Belted Ammo, ouch that hurts... Options

[Xirces]

I've relented and I've got NSRCG and I'm editing the datafiles to better serve my own purposes and I've noticed that belted ammo isn't well served.

Can anyone clarify what ammo can/can't be used in belts and what the maximum belt size is (I remember the 1000 round belts in SSC :) )?

Most, I think, are common sense, but can/would you use capsule rounds belted? Explosive (big bang!) and some others that occurred to me earlier.

[Austere Emancipa...]

I can't understand why any type of ammunition couldn't be belted. If a cartridge cannot handle the pressures caused by the belt feeding mechanism (which is rather aggressive, I'll grant that), it certainly couldn't handle the firing.

Explosive ammunition is absolutely "beltable". That's how most explosive ammunition in the world is fired IRL -- from heavy machineguns and autocannons.

[Cain]

IIRC, there's no actual upper limit to the amount of rounds that can be belted together-- if you want to have a 1,000,000-round belt, there's nothing stopping you from doing so. However, there's a practical limit in the amount of rounds you can carry-- I'd certainly be enforcing the encumbrance rules on anyone trying to tote around a million rounds of ammo.

[TinkerGnome]

Vehicles can carry an insane amount of ammo in their bins. I image that it's all one long belt.

[Xirces]

Ok thanks, pretty much what I was thinking. It's just as I was editing the dat file I was wondering how much or little I'd need to do. I'm going up to 1000 round belts. The only ammo type I'm missing out is tracer (which is pointless), but my thoughts were on whether the others are practical - gel I can see, capsule not so much.

My comment about explosive was for when the Mage sends a Fireball at the 1000 round belt :D

[Smiley]

What's reeeeally going to suck is re-belting all that ammo after you've shot it all off. That is a cast iron BITCH. Those links are easy enough to get, but snapping in every individual round... i don't envy you, boss.

[Smiley]

Also, i just remembered the concealability of a belt of 100 rounds in the back of Cannon Companion (look it up, it's amusing). I don't know if you're planning to walk around with your belt of 1000, but everybody is GOING to know you have it. There's very little avoiding it. I guess if you need to carry around that many belted rounds, the time for stealth is at an end and being spotted with heavy ammo is the least of your worries.

[Moonstone Spider]

I'd get a drone with mechanical arms and an Ammo B/R autosoft to do it for me if I had to belt a million rounds.

[Nikoli]

GM Mr. Fix-it, 2 arms, tool kit and B/R included, SSG I believe, very handy for small annoying chores.

[Smiley]

And trust me, linking individual rounds is EXTREMELY annoying.

[Arethusa]

Or, hell, just get a linking machine. We have them today.

[Shrike30]

The concealability rating for that belt in the book is for Assault Cannon ammunition... not what you'd usually see belted. A normal 100 round belt could be draped around you like a real belt, or slung on your shoulder Pancho Villa style, and easily concealed under a long coat or jacket.

Admittedly, if you figure in things like getting the links bent, getting them dirty, etc, this is a dumb way to carry your ammo compared to in a pouch. But you can, and people have.

[Smiley]

1000 rounds? 10 times the number in Cannon Companion that had a concealability of 'yeah, right?' Try carrying that many rounds, totally concealed. You'll look like the Michelin Man.

[Raygun]

A 100 round belt of 20mm cannon ammunition is not going to be concealed under a long coat. At least not one worn by a human. First, the weight for 100 rounds of "assault cannon" ammunition on SR3.280 is pretty optimistic. For example, the 25mm round the XM307 (OCSW) and Barrett Payload Rifle fires (as close to an "assault cannon" as we get today) weighs 0.368 lbs per cartridge. 100 rounds, sans belt, weighs 36.8 lbs (16.7 kg). Second, each cartridge is about five inches in length. Pretty difficult to sneak around with.

Now, about how much ammunition you can have on a single belt, it depends on the weapon system. Conventional, lightweight, man-portable machine guns depend on the gas expansion of the cartridge to operate the action and pull the belt through the action. There's a limited amount of energy there. Actual link feed systems can't pull an infinite number of rounds because the more rounds you put on the belt, the heavier the belt is, and the more friction it encounters as you're pulling it. If you put too many rounds on a belt and the gun is going to jam repeatedly. Of course, there are ways to minimize that.

1000 round belts are pretty much out of the question on a man-portable system because moving that much ammunition at once is very difficult. The longest belt I've heard of being used was 450 rounds, and that was on an M60E4 under controlled circumstances. AFAIK, the longest belts used in on military small arms is a 200 round belt on the M249 SAW.

On linkless feed systems (like most miniguns use), you can store much more ammunition because the system isn't dependent on the fired cartridge to cycle the action.

[Austere Emancipa...]

Someone mentioned wearing (small arms) ammunition belts as regular belts, or otherwise draped over a body. You should remember that you than have nothing to keep the belt in, and firing a machinegun while 150 rounds are just hanging freely on one side is really fucking stupid, regardless of what Rambo might have to say about that. Reasonably speaking, you should always have belt pouches. You can fire them without, obviously, but getting the belt stuck into places and going into knots can be a pain in the ass, plus all the crap the belt will collect and "deposit" inside the weapon.

Here you can see a belt box for 200 rounds of linked AR/LMG ammunition. That box alone is the size of a stockless SMG (Conc 4, Conc 5?). Of course it doesn't really matter if you're also carrying a fricken machinegun. Might as well carry 6 belt boxes.

Raygun said the most important thing to remember about actual belt length: limited by what the action can pull through. 250s were used in many weapons in WWII -- most Maxims seem to have that as a standard, and it stuck around for a while. But 250 is the largest I've ever seen or heard of for a LMG or HMG carried by infantry.

I'm guessing we aren't discussing miniguns here, but still, have I got this straight: Miniguns work so that the electric engine pulls the belt to a feeder/delinker system, which then feed the rounds one at a time, sans belt, to the actual weapon? Which part, exactly, is it on conventional machineguns that yanks the cartridges free of the belt?

Fired and played around a lot with the internals of 2 machineguns, and still have no clue how that bit works...

[Edit]Nevermind, reading HowStuffWorks.Com right now.[/Edit]

This post has been edited by Austere Emancipator: May 21 2004, 12:02 AM

[RangerJoe]

The mention of using a drone to belt ammo for a runner during pre-run prep time got me thinking of other expensive approaches to what is otherwise a fairly mind-numbing task. Behold the result.

Spell Name: Belt Ammo
Type: Physical
Category: Manipulation
Range: LOS
TN: 4
Duration: Permanent
Drain: +1M
Spell Descritpion: When cast on a pile of ammunition and belting clips, Belt Ammo links up to (successes x 20) bullets into a belt with max successes equal to the force of the spell. The spell takes 10 turns to become permanent (as per normal permanent spells, during which time, the bullets are actually fitted together into the belt-clips).
Notes: (minor phys change M, -1 level (very restricted target), +1 power (physical spell), +1 level (permanent)). The original wording was (successes x 10) bullets, but I felt this made the spell too weak. Yes, this is a hyper-specialized form of magic fingers, but it led to the following idea for an even better spell....

Spell Name: unBelt Ammo
Type: Physical
Range: LOS
TN: 4
Duration: Instant
Drain: +1L
Spell Description: When cast on a belt of ammunition, unBelt Ammo unclips (successes) bullets visible to the caster from the belt of ammunition, up to a maximum of the force of the spell.
Notes: (minor phys change M, -1 level (very restricted target), +1 power (physical spell)). This spell is a great way to ruin any machine-gunner's day. A clever mage could cast this spell on a belt of ammo being fed into the chain-gun which is chewing up his pinned-down team members. Breaking the belt (it only takes one unlinked bullet....) might buy the runners the turn they need to take out the machine-gunner. Worse, a broken belt may start slipping catastrophically out of its ammo bin. It'll take something of a quickness test to arrest the slinky-action.

Ain't snarky cantrips great?

[Phaeton]

[Austere Emancipa...]

Does chain gun = minigun? Because you won't see the belt on a minigun, usually, and I doubt one unlinked cartridge would do anything for that. An unlinked cartridge will only cost the gunner of a conventional machinegun one "Ready Weapon" Simple Action. And I doubt a "slipping" can happen, or can it? I'd figure it'd just jam the weapon and might take some quick fingerwork to get back into working order.

Anyhoo, it's not much more than you could do with a Magic Fingers spell, putting the weapon back to safe, opening the feed system and ejecting the belt every Action.

And forget about the cooking thing. Sure assault cannon rounds might actually hurt a bit, but a plain ole fireball shouldn't really do a damn thing to covered ammunition (in magazines/belt pouches/boxes). I suppose some incendiary or incendiary/explosive rounds could touch off and make a *bang*, but you won't get any significant effect until you've raised temperatures high enough to cook the target person, too.

[Lindt]

Hence the FIREball. I love the unbelt spell, its goofy, yet oddly usefull. All of the sudden the gunner sees 10 rounds fall out of the belt. Evil....

[RangerJoe]

Of course it might only cost the gunner a simple action, but that's one combat phase where you don't have to worry about 15 rounds coming your way. For a non-enhanced gunner, dedicating a simple action to re-readying the weapon means he cannot (usually) get another FA burst off until the next initiative pass.

That, and such a spell would annoy a gunner, which is priceless.

[Lindt]

Id imagine it might be more, though I dont know exactly how belt fed weapons work. It might require opening the breach, pulling the belt over to where there is ammo, cocking, then finally letting fly hot death... but I could (and most likely am) be wrong.

[Arethusa]

Actually, you're pretty much spot on, but in terms of SR rules, that's just a complex action since fully reloading a weapon never takes more than that.

[Raygun]

[Smiley]

[Xirces]

It's amazing what you learn...

Something just struck me whilst typing in all these figures - the availability increases for belted ammunition (Sr3 p281 - add rounds/100 to availability). If I want a 50 round belt I add one to availability (rounding up) just for the added difficulty of getting belted ammo.

This makes getting large belts almost impossible, even for the simple ammo. Take Explosive, for instance (Avail 3). A 100 round belt rises to a 4, still not too bad. However a 1000 round belt has avail 13...

Question is - can't you just link smaller belts together instead of buying a single huge one?

"Can I have 10 belts of explosive ammo, 100 rounds per belt, please?"