According to what I can find, accelleration is considered your walking and running speeds for vehicles. Good, makes it easier to mesh character and drone movement.

To go higher you make a vehicle test, with each hit adding to your movement rate that turn. All good still.

Speed is the "maximum safe speed," which you reach by making those tests. If you go faster, you could be in trouble. Still good.

Now for the hard part: how in the heck are you supposed to actually reach those speeds? To get a GMC Banshee up to max speed for one combat turn takes 150 hits on the vehicle test!

I think you're mis-understanding the vehicle test. Each hit on thetest ADDS 5 meters to the acceleration. So assuming you're "walking" your banshee, you're looking at 1000/50=20 turns to get it to full speed + the hits from your vehicle test

That makes sense, where does it explain that better? What I see:

1) Acceleration is walking / running rate.
2) Vehicle test hits add 5 to the vehicle's movement rate

Do those hits stay around? If so, do they add 5 to both walking and running rates, or are you automatically running as soon as you bypass the highest speed available for running?

well, it doesnt explain it clearly, but heres an example of how i understand it. using bank heist as the target.

Joe driver is out in the ride, stopped, with the car idling in his westwind, while the team knocks over a bank. Its a successful hit, and the team runs out and hops in. Joe, seeing no signs of trouble, gets out of there and cruises away (using the walking speed) using a base 20 meters, and rolls 4 hits on his test, netting him 40 meters per turn, he repeats the next turn and is just as successful, and is now cruising along at 80 meters per turn. He lets off the gas pedal for a little while, until he notices a piggy pull out from an alley behind him, crap lonestar, floor it! is heard from the backseat, and he does so, increasing to the base running speed of 60, and scores 2 hits on his test, netting him 70 meter pet turn increase, bringing him to 150. The lone star tries to keep up, but only doing about 60 meters, our westwind is easily able to out run him.

basicly the walk and run speeds are nice to have when a vehicle is involved with normal combat (like say drones).

however, if you want to calculate "real" acceleration. take the running speed and add whatever hits the driver gets on a drive test, kinda like if a person tryed to sprint.

only diff is that a vehicle have a much higher top speed, so they can effectively sprint for several turns before hiting the point where fatigue kicks in (redlined engine and all that)...

only real change between SR3 rules and SR4 rules that i can see is that the engagement range is not defined by how much the individual vehicles moved in the last turn, so speed only have an effect on the damage done in a crash or when ramming (that i can see)...

Still makes sense, but I guess there's no detailed explanation of how it works that way? We'll probably do it that way, but it's good to know how it was intended.

I read the speed stat as the top speed it could reach, period.
Am I wrong in this?
Also does anyone know how to convert a shadowrun speed to either kilometers or miles per hour?

In the vehicles section it says it's the maximum safe speed, but doesn't have hard and fast rules about what that means.

3 seconds per turn = 1200 turns per hour, so kph is just speed * 1200. mph is speed / 1.6.

Cheers could have got that myself really.
But I'm still having difficulty thinking since last nights game.

but remember that its meters pr turn, and the k in kph stands for kilo, as in 1000. so maybe make that x1.2

Yeah, sorry.

Taht even happened when me and my roommate were talking about it. He mentioned a motorccyle going 180,000 kph and I was the one who pointed out the kilo part. DOH!

That's right x1.2. Which, incidentally, is the same conversion listed in SR3.

On a side note, would everyone (generally) be insterested in a conversion of Vehicle Stats, and Modification rules from SR3 if I worked on them?

Ok, I'll start looking at the Rigger rules then. It'll kind of be a "labour of love" for me. My first character was a Rigger and I think I'll always have a "special place in my heart" for the Rigger. I was greatly disappointed at the giant shaft that Vehicle Modification received in SR4, but I suppose they had to cut something didn't they?

I hear everyone commending the rules changes for "pure" vehicle combat (chase combat). I agree they are much more useable rules, but I never did find the old ones completely unusable. Granted, I threw out the entire Maneuver Score system, and once that was gone, everything fell into place. Basically, you use a 1-dimensional model for position: each vehicle is only X m away from the other. You have to do this for "normal" ranged combat anyway. Then, when each driver wants to "do something" you used Handling as the base TN then applied the modifiers from the various tables for Terrain and Conditions. Each new IP you calculate the new relative distance between vehicles based on the speed difference (and thus, any change in speed). It really wasn't that hard. I think I'll "publish" this system in addition to my Rigger Conversion rules.

The only reason I'm going on about this is this: SR4 "chase combat" rules have no bearing on vehicle speed. One could be a Westwind 3k already going 250kph and the other a Nissan Jackrabbit standing still, but if the driver of the Jackrabbit wins the Opposed Driving test, and he chose "Close Range", then the Jackrabbit has now caught the Westwind. As a Rigger with a super sports-car I would find this frustrating.

never had a problem with the manuver score. and i have allways envisioned the distance system to be one dimentional (alltho it could be multiple dimentions stacked side by side if you have many vehicles mixed in).

By "one-dimensional" I was meaning that we never worried about how far to the left or right a vehicle was, we always assumed one was directly behind the other. The Maneuver Score was fine, it just took way too long for a session.

(For the math geeks)
H = Sqrt(X^2 + Y^2)
where X and Y are the two ("vertical" and "horizontal") displacements.
X
|
3 |
|
_____ Y
5

The "true" distance between X and Y = Srqt(3^2 + 5^2) = 5.83

didnt i already fight this argument and figure it all out in another thread?

edit: yup heres how it figured out:

From an old thread:

I suppose the "quick" rule to fix this problem is:
The driver of the faster vehicle gets a bonus to his test equal to the (smallest) difference in speed / 10 (always drop the decimal).

So, a Westwind already going 200 vs. someone stopped gets +20 dice? Sure. Basically, the driver of the Westwind would easily get to choose the engagement range. This would mean at "the worst" the chasing vehicle would be at "long range", at least initially.

Unless you are in a driving environment that allows at least one of the vehicles to reach very close to top speed for a siginificant amount of time, top end by itself is going to mean very little. In a slow down/speed up/swerve around environement like a busy road acceleration/braking/handling is where it is at. You likely don't even want to reach your top end because you'll likely be over accelerating, leading to overbreaking and poor driving lines and eventually a crash.

Fast and steady wins the race. Stupid Fast ends up spun out or crashed or standing on their nose to keep from doing either of those.

It would more or less necessitate an additional dice roll to be made each round. You'd have to roll for speed. Or the GM could determine the speed based on terrain, and vehicular actions taken. Second option seems most doable as a quick fix.

I look at it pretty much the same way as Mintcar. That's why in my heavily altered chase rules, having a higher Acceleration gives you free hits to your maneuvering each turn, while top speeds are used to determine the threshold for the extended vehicle test to catch up/get away. Maybe I'll post my rules sometime, try to get some feedback.

I was going to start un-ambitiously: (available) weapons, vehicle modifications, and all vehicles list (stat conversion). I was going to leave the Design rules for later (Possibly) as they require a lot of study to make sure you can't make totally "broken" vehicles.

However, with all of the vehicles from Rigger 3 (which was every one published up to that date) converted, plus the modification rules, there should be enough to go on for awhile.

There are other things that require a more... philosphical examination. Like the Speed increase rules. As vehicle Speed in SR4 means very little. I do like the direction that mintcar is going, however, as that still makes speed worth something.

after i made my post, i was thinking something like each terrain type having a max safe speed. above that, you get a negative die on the vehicle tests pr "class" of safe speed above the current terrain.

so like say:

open terrain, max safe speed the vehicle can do.

light terrain, running speed x2.

restricted terrain, running speed.

tight terrain, walking speed.

so if im doing more then running x2 in tight terrain, i would be looking at a open terrain class and -3 dice on all my vehicle tests.

however, one could give each driver a number of free hits on their pr chase turn test equal to their speed/10. so you get the gamble of more speed but bigger chance of crash tests going bad and similar.

rember that you have to take a complex action each chase turn tun keep the vehicle under control anyways, so a accelerate/break test could be a kind of vehicle stunt. and if you dont feel like doing a test you can change speed based on your vehicles running acceleration (or just use the turn and dont do anything, maintaining the speed you have now).

should not be that hard to calculate even tho its similar to the SR3 way of doing things. the GM set terrain, you and him roll for speed as needed. then its just a matter of writing down the current speed and you can see your free hits and your dice pool mod at a glance.

The problem with figuring anything out from the speed the vehicle is traveling, is that you have to keep track of how fast it's traveling In the current rules you don't have to. I think that with my table one could combine your ideas about figuring terrain into the mix, with an easy way of letting the vehicle's horse power give the driver an edge in a chase—and still not complicate things by forcing players and GM's to keep track of current speeds.

hmm, kinda like giving each a speed "category" that they are in, that define what kind of modifiers one would normaly get if in a given terrain?

but at the same time one can move down in category, or with effort, move it up (vehicle test). but at the same time change in speed category have a effect on the pr chase turn vehicle test, in that a higher category gives you more dice on the test.

this way a driver can gamble. push the vehicle into a "unsafe" category for its terrain, and hope that he can pull it of while the opponent cant.

should give hotroding riggers trying to shake the star a ride of their life, while at the same time keep the number tracking to a minimum