Sniping with Pistols, Any suggestions? Options

[Corywn]

I'm looking for an alternative to my character's sport rifle for subtle work, and my main idea is to use one of the smaller Heavy pistols (probably Morrissey Alta or Elite.) The problem is Heavy Pistols have a relatively short range for sniping-type work, 60m, which would limit its potential use.

I have a few ideas to offer my GM, but wanted to see if anyone out there had anything already-existent to offer that I missed.

Extended Barrel: Not necessarily the exact modification from CC, but something close, to improve the range.
Heavier powder load: Similar to the Hi-C rounds, a more potent charge to improve the overall velocity of the round and therefore extend range before the bullet fizzles.
Match-Grade ammunition: Raygun's rules inspired this one; simply high-grade ammunition designed for accurate, long range use.

I intend to use a silencer with the weapon, of course, so the adjusted ranges Raygun offers will not help (they end up being the same after suppression.)

The weapon will probably be purchased on the street, and would be worked on by a contact.

[Dr Vital]

The most important thing in RL would be a shoulder stock, followed by a high quality sight.

Not sure why you'd need the silencer. Sniper guns don't have them... It's the distance that's going to keep you hidden.

[Hot Wheels]

Sniping with pistols? Suggestions? Yeah, don't do it!

[Kagetenshi]

Get within 60m of the target, or 66m if you're willing to spend lots of extra money on a pistol.
That's all I have for you.

~J

[Erghitz]

Design the gun the Joker pulled out of his pants to shoot down the Batwing in the first Batman movie. That should do it. I mean that was at least 200 meters away with that shot he made. Four times the range of a normal pistol. Yup yup. :D

-- Erghitz

[sir fwank]

i'm not much into guns anymore but i know there are some competion hand guns out there. not sure what there ranges are in RL. you may want to look into something like that.

in RL there is some rifle-pistol thing. i forget the name, its a single shot break-action design. i really feel that its name starts with a C. its in the movie Hard Boiled, fired by mad dog in the underground weapons cache.

raygun may have some ideas for you.

[Nath]

[Corywn]

[last_of_the_grea...]

I got one for ya...have Hammerli make a heavy target pistol that works like their light pistol for extended range. Then get a vision magnification3 cyber of some sort and a smartlink 2 with a rangefinder.

In the end, it all comes down to not getting caught, right? So, use your stealth skill!!! A silencer'll help. Stick to urban settings and learn to use crowds, obstacles and distractions. Make sure your ammo's caseless, too. It sucks if ya forget to pick up that shell casing. Make sure any flash from the barrel's suppressed or lighting makes it impossible to determine.

[Shanshu Freeman]

[Foreigner]

Corywn:

Check out the following Shadowrun-related website:

Bocor's Lair: http://www.bocor.net/

In the "Light/Heavy Pistols" section, scroll down until you find the "BocoTech DevilRat" Heavy Pistol--essentially, an SR counterpart to the real-life Smith & Wesson Model 500 (.500 S&W Magnum caliber), except that the Smith & Wesson has a FIVE-SHOT cylinder instead of the SIX-SHOT cylinder of the "DevilRat".

Next, check the "Special Weapons" section. Scroll down until you find the "BocoTech Demon Rat". That's a conversion kit designed to modify the aforementioned "Devil Rat" Heavy Pistol into a sniper weapon.

(Incidentally, the weapon DOES exist in real life, as the Knight Armament Corporation Revolver Rifle ("R-Squared"). It's a modified Ruger Redhawk double-action revolver firing a special rimmed, subsonic .30-caliber cartridge (180-grain/11.66-gram bullet at a muzzle velocity of 1000 feet per second/305 meters per second) . I've read that it's accurate to between 200 and 300 meters. It was developed by the same folks who designed the SR-25 .308 Winchester (7.62 X 51mm NATO) semiautomatic match/battle rifle currently in use by the spotters in Marine Scout/Sniper teams.)

Just thought you'd be interested. Hope this helps! :)

--Foreigner

[Arethusa]

[Ed_209a]

I would use a TC Contender barreled for a "whisper" round, add a suppressor, and hand load the rounds so they are still barely subsonic with the shorter barrel.

If I need multiple shots, I'll go with something like a Desert Eagle .44 or .50, with the 10" barrel and a suppressor. Like above, I would use a heavy bullet loaded to be barely subsonic.

[Shadow]

Personally I think sniping with pistols is just a bad idea. Every once in a while you see a movie with some guy and a fancy pistol with a barrel extension and a rigid stock. And I think to myself, "the right tool for the right job". Pistols aren't rifles, they don't have the range, accuracy, or stopping power for such a venture.

They have there advantages, there concealable and powerful at close range. But you can also get a riffle that breaks down into a briefcase or backpack and take it just about anywhere.

If your just going for size might I suggest you making all these changes to a SMG. You get better range out of it and I belive a SMG will take more mods than a pistol.

[Game2BHappy]

I believe the Gyrojet Pistol from CC has shotgun ranges (Extreme = 100m).

[Kagetenshi]

Slaughterhouse Five!

~J

[mfb]

without commenting on the silliness of trying to snipe with a pistol, the best way to get the maximum range on a pistol is to use mag-3 with an extended-range laser sight. this way, your base TN is 3 at any range. if you have a pistol with burst-fire, use tracer ammo--slightly lower damage on your burst, but you get an additional -1 TN. the bad part, of course, is that everyone knows where you shot from, though i don't recall if that's reflected in the rules.

[Siege]

I guess you had best decide on what you mean by "sniper" or "sniping" and what range you're thinking of.

If you _Really_ want to, I'm sure some weaponsmith will chop down a bolt action rifle into a hand-held model, resembling a pistol.

With the proper strength augmentations, you could hold, aim and fire the thing.

But really...do you want to be tied to a custom weapon that screams "ID me?"

The more unique the weapon, the easier it is to trace.

-Siege

[Tziluthi]

What about those 10" barrel Desert Eagles. That'd have a decent range, I'm sure.

[Siege]

Actually not.

The Desert Eagle is a relatively close-range anti-material weapon. Any person you would kill with the Desert Eagle you could kill easier with a .40 or a .45.

Contrary to what you see on tv, those guns are monsters to use. I was on the range with one and every time he fired (the guy was twice my size and he still held the thing kneeling with both hands), my eyeballs _pulsed_ two bays down.

I'm told the weapon itself is unreliable, prone to jamming and breakage.

As for range:

http://www.zvis.com/dep/dep.shtml

http://arms.host.sk/firearms/deserteagle.htm

The weapon listed is 200m, but I'm not going to guess as to the effective accuracy range.

-Siege

[Arethusa]

Actually, the Desert Eagle is supposedly quite accurate and often used with a scope by big game hunters with compensation issues. It isn't accuracy that the Desert Eagle fails at; it's, well, everything else. The gun is the size of your arm, can knock you over, kill your hearing, and jam if you so much as draw it incorrectly. It's a gun for bad movies and that's about it.

[Siege]

You might want to talk to Raygun about handguns used for big game hunting.

This one looks promising, although the notes about recoil terrify me.

http://www.chuckhawks.com/454casull.htm

If you're going to dig out a scope _anyway_, you might as well just get the whole way and get a rifle of some sort.

Most rifles will outclass almost any handgun in terms of range and accuracy at range.

-Siege

[Mongoose]

I think the simplest "by the book" answer would be to design a sub-machine gun that fires single shots and has a pistol-like look and ammo supply (10-15 round clip).
Unfortunately, it would use the sub-machine gun skill. If you don't have that skill, defaulting from pistols isn't TO bad, but probably not so good for sniper work. Maybe aiming would solve that problem.
Or you could just say that one gun uses the "pistol" skill just damn well because. Maybe toss on some drawbacks to make up for it, prefereably something besides just being expensive, like maybe its fragile or can't use any special ammo types or some such.

[Siege]

I stand corrected:

http://www.smith-wesson.com/products/firearms/m500.htm

For some reason, I remembered a revolver that could only load three rounds in the wheel but (unsurprisingly), I was wrong.

Of course, I stumbled across the monstrosity above.

If there was ever a pistol that screamed "TROLL!", I think this is it.

-Siege

[Raygun]

Yeah. Sniping with a pistol is generally not a good idea. In terms of Shadowrun rules, at 60 meters (with a heavy pistol), you're looking at a base target number of 9. A Mag-3 scope and a Simple Action aiming will knock that down to a 5. If you plan on using canon creation/modification rules, you can come up with just about anything your heart desires. I'm really not the person to ask about that kind of thing, but here are some suggestions where reality is concerned.

While you can use laser sights and tracer rounds to bring your target number down a bit more, you really should think about that in terms of how the opposition could react to those kinds of things. It's a very, very bad idea. At least it would be if I were running the game. (No offense, mfb. I'm sure you were aware of that fact.)

As for using suppression, it is used almost by default by snipers and sharpshooters these days. If you can afford it, you should use it. Not only does suppression make the weapon quieter, in conjunction with good fieldcraft (using your environment to your advantage), it makes you less visible by eliminating muzzle flash and smoke. When using a pistol in a close-range sniping role, using a suppressor along with it should be a no-brainer. If you have to be that close, you should also be as quiet as possible. Using a "heavier powder load" may increase velocity and energy, but if the bullet goes supersonic, it makes a lot of noise in flight, which is not a particularly good thing at such close range.

My personal favorite suggestion thus far was the suppressed Thompson/Center Contender in a Whisper caliber (say, an 8" barrel). It's a break action, single-shot pistol (SS mode), but they're incredibly accurate. I can whip up some stats for that if you're interested. Kudos, Ed_209a. :)

A couple of people have suggested a Desert Eagle, but in my opinion, it would be the wrong tool for something like this. One certainly could be customized for that kind of use, but you'd be spending a lot more money than you need to. You could make heavy bullet subsonic loads for it, but the pistol would also have to be modified a bit in order to function with the smaller powder charge because it is gas operated. You could repeat fire much quicker, but you'd be sending brass flying (another visual signature to deal with) and a brass catcher really isn't practical on a Desert Eagle.

IMHO, the idea of "pistol sniping", even though it has been thoroughly explored in the past (ala the KAC Revolver Rifle that Foreigner mentioned), doesn't seem like a particularly smart or useful way of going about the whole thing. It seems desperate, really. From a shadowrunner's point of view, I can't think of a situation in which I'd actually want to do it, and I can think of quite a few other ways of accomplishing the task I'd try out first. Of course, it all depends on the situation and it's always good to keep your options open. There are lot of ways to conceal yourself if you have to shoot, but there are a lot of other, much sneakier ways of going about assassination.

But if I absolutely had no other choice, a very compact (say, 8-11" barrel) gas regulated and suppressed AR-15 (M16) type rifle chambered for .300 Whisper with a decent low magnification scope or red dot sight would be my choice. It would be small enough for most uses, accurate enough to 100 meters, very quiet, and it could be switched to full-auto should defense be necessary.