[X] My Assistant

[Snow_Fox]

Guys, just hark back to 1st ed. It came out in the late 80's. There was no AK97 then, they were just trying to make the ol' Kalishnikov sound modern.

[Dumori]

That may be true but did they then expect the 97 to be 50+ years old as isn't 1st in 2053 thus making the ak97 56 years old.

Thinking about it that arounf how old the 47 is now so thats ok but in 2071 it is 74 years old.

This post has been edited by Dumori: Jun 6 2008, 11:00 PM

[Snow_Fox]

I think most people still call thecurrent guns AK-47's

[Dumori]

Meh being a bit of a Russian weapon nut this fact annoys me for no good reason. I my game it will be the 110/120X make some sense to me people may call it the 97 as the diffresce are minimal but just to keep up with current gun tech.

[Link]

It always strikes me as kind of poignant how back in the 80s they thought everyone would switch to caseless, before their hopes and dreams got QWERTY'd. When I read Twilight rules about how characters could use G11s in that game which was supposed to have caught on by that time a little tear trickles down the outside of my face.

It lives on in SR (2050 edition)

The H&K G12A3z is the next logical step from the G11A4z, the premier assault rifle of the last two generations. (Street Samurai Guide p52)

[psychophipps]

One thing to keep in mind is that caseless ammo went the way of the do-do as of the collapse of the Soviet Union. The only weapon seriously considered for adoption was the H&K G11 and that idea went out the window when Germany suddenly had a tore up from the floor up eastern half to support. There was a caseless hunting rifle that was made for a bit and it's been discontinued due to lack of interest. I haven't heard anything new about caseless weapons for a quite a while now.
The main reasons for not going caseless are pretty daunting for any military or paramilitary group. You'd have to buy all new weapons and ammunition from specific manufacturers to start. To call this process "expensive" is putting it mildly. Not only do you need the weapons themselves but you need all the replacement parts, guaranteed resupply of these parts, armory courses, guaranteed resupply of ammunition, familiarity training courses, etc, etc...
The cased ammunition is good stuff, really. Every bullet is a self-contained unit. It's largely waterproof, weather resistant, will discharge in a wide variety of conditions and there are a good many manufacturers that do now, or can in short order, make the ammunition you need depending on how standard you want you caliber to be. Even introducing new loads isn't overly hard, as evidenced by the amount of 6.8 SPC and .45 GAP cartridges available in a relatively short period.

[Faelan]

Check my last post. The US Military was looking at caseless fairly recently. It has been dropped because the developer feels it is a high risk venture. In other words materials technology is not quite there yet to make it affordable. Give it another 10-15 years.

[hyzmarca]

The big problem with caseless is that it is fragile compared to cased ammunition. Aside from the issue of cookoff due to high barrel heat, which can be mitigated with some effort, caseless ammo is prone to breaking up under stress and is vulnerable to extremes of humidity.

[Earlydawn]

Caseless would be pretty scary if it ever hit the civilian market, black or not. Can't imagine the field day homicide would have with no matching slug / casing pair. It's all well and good to say they'd be restricted to the defense sector, but there was a news report of FN Five-seveNs hitting the Mexican black market in bulk and getting used on cops. Showed 'em packed up in the foam-lined individual cases from FN and everything. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/indifferent.gif)

[CanRay]

All you need is one blackmailed (Or bribed, or disgruntled) Quartermaster, and the MilSpec stuff will hit the black market!

[Zaranthan]

Umm, aren't you still gonna be screwed by ballistic evidence on the bullet itself?

Vlad

How much ballistic evidence do ExEx rounds leave behind? (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

[Naysayer]

If you want to be CSI-entific about it, you could say that every manufacturer adds a specific compound to their explosive rounds to make their rounds traceable and residues of which can be picked up by advanced forensic chem-sniffers in combination with hip contemporary music. All the lab-guy then has to do is determine the caliber based on the size of the wound, cross-check with your alibi with relevant botanic data based on specific climate conditions at the crime-scene, put on his trusty RayBans and YEAH!

[CanRay]

Along with their Insta-Matic DNA machines! (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nyahnyah.gif)

[hyzmarca]

Caseless would be pretty scary if it ever hit the civilian market, black or not. Can't imagine the field day homicide would have with no matching slug / casing pair. It's all well and good to say they'd be restricted to the defense sector, but there was a news report of FN Five-seveNs hitting the Mexican black market in bulk and getting used on cops. Showed 'em packed up in the foam-lined individual cases from FN and everything. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/indifferent.gif)

Matching casings is already a crapshoot. Toolmarks left by firearms are neither unique nor consistent so the probabilities of both false positives and false negatives are high enough to give pause to a random match. The same is true with matching bullets, though CSI investigators are unlikely to tell you so. All you have to do is clean your gun between shootings and rifling matching becomes impossible even if a a sufficiently intact bullet can be found.

The only real loss here is that loose casings can't be used to determine the shooter's position, and a smart shooter would collect his casings anyway.

[CanRay]

Always pick up your brass for reloading! Reduce, reuse, recycle!

[Zaranthan]

Not every combat ends in 100% NPC fatalities.

IP 1: Lay down suppressive fire against corpsec team packing multiple gyroarms.
IP 2: Second burst of suppressive fire. Hacker opens the maglocked door that you've got your back to.
IP 3: Run to the hills.

Exactly when are you going to go around collecting those forty shells?

[hyzmarca]

Not every combat ends in 100% NPC fatalities.

IP 1: Lay down suppressive fire against corpsec team packing multiple gyroarms.
IP 2: Second burst of suppressive fire. Hacker opens the maglocked door that you've got your back to.
IP 3: Run to the hills.

Exactly when are you going to go around collecting those forty shells?

Simple, really, you put your smartlinked weapon into a transparent plastic bag before going on the run and don't bother taking it out. All of the casings come with you. You could also just duct tape a bag to the ejection port or, if you want to get fancy, http://www.cactustactical.com/osc/product_...?products_id=70

[Earlydawn]

I'm not implying that a Shadowrunner's ballistics should point to him in a traditional way - the Star does the work on the gun, identifies it as belonging to him, and goes to his house and arrests him. Any Runner worth his salt is either going to be using a stolen gun, or hire a decker to erase any records for a customized favorite that happened into a database somehow. I'm more concerned with the tactical advantage that it could give whomever recovers the evidence. By 2070, the technology will probably be more robust. Here's a for-example.

Continuing a string of runs to lay the groundwork for a future, grand heist, you break into the Ares regional office. Once there, you have your Decker break into the system, and download the shipping schedule for what you want to nab. On the way out, however, you get into a brief, primarily suppressive exchange with CorpSec, and your decker dosen't have time to totally clear his access logs. While the shipment has to go through that day, Ares can now connect you as a member of the same group that performed a similar break-in two weeks ago, in which a mage slung quite a bit of mojo. Although Ares has to send out the trucks, they've used your ballistics to better assess an upcoming threat, and ensured you that you'll have at least an extra wagemage for the final run.

It's a specific example, sure, but given that the megas are shipping packages of massive economic value and have essentially bottomless security budgets relative to a Runner team, I could definitely see them trying to analyze casings to try and build team "profiles". Since most (all?) of the big megas also have some kind of significant defense subsidiary, they may even already own part of the equipment necessary to try it.

[Dumori]

Case less is also the snipers friend allows the use of semi auto sniper rifles like a bolt action. You don't need to hold the brass for a safe time so they don't see the refection. Flangeable rounds and called shot eliminate the need for ballistic evidence so do explosive rounds.

[Snow_Fox]

Ballistics still mark the slugs, caseless just means no brass to check for the impact point of the firing pin, but the slug, still has marks.

The ex-governor of New york, Elliot spitzer, when running for governor years ago had a mind boglgingly stupid idea .He wanted to require every freaking bullet to have a code unmber engraved on it, that could be tracked so when you dug the slug out of someone you could, in theory, track down who bought it. Do I have to list all the ways this was f'ed up? He didn't win then and when running later he'd dropped this pin head idea.

[Wounded Ronin]

Ballistics still mark the slugs, caseless just means no brass to check for the impact point of the firing pin, but the slug, still has marks.

The ex-governor of New york, Elliot spitzer, when running for governor years ago had a mind boglgingly stupid idea .He wanted to require every freaking bullet to have a code unmber engraved on it, that could be tracked so when you dug the slug out of someone you could, in theory, track down who bought it. Do I have to list all the ways this was f'ed up? He didn't win then and when running later he'd dropped this pin head idea.

Well, Dupre probably suggested it to him.

And when I say Dupre, I mean the expensive but small prostitute, rather than the Ultima character.

[Wesley Street]

I'm not a gun nut but according to news reports like these over 100 million AK-47s are illegally manufactured every year. That's a 60 year old assault rifle still in use! Since the Shadowrun time line deviates from RL somewhere in the early 90s it's not unreasonable to assume that the Soviet or Russian government (don't remember in the timeline when the first SovGov fell) created a rifle in the late 1990s that became just as cheap and easy to reproduce as at the 47 which then became popular with criminals, mercs, terrorists and rogue states. I wouldn't see a corpsec guard carrying one but a street ganger? Hells, yeah.

[nezumi]

Seems the answer is pretty simple.

The designers firstly realized that the number should be higher than the previous number, so people know it's the newest and coolest version (keep in mind the sort of twits who oftentimes use these weapons), so they want the number to be above 74, even if it should rightly be 28 or something (2028). On the flip side, 105 and the like sound pretty dorky, and that can't be any good. So rather than tie themselves to the year of design still, they just began making up neat sounding numbers which would move product (the irony of the Soviet gun becoming a capitalist toy...)

On the flip side, you could say that the 97 marks 97 years since the development of the 47 - 2044. This keeps (more or less) to the counting method, just rebaselines, keeps the cool name concerns above, and explains why a 60 year old gun is still so competitive with all the other guns being offered.

[Naysayer]

So, let's sum up what we've got so far:
- SR developers traditionally aren't super knowledgeable about the finer details of gun-nut-ness.
- The SR timeline deviates in enough places to justify that at some point, some alternate universe russian decided to name the 50-year anniversary edition of everybody's favourite assault rifle the AK-97.
- AK-97, as pointed out by nezumi, sounds significantly more awesome than AK-105, AK-110 and even AK-X.
- Shadowrun and firearms. You know?

So, with these facts in mind, I give you: The Uzi III/Uzi IV, and the HK 227.
Discuss!

[hyzmarca]

I'm not a gun nut but according to news reports like these over 100 million AK-47s are illegally manufactured every year. That's a 60 year old assault rifle still in use! Since the Shadowrun time line deviates from RL somewhere in the early 90s it's not unreasonable to assume that the Soviet or Russian government (don't remember in the timeline when the first SovGov fell) created a rifle in the late 1990s that became just as cheap and easy to reproduce as at the 47 which then became popular with criminals, mercs, terrorists and rogue states. I wouldn't see a corpsec guard carrying one but a street ganger? Hells, yeah.

Given the age of the weapon, the patent has run out in all reasonable jurisdictions meaning that licensing is a non-issue. This is the same reason that 36 companies produce AR-15 and M-16 variants.