I wonder what Sigmund Freud would have to say about that.

Surefire was pushing assault rifle silencers for police use inside buildings, mostly as it prevents the permanent hearing loss that comes with shooting when you don't have ear protection and also allows you to talk amongst each other without the volume level you need when your ear pro has to handle 5.56 in a phone booth.

It's not a movie silencers, which generally don't exist.

They also seem to employ lesbian catgirls in school girl outfits, or just leather straps, a lot.

Come to think of it, it's a lot like Shadowrun.

To add some info:
That howitzer and silencer belong to the German Heer (army).
That particular artillery shooting range is near a city so the silencer is used to go easy on the citizens' ears.

I think he'd just point and laugh. (But then, psychology is one of the few things I've never really studied, so I don't know. )

But you could simply replace the whole barrel.

Hmm... Sometimes gun parts are married to the gun as a whole and to replace one part, expecially the barrel, would reduce the overall effectiveness of the gun. (I.E. gun jams more often, the accuracy of the gun is thrown off or power is not applied properly to the projectile due to a flaw in the new mating)
Now when dealing with machineguns though, most are made with the idea that the user will have to change out the barrel every 200 shots or so due to heat bending the barrel. In this situation, the argument above doesnt work as well, but on rifles or assault rifles, it holds more water.

Isn't this what the GM-invented armourer check (a somewhat harder one) to remove it is for?

The check can't be harder than making a rifle from scratch yourself, and while (thank god) firearms design hasn't made it to SR4, players have been able to do that with the tech skills before.

Ain't that the truth?

There's a reason they invented quick draw holsters that hold machine pistols, and hidden arm slides that hold Predators.

And that's without even getting in to the gloriousness that is the Adept Quick-Draw power.

GM: "What? You can't drop your Smartgun and draw an Alpha?!"
Me: "Yes, yes I can."
GM: *sighs* "I hate you."

Taking your inspiration from the Matrix lobby scene, you should have a gun in each hand, an assault rifle slung across your back, two machine pistols in shoulder holsters, two pistols on your hip, a gun in your waistband, and possibly a shotgun in your pants. If your GM is nice, you can have 2 predators in hidden arm slides as well.

Ambidexterity: The best 5 bp you'll ever spend.

Only one pistol in your waistband? Slack!

I think it's slightly more than 200 shots or so

have you seen this youtube link
It looks like the guy's having fun for the first 300 rnds. I wouldn't want to be him the next morning.

did you not see the youtube movie? that guy had the trigger down for minute, forty-five seconds. Is there something I don't understand?

EDIT: The guy in the clip said:

it's a matter of safe/economical practices, and possibly a misunderstanding about what it means to change a barrel. yeah, you can pour 15,000 rounds through one barrel without changing it--but you probably wouldn't want to do so more than once with the same barrel, since when you're done, i'd imagine the barrel is substantially weakened and unsafe to use again.

when you change out a barrel, you generally don't throw it away or even do any work on it. with the M249, we just swapped out two barrels, putting the one we'd just used on the parts bag to cool until it was time to swap it back in. doing this every 200 rounds means that your barrel will last for a good, long time. firing more than 200 rounds through one barrel will decrease the lifespan of the barrel--instead of, say, five years, it will only last one or two.

military practices tend to heavily favor extending the life of the equipment and minimizing the possiblity of malfunction. if you're constantly pushing the envelope with your equipment's tolerances, you're eventually going to tear the envelope. better to change out barrels to cool off long, long before you start doing damage to them. that way, you have to buy barrels less often, and don't have to worry as much about your barrels malfunctioning.

Well, to be fair you'd probably have been killed by North Korean arty or WMDs long before you reached your SAW.

Had you lucked out, yeah, facing a million soldiers pouring across the DMZ is not a time when you'd want your barrel malfunctioning.

How do you know when a barrel needs to be dumped? Do you just discard it after a certain amount of time or can you tell that a barrel's prone to giving out before it actually does? Or c) none of the above?

Skinlinks all the way.

I'm a hard-core SR3 throw back in that department. Wireless is for the crazies. I hardwire my stuff, and hope for the best.

Hey, we coulda used the SR ruleset to berate - that would have been even better!

"In my copy of the BBB, it doesn't even mention barrel swapping. I don't think you really know how to play the game!"

Pretty much what mfb said. Weapons are routinely passed through a unit armorer who has access to the tooling and gauges necessary to determine the condition of the weapon and replaces parts as necessary. The armorer also keeps a log of each weapon by serial number to give him an idea of how many times the weapon has been serviced, a rough idea of how many rounds the weapon has fired, and when certain parts should be checked or replaced.

The two most useful tools in terms of determining the condition of a barrel are what are called a headspace gauge and a bore scope.

A headspace gauge is a chuck of steel shaped like a cartridge case without the neck or bullet in place. The gauge is precision-machined to a ten thousandth of an inch in order to measure the distance between the shoulder of the chamber and the bolt face. When a barrel wears (through erosion and mechnical wear), this distance increases. It can increase to a point that when fired, recoil will cause the case to back out of the chamber and the bolt face will be too far back to stop it before the case ruptures, in best case causing a bad jam, in worst case destroying the barrel. The headspace test usually fails before the actual rifling is worn beyond a serviceable point.

A bore scope (like a non-flexible endoscope) allows the armorer to inspect the rifling from throat to muzzle, but they usually don't take the time to do that. If they see an odd spot with the naked eye, they'll use the bore scope to inspect that spot. Target areas are the throat of the bore, and the port where propellant gases are tapped from the barrel and into the weapon's operating system.

Another tool they sometimes use is a barrel comparitor, basically a device like a manual lathe that the barrel is inserted into, allowing it to rotate on its axis, and a gauge that is run along its outside in order to check for any warpage. Barrels can warp when they're run up to really high temperatures and then cooled very quickly (say, dunked in water, dropped in snow, or, in the interest of field-expediency, even pissed on).