Safety Grenades, why not in RL? Options

[Riley37]

Advanced option for grenades:
a device built into a grenade fuse which prevents detonation as long as it's receiving a certain signal,
used in combination with a device which emits that signal at strength 0.

Advantage: while the broadcaster is live, your grenades will not go off within 3 meters of you (or any teammate who's also wearing an emitter) even if fumbled or you're KO'd mid-throw or or enemy mage uses Magic Fingers or whatever.

Disadvantages:
1. only works while you're broadcasting, which has negative consequences in certain areas (eg places in which opposition is scanning, and will notice that signal among however many minor broadcasters are active).
2. if the opposition figures out, they can broadcast the safety signal, at whatever power. Or they can jam.
Countermeasure to disadvantage 2: you're scanning for the same signal at any strength higher than 0, and you can reprogram the safety code with trivial ease.
3. Cost. Seems to me this should be relatively cheap, even with enough miniaturization to fit into a grenade.
4. If for some reason you *want* to detonate a grenade within 3 meters of yourself, you need to turn off the emitter.

[Chrysalis]

The more moving parts in something simple like a grenade the more chance that something can go wrong. I like knowing that when I pull the pin on Mr grenade I do not have to worry about evil AIs, technomancers, sunspots for it to detonate.

-Chrysalis

[Stahlseele]

another thing would be the question if people are prepared to spend money to do something like that for something that's intended to blow up with enough force to destroy the safety mechanism . .
money is a big part in those equations, especially when you enter the millions in numbers manufactured . .

[kzt]

You are also often setting the grenade off within 3 meters of you, though hopefully on the other side of hard cover.

[Oenone]

Surely the point of fumbling the grenade is that something unexpected / bad happens? For example a glitch result could still make the grenades go off because the code you're broadcasting doesn't match the code it's expecting or the safety is a dud.

It's reasonable to have it protecting against say being knocked out or the grenade magically moved back to you though.

[psychophipps]

I would have to say because any signal can be copied and repeated. Sounds really sexy until all of your grenades stop working and you get dead because of it.

[masterofm]

Isn't there already a safety feature for RPGs in SR? I thought there was a "this grenade will not explode withing 3-5 meters so it won't blow yourself away" feature that you could leave on or turn off as you saw fit on the Ares Alpha at least, or maybe it is a smart link feature. I thought I remember reading that in the BBB or Arsenal.

[Heath Robinson]

Launched Grenades have a minimum arming distance or time. In the case of the RPG line, this is implemented by having an actual pin in the grenade that you have to remove prior to launching the projectile. In many grenade launchers the grenade must rotate a certain number of times at an angular velocity above a particular value as the arming mechanism.

SR4 just says that they have a minimum range before they arm their explosives. This isn't a smartgun or airburst feature, its a normal feature.

[masterofm]

If shadowrun has not yet created a not kill you device there is something seriously wrong with the world. It should have some future tech that does not have accidental pin pulling explosion issues.

I thought that was the case, but it is 11:30 pm where I am right now and I did have a long day so I could only remember that I read it in what I thought was the BBB.

[Blade]

What Heath said.

And don't worry about the cost. The gear section of the BBB states that a lot of gear is wireless-enabled (for free).

[psychophipps]

Basing any "Don't kill yourself" tech upon anything that is not completely self-contained and/or wireless enabled is, in highly technical terms, non-optimal. There is just too much random crap being fired around over the airwaves in a given SR combat situation to make sure that someone isn't rewriting your ordinance to go off while still in the magazine. Hate to see what happens when your RPG is reprogramed to detonate the rocket upon ignition of the motor rather than with impact with the target (unless I'm the one who's character hacked it, of course).