whats the difference?, SMG's and machine pistols Options

[eidolon]

[The White Dwarf]

The damage code on suppression is irrelevent. The point is the bad guys are forced to make a dodge test or suffer a free attack. Either they blow their combat pool, or you get to hurt them. And presuming a SL-2, you get to roll your skill at TN 4 for the free shot. In the hands on anyone with an above average skill (8ish dice) thats going to hurt a lot, especially because if they tried to dodge they have less combat pool left. And if youre doing something like supressing a doorway, which are roughly only 2 sq meteres, thats 5 successes they need to dodge; which is near the top or past what most people can make even if they use thier whole pool.

But I guess for you the damage code of 6L (again, focusing on the dmg code, tsk tsk) isnt useful for tapping an opponents entier combat pool and getting a free attack. Oh, and in the case of a door it hits *every* badguy that decides to move thru that round. Gee, me and my crappy MP just took away the combat pool for everyone persuing us in one action, without *any* recoil compensation. That blows.

And on concealability, MP con6, holster +2, longcoat mod, is con12. SMG is con6, longcoat mod, con9. Conceal 12 vs conceal 9. Takes 36 dice on average to spot the 12 with 1 success, but only 12 dice to spot the 9. MP's 3 times as concealable. Yet another example of the non-linear scaling TNs making a big change over a small difference...

But of course youve considered everything and keep ignoring it, because youve run all the numbers. Guess you missed some or something /shrug.

[toturi]

[The White Dwarf]

Correct, misread a line. Point still stands its a free attack, and with a decent skill level you stand to land at least a moderate. The specifics of course depend on the exact character shooting and what hes shooting at, but presuming a few attacks in a scenario where youd be using suppressive fire, and a MP loaded with EX rounds, theres a very fair chance to tag everyone with a moderate.

[Austere Emancipa...]

Doesn't Suppressive Fire work so that additional successes on the attack test do no stage up the DL?

[The White Dwarf]

Nope, p107 CC

If you get the free attack, and land a hit, the defender gets no second dodge test and the attack is staged only by attackers successes (ie, no bonus for burst/auto fire). So basically presuming you hit theyre forced to soak using only armor and body, staged up by your successes.

[Austere Emancipa...]

Wow, you're absolutely correct. I'd always figured otherwise, dunno why.

[Person 404]

Probably thinking of searching fire which, IIRC, doesn't allow successes to stage up.

[Phaeton]

Pardon my lack of rules-fu, but what is searching fire? I don't have CC, so...

[The Jopp]

[Person 404]

[I Eat Time]

I don't get it. In the games I've played in alone, I've seen 2-3 gun adepts, cybered or magical, that have the Pistol skill. Now, with the Pistol skill alone, one has an incredible range of concealability, a nice spread of available damage codes, a whole slew of options, and any firing mode available (thank-you machine pistols). Besides that, the prices are a lot cheaper, and there are very, very few ammunition loads that don't work with the guns.

While SMGs are the single most widely useful weapon type, it's still not as useful as ALL the pistols. Really, they're useful weapons stuck somewhere in between assault rifles and heavy pistols. While they're pretty useful by themselves, if I wanna do a crapload of damage, I'll get an AR, and if I want to do decent damage without sacrificing concealability, I'll get a heavy Pistol, or GASP, a machine pistol.

As far as the mysterious 40-round clip, I'm guessing the 6L damage code indicates that it uses fairly small bullets. Ever seen Equilibrium? Not the most realistic movie ever, and using it as an example doesn't beat flat-out common sense, but my guess is that the rounds he uses are small, in big guns, hence why he can use them like machine pistols.

[Austere Emancipa...]

40 rounds of anything cannot be fit inside a pistol grip. It just won't happen, unless you want a compressed-air BB gun. That's 30 rounds of 9mmP, by far the most common "medium" pistol caliber in existance. The second picture from the top on this page is 20 rounds of just about the smallest western pistol cartridge. 40 rounds of that would still be almost twice as high as the largest pistol grip, even when double-stacked.

I suppose you could fit about 30 rimless straight-cased .22s in a very hefty pistol grip without it sticking out much, but that shouldn't even count as a "Light Pistol". Damage-wise, that's closer to Hold-Out.

[Siege]

[TinkerGnome]

Would caseless ammo account for the smaller size? If so, maybe a sensible houserule would be that weapons with high capacity and high conceal have to use caseless?

[A Clockwork Lime]

Caseless ammunition is the norm, so the house rule would have to be all other weapons use cased ammo instead.

[TinkerGnome]

It is? I was under the impression that both were in common usage.

[A Clockwork Lime]

They're both equally available. Check out the first paragraph under Firearms in the gear section. I know it says caseless is the norm, or at least the most common type.

[Siege]

Sure, but the Glock 18 can be equipped with a 31 round mag of standard ammo.

Granted, the mag is as long as your forearm, but it works. :grinbig:

-Siege

[I Eat Time]

AE; The only things I can think of are maybe an underbarrel clip, as opposed to in the pistol grip (which would be counter to illustrations, of course), or possibly a new way to stack it we haven't thought of yet. Maybe some kind of round clip? Make it 2x the length of bullets for diameter and just radially stack the bullets. How wide would that clip be?

[Zeel De Mort]

Maybe they can afford to make bullets smaller in the 2060s due to some super advances in ballistics we haven't thought of yet.

Or maybe the CC rules just don't work perfectly, it's a posibility too..

[Austere Emancipa...]

When I said "fit into a pistol grip" above, I meant it should fit inside a pistol grip in all directions. So that precludes magazines that protrude 15cm down from the grip. The whole point was how something could have such a good Concealability while having such a huge magazine, so a magazine in front of the grip won't help at all -- instead of a large T-shaped weapon, you'll get a large somewhat rectangular weapon.

Caseless ammunition is not that much smaller in volume than cased ammunition, but the few examples of caseless ammo IRL certainly are shaped different. RL caseless ammo is much shorter than cased (5.56x45 is slightly over 5cm long while 4.7x33 is, you guessed it, about 3.3cm long), but it's also significantly wider. That helps with non-conventional feed systems, which use the difference in shape to pack more ammunition into a smaller, or at least more handy, space.

Because caseles ammo tends to be shorter but wider, it is actually more difficult to get the same amount of ammo into a pistol grip. It does allow you to have a more powerful pistol with small ammo capacity and a smaller grip, though.

You can see helical magazines (which, I guess, is a bit like what you were trying to describe, I Eat Time) here and here. I think it's obvious why such a setup won't work with a machine pistol, although it's certainly interesting for a SMG. Going to caseless might allow an AR to have a feed like that, but there's no additional advantage for pistol-caliber weapons for helical+caseless.

[I Eat Time]

Jeez, those cylinders are flat-out ugly. That's probably the closest thing in existence today to what I was talking about, but it's still too big. If you got caseless (which I assume exists) .22 ammunition, which is shorter, and spun it in a tight spiral down the clip, tip to tip across the diameter of the cylinder instead of straight up and down with respect to the outside of the clip, got a good crack engineering team to design the feeder without blowing themselves up (assuming that's doable in 2060), then I could see more, maybe even a lot more, rounds per clip. And it'd fit in the pistol grip.

[Arethusa]

It wouldn't. No amount of future technology's going to change the fact that 40 rounds won't fit in that space. Even if you went caseless helical, you could not possibly wind it tightly enough without incorporating a dimensional rift inside the magazine.

[Austere Emancipa...]

Like I said, going caseless doesn't really reduce the overall size (volume displaced) of the round. Compared to a rimless straight .22, caseless .22s might actually be more difficult to fit more of inside a pistol grip, because they are (once again) shorter but wider. Anyway, a vertical helical magazine would require some really weird feed, sort of like G11 Lite.

That would still be extremely underpowered for any real use beyond target practice. I already mentioned that an equivalent of .22LRs is not a "Light Pistol". There's just no way humanity would have gone back to weapons that powerless. Not unless there are some very powerful organizations lobbying for handgun immunity for trolls in NA.