The Fragger - Insane Custom Weapon Design, Someone should take away my copy of arsenal... Options

[Rad]

Hmm, gone over the explosives rules in arsenal a bit more, this certainly needs some work to stay in keeping with that.

The rules for sympathetic detonation specifically mentions multiple grenades being set off on a runner's person, (+1 DV per grenade) lists the explosive rating for grenades, (which allows me to reverse-engineer their weights) and also says to treat multiple explosives as one charge if they're in physical contact, but to treat them as separate charges if there's "a gap of more than a few centimeters between them"

I'm working on a few different designs, at this point it's basically going to be just custom ammo for the regular underbarrel bola launcher. Offhand you could use the rules for making IEDs to add 1.5 kilos (based on the grenade weights I reverse-engineered) of plastic explosives per ball.

Not sure about the detonation method. Using a wireless detonator and adding a smartgun system to the bola launcher would take care of it, but I'd like to add a few more systems for redundancy. Maybe upgrade the bolagrenades all the way to drone status with smartgun system and pilot upgrade, then add a pull-release detonator linked to the monowire. The idea is to have the drone monitor the tension of the wire after it wraps around the target, and detonate if it changes.

Also toying with the notion of droning the bolaweights, filling them with binary explosives (one chemical in each weight) and adding a built-in atomizer. Bolas hit, drones starts pumping out atomized explosives, which mix automatically in the air. 1 kilo per simple action with a drone's 3 IP's means it can pump out all three kilos and still have a simple action left to detonate them with in the time it takes a thrown grenade to explode, assuming you allow them to start pumping on the IP they hit.

Binary Explosives don't have as high a rating cap as plastic explosives, so your maximum damage output isn't going to be as high, but it's got a nice psychological intimidation factor:

Do this with a regular bola instead of a monowire one, so the target's just knocked down but not killed or incapacitated, then flash the remote detonator in your hand as the explosives begin pumping out around the poor slot.

Of course, you'd have to move a ways away before you actually pressed the button. 3 kilos of rating 12 binary covering three square meters when atomized means a blast radius of thirteen meters. (square root of 3 kilos x Rating 12 rounded up = 21 DV with standard -2/meter blast = 10 meters + 3 meter ground zero from atomization)

Still, after watching The Dark Knight last night, that seems like something a sadistic bastard with access to explosives might do. Hell, the Joker'd probably keep the monowire and just count on the fact that 8p probably won't kill the target outright--just seriously mess them up.

As for the fun of my original uber-weapon design: If you can't see the fun in full auto monowire explodey goodness, you lack a visual imagination and should not be playing games that don't come with their own graphics. It's the concept, and the image of some runner taking out a milspec-armored strike team in one spectacular sweep of aurofire, voice-response ammo creating an electronic choir as it hums out "Ride of the Valkyries" and then detonates in a massive cascade explosion.

The intricacies of rules and game balance are interesting on an intellectual level, but when you lose the ability to get into the scene and have fun, you've missed the point of roleplaying, omae.

Will provide finished stats later. Probably going with the binary version, since having two bolagrenades could be interpreted as only adding +1 to the explosion's damage code.

Seriously wish there was a core stand-alone bola launcher.

[masterofm]

Wireless will get you killed if the opposing team has a hacker. They just send an activation signal when it is inside your gun and you explode. Doesn't make too much sense, but thats the matrix for you. Also to give you some point of reference:

A grenade weighs about 19 ounces (just over a pound)

A kilogram is approximately 2.2 pounds (33.6 ounces)

The fact that you are now putting something so custom made that does not really have rules per say written for it and trying to fit it into the rules as a GM I would say no. Using a plastic explosive bomb, having it fired at high speeds out of a bolo launcher, while attached to monowire, expecting it to have a perfect detonation every time as it is rotating at high speeds just part of my brain shuts down and refuses to see it. A bolo grenade launcher at least seems to give the "Rambo effect" in that it might not be all that cost effective or even make all that much sense, but probably someone would do it for the coolness factor (stupid bow explosives.) Although I would laugh if you shot the monowire grenades and all it did was lop off someones arm and the grenades then detonated far out of range.

Anyways... by RAW you would need an airburst link not a smartlink when firing a grenade or some kind of improvised explosive to improve the effectiveness, and even then you have to take scatter rules into effect. Only if you were able to reduce the scatter to 0 would I rule that you would hit the person with the monowire. Although I would say get a smartlink anyways as the +2 is very handy.

[Lionhearted]

As for the fun of my original uber-weapon design: If you can't see the fun in full auto monowire explodey goodness, you lack a visual imagination and should not be playing games that don't come with their own graphics. It's the concept, and the image of some runner taking out a milspec-armored strike team in one spectacular sweep of aurofire, voice-response ammo creating an electronic choir as it hums out "Ride of the Valkyries" and then detonates in a massive cascade explosion.

Personally I prefer the crescendo of Tchaicovsky's 1812 Overture

[Isath]

If you can't see the fun in full auto monowire explodey goodness, you lack a visual imagination and should not be playing games that don't come with their own graphics.

As I am in the mood to let me be provoked to answer that... I drop by for another run. First off it is kind of funny to hear that from someone trying to build munchkin weaponry. My imagination, visual and otherwise, is more than ok - it helps with the job from time to time. Why I do not see the fun of that concept is, because it's a cheap try to create a mega-gun by willfully bending the rules to your advantage or simply ignoring them. Cheap does neither match my taste nor my preference for humor or fun in general. It is OK though, that this might be hard to understand for you, as you have a different perspective and your own preferences.

While rules do not matter that much for the story, they do however, matter for stats. My imagination let's me visualize scenes, that are more apealing to me, without the need for munchkin-tech™.

...ladida...

[Rad]

As I am in the mood to let me be provoked to answer that... I drop by for another run. First off it is kind of funny to hear that from someone trying to build munchkin weaponry. My imagination, visual and otherwise, is more than ok - it helps with the job from time to time. Why I do not see the fun of that concept is, because it's a cheap try to create a mega-gun by willfully bending the rules to your advantage or simply ignoring them. Cheap does neither match my taste nor my preference for humor or fun in general. It is OK though, that this might be hard to understand for you, as you have a different perspective and your own preferences.

While rules do not matter that much for the story, they do however, matter for stats. My imagination let's me visualize scenes, that are more apealing to me, without the need for munchkin-tech™.

...ladida...

And see, that's the problem. People look at this thing and immediately go into Munchkin-Defense-Mode™.

I said right in the first post, before I even listed the stats, that it was an insane design and I expected it to be outlawed by the GM. If he didn't ban the thing, I still wouldn't use it because it doesn't fit my character. My intent is not to build munchkin weaponry, but to stat out an over the top concept weapon dreamed up while yucking it up with friends after a gaming session.

Moreover, it's not cheap. Arsenal provides much more efficient ways of pulling off superdamage. It's the crazy ramboness of the thing that I'm going for, not a low cost (nuyen or otherwise) win-button.

If I can design a more sane, rules-freindly version, I might consider bringing it into our game--but it would probably be more effective to just grab a missile launcher. Maybe we'll build one and keep it in the van, as a concept piece never intended to be used.

I stand by my statement. If you're so uptight about rules and game balance that you can't appreciate the fun of a joke uberweapon that's never intended to see play, something is wrong with you.

Wireless will get you killed if the opposing team has a hacker. They just send an activation signal when it is inside your gun and you explode. Doesn't make too much sense, but thats the matrix for you. Also to give you some point of reference:

A grenade weighs about 19 ounces (just over a pound)

A kilogram is approximately 2.2 pounds (33.6 ounces)

The fact that you are now putting something so custom made that does not really have rules per say written for it and trying to fit it into the rules as a GM I would say no. Using a plastic explosive bomb, having it fired at high speeds out of a bolo launcher, while attached to monowire, expecting it to have a perfect detonation every time as it is rotating at high speeds just part of my brain shuts down and refuses to see it. A bolo grenade launcher at least seems to give the "Rambo effect" in that it might not be all that cost effective or even make all that much sense, but probably someone would do it for the coolness factor (stupid bow explosives.) Although I would laugh if you shot the monowire grenades and all it did was lop off someones arm and the grenades then detonated far out of range.

Anyways... by RAW you would need an airburst link not a smartlink when firing a grenade or some kind of improvised explosive to improve the effectiveness, and even then you have to take scatter rules into effect. Only if you were able to reduce the scatter to 0 would I rule that you would hit the person with the monowire. Although I would say get a smartlink anyways as the +2 is very handy.

I went with wireless detonator + smartgun rather than smartgun + airbust (airburst requires a smartgun system) because airburst is specificly for grenade launchers, and I didn't want another round of RAW-Hammer dropping. It's a case of the same thing by a different name.

Similarly, while the original idea was to use grenades as the bola-weights, that just doesn't fly by RAW, so I had to go a different route. To be clear, this isn't a grenade launcher, it's an explosive monofilament bola launcher--or more accurately, a launcher for monifiliment bolas that explode. (Since if I use the word explosive someone will go "oh that's +1 DV +1 AP by RAW!")

Technically, only the exploding part of that description requires modding to achieve, and the IED rules cover this nicely. Before anybody accuses me of using semantics, I'd like to point out that I'm only responding to other poster's use of the same. The concept has always been a monofilament bola that launches, wraps around the target, and then goes boom. If using the word "grenades" get's people's hackles up, I'll use a different word.

I'm trying not to bring real world weapons and engineering into this--particularly because SR spits in their faces pretty consistently already. If those are listed weights for SR grenades, I'd like to know where I can find them. I calculated a 1.5 kg weight for SR handgrenades from this line in Arsenal:

"For purposes of sympathetic detonation, commercial hand grenades contain Rating 8 explosives..."

Not perfect, but it's the only core mention of wieght or explosives rating for hand grenades that I've found.

HE grenades have a DV of 10, divided by rating 8 explosives = 1.25, which is the square root of 1.5625 Since you're supposed to round up when calculating the DV of explosives, I rounded the number off to 1.5 for simplicity's sake. Run back, that's:

Square root of 1.5 kilos =
1.2247448713915890490986420373529

x Rating 8 explosives =
9.7979589711327123927891362988236

Rounded up equals = 10 DV

So I'm assuming the weight of SR hand grenades to be 1.5 kilos, or 3.306933393 pounds Sounds a bit high to me, especially as bola weights, but SR physics don't always match ours. Until I see more reasonable (or more official) core stats, that's what I'm going with.

I'm a little suprised by people's strict literal adherence to the RAW here. The rules of SR are designed to be somewhat flexible in order to cover unexpected situations, even moreso than alot of other systems, especially the rules for customizing weapons and making IEDs. Hell, the example they use for making an IED is a guy filling an empty beer can with rusty nails and foam explosives to make a frag grenade. He doesn't get any penalties on the device's performance or function because of it's jerry-rigged construction, in fact, it performs better because of the two net hits he got on his demolitions + logic test.

I'd say coring out the weights of a monofilament bola and putting in explosives and sophisticated control systems is at least a slightly more professional approach.

Personally I prefer the crescendo of Tchaicovsky's 1812 Overture

Ah, finally someone who get's it. You're right, that would be better--especially on full auto. Thanks for the link, omae. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

[edit] Crappy internet ate half my post, fixed.[/edit]

[Platinum Dragon]

See, one of the problems I can see with your design is that the underslung Bola Launcher would likely have the two balls offset slightly to allow them to begin spinning in flight. If we're going full-auto, we're probably talking cartriges / sabot of some sort, so I'd suggest making them 3-balled bloas, so that they can be packed in a row and still fly out into a spinning formation once launched. This has the twofold advantages of increasing the weapon's maiming potential, and reducing the chance of a malfunction, while allowing a belt- or drum-feed.

And yes, the idea of firing entangling, exploding sticky-bombs at full-auto is sheer awesomeness. My next character is totally going to get an automatic grenade launcher with gecko grenade ammo.

A friend at my table had a similarly silly idea of packing monofilament nets into a shotgun. You'd probably only get one shot (I don't imagine the gun barrel would survive the monofilament being launched out of it at speed), but you'd probably only need one shot.

Also, for a less dramatic and more scarily cartoonish mega-violence scene, replace Ride of the Valkyries / 1812 Overture with Waka Laka.

[Dumori]

the bola could have 3 wights of 0.5kg each filled with rating 15 explosvie it should be close to 18DP. Or 1.5kg each wights for 4.5kg and a DP of 32 rounded. One is more lilly the other godly.

[Platinum Dragon]

For an idea of what using this would feel like, play Call of Duty 4 single-player with infinite ammo turned on and use an underslung grenade launcher.

[Kyoto Kid]

Thats what I had told the GM, but he wanted me to roll them as separate hits. I figured if he -really- wanted to make it a run and gun campaign, who was I to tell him no? (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nyahnyah.gif) Like a Phys Adept's punches, it was alot of extra dice becoming hits.

But yes, 7P is right.

...I'd love to bring Dr Zanzibar with his PJSS Elephant rifle into this campaign 10P/-2DV base x 2 (EXEX). Talk about a spirit disrupting "boomstick".

[Mäx]

So I'm assuming the weight of SR hand grenades to be 1.5 kilos, or 3.306933393 pounds Sounds a bit high to me, especially as bola weights, but SR physics don't always match ours. Until I see more reasonable (or more official) core stats, that's what I'm going with.

So your gtun has a 50 round drum magazine of 3kg bola rounds, who the hell carries around something that weights over 150 kilos as a just in case weapon.
And that thing would also be huge so no way to use it as a underbarrel weapon.

[Platinum Dragon]

So your gtun has a 50 round drum magazine of 3kg bola rounds, who the hell carries around something that weights over 150 kilos as a just in case weapon.
And that thing would also be huge so no way to use it as a underbarrel weapon.

CEASE YOUR PESKY LOGIC! We are not designing practical weapons to hand out to the military! We are aiming for MAXIMUM SLAUGHTER! MAXIMUM SLAUGHTER!

*ahem*

Make it vehicle mounted, and belt, rather than drum, fed, and you also eliminate those pesky recoil mods. Now if the vehicle it's on is a souped-up bike with smart tires, you can even take it indoors! Explosive sticky-bolas for all!

Or just, y'know, play a troll with softmaxed strength.

[Dumori]

Mount it on your citymaster riot control for the masses. Watch those pesky rioters just disappear.

But I dont see the need for FA BF would be enough for most occasions. A nice 15round clip.

[Rad]

So your gtun has a 50 round drum magazine of 3kg bola rounds, who the hell carries around something that weights over 150 kilos as a just in case weapon.
And that thing would also be huge so no way to use it as a underbarrel weapon.

Like I said, it sounds a bit heavy to me. But then, the idea of a 3 pound grenade sounds like a bit much too. It's like the fantasy RPG's that list rediculously heavy weights for their swords. It may not make sense in our world, but apparently in the game world you can swing a 10lb hunk of metal effectively--with one hand.

I agree completely that this doesn't make sense as an underbarrel weapon, but that's the only kind of bola launcher I can find in SR4, and there are no official rules for converting an underbarrel weapon to a stand alone one.

Personally, I'd use the Forgrip and Trigger Removal mods as analogs for attatching a handle and installing a trigger, and then maybe add Extended Barrel to make it more rifle or SMG sized. To be clear, you wouldn't get the -1 recoil from the foregrip, the idea is that the mod is roughly equivalent to the difficulty, cost, availability, ect. of what you're actualy trying to do. The only reason I didn't do this with the original design was that adding a drum and full auto used up 6 slots, and I figured an underbarrel weapon with the full 6 slots was pushing it already--you don't want to overmod a weapon that's got the glitch rules for monowire and explosive ammo.

A monowire net gun was actually something that came up after the first session, before we got the idea to add explosives to the mix. I think the final concept was a retractable net gun that you could fire over the front-line enemies heads, let it drop on the rear-guard, and then retract it through the whole group. We abandoned it because no one liked the idea of having an invisible monofilament net retracting towards them.

I had thought about the problem of getting the bola's to spin correctly, but since it already works in game I decided it wasn't nessecary to figure out how. The issues of adapting the weapon to full autofire I took to be covered by the Firing Selection mod.

Using three-weighted bolas does make more sense, and appeals to the engineer in me, but since it already works and there's a problem of multiple explosives becoming redundant, I decided to leave that alone and preserve the visual image of the thing.

Using three wieghts with less explosives in each would also solve the heavyness problem, but again, they can't combine DV so you'd be stuck with a low damage code and a very expensive +2 DV from the other two. You could go liquid explosives + drone atomizer to get around that, but it might be even more expensive that way.

The vehicle-mounted idea I definitely like--I was already thinking this would be good as a drone weapon, especially since a critical glitch would just leave you with a fragged drone instead of a missing torso.

Thanks for the input everyone, it's much appreciated.

[Dumori]

But I'd just say that the charges are close enough together to be treated as one bigger charge. Or treat each charge speratly the better option not a huge area of doom but less likely to live as it has a higher total DP.

[Rad]

I'd say they're close enough too, but arsenal says a few centimeters gap = separate charges for +1 DV each. Since we're already talking drones, I was toying with the notion of adding a mobility system to the bolas, along with the smartgun system and pilot upgrade. That way they could crawl around, link up, and go boom as one charge.

Still though, I like the binary explosives with drone atomizer concept. Technically though, if you went with the 3-bola + liquid explosives route, you could just have the bolas function as gas grenades and add a detonator to ignite the cloud. You only really need the atomizer if you're mixing binary explosives.

On that note though, it says 1kg of liquid explosives = 1 liter of fluid, which might be tough to cram into such a small volume. Dunno if that holds for binary too. Weight vs Volume, heh, this is why I try not to get too technical or bring real world science into in-game weapon design.

[Voran]

A gun that shoots swords if fun.


As is a Dire Tarrasque Flail.

[Rad]

But neither explode.

Besides, the Tarrasque is better air-dropped--preferably from orbit. That's what orbital gentech labs are for, after all. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

[Platinum Dragon]

A gun that shoots swords if fun.


As is a Dire Tarrasque Flail.

Three words.

Rocket. Propelled. Chainsaw.

[Rad]

Actually, we discussed that one at the last gaming session. Thing is, it'd have to be a rocket propelled monofilament chainsaw, stuffed with rating 15 plastic explosives.

The hilarious part, I chimed in with that just after the GM made the mistake of saying: "Actually, you could make that with the rules in Arsenal..."

Evilness.