APDS, and their involvement in the armorer skill Options

[Janice]

According to the build/repair table (page 125, Shadowrun 4th Edition) what difficulty would it be to craft an APDS round?

[WearzManySkins]

IMHO one would need a Armor Facility to make such from scratch. I do not recall any OEM IRL that sell anything near that as something that can be reloaded.

Target Number same as availability number, use the rules out of Arsenal

WMS

[Janice]

http://www.maadigriffin.com/sabot30.gif This is the same APDS we're thinking about right? You could make it with reloading press if you could get your hands on the sabot.

Edit: it would seem the imagelinking methods I'm used to don't work here.

[Werewindlefr]

http://www.maadigriffin.com/sabot30.gif This is the same APDS we're thinking about right? You could make it with reloading press if you could get your hands on the sabot.

Looks like non-discarding sabot. Are you sure it's APDS?

[Crusher Bob]

Discarding sabot for small arms is generally ineffective, but you'd still need to get your hands on an AP projectile to fire. Assuming that APDS is supposed to model the generally best produced small arms AP ammunition, you are probably wanting a composite projectile with a tungsten carbide penetrator, brass jacket, and some lead to add weight to the projectile. You can, of course, make something that works almost as well using a steel core rather than a tungsten one.

[Janice]

Looks like non-discarding sabot. Are you sure it's APDS?

Good question.

[Crusher Bob]

Yes, those sabot are discarding.

Looks like you can buy SS109 5.56mm (AP) ammo for around 500 USD per 1000 rounds (plus shipping) and the SS109 bullets alone for around 110 USD per 1000 bullets.

So you could mate up the sabots for .30->.22 with the SS109 projectiles and have AP(DS) ammo, for around .50 USD a round.

[kzt]

The picture looks like a remington accelerator round. Which you once could buy for rifles but now can't as it just was a commercial failure. There are components out there for reloaders, but making these work well is apparently hard. Nobody has described the accuracy, particularly of reloads, as better than "Ok for 200 yards or less". I did see an interesting note that firing a saboted round in a gun with a muzzle brake could result in a kaboom.

In RL, pistols don't shoot APDS or any saboted round. I don't even know of any attempts to do it. For one thing, the critical velocity you need to get reliable sabot separation would be hard to reach. Attempts to get APDS working in 7.62 MMGs resulted in occasional minor problems like the AP core exiting the side of the barrel, so they were abandoned after quite a lot of work and money.

What pistol AP rounds exist are just solids. KTW used Brass, which was coated with teflon to keep the barrel from getting destroyed. It proved more effective in penetrating things like trash dumpsters than regular bullets but isn't really very effective in defeating armor. Handgun rounds just are not going to be effective in that. Rifle rounds are much more effective, as they are typically going at least 2-3 times faster and 50% heavier.

[Crusher Bob]

Heh, you you want excellent penetration out of a pistol, get an M1 Carbine; plenty of people describe it as 'one of the best pistols ever made'.

And yes, the 30-06 accelerators were pretty crappy. Sure you could fire a 55 grain bullet at around 4000 fps, but they left gunk all over the barrel, they were horribly inaccurate, the sabots were a range hazard due to their unpredictable flight path, and they tended to produce those messy accidents that make great stories for ER docs (like trying to fire one out of a rifle with a muzzle brake).

[krakjen]

Heh, you you want excellent penetration out of a pistol, get an M1 Carbine; plenty of people describe it as 'one of the best pistols ever made'.

That would be a Troll pistol then...

[MaxHunter]

Well, it's 2070 technology, we can imagine the problems for pistol borne apds have been solved. I would rule it half cost and a threshold = availability (16, 8 hours), needing a shop or less, plus some difficulties (i.e. acquisition rolls) to get the materials for the core.

Cheers!

Max

[crizh]

I imagine it might actually be easier to make straight AV rounds. The materials might be easier to find and/or machine.

I always felt that making bullets in a shop was a given. Really a facility is massive overkill for that sort of thing. Heck if you had the plans you could make a Gauss Rifle in a facility....

[Janice]

I'm not trying to be munchkinesque here, but 16 dice seems a bit excessive, considering a person with 7 armorer and 7 logic couldn't make that round. If I may be so bold: perhaps the 16 dice availability isn't so much difficulty in making as the fact that anything AP is gonna be labeled "cop killer" and the ban happy crowd is gonna jump on it.

[Heath Robinson]

I'm not trying to be munchkinesque here, but 16 dice seems a bit excessive, considering a person with 7 armorer and 7 logic couldn't make that round.

I was under the impression that fabricating things was an extended test; you're going to get it finished eventually but you might be on a time limit. With APDS I assume that test will be for 10 rounds.

CODE

18 / ( [7 + 7] / 3) = (18 * 3) / (7 + 7) = 54 / 14 = 3.85

You 7 Logic 7 Armourer will take, on average, 32 hours of pure work to make 10 rounds of APDS in a shop. If you buy successes instead, it'll take 48 hours of work. For someone without ridiculous skills and stats it takes a lot longer.

Hmm, maybe the threshold should be a bit lower so it doesn't take weeks upon weeks of work for an exceptionally talented armourer to produce even a single magazine of the stuff.

[crizh]

Or you could make the interval shorter...

[Janice]

I forgot about extended tests. I'm still a touch new to the game and still finding my feet so to speak.

[MaxHunter]

Yep, I always meant an extended test. maybe the interval or the test should be shorter (like, one hour) or the threshold significantly lower (8 sounds nice). Even both would not make it gamebreaking, and if you want to control it a little bit remember you need some special materials to begin with (mmm, maybe availability 10 )

Also, remember I never said how many rounds would be produced in one such test. 10?, 50?, 100?

So, after some thought...

CODE

Making APDS ammo
Cost 50y per 10 shots (availability 10R), needs: armorer shop.
Test: Armorer  (8, 1 hour) secondary skills required (ballistics -knowledge or knowsoft-) or plans.

Just me working from memory, does it look better now?

Cheers,

Max

[Backgammon]

An item's availability reflects how difficult an item is to acquire on the black market. If it were easy to manufacture APDS yourself, the item's availability would be lower as it would take that into consideration (as syndicates would be churning them out). So RL rationalisation aside, APDS should be very hard to make yourself.

[Pendaric]

And/or quickly stopped by cops or corps or syndicates.

[WearzManySkins]

Are not most firearms in SR4 caseless? if so building the block of explosives would require skill in chemistry aka out of Arsenal and the chemistry tool kits.

Also in Arsenal they use a system that takes the availability of the item as the threshold number.

WMS

[Cabral]

Alright, I have Background Knowledge: Firearms 0 so I'm defaulting to BK: Depiction of Firearms in RPGs 4. I hope I don't glitch.

I would classify assembly of 10 rounds APDS ammo from its component parts an Armor+Logic (8, 30 mins) due to its complex nature.

Now, creation of the Gunpowder (Chemistry?) and other components (Armorer?) from scratch would be different. Yeah, it should take a skilled professional quite a bit of time to create some rounds from scratch. Now, a professional may seem to take less time because when you place your order, he's may already have a lot of prefab 9mm casings with powder charge ready.

[kzt]

It's not difficult the load the bullets in the cases. Doing the testing to find a good load often takes days to weeks (mostly as you have to load the stuff, then go somewhere and shoot it, modify the load and repeat) to get good. If you follow a recipe it's a lot easier.

You need loading tools, but once you get going you can load more than one a minute. Basically you are just moving a lever.

Machining the bullet requires more tools and heavy equipment, though you could cast some metals (though not the really good penetrators). Again, if you are following a plan it's a lot easier than if you are developing the stuff from first principles.

It would seem really hard to be home brewing caseless ammo. Caseless is essentially a block of denatured HE molded around the bullet. This implies that you are cooking up a complex HE, then mixing it with chemicals to change it's properties, then casting it around bullets that have to be precisely located in 3d space for the gun to work.

People do blow up their guns with reloads on a fairly regular basis, but I got to think that someone trying to cook up caseless has a much higher chance of a disastrous oopsie. I'd certainly suggest that accuracy would tend to suck, and get much worse as the range increased.

[Larme]

I'd certainly suggest that accuracy would tend to suck, and get much worse as the range increased.

I think that's what the dice system is for. Of course accuracy would suck if you didn't roll well enough, but if you did, I can't see why accuracy would suffer. If it's really really difficult to home-make professional quality ammo, then it should be a really really difficult dice roll. But I'm not going to let a GM tell me, "Ok, you succeeded on the roll, but you still failed." (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nyahnyah.gif)

[kzt]

DS rounds ARE really hard to make well. The interaction of the sabot separation, etc makes for some ugly exterior ballistics. That's why you can't go out and buy some for your rifle, because commercial attempts have failed to produce bullets that people will pay for. It's not easier to do it without the half dozen experts in ballistics and the dozens guys with 20 years of experience in designing specialized loads and machinery that a commercial vendor has.

Really good hand-loaded conventional ammo is a whole other issue. If you actually know what you are doing you can produce rounds that are as good as or better then the best commercial ammo and are suited to the particular use you have in mind better than any commercial round. You can also blow your rifle up with a little failure to pay attention for a few moments...

[Werewindlefr]

DS rounds ARE really hard to make well. The interaction of the sabot separation, etc makes for some ugly exterior ballistics. That's why you can't go out and buy some for your rifle, because commercial attempts have failed to produce bullets that people will pay for.

I'd pay for a -4 armor. Somehow, they've managed to make cheap, tremendously efficient APDS.