Effective Tactics, What to do and NOT do Options

[Siege]

[Austere Emancipa...]

[Frag-o Delux]

[Austere Emancipa...]

Frankly, I think a little LED is pretty fricken hazardous already. In the Finnish Defense Forces, we were warned not to turn NODs on until they were firmly placed over your eyes so that not one bit of light would be reflected off your face and be visible to anyone else. In near-pitch black, the tiniest little LED is bad.

An extremely faint IR-light, for use in complete dark only, might be a good idea. The guys in my group only turn their Eye-Light systems on when the enemy already knows where they are or when it doesn't matter if people know where they are.

[Sahandrian]

Aren't eye-lights polarized anyway?

[Austere Emancipa...]

They'll still be reflected all over the place. You can't spot the source of the eyelights very easily, but you can see what they are looking at, unless every surface is a near-perfect mirror. And if there's smoke or fog in the air, the guy with eye-lights is immediately spotted.

[Sigfried McWild]

[Frag-o Delux]

I always thought the LED were for near perfect dark other wise you would just use the ambient light, you wouldn't need another light source.

[Sigfried McWild]

Yes, but unless you are underground or in a room with no windows, perfect darkenss is quite hard to find. Having any source of light on you it's the equivalent of putting on a hawaian shirt with a target painted on in normal light.

And even in perfect darkness it's a lot better if you can get the enemy to turn on their lights first.

[edit]
Actually I think I'd rule that a shot to a light in the darkness would be counted as a called shot to whatever part of the body is holding the light (called shot to the head for eye-lights for example). The shot would incur in a +4 TN (called shot) but no darkness modifiers and possibly a -1/2 for a contrasting target and then apply all the effects of a called shot.
[/edit]

This post has been edited by Sigfried McWild: Dec 29 2003, 07:33 PM

[Austere Emancipa...]

[Frag-o Delux]

I didn't make the device, I just saw it in the catalouge. :D I believe in the first cybertech book they showed a guy with the eye-lights and it looked like he had car head lights in his head, so I never gave them a second look. I just read the new versions and they sound a lot more appealing.

[Sammiel]

[Frag-o Delux]

We use the fudge method with expolsives. If you should be a smear on the street you best bet you will be. That is for the kids who use explosives to much and try to loophole their way around somethig.

[Diesel]

Copy that, Frag-O.

If you're not prone and a ways away, kiss your ass goodbye.

[Frag-o Delux]

We had a guy try doing the 2 meter thing. I had to walk through several apartment buildings to find his weapon foci, which I promptly sold to his Oyabon (been a while i can't remember how to spell that word) for a tidy profit. The oyabon didn't like him much either. I kept his titanium watch that I dug out of a homeless dude standing down the street. :) We are pretty lenient with the explosive thing but sometimes close is just to close. He, well was way to F***ing close.

[Austere Emancipa...]

You shouldn't exaggerate the effects of undirected explosives either, especially not when they are just sitting on open ground. 2kg of C-12 certainly is a big deal -- after all, the rules would have us believe that is the equivalent of 32kg of Commercial Explosives, and being 2 meters away from that might indeed rip you into chunks.

However, standing 2 meters away from 2kg of Commercial Explosives on open ground probably wouldn't -- you'd be mangled and burned for sure (about Deadly, perhaps a bit of overdamage), but you wouldn't be ripped into pieces.

My players just have never used any explosive charge (apart from grenades, rockets and the like) which weighed less than 10kg, and even that is always C-12. So they've never used an explosive charge that has done less than 36D+4. Being 2 meters away from that wouldn't save you even by canon... Anything more than 3 meters would still spare you from all harm.

This post has been edited by Austere Emancipator: Dec 29 2003, 11:41 PM

[Frag-o Delux]

We usuallly stick to the rules in 99% percent of the cases, but once in a while you had guys who thougth the more chrome you had the longer you will live no matter how dumb you are. This guy was set up in an ambush buy some triads. He was supposed to pick up something. He had a body guard open the trunk but jack ass decide 5 meters was more then enough to be safe, he thought chrome plus adept equals GOD. I don't remeber the amount of explosives used, but it was alot and of the sort meant to knock down builds. I know a little about explosives and I know C4 is really good at certain things, but he wanted some thing with a real bang. I had the GM use a RDX mixture with a nitro starter. The GM asked for advice on it weeks ahead of time one of the players was a demo expert or we were going out hire one for a run, so I didn't give it a thought. My character tagged along because I knew the soon to be flamed character. I knew there was a gang war going on and I didn't want to get caught in the cross fire so I was in the stuffer shack on the corner filling up on some soy, the symbiotes were aching. I usually tagged along because my character hated his but hid it well, but I was not going to miss his demise for nothing, I knew it was a matter of time, I just had to wait it out. :D

We have had great dragon shot outs. The character I had at the time had an uncanny ability to roll extremely high for finding gear, so I was the go to guy in the group. Our GM goes with the rolls 99% of the time, because a standing quote in our group is "if it is good for the PC it is good for the NPC" and generally vice versa. That usually keeps a cap on the mayhem and ungodly amounts of weapons to a minimum. We figure if we don't use AV rounds neither will the GM, but we keep a few clips around jsut incase we hit a guy that is tough.

[Birdy]

[Siege]

A limited tactical approach is still beneficial -- the concepts still apply, if the exact mechanics don't translate well.

PCs and NPCs should dive for cover at the sound of gunfire, but there are plenty of people who stand around and look for the noise. The long-lived tend to have learned that lesson early.

-Siege

[Stein]

Let's keep in mind that IRL, today, a 40mm HE grenade launched from an M203 or M79 has a kill radius of 5 meters. Those handy little buggers have about 0.033 kg of C-4 in them, and the only metal is the casing of the round. Scale that to C-12 and then multiply the effect by 66 to simulate your 2 kg of C-12.

Welllllll, not exactly. Explosions, like any wave, follow the path of least resistance. In this case, with the ground as an obstacle, straight up and out. Makes a decent size hole and a real big boom, falsh and burn. Yeah, the rules suck for safe distance calculation. 'Nuff said. However, the real question is the destruction of the crane. Since the explosion was not directed by tamping, or shaping, I would be really surpised that it took down a structurally sound crane.

Demolition charges are always directed. Even then, we look for weaknesses in the structure and use physics and gravity to be able to carry enough charge to do the job. For said crane, supported on probably 3 or 4 I-beam, or cylindrical legs, I estimate that it would take about 12 kg (12 pakages) of C-4 or RDX specifically placed and tamped with, at least, wooden backstopping to cut those legs would be necessary.

Apply the conversion from C-4 to C-12 to get the reduction in weight, but one still needs to account for specifically placing the charges. It would take at least a 250 lb (120 kg) bomb, with a close to direct hit to take down that crane with undirected explosives.

[The Jopp]

[Rev]

There are knockdown rules someplace in the combat section of the main book. Not sure what they say about explosions though.

If you want any of this explosive power stuff to be remotely realistic the rule needs to follow the inverse square law as well. Damage should drop with the square of distance in a fairly open space. That will greatly alleviate the problems of the power being too low nearby or too high far away no matter what reduction per meter you choose with a linear model.

[Austere Emancipa...]

[gknoy]

[Fahr]

(aside:TIE pilots - either you are very good or you are dead)