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Posted by: FuelDrop Sep 16 2013, 12:53 AM

Ok, I'm doing a bit of a thought experiment here.

100 kg of commercial explosives will set you back 10 grand. Not a minor investment. if detonated together this much boom deals 50P + 10P per hit on demolitions, with -2 armour penetration.

If formed into a shaped charge, this attack is funneled into a 90 degree arc, losing 1 point of damage per meter.

Let us assume that the group demolition expert has 12 dice in demolitions, and the group face has 12 dice in leadership. Leadership for teamwork gives an average of 4 extra dice to the demoman, giving him a dicepool of 16. 16 dice averages 5.3 hits, which we'll round down to 5 for this exercise.

That gives us a 90 degree cone that deals 100 damage, -1 per meter.

So how big is 100 kg of commercial explosives?

well, for the sake of argument let's say that commercial explosives are 1.5 times the density of water. water at 4 degrees Celsius takes up 1 cubic meter per 1,000 kg. That means that 100 kg of water takes up approximately 1/10th of a cubic meter. Now by our logic 1 cubic meter of explosives will weigh 1,500 kg. therefore, 100 kg will take up 1/15 of a cubic meter, or a slab 1m long, 1 m wide and 67mm high. In cube form, you're looking at a block about 40.5 cm on a side (damn, my math skills are rusty).

That's not really that big. You can easily fit that in the boot of your car. As a shaped charge it will make the day bad for anyone behind you without killing your car or you (In theory...), so it might be workable for getting rid of pursuit (and the street. with this kind of boom, expect civilian casualties).

So, thoughts?

Posted by: Slithery D Sep 16 2013, 01:22 AM

I don't agree that your car will be unscathed and driveable, but it's reasonable as a park and walk away area weapon. When I was in Iraq 300-400lb of home made explosives car bomb fit in the truck and handily knocked people on their ass 100m away, flopping around from having the air pushed out of their lungs. Some slow moving but largish sheet metal shrapnel traveled farther than that, and the engine block went about 30m. That was cheap, low quality shit presumably without any packing and no special shrapnel added in.

Posted by: FuelDrop Sep 16 2013, 01:26 AM

I was basing it on the shaped charge rules in the core book. I agree that if we bring realism in then that kind of boom won't leave the car in any condition that can be considered 'Driveable'.

Posted by: Angelone Sep 16 2013, 01:27 AM

I'll second that car bombs cause a hell of a lot of damage. You find pieces very far away.

Posted by: Dolanar Sep 16 2013, 01:31 AM

the obvious answer is a space in the trunk that deposits little blocks of explosives behind you as you speed off away from the explosion.

Posted by: Slithery D Sep 16 2013, 01:43 AM

Rigger 5 will feature the Ares Spyhunter with standard oil slicks and tire shredders.

Posted by: KarmaInferno Sep 16 2013, 02:02 AM

My current Missions character has nice amounts of Demolitions dice for a reason.

Also, it is amazing what you can achieve with explosives and an earth elemental to help you place them at strategic points under a structure.

"We need you to make sure this facility is delayed as much as possible from opening. We don't care too much how you do it."

<in thick Hollywood-style Russian accent> "Is no problem. You pay on time, da?"



-k

Posted by: xsansara Sep 16 2013, 07:03 AM

For a shaped charge, you need something to shape it which that can withstand the blast. If you can find a material that soaks 50P+ damage then go ahead. Anyway, 50P should make a sizable crater on the street. No one will follow you because they would have to find a new road first.

If you just want to make a roadblock, I think there are cheaper and less newsworthy ways, e.g. spikes, a couple of grenades or equivalent explosives. And also you won't be going to prison for as long as a suspected terrorist. And you will probably be able to drive away in a more or less intact car.

Still, you could use it to blast away a dragon, a tank, or something similar.

Just on a sidenote: I wonder why the rulewriters (all editions) are so allergic to high DPs and so on and then go ahead and put in something like explosives with potentially insane amounts of damage. It is like re-inventing rock, paper, scissors and then putting in "the bomb" which always wins.

Posted by: Sendaz Sep 16 2013, 08:35 AM

Been asking myself that myself for years. It's like Mind Control, as it is written has a huge potential, so much so most tables put their own brakes on to try to mitigate the worst cases.

The 'Can't coerce someone to eat their own gun or other obviously self-destructive actions' is common and does make some sense, or at least should provide bonuses to resist.

Explosives should be powerful, but again the potential is so great that it can come down to who uses it first in some situations with little room to maneuverer.

A good GM will of course work in situations where using a grenade would be a bad idea, but once your out in the clear it can be open season on either side.

I honestly believe the Devs write this all in to provide the ability to cater to all sorts, then we as players are expected to go out and tweak it to taste for our campaign.

The problem is new players won't understand the need to tweak and rules lawyers will beat them over the head chanting RAW is GOD, which in most games is fine, but there is a lot of stuff in this edition that seems to require previous experience with the game to even have a concept of the impact some of the things are having before having a party walk into a TPK and group frustration.

Yes, there are snippets scattered through the book saying it's okay to change, but it still seems to imply that it should work as written when there are clearly parts that I would question that belief and that tweaking is almost mandatory.

Posted by: xsansara Sep 16 2013, 09:28 AM

True... Mind Control is implicitly or explicitly houseruled on all tables I have ever played and using explosives as weapons rather than as plot devices is explicitly or implicitly discouraged as well. I usually use this as a reason for people to be less paranoid about turning on wi-fi. After all, a mage could just Mind Control them, and that would be much worse than a couple of bricked or taken-over devices.



Well, I doubt they put that much thought into the whole thing. I have some experience on writing rule books myself and it devilishly hard to get everything consistent and balanced with itself AND with popular notions on how the real world works (AND on an acceptable amount of pages). Reflexively, you tend to work on one scenario in your head, but that the same mechanism can be exploited for another scenario is really hard to see. Plus, the real world is seriously unbalanced and scales in a weird way. You can fly a jumbo jet into a sky scraper doing tons of damage, with only a few dots in Intimidation and Pilot Aircraft as a pre-requisite. You can take over the Aztec empire with a couple of horses and swords, but fail to conquer Vietnam with much better equipment and many more people. Try to put that in a rule book that has some ambition towards being balanced. Instead, you overthink the D&D-case, developing intricate balancing schemes, checks and balances. And then rule everything else on real experiences, e.g. car crashs, falls, explosives... which easily goes out of proportion. The problem is here that explosions are an important element in modern urban warfare and not ruling them under the same set of scrutiny as guns and laser blades seems extraordinarily weird.

In one of my game system, I ruled that all weapons, etc. do exactly one point of damage per attack for simplicity. Then a player overran the Zombie with a car. I was just about to describe the splatter, when the players pointed out that per RAW a car is a weapon and will only do one damage. I was asking them about suspension of disbelief later, a player replied that if "being overrun by a car does more damage than a machine gun, tanks would not bother will installing one." Once he had accepted that all weapons only did one point of damage, accepting that a car was exactly like that was easy.

Posted by: toturi Sep 16 2013, 09:35 AM

RAW is God and you come dangerously close to heresy.

Posted by: Epicedion Sep 16 2013, 09:40 AM

It's an edge case, and RPGs always have issues with edge cases. The logical consequence of such a bomb would be the total destruction of the vehicle it's mounted on. To accurately model what would really happen takes nonlinear modeling, though, and that's outside the scope of a game.

Shadowrun has explosive rules that generally work for common cases, but is too simplistic to cover everything. At a certain point you just have to rely on logical assumptions and fiat rulings to get by. It's not a flaw, just the way games ultimately have to be.

Posted by: FuelDrop Sep 16 2013, 11:36 AM

Let us extend this thought exercise. What is the most damaging 1-shot vehicle-mounted cannon we can design using commercial explosives, the demolition rules, the structure rules, and a length of steel pipe sealed on one end.

Now let us assume that our steel pipe is equivalent to a heavy structural material. That gives it 12 structure and armour 20. For the sake of easy maths, let us also assume that the steel is buying hits to soak. Also, since the intent is for the steel to channel the blast rather than be demolished let us rule that the steel is not at half armour as most of the blast is taking the path of least resistance. That means that the Steel pipe is staging down damage by (12+20-2[ap]=30 dice/4[buying hits]=) 7 points. We only need one point of structure remaining after the blast to contain it, meaning our maximum damage for this 1-shot-wonder is 18. Ironically, if the damage is merely 17 or less then the explosive fails to punch through the armour and is reduced to stun, which structures ignore.

So...
1 kg of our explosive deals 5+net hits damage. We need more boom.
4 kg deals 10+(2Xnet hits) damage.

a competent demolition man can reliably get 3-4 hits, or if his dicepool is really high he can just buy hits. For the sake of this let's say he gets 3.

4 kg of explosives (400 nuyen worth, plus a remote detonator for 75 more) plus some high strength steel pipe (don't skimp out here) and some REALLY good welding (again, don't be cheap here) defeats the disposable part but gives us a cannon that can be bolted onto a car fairly easily, and when fired hits everything in a 90 degree arc for 16P -1/m at AP -2.

Now the obvious improvement here is simply replacing the explosives with an explosive grenade, which removes all that annoying mucking about with the demolition skill at the cost of doubling the damage dropoff.

So, let's scale up. Now as far as I can tell there's no rule saying that you can't cast an armour spell on a length of steel pipe. You have to get past object resistance, yes, but we're not exactly talking complex electronics here. So we cast the spell at, oh, let's call it force 5. that's 3 points of drain, for those keeping score. Magic 6, skill 6, specialization in manipulating +2, spellcasting focus 4 and an appropriate mentor spirit gives us a healthy 20 dice base. let's give our steel object resistance 6, and assume both mage and object are buying hits. mage gets 5, less the steel's 1 gives us 4 net hits.

That gives 4 points of extra armour.

So, let's up the explosives to 9 kilograms. we're looking at 15 damage, +3 per net hit on demolitions. Now assuming that our demolitionist can voluntarily limit the amount of extra damage he causes (possibly a bit of an assumption, but not an entirely unreasonable one), he now needs a mere 2 net hits to push this load to the limit of what it can safely contain: 21p base damage.

At this point our cannon is able to lay out damage comparable to an explosive rocket, as a shaped charge, for a bit under half the price and a lot under half the availability.

I am really quite happy with this. A couple of fairly reasonable rulings are required to make it work, but that's true of all great enterprises in games.

Now we run into a slight problem. I cannot leave well enough alone.

See, we have this cannon that deals a very hefty amount of damage to any poor sod in front of it. However, it's currently doing so merely via shockwave. That's not good enough. Now those of you at home playing the FuelDrop drinking game should get ready to take a shot.

I say we add napalm!

Why settle for killing your foes with a big-ass home-made cannon that requires a powerful mage to maintain its structural integrity when that same cannon can also set them on fire?

Posted by: xsansara Sep 16 2013, 12:24 PM

Actually, I am amazed how close you get to actual guns and grenades with a completely different rule set.

I take everything back and announce the demolition and structure rules as being consistent with the rest of the rules. Kudos!

Even the 100 kg car bomb is actually making sense, just that it isn't a makeshift gun, but a ... 10 grand car bomb. As such able to kill almost everyone within 30m and deal hurt within 50m (the barrier being the car and the street). More, if you roll well. I wish they had spend maybe 2 more sentences on it and put it with the section on Structure and Barriers, instead of hiding it in the Equipment section.

Posted by: FuelDrop Sep 17 2013, 03:00 AM

Hmmm... could you make a hand cannon for trolls that just shoots a cone of undodgeable damage for a few meters? Use your demolition skill in place of close combat! also, low agility doesn't matter at all.