My GM last game had a little trouble deciding what visibility modifiers to apply to a PC firing at a target using his SmartGun camera to aim.

The opponent was under a table and the PC was standing. The PC, without dropping low enough to actually see the guy, fired on him. At first we were going to say it was blind-fire, but then we remembered his smartcam. The PC could see him, but the GM said that the angle and perspective of the camera would be so awkward that firing this way would be almost as disorienting as trying to shoot blind.
Should Blind-fire's Intuition rule stay in effect while using SmartGun for indirect fire? What mods apply, according to the rules, to such a situation?

Looking through the book, I'm stumped.

the presence of the cross hair in your sight i would think would negate the blind fire part, even with any awkward position from not stooping to the target's level. anyone can line a cross hair up on something and pull the trigger. it might be more acceptable to apply penalties to the subsequent shots due to the weapon's kick putting you in a weird position.

i mean, isnt that how the guys in the airforce with the remote planes do things? line em up and take the picture? (course i am in no way a military buff, i only know that remote control planes exist in that branch because a friend of mine is currently serving and that is his job).

Our GM explained how he thought the shooting worked. He said that there would be a window in your field of vision that shows the camera feed and that any crosshairs would be shown there. Think of it as Picture in Picture. Off to the side. Shooting in some tiny window in your feild of veiw would be disorienting because you're shooting as if you're the camera.

I thought of it as integrated into what you're veiwing. Like the camera filling in the gaps of what's going on under the table as if you're seeing through the table. The crosshairs would be shown projected onto this hybrid veiw.

Is my interpretation right, or his?

The way I'd handle it is to allow a free action mode-change to go from guncam window being a tiny picture-in-picture in the corner of your field of view, to being a large window, preventing you from seeing anything but guncam footage.

The way I read it was that the smartgun link puts crosshairs on your normal view, along with what it thinks are targets being highlighted. I could imagine the smartlink in the cyber eyes or wherever having some sort of perspective correction system built in, and it's how it sounds in the fluff.

I would imagine three possibilities:
First you are firing at a highlight which is imposed over the table, but not likely
2 you need to close your eyes and let the camera view take over
3 You need to actively pull up the camera view

That's assuming there's enough light under the table to shoot.

hes behind a table? go to the cover rules. if he has full cover, the penalty is as bad as blind-fire.

if you get a gun camera (not just a smartgun link), then that can give you the cameras LOS for visibility- such as shooting under tables. The SGL by itself simply tells you where in your feild of view the gun is pointing at. now whats around a corner or under a table.

This is how the military currently use cameras mounted on guns: You have a view finder that goes over one of your eyes that gives you the feed from the camera. This way your just swing your rifle around a corner to see what is there. Most camera guns are not used for firing, just t osee what is around the corner.

But then this games takes place 65 years from now and anything is possible.

I don't think any special equipment is needed to image real locations of targets. You can tag things in AR pretty much for free, so getting that data and displaying it isn't a problem.

An example that came up was a target hiding behind a wall. A microdrone snuck around and spotted the target, broadcasting the target's location on the team's AR. The target then got the extra protection from the wall, but not blindfire, since he was outlined on everyone's imagelink. Of course, one couldn't cast spells on him.

As for firing around corners, if I was the GM, I'd impose a double recoil penalty on the shooter, and take away recoil compensation for things like shockpads.

A situation like that (a drone spotting a target) would get the -6 blind fire modifier, but a +3 AR modifier. I'd be inclined to do something similar for smartguns fired around corners.

The other option would be that you could simply remove the smartgun bonus if the smartcam is being used to fire, rather than as an aid to normal firing.

I think we can fairly easily assume that your AR has the ability to present the guncam image big and clear in the center of your vision if that's what you want, and even place it on the gun and contort it so the "image plane" was perpendicular to firing direction if that helps you control it.

As to how awkward this would be, just test it. Take your digital camera or phone camera and try aiming around corners with. It's not really awkward aiming at all. Impose the firing from cover modifier -1, and perhaps another -1 because you can't really get a good firing position. Blind fire, no way IMO.

But a range finder is simply a number you use to reference a guestimate on how far up or down you tilt the barrel. That is hardly equivelent to the use of your depth perception.

Grab a pistol. Close one eye. Have someone tell you that your target is 20 meters away. Can you use that "20 meters" to adjust for distance as equally well as simply opening up your closed eye? I know I couldn't. Nor 99% of the rest of the population on earth. (Because that other 1% are probably freaks of nature anyways.)

I could consider the use of the range finder and a 2d image as equivelent as normal depth perception. Therefore, no bonus dice from the smartlink. The smartlink would thus simply prevent any further negatives.

Lots of discussion on this here:
http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?show...737&hl=smartgun

Consider watching a home move and how shaky it is.

Consider you're holding a rifle, in a way it wasn't designed. It's not about perspective it's about stability. You say recoil should be increased and that's enough to compensate for the difficulty, but in fact stability has as much to do with accuracy as it does countering recoil.

Imagine holding a broomstick by one end, how much will the other end wobble.

Want an experiment? Take your DVD from Saving Private Ryan, Set up a laser pointer so that it is projecting it’s dot in the center of your screen and during one of the very wobbly scenes where there’s combat going on stand there with your DVD remote and try to press pause so that an enemy combatant pauses under your laser dot.

Speaking as someone who spent years with little to no use of one eye (as opposed to now, which is no use of either eye) I can say that depth perception is something you can get around. I can't guarantee you could do it on the spur of the moment though, I had a good amount of time to adapt to it.

I spent many years (I was in my early teens at the time) using super soakers and the like, and managed a reasonable amount of accuracy. Certainly no less than anyone else. I also managed to be fairly successful ohn a crossbow shooting range at the Royal Armouries (museum here in the UK) firing weighted bolts at moving targets.

If someone did it enough they could easily deal with the depth perception, but only if they were used to it and which probably wasn't the case.

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cone-shaped radar or ultrasound "depth map" that you could overlay your 2D camera image onto. Now THAT would be seeing through walls with AR.

With [a range finder] (and, given the processin possibilities of 2070), it is no real problem to (re)create a 3D-Footage from a camera, especially in a world were trideo is the standard.

This is how I want my smartgun to work! A trid-cam on my gun that interprets data to give me an overlay that is helpful, not just a straight cam feed. A cam feed can be pretty useless sometimes. Overlays are far more helpful.

Really? Even with your pov and reticle moving around all unsteady and such? It would be kinda like using zoom-mag and losing your target, wouldn't it? A little disorienting. Overlays would be less unsteady cam-feed and more highlighting threats and providing shot-to-target info.

If a person's in an established shooting position (that is, their "cover" consists of something like a bunker, or a sniping nest they've spent time setting up), then I don't apply the "shooting from cover" penalty when they're firing into the primary arc they intended to fire into. They've had enough time to "customize" their position so that it's not hard to shoot in that direction. Now, if you're just leaning out of a doorway occasionally and popping off rounds, that's another story... I figure part of that penalty for firing from cover comes from the small motions of ducking in and out of your cover when you shoot.

Seriously, folks... I don't think range is the issue. I'm okay with making the smartgun intelligent enough to figure out the ballistic arc and to adjust it's projected point of impact based on how far it is to the target. The main reason I'd apply a penalty to using the guncam is because you're not firing from the usual position. Losing the smartgun bonus seems a "logical" way to do this, and imposes as much of a penalty as firing the smartgun from your off-hand would (which makes sense... both involve firing in a nonstandard position).

The primary reason you use depth perception when you shoot is to judge distance for elevation and deflection shooting. Having a rangefinder (and being used to interpreting the numbers it gives you) would serve just as well as having depth perception... it would allow you to lead moving targets by the appropriate amount, and the smartgun would handle the elevation for you. Deflection shooting is important. Let's assume for a second that we're firing a projectile at 900m/s at a crosswise running target 200 meters away. Even ignoring loss of velocity due to wind resistance, the rough math says that the target will have had nearly a quarter of a second to move between the time the bullet is fired and the time it reaches the 200 meter mark. You can't move all that far in 1/4 of a second, but you can move far enough that someone who isn't leading you will miss entirely at that range, despite having had his sights lined up right on your center of mass.

The penalties for firing at range are not severe enough in SR4, IMO.

I think a counter argument is if they stop and take the time to aim with the guncam. They can use the aiming move to make up for the problems with how they are aiming before firing.

But, I can see a perfectly good reason for the penalties if they just stick the gun around a corner and open fire.

If they're Aiming (the Simple Action, the same one you'd use to get the bonus from a scope) then I'd probably remove the penalty.

Actually, you could (sort of) build deflection shooting into a smartgun, similar to how they do it on some fighter HUDs. First, indicate to the smartlink (via DNI or a fingertip button near the trigger) that you're going to be firing at a target that is as far away as the rangefinder currently indicates. Then, track the target with the gun. The smartlink calculates how long it'll take for a round to go that far, and then the point-of-impact marker "lags behind" the axis of the gun by that much time. If you move the point of impact onto the target while tracking it, you're leading by the right amount. Then just think fire real hard...

Back on original topic, I think it would require a free action to switch the smart link from "asisted targeting" to "guncam aim window" and that the shooter would lose the smart link bonus. The alternate is to blindfire at a target you can't see but having the +2 smartlink advantage of knowing where you are aiming.

Depending on the shooting position, they might have an additional penalty. However someone with a bag over their head but otherwise in their normal shooting stance would be able to shoot via the guncam-over-imagelink just as well as with iron sights, IMO.