Bows and Smartguns, How it could affect you. Options

[ElFenrir]

Yeah, I have a shaman(finnish mythology based), that had a bow as his primary ranged weapon. He had a few options-a Stunbolt/Manabolt and melee combat as well, but I didn't want to keep popping off spells every time he needed to hit someone, and if he couldn't get close, i wanted another ranged option that fit him. I think he had one point in Pistols he learned later, but his Archery skill was his best ranged attack; he was Strength 5, and did just fine with it; even downed a couple of paranormal critters in one shot. Again, it just seems like the case of hearing about the trolls most often since they have the uber-super-bows.

I also had a weapon specialist that had the archery skill and owned a bow, but didn't use it all that often(it was more of a flavor skill, sport-archery, and hell, just in case.)

[Cain]

I had a SR3 character that only got played once. Dutch was an ork who use anything *but* guns in combat. The bow was his only standard weapon; the rest of the time, he threw billiard balls and clubbed people with pool cues.

[Fix-it]

the ability to combine a airburst link, bow, and explosive arrows would be nice.

think of it as a very quiet grenade launcher.

quiet until the grenade goes off.

[Stahlseele]

tape grenade with grenade airburst link capabilities to arrow and shoot arrow.
use grenades that let out smoke and or stun gas or something equivalently vile.
or shoot splash grenades with slip-spray faar away ^^
will still stay kinda quiet in those cases O.o

i had a STR16 Troll built for a game, but my GM said i could only spend 2 points of essence on him, so i had to take out things like smartlink, rangefinder and mathmatical subprocessor to calculate wind and range for indirect shooting . . will put those in first thing in game though . . because i allways had planned on him using the bow for long range sniping . . kinda like in most anime where the single deadly arrow suddenly falls seemingly straight from the sky and nails the target to the ground . . and his backstory will be of a critter hunter that does his hunting old school style with bow and arrows and his hand blades . . both laced with GammaScopolamine so he can just lightly to moderately wound his prey but have it fall down and go to sleep immediately so he can shoot it with a net gun and cart it off to where ever . .

[Scoot]

The character I asked this question for is actually a strength 6 (after cyberwear) elf adept.

[simplexio]

smargun system, why not little piece of ware on bow which calculates current bow tilt, tension and knows used arrows material etc. sound reasonable. rangefinder could be used measure distance to target so that smartgun system could give hint what to do if user wants to hit target (adjust angle, more power) but it would not help when using indirect fire

[ornot]

I'm relieved to see that bows are not soley the province of trolls!

I think getting into too much detail about what a smartlink does on a bow is not worthwhile. Just as a smartlink in a pistol probably measures barrel temperature, ejection pressure and a dozen other things we don't care about (about the only piece of relevant information from a game point of view is ammunition remaining), a bow smartlink would logically measure draw pressure and loading, but none of it is important. Unlike the smartgun, ammunition is unimportant to the smartbow, since it must be reloaded each time.

Considering the relatively simple physics involved in a bow, I forsee the smartbow displaying a predicted flight path to the user, just as a smartgun displays a targetting reticule, so would apply equally to indirect fire, within reason (there is no way for the system to compensate for unknown windspeeds at different altitudes).

[Stahlseele]

hmm . . tape wire with wifi-capable RFID-Tag onto the arrow, shoot arrow through the frigging wall and use the wire to get through wifi-inhibiting stuff and then use the wifi rfid to go into the wireless net of the building?

[BIG BAD BEESTE]

Oooo, that's a good one.

As for taping grenades to arrows, well don't expect them to fly true. In fact they're more likely to spin off and hit the ground near to the archer because they'd be incredibly unbalanced. Better off sticking to lobbing them, or grenade launchers.

Air-timed explosive heads would be feasable though. Plus don't forget toxin-coated heads. Or even capsule heads if shaped and machined appropriately.

BTW - anyone ever consider the length of a troll's arrow? As a standard human I've got a wrist to chin drawlength of about 36" (3' or 1 yard). If I was to use a traditional English longbow draw to my ear it might get to 4'. Now, consider that proportionately a Troll metatype can reach 3m in height, roughly a third again - so a 6' arrow shaft isn't unreasonable to imagine. But then also factor in the fact that a troll's arms are the same ratio as their legs. Oh yeah. anyone fancy being stuck by an 8-9' arrow that's probably 2-3" thick? No wonder troll bows are feared. Although Lone Star won't really have to think very hard to solve what did the damage to a bunch of security guard corpses impaled to walls with fletched javelins will they? (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

[Warlordtheft]

Oooo, that's a good one.

As for taping grenades to arrows, well don't expect them to fly true. In fact they're more likely to spin off and hit the ground near to the archer because they'd be incredibly unbalanced. Better off sticking to lobbing them, or grenade launchers.

Air-timed explosive heads would be feasable though. Plus don't forget toxin-coated heads. Or even capsule heads if shaped and machined appropriately.

BTW - anyone ever consider the length of a troll's arrow? As a standard human I've got a wrist to chin drawlength of about 36" (3' or 1 yard). If I was to use a traditional English longbow draw to my ear it might get to 4'. Now, consider that proportionately a Troll metatype can reach 3m in height, roughly a third again - so a 6' arrow shaft isn't unreasonable to imagine. But then also factor in the fact that a troll's arms are the same ratio as their legs. Oh yeah. anyone fancy being stuck by an 8-9' arrow that's probably 2-3" thick? No wonder troll bows are feared. Although Lone Star won't really have to think very hard to solve what did the damage to a bunch of security guard corpses impaled to walls with fletched javelins will they? (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

Sterilize the area with a spell to remove fingerprints and DNA, and well there you go. Which troll killed them? (Side note: upstrengthed characters of other races could also do something similar).

[Scoot]

I dunno about fingerprints. Even with a fairly weak bow in the LARP I play, I fire with gloves to protect my fingers from string burn. I would think with a rather powerful bow like that you would definitely use gloves.

[Stahlseele]

trolls get dermal armor for that ^^
or if they are using sissy bows with itty bitty little strings . . just draw with the nails O.o
the really bad thing about toyin laced arrows from troll-bows is the simple fact that if you hit, you DO deal physical damage, thus every hit is an guaranteed injection with whatever you so chose to dip your arrows in . . even if a Ranger-X Bow in SR would only do STR+4L damage(it does STR+4M by the way), a high strength troll would still hit for anything between 14L and 20L Damage at Game-start.
if you don't manage to fully dodge the shot, you're not likely to be able to stage down damage to nothing . . and because of the huge power, it's very likely above armor and so does physical damage in SadoRun4 . .
and even if you only hit for the 20L damage and thus only gain one box of physical damage(however that would work, probably a long scratch from head to toe along the whole body underneath all of your armor) you would be able to inject things like GammaScopolamine so the target has to resist 10DEADLY Stun in Addition without any kind of Armor and most likely only with relatively low natural body . .
even trolls are hard pressed to roll eight tens to reduce the deadly to zero stun . .
so with one box physical damage, you'd probably drop most big critters with . . probably, 10D instant Stun-Damage . .
thus it's the perfect weapon for any real hunter who does not want to damage the body/pelt more than neccessary O.o