*Posted this in the main Shadowrun area, got told it would probably do better here, so, here we go.*

OK, a newby friend of my GM's has recently built a character (we've only just got rid of the crane ) that carries two Sakura Fubuki pistols, of which both are silenced. Now, my GM has, quite rightly, asked him to buy four suppressors per pistol for it to be silenced.

This is fine from a purely games rule perspective, as no where have i seen that the Sakura Fubuki pistol cannot have barrel mounts of any kind, but i have to ask, does anyone else find this slightly unrealistic?

It does, i suppose, depend on how the gun works. Personally i assume it runs off todays Metal Storm technology and that it works by firing one round from each barrel sequentially, thus giving it such a high rate of fire with as little recoil as it suffers from. My two major questions about this are thus:

1) Does each barrel, being close together, have enough space to accomodate a silencer/suppressor without fouling the muzzle of it's adjacent barrels?

2) if this four barrelled beast fires the way i've described and can fit the necessary silencing device to it, surely, because each barrel only deals with one bullet at a time, only a silencer is necessary, not a much bigger, therefore more prone to adjacent muzzle fouling, suppressor?

It's an interesting quandry that i'm unsure was considered when the weapon was introduced into SR4. Personally, i don't believe that you should be able to fit a silencer/suppressor to the weapon as i'm sure that it would foul adjacent muzzles, not to mention, with the weapon being a breach-loader, it would make the already cumbersome job of reloading a nightmare in a combat situation.

Your thoughts please, ladies and gentlemen?

Use the Search function to look for "Fubuki". All that and much, much more has been discussed in length.

In brief:

Each muzzle also serves as a clip of sorts, so reloading would also require migrating a silencer from one muzzle to the new loaded one. Either that or each of your preloaded muzzles would be carried with their own dedicated silencer, which has its own obvious concealment/misalignment problems.

So, could it be done? Probably. It'd be damn inconvenient at the least.

I imagine the cheapest and most feasable way to silence such a weapon would be to use that spell, Silence, if it's still in the game.

Barring that, switch to the AVS.

hmm, would be interesting if you could quicken a non-area silence spell on the gun

Honestly, there isn't a single person who uses the Sakura Fubuki in our games. We houseruled that it was a lot bigger concealability-wise than the book suggests. As a matter of fact, we almost never see anyone with automatic weapons on the sheer fact that it's still going to make a hell of a lot of noise suppressed.

I can easily see the weapon supporting a suppressor, but it really isn't going to do the user a whole lot of good. If you're looking for stealth, pick up a light or a holdout pistol.

Well if you made it bigger and less concealable, why would anybody take it?

hunting vampires in the z-zones...

man reading those old threads hurt my soul.

Thoughts:

Metalstorm type weapons, the barrel is manufactured with the ammo in it. You don't reload the barrels - you discard them. The trade off for this is no brass all over. I interpret the rules for reloading it to mean that you change

I don't think the weapon could be loaded with more then two different types of ammo without boning up the rate of fire of a single type.

Silencing: I just don't see how it would work with a regular silencer. Some kind of sci-fi one not availible, maybe.

Recoil: The thing has one point inhearent and a stock if you're in deep - isn't tha enough?

Balance: It's no more powerful then a heavy pistol. I'd let somebody take it.

ex-ex and gel rounds: I would say overpowered and nonlethal ammo could be made for the gun, even if they didn't perfectly correspond to the equivilent ammo for other guns.

The SF has no penalties for burst fire, raising it up to 7P, and if it's smartlinked, you can fire it again sans the SA recoil penalties. Combine that with the 40 ammo capacity, and it's damned appealing. The silencer issue is what's keeping me away from it, but my GM is considering having our gunmonkey work on putting together four silencers and rigging it up to a mount that folds onto the side of the gun. Concealability is always an issue with a gun the size of a large brick, so I'm pretty sure that a concilable holster, or even a quick-draw holster would be off limits.

Also, since the burst fire doesn't add to the DV until after you check armor, this thing's less likely to penetrate body armor than a heavy pistol. And it uses the (shorter) light pistol ranges.

Not to mention the thing only has one net power over the predator if it bursts, but takes 4x as long to reload and has one less AP. When you take into account 3x the ammo usage, it becomes less of a big deal--standard ammo is cheap, but EX Explosive is 10 nuyen per round. It adds up pretty quickly when it does come up. (3 rounds/shot x ~6 shots / turn = ~ 180 nuyen / turn).

Also, if you don't like the stock, just ask the GM if you can get a SR3-style Personalised Grip on yours instead. Same effect, rules wise. The only real change is the fluff of how it looks.

Any viable handgun with four barrels AND a folding stock is not going to be very concealable.

Still, the Fubuki is a lot of fun.

The gun doesn't have a slide or, hell, many moving parts at all. I'm sure that'd cut down on some of the thickness-related bulk. The design also makes it more paperback-book shaped than gun shaped. Put something like that in a shoulder holster or one of those funky inverted pancakes and you really shouldn't have much trouble. It's the inner-pants or crossdraw holsters that the funky shape screws with.

Add a smartlink, and you could do away with that...

Some runners are attracted to the bigger guns just for the intimidating look they possess. Some runners like guns for the wiz factor they have. However, a logical runner wouldn't want to toy around with such a plaything. Even in a shoulder holster or something, your movement would be a tad limited. I made a printout of the gun to fit my hands comfortably (I'm a girl with small hands) on a large sheet of paper, and I found the thing to be longer than my torso.

again i state that the drawings is a artists representation based most likely on a bare description of the guns functions. most likely its drawn to look cool rather then practical...

still, its not something i would bring to the meet, hudden under a shirt or similar. its something i would bring when i need a lot of lead deliverd in a (by the book) small package

as for the light pistol classification. im guessing damage pr bullet rather then overall size...

For once I feel like I've added something useful.

Putting the gun under my arm in a vertical position was an absolute pain. It was just too big to run around with. This is without silencers. The Sakura Fubuki and the Ares Predator IV are absolutely HUGE. It doesn't matter who you are. I swear a troll could handle a human sized Predator IV.

A 1911 is small. I own one. I can wear it just fine. Mac 10 and 11 is huge. In all honesty, someone should not be carrying one and expecting to hide it. I handled one before. It's a big gun for one hand, even if you're a big guy.

Most smaller handguns like a Colt 1911, Browning Hi Power, Beretta Centurion, Para Ordnance, etc. are fairly easy for me to carry and conceal. I have a holster for my 1911 that goes inside of my pants. Sometimes it's well hidden, sometimes not.

It is worth mentioning that attempting to use any SR art in an attempt to approximate the actual size and shape of anything mentioned in the rules (or fluff a good lot of the time) is an exercise in futility at best, and a flat out waste of time in general.

"Reality" in gear and weapons has never been a strong point of SR. Weight, concealability, damage, etc. have always been mechanics and "balance" first, attempt at conforming to logic a distant second.

Not that it bothers me too much, mind you. It doesn't often harm my enjoyment of the game, and when it does it's trivial and easily modified. But it does bear mentioning in this thread.

Being a light pistol, it's questionable whether the SF was really designed with runners in mind, anyhow. Though that class of gun is more useful than they have been in past editions, they're still mainly used as a weapon of last resort, or something to make Johnny Citizen feel safe enough to walk the streets. He doesn't really care about concealability, since he's legally allowed to carry a licensed handgun for protection. And the SF provides a suitable bang for the buck - while it does take 4 times as long to fully reload it, your average user isn't going to be burning it on burstfire all that often - he'll be replacing one 10-round barrel every now and then, rather than all four at one go. And, as mentioned, it looks really cool and future-y - something your fashion-conscious, casual gun owner is generally concerned about.

Though on the topic of artistic license with the picture - that's probably exactly what it was (I believe the artist said as such, in another thread where it came up). I remember the supposed handgun prototype (which, sadly, is no longer being featured) on the MetalStorm site showed the barrels clustered together into a roughly diamond-shaped configuration (somewhat reminiscent of the old "pepperbox"-style black powder guns) - which, all-told, made for a weapon that wasn't considerably much bigger around than the cylinder of a medium-calibre revolver. And extending that width all the way to the end, while requiring a specially-designed holster, doesn't make for as unwieldy a weapon as (the considerably cooler) concept drawing. And on that note, such a design would probably lend itself much more readily to being suppressed than the vertical stack shown.

One of the big selling points to the runner crowd would be the ability to select ammunition types. Mix explosive and APDS (for "soft" targets versus armored, or if you have to shoot through a wall), or standard and gel (lethal/nonlethal), or APDS and flechette (for general purpose shooting versus when you're worried about overpenetration)... all without having to change out a mag or swap to a different gun.

Just out of interest, what is the outer diameter of the protruding barrels on your "real size" printout of the Fubuki, Akimbo? Even on my screen just about big enough to be 12G shotgun barrels.

and most likely there the artist have been pointed towards the real life guns for a comparison and "update"...

i wonder, that predator image. is it the same as have been used since SR1 or there about?

Yes, the Predator has become more of a Desert Eagle.

http://www.enemyforces.com/firearms/deserteagle.htm

With the 10" barrel option it is nearly 15" long. There are longer socalled handguns though. They are kinda hilarious to look at in profile as the barrel very noticably tappers at the muzzle end.

When I look at the Fubuki, I can sort of imagine how it would work out in-hand, the final size it would end up being, all that good stuff. If you actually do the scale measurement/blowup of the picture until the grip fits your hand, it's a bizarrely huge gun. If you redesign the grip and rear of the piece, though, it works out pretty well. I imagine it to be not much taller than my hand, with the length based on the ratio of height to length depicted in the picture.

That's basically what I proposed earlier. If it was well made, the machining would be precise enough to fit right up against the muzzles of the barrels.

or fit around the bits of barrel that sticks out. rember that it needs only capture and spread out the gasses that is produced from firing (the subsonic ammo bit we ignore for playability-reasons), something it should do nicely if its big enough

That's true. Some sort of gasket built to fit around those barrels would probably work well, or even an electrically-driven screw-on kinda deal if you want to get really techhead about it.