Rail Guns in SR4, I can't hardly wait Options

[Kronk2]

[URL=I saw this]http://img295.imageshack.us/img295/7702/sr...waffen00ao6.jpg[/URL]

And was wondering what the stats for a Tank Mounted Rail gun would be?

My party is about to do something stupid and they deserve a rail gun of the stern.

Ok here is the gig. They have been hired to Blow up an Azzie motor pool in Victoria (formerly in Texas), and instead of just blowing it up, they want to try and steal all the vehicles. They know that reinforcements are at best a half an hour away. The reinforcements consist of a group of tanks. I am being nice and ignoring that there is a HUGE airfield in Victoria, which has seen military use before. If things get really squirrelly then the Azzies can dispatch a team of heavy UAV's to bomb the crap out of them.

So anyway what I am asking here is, what would a railgun do to a City master or an APC. I pretty much am guessing that if the Railgun hits then the vehicle is toast. Guessing like 12P -15AP(AV) but they cost like 40k each and are fiddly to repair.

[kzt]

Rail Gun is a kind of vague statement. Are you talking tank gun armament or something like a machine gun?

A tank main gun round would go through anything that isn't a tank frontal armor or protected with >5 meters of reinforced concrete. It would be something like a 10kg round moving at 8000m/sec. It will go thought the front and rear armor of anything in the rule book.

I'd suggest more like 50P and -100 AP. Anyone struck is just dead. Vehicles that are not MBTs are destroyed. If you want more realism a vehicle might or might not be destroyed, depending on were it gets hit and what the round passes through.

However most people don't have AFVs loaded and ready to go unless they have the crew on hand and ready to go, like for a QRF. Otherwise the ammo is in a locked bunker and critical parts to the weapon system are locked in a vault. Plus I'm told that AFVs are normally stored with all the hatches locked, and you need what is essentially a alarm remote to unlock the hatches. Which is also locked in a safe when not in use.

And if the crew gets in a loaded hover tank the players are going to be toast, as there is nothing in the gear section that can kill an MBT.

[Kronk2]

So simply put MBT = Party Death. Oh and I was intending as the main gun firing an ingot not a rapid fire ball bearing gun.

[JBlades]

You want to do rails off a gun? What?


</bad drug humor>

[Jack Kain]

Generally the biggest gun you can mount on the available Vehicle is an Ingrim White Knight. Though one could say the City Master could hold a panther cannon or two.

For a tank mounted rail gun perhaps 10P but with an AP of -8. Otherwise use the damage for anti-vehicle rockets. The city master isn't a tank but an APC which would be more lightly armed. A hit from a military level tank would blow most any vehicle or runner away. It is also likely that tanks wouldn't not be enabled for wireless control.

Assuming the motor pool is traveling through a city I doubt any tanks would be allowed to pass through the city. So Aries City Masters with Ingrim White Knights with armor piercing rounds and some with rocket launchers mounted.

The advantage that BIG vehicles like City Master that people often forget is the
armor of 20.
If an attack’s modified DV does not exceed a vehicle’s modified Armor rating, then the attack automatically fails. (extra damage from burst and full-auto modes don't count)

An actually full fledge combat tank should have an armor beyond approach from anything other then an anti-vehicle rocket.

[Dancer]

If the tank is firing a standard standard antitank penetrator it might just pass straight through a light vehicle leaving a neat little hole. The engine's FUBAR and there'll be a bit of shrapnel, but everyone won't neccesarily be dead.

Until they decide to finish the job with the rocket pods, of course.

[Starmage21]

We're talking about an MBT here, and so a railgun isnt going to be much different from the normal 120mm smooth bore cannon thats already mounted on 2 or 3 differnt kinds of MBTs of today's military. The difference is, a sabot penetrator round is no longer required, so at least half the tank's ammo will be completely non-explosive.

The only chance the PCs have at surviving an encounter with a main battle tank is by avoiding the main gun all together. Fortunately for them, turrets can only turn so fast, and any cybered street sam, or rigged vehicle is going to have little trouble avoiding fire.

[Riley37]

Let's be overt: do you want the PCs to succeed, want them to fail, or want them to succeed only if they have a cool plan and/or good rolls?

Let's say the PCs somehow get into the motor pool and take control of many vehicles. If they slot preprogrammed chips into the autopilots, giving each vehicle a different escape route, with many of them converging after a while at pickup points, and then they personally drive one or two of the vehicles, then the MBTs may be able to intercept and destroy a few of the vehicles (eg the ones that scattered *towards* the MBT base), but not all.

If the PCs know who will get called when the motor pool gets hit, then they could take some measures to slow pursuit, eg mines and/or roadblocks. Diverting a herd of cattle onto the road that the MBTs would take, might slow them down a fair bit - sure, an MBT *can* squish cows like bugs, but enough of that might jam the treads, and the drivers need Composure checks.

More relevant question than damage: what is the speed of the MBT and how flat is the terrain? If the escaping vehicles are faster and the terrain isn't flat, then the MBTs will not in the short run get line of sight (LOS) to any stolen vehicles except, again, an unlucky few that drive towards the tank base. You can reasonably figure that tank guns are aimed either by a Rating 5 or 6 pilot with a Rating 4 Target autosoft, 3 IPs each turn, or by a metahuman who's even better and thus overrides the Pilot. Tanks might also keep a few high-speed rotodrones as advance scouts; if the tank keeps a 100m datacable on a reel, and sends the rotodrone 100 meters up, it can "see" a lot further out to the horizon, and it can detatch the rotodrone for further scouting. (Better to treat a multi-thousand-nuyen drone as expendable, than to drive the tank into an ambush.)

If the PCs instead take the vehicles as a fleet, all going in the same direction, then the MBTs know where to go and can give chase, and then relative speed matters.

Key question: where are the PCs taking this fleet of vehicles? Sooner or later they gotta stop somewhere, and if the Azzies can keep tabs on where the stolen vehicles are going, then they'll have time to call in more and more reinforcements, maybe pay others to set up interceptions.

[Crusher Bob]

Here's some commentary on RL tanks, tanks guns, and fire control for you:

There are generally two ways used to penetrate armor: high explosive shaped charges (google 'monroe effect') (usually called HEAT, for high explosive anti-tank) or by very hard and fast projectiles (straight up kinetic energy).

Armor effectiveness is popularly compared to the equivalent amount of rolled homogeneous armor (RHA) is is comparable to.

Depending on how a tanks armor is constructed, it might have different RHA equivalents vs. HEAT and KE.

For example, from the front the armor equivalents of an M1 Abrams tank are somewhere in excess of 600mm RHA equivalent vs KE and in excess of 1400mm RHA equivalent vs HEAT. (Note that the M1A2SEP is something closer to 800/1600). For comparison, modern equivalent to the SR Citymaster would have armor equivalent to between 15 and 20mm RHA.

The armor of the tank is greatly concentrated on the front part of the hull and front turret face. So the armor distribution of a tank might be something like 10 front, 4 sides, 1 or 2 rear.

In general, modern tanks can shoot and hit each other on the order of 4+ kilometers away. This does not mean that tanks can kill each other with these hits though. In general, equivalent tech tanks can kill each other from the frontal arc somewhere between 1000 and 2000 meters, and can kill inferior tanks as far out as they can hit them.

[hyzmarca]

Why don't they just steal the tanks, too? Then they can use the tanks to destroy their target.

[kzt]

RL, a tank platoon would typically have an infantry company around it. So if the vehicles are loaded and ready to go, the infantry is also sitting around with weapons, armor and ammo, and fully loaded IFVs with AT weapons. So the PCs have to try to cut open the hatches on the AFVs (about as thick as a decent safe door) while dealing with this. Ever see the end of "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid"?

[Ed_209a]

[Ed_209a]

Motor pool.

Are we talking about a bunch of jeeps & trucks, like for a support unit motor pool or a bunch of AFVs and tanks, like for a combat unit motor pool?

Both are valid targets.

KZT is dead on about how (un)ready a combat vehicle would be. Also about how well secured it would be.

OTOH, I can tell you from personal experience that you could steal many military trucks and jeeps with nothing more than a pair of bolt cutters. They are generally secured with just a padlock & chain through the steering wheel.

(btw, experience _securing_ not _stealing_ trucks and jeeps :P )

[Prime Mover]

EDIT: Ok found biometal79's full gallery including a sweet SK railgun pic, luv his SR guns!

[Dender]

[Ed_209a]

Dender,
Only Skippy I know is on my PBJ sandwiches.

Kronk2,
Back on topic, oh yeah, a 40mm railgun penetrator would make a mess out of most things.

I think a 2070 front-line tank would not even need stats. It is tougher than anything you can carry, and just flat out kills you. Period. Since it should cost 10 million nuyen or more, they won't mind putting 100k in black ice on it or have a mage on the company maintenance unit just to ward it, or have a swarm of anti-infantry/anti-RPG drones to help keep the PBIs (Poor Bloody Infantry) away.

What might make the encounter doable for the PCs is if it _isn't_ a front line tank. Some armies (Including the Russian and Chinese) still use 1960's tanks in some roles. I think it would be very plausible to still see Abrams, Leopard 2s, and T90s in 2070.