What's RAW again?

Rules as written.

Aha! Thanks. One of these days, someone should make a sticky with all the acronyms and jargon used around here.

Bite your tongue, then all the Newbs would understand us and we wouldn't be l33t anymore.

Pah, I say.

When my father hunted grizzly bear in Alaska, he found himself just under 200 yards from a 8 foot tall, 8 foot armspan grizzly, while armed with a .338 Win Mag bolt-action rifle that SR4 would likely classify as one of the high-DV "sport rifles." He aimed his shot into the armpit of the animal from the side, and fired. His hunting partner and spotter immediately told him to "keep shooting keep shooting keep shooting..."

He ran through the 4 other rounds he had in the rifle, and hand-chambered and fired two more before the grizzly fell about 60 yards from him, dead. Grizzlies can move over 30 miles an hour... those seven shots were fired in under 15 seconds.

While they were skinning and taking the meat from the bear, my father (a vascular surgeon by trade) examined the internal organs to figure out why his first shot hadn't killed the animal... and found, in fact, that it had.

The six rounds he fired after that first, while they struck and did noticeable amounts of damage, didn't hit it in places that would kill in a short period of time. That first shot entered exactly where he'd put it, under the armpit from the side, went between two ribs, fragmented, and shredded the top of both lungs, the heart, and most of the upper aortic artery, essentially destroying the bear's ability to feed fresh oxygen to it's blood, and to pump blood to it's body and brain. Despite essentially having it's entire cardiovascular system shut down, the bear was able to rush over a hundred yards towards it's attacker before shock and/or brain hypoxia caught up with it, and it died.

Shadowrun 4's damage system is abstracted from reality, but pretty functional in a gameplay environment. Major hemorrhages (like those associated with massive trauma to the femoral or carotid arteries) can be fatal in very short order in the field, but proper application of hemorrhage control and IV fluids can stabilize these injuries so that a patient can make it to the hospital, and hopefully survive the day... one possible interpretation of the Hand of God rule. A wound doesn't have to be immediately lethal (grey matter all over the parking lot, for example) to kill you in very, very short order... patients who manage to get a dissected aorta during a rollover car accident promptly dump a lethal amount of their blood into their thoracic cavity and die. It's not instantaneous, by any means... but when your heart is pumping directly into a large, useless space, unconciousness and death are only seconds or minutes away.

an interesting development in first response medicine is that doctors are finding that the sudden jolt from a defibulator is just as likely to kill you as it is to save you. its much easier to put someone on ice, and slowly work thier heart back into motion later. in less than a decade we should start to see EMTs running around with cryo-injectors instead of AEDs. in shadowrun, i'd suspect that technology would have progressed enough that a single shot could inject a quick hibernation & nanostabilizer mix into the wounded person, and with a little bit of first aid (plug up major wounds, CPR) all but instantly fatal wounds could be survivable.

Shrike30 wins this thread.

In response to Shrike, on a subject related to his post & unrelated to this thread:

The US changed it's standard issue firearms for a higher caliber because of the Filipino warriors (users and creators of Arnis De Mano, Kali, Escrima, etc). I forget which war. The lower caliber weapons were sufficient to kill the warriors before they reached the soldiers, but not capable of stopping the warrior from reaching the soldier and killing him as well, despite already being dead. The higher caliber was selected for it's ability to knock a target down, stopping the charge.

i suspect either option is built into the medikit of 2070 (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

That was the plan. I'm told that it didn't really help much, as the .45 wasn't really that much more effective than the .38 in stopping drug crazed fanatics. But that isn't want the mythology says and all...

And the physics behind "knock down" are clearly not there. If you can shoot the gun without getting knocked on your ass how is it going to knock down someone? Particularly if they are rushing you. It's all doing enough damage that you convince their body to shut down or otherwise convincing their mind that they need to stop attacking you.

Pistols of any reasonable caliber are really pretty ineffectual tools for personal self-defense, but they are much more convenient to carry around when you are not expecting a fight than a 12 gauge pump shotgun.

never mind...

"A pistol is what you use to fight your way back to the rifle you never should have left in the first place" as the saying goes...

Daier Mune: Where did you read about this? It doesn't seem to me that AEDs are going anywhere any time soon, but I'm curious.

And Shrike30 did a great job explaining sudden traumatic death. The only think I would add is the idea of decompensation. The body has some pretty amazing mechanisms to compensate for loss of blood, hypoxia, etc. but usually when people die suddenly from trauma its because those mechanisms either cease to function (decompensation) or actively contribute to the cause of death (like when your heart beats harder and faster while pumping blood into the pericardium in cardiac tamponade- just causes the pressure to build faster leading to death).

y'know, i'm not certain where i read about that now. i want to say that i read it in a Discovery, or some other science journal. it was at least a year ago.