Yeah, I have to watch mysellf when doing combats...I think that 15+ years of wargaming means that my armchair generalship is better than most. I do have my off days however. This means that I can usually pick out the flaw of the PC's plan and destroy them at will. But then again, any GM can (re the Sacred F#$%&^! Cow from Outerspace) kill the party off at any point in time. That is not the purpose of the GM however, to me the purpose is to make sure the groups has a fun, challenging and immersive experience.

Hrm...coulda sworn it was in the back of the main book or one of the sheets from the box. Mebbe I'm just a dummy, 20+ years of gaming makes a lot of things blur together at times. Now I find myself wondering if it was even from T2K or maybe another of GDW's games. If you have the books on hand you can try checking out the old Infantry Weapons of the World (I think that was the title, IIRC) book, but the more I think of it the more I wonder if it was for Traveler or Dark Conspiracy. I feel certain that it was a GDW record sheet originally, and if I recall there was a sheet for small arms and one for larger capacity heavy weapons (belt-fed MGs for instance).

[rant]*sigh* I really do blame Gygax for ruining GDW with that god-awful Mythus and causing the destruction of both GDW and the old TSR, but how mad can I really be now that he's gone?[/rant]

Nobody's mentioned legality... ExEx is Forbidden ammo, so you can't take it through a checkpoint using a fake permit. It can only be used in situations where you're not going to go through an explosives detector. If you have regular ammo, as long as you appear to be licensed to carry it, no problem. If you have ExEx, your ammo will be confiscated and you might be subject to other penalties.

Also, with its higher avail, it's harder to get on short notice. And the price does start to matter when you're talking about high rate of fire weapons -- if you own an HV weapon, you're going to have to think long and hard about whether you want to spend your money on ExEx, since thousands of rounds of that starts to get expensive, and arguably isn't necessary.

So, ExEx does have real disadvantages. Though it is certainly the "standard" shadowrunner ammo for executing innocent security guards, smart teams will question whether doing that is smart in the first place. I'd expect to see ExEx on wetwork jobs, and on jobs where the target isn't human -- nobody's going to mind if you wipe out spirits, ghouls, or other critters with the baddest ammo you can find. If ExEx is used too often, and that bothers the GM, the GM can simply adjust the missions. Send the team on jobs where they have to smuggle their guns, or have their Fixer let them know that Johnsons are starting to get leery of hiring them because they always seem to blow security apart with milspec ammo, which is making their competitors take extra countermeasures to make them more difficult to hit in the future.

Excellent well written post. /me looks around for a points system

That happened quite a bit in my campaign. Probably 'cause the PCs were up against a toxic shaman who loved the Acid Stream spell. >:)

Do you have guards/police shecking what ammo the characters have in their guns often?
BEcouse that's something i have been thinking a lot, would the cops chek to see what ammo you have loaded if your licence for the guns shecks up okey.Or would they just wafe you trought the chekpoint after seeing your gun licence.

I honestly doubt cops would do that since they don't do it now. It's just too much work, especially if, 9 times out of 10, everything'll be legit.

"Jim, d'you see the size of that Fraggin Trog? If I wasn't on the clock you know I would beat him down. Did you check his weapon? Yeah, I know he has a license but check everything. There kind don't deserve to breath the same air we do."


Cops ... Bigotry? Only on days that end in y (or G for our German readers)

Not every single cop is like that!

There might be a few, but not the vast majority.

Cops, for the most part, are decent, hard working folks doing a shitty job. Give them SOME credit BlueMax.

The point about chem sniffers still stands. If the security is strong enough to include them, they'll likely pick up exEX. Of course, YMMV

Apologies. You are 100% correct. I do not mix much reality and fantasy and I meant to state that my view was tinted through how I see a dark future.

Real life cops are some of the best people on the planet.

I think even the 'Star is made up of mostly (~ 60%) good people just trying to make a decent living and providing protection to people. Now the ~40% that remains gives the rest a REALLY shitty name.

Hell, considering that my combat mage carries a rating 3 olfactory booster as a micro sensor "button" on his Lined Coat, those kind of sensors might be everywhere.

Seems like a fairly good reason for a runner not to carry exEX as standard.

Obviously different gear is appropriate in different circumstances. If your runs are mostly in the barrens, law enforcement is not a reason to not go saddled for bear. Going into the core, with its A rated zone, discretion is advised.

No, just no. There is no way anyone would put an explosive detonated by either heat or impact (the only things you could be referring to with explosive ammunition going off during a fireball) into a projectile that's meant to be launched over the speed of sound via means of a directed explosion accompanied by a sudden flash of extreme heat. Military explosives are generally very stable, a fireball would destroy the ammunition with no ill effect long before the ammo goes off unintentionally.

As to removing explosive rounds: I've been tempted to, if only because they're silly. Generally, I just refluff them so they're not explosive, instead basic explosive rounds use a projectile designed to fragment without compromising penetration, and EX-Explosive are that only hotloaded. Neither has any risk of blowing your gun up either. It may not be particularly realistic, but it's a great deal more believable than exploding bullets.

And this is why you fail Janice... Shadowrun is science fiction. Also while military explosives are generally very stable, they can be set off accidentally (I think my favorite for this would be some kind of EMP spell). There's a long history of 'secondaries' as explosives cook off or are set off by other explosions.

Now, they do have high explosive rounds for .50cal in the present...
In the past there have been experimental rounds in .30 cal.
In the dystopian future of sci-fi... no good reason why not.

Not cost effective. You can already achieve levels of fragmentation reminiscent of the round exploding (Take a look at the Mk 262 77 grain bullet in the middle) without needing a tiny and expensive explosive device to add another part capable of malfunctioning. Aside from that, the current statistical effects of the explosive rounds make little sense.

By the way, I already know of the Raufoss Mk 211 ammunition, it's strictly an anti-material round of limited issue that doesn't reliably detonate when used on personnel.

It depends on how many hits the chem sniffers get -- just 1-2 hits, and the sniffer knows it's bullets, but 3 or more, and they probably recognize that the amount/type of explosive is military grade.

All the more reason to carry stick and shock and narcojet rounds. Better than EX-EX rounds against targets that are not wearing military body armor.

Make up post!

>All the more reason to carry stick and shock and narcojet rounds. Better than EX-EX rounds against targets that are not wearing military body armor.
actually SnS is still better because that -1/2 AP starts to mean a hell of a lot.
'
>...Cops....
Almost all cops are "good-people" in the sense that they put the good of the community before there own physical safety. All cops are should be treated with suspicion because they think themselves fit to wield power over other. Doing police work for years has a high chance to warp you. I've know several cops and the worst thing about veteran cops is what being a cop for years does to you.

Also even if it isn't directly racially motivated cops do give people an amount of flack directly related to how sketched out they are.


--

On the legality of ex-ex and checking for ammo. No one checks today because in the kinds of situations that you would have those checks today, you don't see people with body armor. If you don't have body armor all real ammunition if practically identical from a lethality perspective. Even there is a spread in lethality, out of the range that actually effects behavior. But in 2070 SnS is actually pretty different from ex-ex, capsule, regular rounds.

This is shadowrun... anyone choosing to play a troll or orc (and to a lesser extent dwarf and elf) has already signed on the dotted line for racial harassment.

Seriously, troll and orc are so undercosted, they deserve every bit of RP hassle you can throw at them, easily including increased scrutiny by security.

All those 5.56 rounds you just linked have one serious problem their ability to fragment on impact is based on impact energy. Most don't reliably fragment over 200m, (50m out of a carbine) for the M855 (which is a semi-AP composite round at that). Those rounds are fired from a higher twist barrel than the older guns have (they spin faster), this means that they're closer to the material tolerance of the bullet simply spinning itself and exploding right when it leaves the barrel. As they go downrange when they hit, the sudden deceleration and material stresses are enough to cause the bullet to fragment, but this is only true for a fairly small window of energies.

Look at the FPS figure on those ballistic charts, most of those velocities are very close to the muzzle. I haven't read/heard anything out of the Mk262 which gives it anything more than a marginal increase in effectiveness. And I HAVE been on the range with the army marksmanship unit (who's been using that bullet since the 90's).

The reason you'd want a HE round is for exactly that anti-material. Or in the SR universe, pretty much everyone wears body armor of some sort. You need a round which will reliably pierce the outside, then do it's thing on the inside.

Again, I bring up this is SR and sci-fi. There's a coolness factor in play, the M211 is unreliable in hitting people today, why would this still be true in SR's hyper-sci fi setting.

Mind you, I'm not a huge fan of Ex-Ex either... to me the marginal performance increase isn't worth the IC cost and legality issues for anything except special run use. I'm more likely IC to carry gel or cheap ball just in case the star has more interest than necessary. I just don't really see any reason to ban or modify it. If someone wants to spew firecrackers downrange to announce their presence... the more power to em. It's not really game breaking, just overused IMO.

OK, so not claiming to be an expert on guns, but this would appear to be explosive ammunition, for an AK-47.
http://www.gunbroker.com/Auction/ViewItem.asp?Item=116629126

Somebody care to explain how this doesn't basically allow for us to have "Explosive Rounds" seventy years from now?

From what I've seen so far the arguments seem to be that modern explosive ammo is unreliable and expensive. Need I point out that everything is unreliable and expensive at first, and then gets more reliable and less expensive as more work goes into developing the product?

This is one of those bugbears that keeps coming up; Why do people assume, just because they still use guns in 2070, that they haven't improved on the technology?

I agree. The "it's impossible today, and thus will not be possible in the future" argument is utterly insane. It's the future, and not only that, it's the fictional future. We don't know how they accomplish particular futuristic things because the technology doesn't exist, if we knew how it worked, we could build it right now. But they do. Not being able to imagine how it would work is not grounds for deleting it from the game.

Whilst it seems strange to quibble with someone's who's agreeing with my point, I'd like to note that you're not entirely correct here. It's usually the case that we can at least predict what will theoretically be possible, even if we can't implement it now. However you are correct in that what we cannot implement is usually a result needing breakthroughs to occur in other areas of science first.

If explosive rounds aren't practical right now, is it because the theory is flawed, or because we simply don't have the means to cheaply produce reliable detonators (to pick on just one argument raised)?

In 2070 they have nanofaxes. This might not be what they would use to make said detonators, but it demonstrates that they have access to a level of precision micro-engineering that is simply impossible today. So if we assume that precisely engineering the parts cheaply isn't a problem, that cheap, stable, high powered explosives are available, and that over 100 years of development have finally worked most of the kinks out of explosive ammo (and only most; note the rules specifically account for the unreliability factor), is there anything left to say that explosive ammunition is not practical?