Skill question, Gunnery or Heavy Weapons Options

[Luke Hardison]

Thinking of planning an ambush with a tripod mounted LMG (hopefully HV) in the bed of a pickup truck for suppressive fire and overwatch. I want to leave the weapon in the bed so that we can peel out after it's over, or early if things go bad. Would the operator of the weapon use Gunnery or Heavy Weapons to fire the weapon?

Summation: The weapon is mounted on a tripod sitting in the bed of a truck. In this situation the truck is not moving during the firing of the weapon. How is it fired?

Reference:

[A Clockwork Lime]

That would be Gunnery if it's on a vehicle. The big difference is that Gunnery covers adjusting for all the bumps and jolting around you have to endure while on a moving vehicle (which arguable accounts for the +2 defaulting penalty for using Heavy Weapons).

[xizor]

i would say that as long as the pickup truck was (stationary) it should be a heavy weapons skill.
i don't really see how i would use different skills if the gun had been attached to a truck without my knowing about it.

[blakkie]

How I'd rule it:

The tripod effectively becomes a pintle mount when you bolt it to the truck bed. You are going to bolt it down, right? Otherwise you might as well leave it on the ground behind you because if you don't bolt it down that is where it'll end up when you peel out. :spin: :rotfl: :spin: :rotfl:

Check this out this website for details on why I'd rule this way: http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/lib...m/23-27/Ch3.htm

You can see that the ground tripod is infact just a platform to attach the weapon's pintle mount to. Tripod bolted to the truck is a pintle mount, with all the associated Body requirements.

[Luke Hardison]

[Zazen]

I'm with xizor, Heavy Weapons. Gunnery is about accounting for a moving vehicle, IMO.

If you ever played an arcade game called Virtual On, you've got gunnery down. That was all about accounting for your movement and their movement at the same time. If you just sit and shoot it feels pretty different.

[Arethusa]

Personally, I'd just get rid of Gunnery altogether and just use Heavy Weapons. If you don't want to do that, just use Heavy Weapons while it's stationary and Gunnery while it's moving. Of course, to say that the second that technical gets moving, your skill matters no more than if you'd been trained in pistols is pretty damn stupid, but hey.

[Kanada Ten]

You use Gunnery if the weapon receives the 1/2 recoil modifier from vechile mouting and Heavy Weapons if it does not.

[blakkie]

[Luke Hardison]

For tripods / bipods intended for operation in our urban jungle, SOP is to use rubber tips, designed for friction on pavement or concrete instead of digging into dirt.

Add to that my propensity towards spray-on bed liners ....

You must be from somewhere in the north. Here in Texas, a pickup without a bedliner is like shouting, "I don't know what I'm doing!" everytime someone sees your truck.

[blakkie]

Still not the same as normally smooth, frankly slippery surface for in factory truck beds. I just see it as bad, bad news looking to happen. I don't think buddy is really going to have the time to breakdown the weapon before you bug out. Why not just slap a gyro on the weapon and have him sling it over his arm and sit on a lawnchair in the back of the truck. When it comes time to leave he just lays down in the back, tries to brace himself for the ride, and prays you don't flip the vehicle during the getaway. Then if you have to stop and shoot someone midchase he has the option to pop up and spray down the LS cruiser or whatever. ;)

[blakkie]

BTW if the weapon is not affixed to the vehicle I'd go Heavy Weapon skill with the associated rules for firing a weapon from a vehicle (plus appropriate recoil as Kanada Ten mentions). They're in the SR3 there somewhere, reference escapes me at the moment.

[Eyeless Blond]

That said I'd just bolt the thing down [edit]thus using the Gunnery skill rather than Heavy Weapons[/edit]. It's not really that hard of a vehicle mod, and will make the HMG much more usable (the 1/2 recoil mod being by far the most important part). If you're worried about driving down the road with a heavy weapon bolted down in the back, get some kind of convertable top, or have a couple of guys in the back unscrewing the base-I wouldn't think it would take *that* much longer to do.

[Austere Emancipa...]

He's talking about a LMG here people. You could fire that thing from your shoulder without any trouble whatsoever, so keeping it on a tripod, even if it's not bolted down in any way, would be easy enough. The recoil will not move it around. A standard LMG on a bipod is like a 17kg braced Assault Rifle, and a HV-LMG is like 2 8.5kg braced Assault Rifles.

Still, to keep the tripod from sliding around when the truck moves, you could brace it with sandbags, or something attached to the bed of the pickup. Just rubber tips on the tripod legs won't do it.

I'd definitely count it as Heavy Weapons in either case, as long as the truck doesn't move. If you want to fire the LMG while it moves, you should just fire it from the shoulder, and if your GM says something about it being a Heavy Weapon and giving it double Recoil Penalties, you can just ram SR3 up his ass.