The Matchkings are also all hollowpoints. Might have something to do with the fragmenting. Like most match grade bullets they use a thinner jacket. Personally I really like them for fun shooting.

I loaded some rounds for my friends 30'06 using these 150gr BTHP Sierra Matchking. He got the ammo confused and took them on a hunting trip. The deer was shot at approx. 120yards just behind the front right leg. Beautiful shot overall, but as Raygun said what a mess. The exit hole was about the size of my fist.

What in particular?

My thought was reducing the DV of pistols (all, including MPs) by one and increasing the DV of longarms (+2 to ARs/LMGs, +3 MMGS/Hunting rifles/sniper, +4 to HMG/heavy sniper). Get rid of AP factor for pistols/SMGs.

Changes to the ammo and the stupid telescopic sight/vision mag rules would also help, but you could get some useful effects by changing just the table. Even the most extensive fixes that I'd want to do wouldn't require real mechanics changes IIRC, just equipment notes.

The armor penetration=damage bit is too embedded to be fixed without a total overhaul, so I'd just let it go.

30'06, .762, .308, there are several. Police use .308 a lot. .50cal is used by military's special snipers. Military is big on 30 caliber rounds too.

as for .308 assualt rifles, look at the AR-10. Think AR-15/M-16 but it is .308. Nice weapon, much more kick than the .223/5.56 M-16/AR-15. But it is still very coontrollable.

.45 generally will kill someone and if it doesnt it will make it feel like you wished you were dead. Now your comments about the DC snipers, if they would have shot them with the .45, they would have died too. Sniping is not about the round but the "how you hit" your targets. But then again you are comparing apples to oranges. rifle rounds and handgun rounds are not the same.

and yes, I know way too much about this.

dog

There are a lot of factors to consider in a statement like that, but generally speaking, from the evidence I've seen, I would tend to disagree with it.

All shot in the head, IIRC.

The DC "snipers" were mediocre shots, barely trained shooters is more like it. They generally got torso hits. If you think that 77% of the time you shoot someone with a .45 in the abdomen or chest that they will fall down and die you are in something of a minority.

In terms of rifle and pistol rounds not being the same, I agree. However your ratings show them doing the same damage.

There really isn't that much difference seen in real gunfights between 9mm, .40 and .45 when used with modern ammo. Given the narrow range of DV values available I'd go for simplicity and just rank them all as mediocre, DV 4 or 3. (There is a reason why people get trained to shoot two to the chest, and to keep shooting when he doesn't fall down).

Trying to show some sort of difference in DV when (to grab an example I'm familiar with) the difference between a Glock 27 and 23 is 38 FPS (935 vs 968) seems to be pushing things. Functionally, the bullets will do the same thing. (and a Glock 26/29 in 9mm/.40SW has a 3.46" barrel). The mistake I've seen SR make in the past is trying to come up with a list of different guns by varying stats. In game terms, there isn't any difference between a .40 and .45, or between a .25 and .32. I'd agree that there is some difference (like 1 DV) that the game can show between a .25 and .45, but the DV range you can use for pistols is really small if you want rifles to do the much greater damage they really do without being instant death every time. Basically, pistols suck at stopping bad guys without getting a CNS hit, but they are mighty portable.


A drawback of SR is the lack of a hit location system, particularly as virtually all the armors provide only partial coverage and things like cyberlimbs react differently to being shot than the meat part of the target. And it's hard to argue shot placement when it's applied to a generic target with “average” armor. This seems to require more than minor changes to a table however.

Oh yeah. That's why I love the SR weapons system.

Nope. They were barely mediocre shooters. These were at 50-100 yards.

Fatally shot in the head in the parking lot of the beauty store she managed.
Fatally shot in the chest while pumping gas at a Mobil station.
Fatally shot in the neck while sitting on a bench at a shopping center
Fatally shot in the back while vacuuming her minivan at a Shell station.
Fatally shot in the chest while standing near an intersection.
Shot in the back in the parking lot of a Michaels crafts store.
Shot in the back in the parking lot of a Michaels crafts store.
Shot in the abdomen outside Benjamin Tasker Middle School.
Fatally shot in the back while pumping gas at a Sunoco station.
Fatally shot in the back while pumping gas at an Exxon station.
Fatally shot in the head in the parking lot of a Home Depot.
Shot in the abdomen outside a Ponderosa Steakhouse.
Fatally shot in the chest while standing in the stairwell of his bus.

The players are roleplaying. For the GM with a pack of NPCs it can be useful. Very few crooks will really fight to the death when they can flee and discussing that, and why they will, can be useful. There are similar issues that come up in whether the fight will start, or do they back down. Dice can be a useful randomizer when the outcome is both not obvious and not predetermined by the plot.

Hmm. Not that my impression was based on anything more than news reports of the time... Source?

Pffft. The entirety of the data you're using to support your conclusion is based on 13 incidents of civilians being sniped at while unaware. A meaningful conclusion this cannot make. I don't believe the .223/5.56 produces a "fall down and die" rate anywhere near that considering just a slightly larger sample...

The best data I can find for the .45 ACP is Marshall & Sanow's (can't be any less scientific than your own, right?). It shows the .45 ACP 230 FMJ as producing a "one shot stop" rate of 63% (here). That data, while often maligned, is based on hundreds of police reports and ballistics test. Not that that really makes it any better than your conclusion. It's all thoroughly unscientific and the margin of error is certainly large enough for me to consider it fairly useless.

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bal-muham...ack=1&cset=true


Marshall & Sanow’s bullet sales brochures are really questionable for many reasons. But they are not unreasonable general guides as to effectiveness. But look up their one-stop shot number for rifles and compare it to pistols. It's 100% for several 5.56/.233 rounds. (or it was back when Dale Towert had his page up and when Frackler reviewed "Street Stoppers". http://www.firearmstactical.com/streetstoppers.htm I can't find anywhere on the net where it still hides.)

Rifles are really much more effective than pistols for shutting down the bad guy. But the guy I know who was in the most gunfights makes a point to his students that the ONLY one shot stop he ever got was an NVA company commander he hit in the chest with a .50 machine gun bullet. Everyone else took multiple hits, whether it was a 9mm pistol, a .45, an MP5, an M16, a shotgun etc.

The GM rolling dice to randomize his own spins on the game has absolutely nothing to do with the SR combat system. Personally, I don't really see the point in rolling dice for something like this anyway, since it makes much more sense to make a decision based on the NPC's individual personalities rather than the results of your rolls.

If this doesn't convince you that something's amiss, I don't see the point in continuing the conversation.

So a .22 LR rifle is "much more effective" than a .357 magnum revolver under all circumstances for "shutting down bad guys"? (See what I'm getting at here?)

It is in no way "a lot more likely" that one would survive "being shot with a .45 hardball" as opposed to "an AR-15" under all circumstances. There are a lot of factors omitted from the statement that could easily make it false. I'd rather not assume what you meant by it, but in almost any way I can imagine (short of the body armor factor), it's arguable. 50-80 grain bullets that basically blow up inside are nice and all (when they blow up), but a .45-caliber hole in and out tends to lead to an awful lot of bleeding. People just dropping and praying to Jesus can't be counted on in either case.

Cool. Thanks.

I didn't say you couldn't improve on it, I said you couldn't make it realistic. You can add in greater and more logical variations between guns and ammo, but you still won't have a realistic combat system. To truly model and codify the things weapons do to a body needs more than a damage meter with a penalty every three boxes.

For Clyde and anyone else interested in this idea, I recommend that you check out a little game called Chalk Outlines Waiting to Happen.

It's a rules-lite game by the same guy that wrote Dogs in the Vineyard, and it's totally free. One concept contained within is that the character's skill is what matters, and not the gear/equipment/weapon. It's taken to the extreme, and therefore there are no ratings/stats/rules for weapons. Interesting idea (whether unique to that system or not; actually it's not, Simple 20 uses a similar idea).

If you're interested, you can find it here: Chalk Outlines

/tangent

Everything looks great except this. Why are you nerfing APDS? If you are going to do that the prices should be changed accordingly for game balance. APDS should be cheaper now that it is less effective. Here is an excerpt from Serbitar's House Rules that explains the dilemma.

"7.3 Ammunition:

Ammunition is really messed up in SR4. Gel and flechette ammo that was supposed to be weak against a lot of armour does not care about armour at all. It gives you +2DV/+2AP and is resisted by impact, though most of the time, impact is 2 points lower than ballistic. One would need 6 points of armour to compensate for the +2DV and it does not matter at all whether you have lot of armour or no armour at all against flechette and gel. Because +2DV/+2AP effectively reduce the armour + body of the target by 4(2*3-2), they are always better than regular ammo. Exexplosive
rounds in SR4 do not only penetrate better than normal rounds, they do outperform APDS, which has higher availability, always, even against heavily armoured targets. This is because the modified DV is compared against the modified armour of
the target. ExEx gives you +2DV/-2AP which effectively results in a difference of 4 points in this comparison, compared to regular ammo. APDS also gives you a difference of 4 (-/-4AP), but APDS only reduces the armour of the target by 4, while ExEX reduces the armour of the target by 2 and give you 2 more damage that needs 6 points of armour for compensation. Thus ExEX gives you an effective armour/body reduction of 8 while APDS is always the worse choice. Just read the electricity damage rules to know why StickNShock was downgraded. Together with the amour reduction this was the overkiller."

There are some grammatical and spelling errors but I think you should get the point. I do like that you removed the -AP from Explosive and EX-Explosive, but the APDS problem still remains and now is actually worse.

Your forgeting APDS doesn't run the risk of blasting yourself on a glitch like Explosive ammo does.

Also its hard to tell what math you all are using. But it appears you assume every four dice nets a hit.
That is only true when buying its. When you actually roll it comes out to every 3 dice.
On a six sided die there are six possible out comes. A hit happends on the roll of a Five or a Six. Thats two out of six. Or one third the time.

If it's APDS, then surely the plastic shell strips off the penetrator when it exits the muzzle. For weapons of caliber smaller than .50 BMG, of course, more common are designs where the projectile is enveloped in a jacket just like on most other bullets, like the US M993 and M995 and the Russian equivalents. Also, for small arms, the penetrator is likely to be bullet-shaped if somewhat lengthened, and if you're talking about the high quality stuff especially in the West it will be made of tungsten carbide instead of steel.

In any case, for what it's worth, real world logic justifies the lowered DV.

People shot by any real rifle (sorry, .22lr doesn't count) tend to be much more messed up than people shot by a pistol, everything else being equal.

And if I'm shooting at someone I'm not trying to kill them, I'm trying to make them stop doing whatever they were doing. Once they go to zero body that works fine. (You can always shoot again after that.) And if you are barely hitting them (no extra successes) that's like grazing and minor peripheral hits. It takes a lot of grazes and through-and-through limbs wounds to stop someone.

If you have a decent level of skill you will typically have more successes than they have body successes.

I’m perfectly willing to have a game where incompetent idiots shoot the hell out of each other before falling down and bleeding on the floor, while someone who knows what they are doing is really lethal with the same gun.

Rifles are in a whole different category from the typical service handgun. The bullets are moving at least twice as fast and the typical wound profile is hence vastly more devastating. People tend to be physiologically incapacitated a lot more often when shot once by rifles (or shotguns) then by pistols. If you signficantly reduce the pistol damage that also provides the same effect.

To properly reflect this requires some change in the ammo rules also, but not a whole lot.

There is more you could do by performing surgery on the rules, but that gets hard. Bullet placement is really the key to effectiveness with small arms, which is hard to simulate in a game that doesn't have hit locations (and most of games that do it doesn't work well). I’m toying with using the graphical template concept from Millennium’s End, but this requires major changes in the mechanics and concept of combat.

So is the 5.7mm bullets from FN IIRC. Wound track looked a hell of a lot like a .22LR hollowpoint. This certainly isn't good for the target, but it isn't something you want to count on.

They were probably talking about (or hyping up, as the case may be) blended metal bullets which a certain firm (Le Mas Ltd, now apparently bankrupt) claimed would remain solid when hitting hard objects but would pulverize in human tissue. Only they couldn't demonstrate that it actually worked as advertised, and there were other issues with it -- like drastically shortened range. Seems to whole thing has been buried for a few years now.

Even if it had worked exactly like they claimed, it would still have been worse at penetrating armor than dedicated armor piercing rounds, and its wounding capabilities would have been inferior to controlled expansion rounds because such ammo would not have penetrated deep enough in tissue.

Moreover, regardless of advances in material technology, bullets dedicated to piercing armor will pierce armor better, and bullets dedicated to causing more lethal wounds will do that better.

Rounds that penetrate through the target are not as big an issue as rounds that miss the target altogether. The police get quite a few misses per hit, so that's what they're worrying more about -- at any rate, taking too long to disable (kill) the target is more likely to cause loss of innocent life than rounds that penetrate through, so if AP ammo is what it takes, AP ammo is what they'll use. Provided that they have any, of course.

The military isn't going to give a damn what happens to rounds that penetrate through the target in most cases, and they're usually stuck with FMJs anyway -- AP rounds will usually not penetrate much further through tissue than those.

Which usually works out to be synonymous, since killing them is pretty much the only reliable way to "stop" them with a firearm.

Not necessarily true, depending on which part of the body the bullet travels through. The higher velocity projectiles tend to cause more extensive damage to penetrated bones and will really fuck up the liver should they go through it, but through muscle tissue a 5.6mm diameter spitzer bullet will leave behind the same sized hole regardless of whether it moves at 1500fps or 3000fps -- a hole much smaller than that which a 11.4mm roundnose creates at any velocity.

The whole point of the 5.7x28mm and 4.6x30mm cartridges is indeed the ability to penetrate soft body armor with a very compact weapon. The tumbling is supposed to counteract the otherwise extremely limited wounding potential of an extremely light, extremely small non-deforming bullet, but even in an optimal situation the overall size of the resulting permanent cavity is quite small -- ruling out hits through the liver or other organs that cannot handle stretching from the temporary cavity, I assume it will be smaller in volume and surface area than with a 9x19mm FMJ in the same conditions.

The SS190 looks like this in gelatin. Kinda resembles a 5.45x39mm FMJ impact chopped in half. Insufficient penetration + small permanent cavity = meh.

The part about 13 CM into the wound track where the FMJ round yaws and shatters is where the terminal ballistics get exciting. A through-and-through impact on an arm may well miss that part. But shooting people in the arm isn't going to result in a physiological stop very often until you are dealing with heavy hunting bullets or crew served weapons.

You keep saying this, but still have yet to show us any evidence of it, namely in context of AR-15 vs. 45 ACP pistol. I'm willing to bet that you're "vastly" overstating the case, and that single hits from .223/5.56mm rifle rounds aren't anywhere near as effective at "resulting in a physiological stop" as you appear to believe them to be.

You'd think that, but it's not true.

I have to train myself not to think that way.

But on average, you'll get one or more hits on 3 dice 70% of the time. You'll get one on 4 dice 80% of the time.

I agree generally that subtracting dice from your opponent is always good. It creates a smaller pool, which is more likely to glitch, and gives them less dice to reroll with edge.

Compare the wound profiles yourself. Which does more tissue damage?

http://www.brooksidepress.org/Products/Ope...ures/Fig12.html
http://www.brooksidepress.org/Products/Ope...ures/Fig04.html

Or a slightly easier to view versions that are not part of an offical DoD publication:
http://www.firearmstactical.com/images/Wou...230gr%20FMJ.jpg
http://www.firearmstactical.com/images/Wou...ofiles/M193.jpg
http://www.firearmstactical.com/images/Wou...ofiles/M855.jpg

And since someone mentioned .22LR
http://www.firearmstactical.com/images/Wou...040gr%20RNL.jpg

And for completeness, a 12 gauge shotgun wound
http://www.firearmstactical.com/images/Wou...%20Buckshot.jpg

Can you show me that math, please?

What you seem to be arguing is that a .45 FMJ that behaves as expected does more damage than the rifle bullet that behaves in an extremely unlikely fashion and doesn't yaw, rotate, or fragment as they virtually always do. That's likely to be true.

Ok. This indicates exactly what? How is this useful information to combat mechanics, which need to be based on typical behavior, not "if you assume the moon is made of blue cheese then" type assumptions?

I don't mind the debates (although I rarely add anything constructive ). I'll agree with more game in addition to the debates though.