilities of our systems are classified.

[Username17]

In the world of 2073, there have been cybernetic trolls who could lift and throw a motorcycle for thirty years. So, think of all the weapons development that has been done since Carter was president, and now imagine a comparable amount of research in a world in which some soldiers are capable of personally carrying and firing weapons that weigh a hundred kilograms.

HMGs with handles and a sling would totally happen.

-Username17

[Spike]

Oh, sure. I'm just pointing out technical problems that have to be addressed. I mean, I've carried a Ma Deuce with the barrel a few times, and I'm no troll, so I've got no problems with them lugging it around... and from there its a short-ish step to shooting the damn thing.

Like: here are the real life obstacles you have to overcome, even if you are ten feet tall and can throw rebar harder than anti-tank shells...

Speaking of technical problems: HMG rounds are, in terms of size and weight, knives. People don't seem to think of that, but ammunition gets heavy fast. Don't get me wrong, I love running around Fallout New Vegas with thousands and thousands of bullets and hundreds of missiles, but realistically, even a troll isn't going to be carrying more than a couple hundred belted rounds for his HMG (speaking of: The bigger the gun the less rapidly they tend to shoot. I tend to find conversations about cyclic rates glaze over the eyes of even gun nuts, so I'll put it in 'real world feel'.. the 50BMG tends to fire around every half second or so, the Mk 19 AGL fires closer to every second or so, maybe a bit under. Now, I haven't actually fired one in over a decade, so I could be off a bit here. I'd say the M249 (LMG) fires closer to 7-10 rounds a second, or about 4-5 times faster than the M2 (HMG). )

Edit::: Just wanted to add, now that I've had a moment to look it up, that a typical HMG cartridge weighs just over a quarter pound. Which means my unstated eyeball estimate for a 100 round belt (20 lbs) wasn't too far off the mark. Now, a 200 lb belt, weighing in the vicinity of 55 lbs or so (to account for the 'more than' part and the weight of the links) isn't going to be a back breaker for a troll, even when combined with a 100 lb gun.

However, they are also quite large. An ammo box for a 50 round belt is a 12x6x8 inch box (Best guess). If he plans to carry more than 100 rounds he is also going to want a spare barrel... though enough techno-babble could hand wave this away... Water and oil cooling shrouds become arguably practical again, and advanced ceramics would absorb less heat per shot and would have a higher melting point... though once they got hot they'd stay hot longer, and of course they might crack long before they melted.... maybe we should just waive heat considerations?

My area of expertise, however, is the mechanical aspects, so someone with more (or fresher... I'm a decade out of practice on the big guns) range experience might have more accurate assessments.

[Username17]

SMGs and Machine Pistols. Those are actually the same thing. But SR has always had the two separate designations. The SR Machine Pistol really does appear to be exclusively stuff that is basically a pistol with a high rate of fire. So I'm comfortable having put Machine Pistols back into the Pistols category.

But the question is: what should the damage code be? The SR4 damage code is basically a little worse than a heavy pistol. I could see the argument for anything from a little better than a heavy pistol to basically just a light pistol with a better range.

-Username17

[sabs]

The Scorpion blurs the line between the Machine Pistol and the SMG.

I would think that a Machine Pistol's power should not be that it does more damage. It should be that it can do BF, and has a bigger clip. Heck, A Machine Pistol probably shouldn't be able to do SA at all, unless it has an electronic trigger and some other fancy dohikyes.

DV 3 as the base seems completely reasonable.
On average it would give the weapon a DV of 5 or 6 with burst fire.

[kzt]

The Scorpion blurs the line between the Machine Pistol and the SMG.

It fires a .32 acp bullet. It sucks quite a lot. It's a light pistol in SR terms. It's cool looking gun and all, but it's actually terrible.

Essentially a machine pistol is a semi-auto pistol with the sear filed. It does EXACTLY the same damage a a pistol of the same caliber firing on full auto.

[kzt]

But the question is: what should the damage code be? The SR4 damage code is basically a little worse than a heavy pistol. I could see the argument for anything from a little better than a heavy pistol to basically just a light pistol with a better range.

I'd suggest going to a light pistol with a 2 and pistol with a 3. And no heavy pistol, much less one that just as effective as an assault rifle; that always been seriously dumb.

[Lokathor]

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

Doesn't that get really really swingy though once you get into piles of 20 and 25 dice? I'm looking for something less swingy for a computer game I'm working on. The impossibility of rolling 25 dice regularly at the upper end isn't a problem, but the results of "you aren't affected or you die instantly" at the upper end are a problem. For something like that, should I just stick to SR4's totally linear damage scale?

[Vebyast]

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

Actually, for about 35 years the world record sniper kill was held by a scoped Browning M2 HMG. The recent world records in Afghanistan, which edge out that record by less than 10%, are mostly thanks to calmer air, better visibility, handheld gunnery computers, and pure luck. I figure that sniper rifles should probably fall under HMG ranges and damages, since these days they're mechanically just HMGs with single-shot or semiautomatic actions and less cooling.

(note: I haven't read the rules in question. There may be skill-based effects that I can't see.)

[Spike]

Wasn't that new record set with the 50 BMG round? So we are talking, essentially the same bullet and barrel length with only differences in the reciever platform.

[Vebyast]

Two of the new records were set with .50 BMG, but the longest (by 40 yards out of 2400) was set with a .338 magnum round specially developed for long-range sniping. In the case of the .50 BMG rounds, the ballistics are more or less the same; the rifling is different, some guns have muzzle brakes, and guns almost always have different recoil characteristics, but the bullets all have roughly the same energy and go about the same speed.

[CatharzGodfoot]

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

Doesn't that get really really swingy though once you get into piles of 20 and 25 dice? I'm looking for something less swingy for a computer game I'm working on. The impossibility of rolling 25 dice regularly at the upper end isn't a problem, but the results of "you aren't affected or you die instantly" at the upper end are a problem. For something like that, should I just stick to SR4's totally linear damage scale?

Don't use simulated dice in a computer game. Simulate what the dice are trying to approximate.

[kzt]

If a game mechanic obviously doesn't work in a fairly common situation perhaps the mechanic needs to be fixed rather then tiptoed around.?

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

Doesn't that get really really swingy though once you get into piles of 20 and 25 dice? I'm looking for something less swingy for a computer game I'm working on. The impossibility of rolling 25 dice regularly at the upper end isn't a problem, but the results of "you aren't affected or you die instantly" at the upper end are a problem. For something like that, should I just stick to SR4's totally linear damage scale?

[Username17]

Doesn't that get really really swingy though once you get into piles of 20 and 25 dice? I'm looking for something less swingy for a computer game I'm working on. The impossibility of rolling 25 dice regularly at the upper end isn't a problem, but the results of "you aren't affected or you die instantly" at the upper end are a problem. For something like that, should I just stick to SR4's totally linear damage scale?

If you were doing a computer game, you'd probably "roll" a fixed number of dice that gave the swinginess you wanted and then have fixed numbers of hits added or subtracted from that.

That's pretty close to what I'm doing anyway with the Hardened Armor and Weapon Damage rules. The attacker gets fixed hits on every attack from the weapon, and at the high end the defender gets fixed hits on every attack from hardened armor. The number of dice you roll doesn't actually get to 20.

SR4's damage scale falls apart completely at the high end. That's actually why we're going to a proportional damage system.

-Username17

[Sir Neil]

I would think that a Machine Pistol's power should not be that it does more damage. It should be that it can do BF, and has a bigger clip.

I agree with sabs here. SA should still be available, though.

[fectin]

Okay, so for turning a crew served/tripod mounted Machine Gun (of whatever flavor you prefer) into a personal firearm, you basically need a dedicated cooling system, a way to carry lots of ammo, and enough mass/traction that you can stand still. You also need a much bulkier gun to accommodate that.

So basically, Machine Guns turn into Heavy Bolters, and your trolls end up looking like Space Marines, equipment-wise. Or like Fawkes from Fallout 3, if you prefer. Either way, it's always going to be specifically designed for that, and probably much more expensive, and it will be explicitly a capitolized Bad Idea to try to use an unmodified version as a personal weapon.

That could set up some cool scenarios though, where if you do manage to take down an armored troll, you suddenly have your very own personal emplacement.

[Spike]

I fully endorse this idea.