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[James McMurray]

According to what I can find, accelleration is considered your walking and running speeds for vehicles. Good, makes it easier to mesh character and drone movement.

To go higher you make a vehicle test, with each hit adding to your movement rate that turn. All good still.

Speed is the "maximum safe speed," which you reach by making those tests. If you go faster, you could be in trouble. Still good.

Now for the hard part: how in the heck are you supposed to actually reach those speeds? To get a GMC Banshee up to max speed for one combat turn takes 150 hits on the vehicle test!

[Aku]

I think you're mis-understanding the vehicle test. Each hit on thetest ADDS 5 meters to the acceleration. So assuming you're "walking" your banshee, you're looking at 1000/50=20 turns to get it to full speed + the hits from your vehicle test

[James McMurray]

That makes sense, where does it explain that better? What I see:

1) Acceleration is walking / running rate.
2) Vehicle test hits add 5 to the vehicle's movement rate

Do those hits stay around? If so, do they add 5 to both walking and running rates, or are you automatically running as soon as you bypass the highest speed available for running?

[Aku]

well, it doesnt explain it clearly, but heres an example of how i understand it. using bank heist as the target.

Joe driver is out in the ride, stopped, with the car idling in his westwind, while the team knocks over a bank. Its a successful hit, and the team runs out and hops in. Joe, seeing no signs of trouble, gets out of there and cruises away (using the walking speed) using a base 20 meters, and rolls 4 hits on his test, netting him 40 meters per turn, he repeats the next turn and is just as successful, and is now cruising along at 80 meters per turn. He lets off the gas pedal for a little while, until he notices a piggy pull out from an alley behind him, crap lonestar, floor it! is heard from the backseat, and he does so, increasing to the base running speed of 60, and scores 2 hits on his test, netting him 70 meter pet turn increase, bringing him to 150. The lone star tries to keep up, but only doing about 60 meters, our westwind is easily able to out run him.

[hobgoblin]

basicly the walk and run speeds are nice to have when a vehicle is involved with normal combat (like say drones).

however, if you want to calculate "real" acceleration. take the running speed and add whatever hits the driver gets on a drive test, kinda like if a person tryed to sprint.

only diff is that a vehicle have a much higher top speed, so they can effectively sprint for several turns before hiting the point where fatigue kicks in (redlined engine and all that)...

only real change between SR3 rules and SR4 rules that i can see is that the engagement range is not defined by how much the individual vehicles moved in the last turn, so speed only have an effect on the damage done in a crash or when ramming (that i can see)...

[James McMurray]

Still makes sense, but I guess there's no detailed explanation of how it works that way? We'll probably do it that way, but it's good to know how it was intended.

[NightHaunter]

I read the speed stat as the top speed it could reach, period.
Am I wrong in this?
Also does anyone know how to convert a shadowrun speed to either kilometers or miles per hour?

[James McMurray]

In the vehicles section it says it's the maximum safe speed, but doesn't have hard and fast rules about what that means.

3 seconds per turn = 1200 turns per hour, so kph is just speed * 1200. mph is speed / 1.6.

[NightHaunter]

Cheers could have got that myself really.
But I'm still having difficulty thinking since last nights game.

[hobgoblin]

but remember that its meters pr turn, and the k in kph stands for kilo, as in 1000. so maybe make that x1.2 ;)

[James McMurray]

Yeah, sorry. :)

Taht even happened when me and my roommate were talking about it. He mentioned a motorccyle going 180,000 kph and I was the one who pointed out the kilo part. DOH!

[mdynna]

That's right x1.2. Which, incidentally, is the same conversion listed in SR3.

On a side note, would everyone (generally) be insterested in a conversion of Vehicle Stats, and Modification rules from SR3 if I worked on them?

[hobgoblin]

[Lagomorph]

[mdynna]

Ok, I'll start looking at the Rigger rules then. It'll kind of be a "labour of love" for me. My first character was a Rigger and I think I'll always have a "special place in my heart" for the Rigger. I was greatly disappointed at the giant shaft that Vehicle Modification received in SR4, but I suppose they had to cut something didn't they?

I hear everyone commending the rules changes for "pure" vehicle combat (chase combat). I agree they are much more useable rules, but I never did find the old ones completely unusable. Granted, I threw out the entire Maneuver Score system, and once that was gone, everything fell into place. Basically, you use a 1-dimensional model for position: each vehicle is only X m away from the other. You have to do this for "normal" ranged combat anyway. Then, when each driver wants to "do something" you used Handling as the base TN then applied the modifiers from the various tables for Terrain and Conditions. Each new IP you calculate the new relative distance between vehicles based on the speed difference (and thus, any change in speed). It really wasn't that hard. I think I'll "publish" this system in addition to my Rigger Conversion rules.

The only reason I'm going on about this is this: SR4 "chase combat" rules have no bearing on vehicle speed. One could be a Westwind 3k already going 250kph and the other a Nissan Jackrabbit standing still, but if the driver of the Jackrabbit wins the Opposed Driving test, and he chose "Close Range", then the Jackrabbit has now caught the Westwind. As a Rigger with a super sports-car I would find this frustrating.

[hobgoblin]

never had a problem with the manuver score. and i have allways envisioned the distance system to be one dimentional (alltho it could be multiple dimentions stacked side by side if you have many vehicles mixed in).

[mdynna]

By "one-dimensional" I was meaning that we never worried about how far to the left or right a vehicle was, we always assumed one was directly behind the other. The Maneuver Score was fine, it just took way too long for a session.

(For the math geeks)
H = Sqrt(X^2 + Y^2)
where X and Y are the two ("vertical" and "horizontal") displacements.
X
|
3 |
|
_____ Y
5

The "true" distance between X and Y = Srqt(3^2 + 5^2) = 5.83

[warrior_allanon]

didnt i already fight this argument and figure it all out in another thread?

edit: yup heres how it figured out:

[hobgoblin]

[mintcar]

From an old thread:

[mdynna]

I suppose the "quick" rule to fix this problem is:
The driver of the faster vehicle gets a bonus to his test equal to the (smallest) difference in speed / 10 (always drop the decimal).

So, a Westwind already going 200 vs. someone stopped gets +20 dice? Sure. Basically, the driver of the Westwind would easily get to choose the engagement range. This would mean at "the worst" the chasing vehicle would be at "long range", at least initially.

[blakkie]

Unless you are in a driving environment that allows at least one of the vehicles to reach very close to top speed for a siginificant amount of time, top end by itself is going to mean very little. In a slow down/speed up/swerve around environement like a busy road acceleration/braking/handling is where it is at. You likely don't even want to reach your top end because you'll likely be over accelerating, leading to overbreaking and poor driving lines and eventually a crash.

Fast and steady wins the race. Stupid Fast ends up spun out or crashed or standing on their nose to keep from doing either of those.

[mintcar]

It would more or less necessitate an additional dice roll to be made each round. You'd have to roll for speed. Or the GM could determine the speed based on terrain, and vehicular actions taken. Second option seems most doable as a quick fix.

[blakkie]

[Eryk the Red]

I look at it pretty much the same way as Mintcar. That's why in my heavily altered chase rules, having a higher Acceleration gives you free hits to your maneuvering each turn, while top speeds are used to determine the threshold for the extended vehicle test to catch up/get away. Maybe I'll post my rules sometime, try to get some feedback.