about the vindicator minigun, i'm confused... Options

[TheScamp]

[Austere Emancipa...]

[Kagetenshi]

I'd imagine that with a high volume-of-fire weapon it'd be somewhat easier to hit at long range due to spread, though if you hit the number of bullets hitting will be, as you say, lower.
Or that could just be the misperception of someone who has never fired anything larger than a pistol.

~J

[Austere Emancipa...]

You're right, and this is partly why I ranted about SR suppressive fire getting nowhere near the actual damage caused with really high volume-of-fire weapons (like miniguns) earlier in this thread.

Even without aiming specifically at it but the area around it, you'd score many, many hits on a man sized target with a minigun, let alone if you really do aim at the target. At long ranges, the latter is not really possible, and you're stuck with attacking just area targets; but a character standing in the area target of a minigun would still get riddled, several hundred meters away.

[Kagetenshi]

Houserule time... does the following sound reasonable?
Minigun still takes one turn to spin up, afterwards it must be fired at a rate of 200 rounds/turn, divided up evenly amongst all of the initiative passes of a character. All normal recoil modifiers apply, and if used by a character they must make a knockdown test against a TN equal to 1/2 modified recoil (even if used for area denial). Proper mounting (GM discretion as to how much work this is, but it should be immobile for the duration) will prevent the knockdown test.
On the one hand, if you try to point it at someone it should still turn them into swiss cheese, but with rules like this no one is ever going to actually try to aim it. It also makes the weapon a lot less likely to be used by runners, as the minimum cost of firing this weapon once is ¥400 (less street index, but still).
Thoughts?

~J

edit: Or I might just require that firing this consumes all Complex Actions, leaving the character open to make Free Actions but nothing else for the remainder of the turn.

edit^2: I might also increase the power of the round with respect to hardened armor by 1 for every 50 rounds, or possibly for every 40.

[Raiko]

This is how we houserule autofire & miniguns.

Autofire

1. All autofire uses the supressive fire rules.

2. Max rnds/metre is shooters skill + recoil compensation.
eg UCAS Army Grunt with assault rifles 5 firing M23 (RC 3 iirc) can concentrate a maximum of 8 rnds/m

3. This Number is divided by 2 if the weapon has +2/rnd recoil or by 3 if the weapon has +3/rnd recoil.
eg UCAS Army Grunt with Heavy Weapons 4 firing a Bipod mounted MMG (RC 2) gets (4+2)/2 = 3 rnds/metre.

4. The concentration is per metre at short range, per 2m at medium range, per 3m at long range, and per 4m at extreme range.

5. When making the dodge test against the suppressive fire, each success lets you dodge one of the bullets. No successes means that all the bullets in that metre hit.
eg If the Grunt with the M23 is concentrating his fire on you at short range, you need 8 successes to dodge completely, if you get 3 successes you get hit by 5 bullets for 13S base damage.

6. If you're using tracer rounds the tn to stage damage up is reduced by 1 to 5.

Vindicator Minigun

1. Since it's a LMG scale minigun it's recoil mod should IMO be +1/rnd not +2, but...

2. As minigun ROF in Shadowrun is far too low, instead of 15 shots they now fire a fixed 15 "3 rnd groups."
Each of these "groups" is treated as a separate +2 recoil shot for 9D damage if using tracer/regular ammo or 10D if using regular.

So for example, the UCAS Army Grunts above with heavy weapons 4 firing a Vindicator from a Helicopter door mount (RC 6) could concentrate (4+6)/2=5 "3 rnd groups" per metre at short range.

A troll street-sami with 12 points of recoil comp and skill 6 would get (6+12)/2= 9 "groups"/metre.

Changing miniguns in this way increases their ROF to 900rpm per action which seems more reasonable.

And as it's difficult to dodge all the bullets with short & medium range autofire everybody tends to duck for cover very quickly (especially if they hear minigun barrels start to spin :D )

What do think.

[Austere Emancipa...]

[Kagetenshi]

Sorry, I'd forgotten the Suppressive Fire rules didn't account for staging. After CSSE I'll get to working on a way to stage it.
Either that or I might just give miniguns their own initiative, always 40, 50 rounds/pass. 7S damage ought to be enough if it's done 4 times every 3 seconds.
Well, except for trolls... well, I'll post some better thought-out rules later.

~J

[easytohate]

[Kagetenshi]

It may not have horrible shake-the-airplane-apart recoil, but it's still launching quite a bit of mass forwards at high speeds, which means it's going to get pushed back. Do that in the air at too low a speed and you've got problems.

~J

[Austere Emancipa...]

I use a system where the amount of rounds in a meter reduces the TN to hit with suppressive fire, as well as adding damage. Currently, suppressive fire is declared in 2 meter areas, but I think 1 meter/range category (like Raiko put it) might be better. I think it was every 10 rounds in the char's 2 meter area that lowered the TN by 1, and every 15 that added 1 round for damage purposes. However, every dodge success (TN 4) reduces the amount of potential rounds by 4. Using Meter/Category areas, that should probably be 3 potential hits in char's meter for TN reduction and 5 for extra damage round.

UCAS Army Grunt fires his Vindicator Minigun at full auto (200/CT, 4000rpm) at a bush where he thinks an enemy might be lurking, 500 meters away. That's extreme range, thus the 50 rounds per meter. The unlucky Joe OpFor rolls his 5 CP dice vs TN 4, getting 3 successes, bringing the amount of potential hits down to just 38. UCAS AG now rolls his Gunnery skill (4) against a TN of 6 (the base TN for extreme range suppressive fire in my games) - 12 (38/3 = 12.6666) = 2, getting 4 successes.

Joe OpFor is thus taking 15D+1 damage; 7S (base damage of the Vindicator with FMJ rounds at extreme ranges in my games), 8 rounds (1 + 38/5 = 8.6). Good luck with that.

The A-10 carries 1100 ready rounds, ~300 gram projectiles each, 1067m/sec, 320.1 kgm/s momentum each, 65 per second (3900rpm), for a thrust of 20806.5 Newtons. Assuming a combat weight of 20,000kg, that's 1m/s^2 acceleration backwards, or one tenth of the gravitational pull. Doesn't seem like something that will make the plane stall. But, again, physics work in mysterious ways.

However, put that on a TROLL and you've got a ~900kg creature (225kg + 300kg (GAU-8 ) + ~375kg (half the weight of the 1100 rounds, or the average over the period of shooting)) being pushed back at 23m/s^2, or twice the gravitational pull, for a duration of 17 seconds.

Or think of a KLEINBUS... :D

This post has been edited by Austere Emancipator: Oct 30 2003, 06:56 PM

[Buzzed]

CC pg. 26

[Siege]

Yeah, but the second you crank down on the trigger, the muzzle flashes and the rain of spent ammo will be equally evident.

Besides, allowing for ambient sounds the whirrr may not be that easy to detect.

-Siege

[Buzzed]

Ignore this post.

[Raiko]

CC Page 107 (Suppressive Fire):

[Austere Emancipa...]

Whoops, sorry about that success thingy. But I guess it shouldn't shouldn't surprise me that that bit TOO is just a house rule of mine...

Yeah, wasted rounds rock :)

[TheScamp]

[Herald of Verjig...]

Two engines at 9,000 lbs each are together less than one counterforce at 19,000.
So, slow the rate of fire or only apply it for short portions of a strafe.

Not hard to work around, but a real problem for the novice.

[Austere Emancipa...]

[TheScamp]

Your source.

[Austere Emancipa...]

It also says that at 4200rpm, the average recoil force is 9,000lbs (40,000N, not THAT different from what I got, considering that the round weights were also off by up to 50%). That's the actual force that the engines will have to work against, when considering acceleration. Currently, the A-10 GAU-8s are set to 3900rpm, so that force will go down to ~8,360lbs (37,000N, not a significant drop but worth mentioning). That's well under a half of the thrust of the engines.

Now, if the A-10 opened up with the GAU-8 while flying straight up, or when flying very slow (engine malfunction, or simply having the engines powered down), that might cause problems. In the kind of situation where the weapon is supposed to be used, in a dive, the recoil will certainly not stall the plane.

Oh, and thanks for the nice info packet on the GAU-8.

PS. What is it with the "kilogram" force figures you can see on US sites? The rest of the world has NEWTONs (1kgm/s^2) to measure force with. If these guys can't be bothered to do the conversion to a reasonable unit, they might as well not do it at all.

PPS. Yes, I know that kilogram-force is an actual unit of force, but I at least have never seen it used anywhere but on american sites as "metrifications" of their units.

This post has been edited by Austere Emancipator: Oct 31 2003, 01:25 PM

[TheScamp]

[Austere Emancipa...]

Oh, right, so you did. So we agree completely. Wow. That's a rare outcome of discussions like these. :)

[TheScamp]

Do we get to snuggle now?

[ialdabaoth]

How absurd and unbalancing would this house rule be:

Burst-fire and Autofire (p.115, SR3; p.103, CC)
Rather than staging up the Power and Damage Level of an attack, a burst adds a number of dice equal to the number of bullets being fired to the attack test. Thus, a 3-round burst would add 3 dice to the attack test, while a 15-round burst would add 15 dice to the attack test. This makes bursts much harder to dodge, and somewhat easier to hit with ‘spray and pray’ tactics, without having to compute and compare different attack Powers for armor and barriers. Successes from these dice stage damage up normally, and must be overcome by any Dodge test for the target to completely avoid damage.