*sighs* Fine, let me get the book...

p. 207, "Vehicle Weapon Mounts"

P207 of what book? That's in the decking section of the BBB and the remote control record sheet in R3 (I admit I don't have Rigger Revised).

Regardless. The quote I gave explicitly stated that fixed mounts half the recoil before applying compensation. Compensated recoil (IE: Recoil that has been removed by recoil compensation) is not uncompensated recoil thus does not figure in the x2 uncompensated recoil penalty for heavy weapons.

Is that so hard? It is +15, halve it due to the vehicle, then apply the mods, -then- doubble the leftovers.

[edit]The quote you gave is on page 307 and it dosen't really make sense as there is no 'doubble recoil modifier' on heavy weapons, only a doubble uncompensated recoil modifier[/edit]

*sighs* I don't know how I can spell it out better. The quote I gave (which is referenced in the index, that's how I found it.. and yes, page 307, not 207) says that you halve recoil. That means you apply it after all other recoil has been figured. That makes it semantic as to whether you apply it before or after the heavy double uncompensated recoil... For thge "uncompensated" part means that you put it at the end.

Basically, it comes down to this: In your view, you can fire every bullet out of a minigun with a 4 TN, theoretically -- no recoil applies. In mine, holding down the trigger will give you at least some recoil, no matter what.. I guess if we both interpret this differently, then so be it.

Athenor

The minor fact is that it's impossible to 'let-go' of the trigger on the minigun.

You are also thinking that you only get one burst.

Let's compare -- 9 points of recoil, shall we?

first grouping: +3 recoil, - 9 RC -- easy, standard TN.
next shot: +6 recoil, see above
next shot: +9 recoil, see above
next shot: +12 recoil.
---In yours, reduce by half (to 6), reduce by 9 to nothing.
---In mine, reduce by 9 (to 3), double uncompensated (6), halve (3)
next shot: +15 recoild
---In yours, reduce by half (7.5), reduce by 9 to nothing.
---In mine, reduce by 9 (to 6), halve and double, to 6.

Just because you can fire no less than 15 bullets, doesn't mean they have to be grouped into a single burst. So you get 5 10-D bursts (someone mentioned the damage code was 7s, right?).. In yours, all 5 of those go with no penalties, in mine, you start getting penalized after the 3rd burst. Which seems more accurate?

I'd like to point out at this fact that firing an A-10's Avenger cannon actually makes the jet slow down, as well as buck upwards a bit, when fired... and that is one hell of a recoil compensated hardpoint...

Athenor

That is also a 30mm cannon firing 4200 rounds per minute. That's, what, a hundred times the muzzle energy of a weapon like the VIndicator? A few hundred? And with a RoF 7 times as large. [Edit]Make that 14 times, 4200 vs 300...[/Edit] Translated to SR, that's 20D in a 210 round burst (230D+70, AV). It should in fact be more, because the 30mm rounds certainly have a greater advantage over your average assault cannon rounds than +2 Power.

It certainly shouldn't buck the A-10 UP however, seeing as how the cannon is located below it's center mass. But what do I know, physics work in mysterious ways sometimes, and I'm certainly no physicist.

On the other hand, the M61 Vulcan doesn't slow down F14s, F15s, F16s or F18s, and that's still a 20mm cannon firing 6000 rounds per minute (or is it 4000rpm these days?). It doesn't turn those aircraft in any direction, either. The "shotgun" pattern stays the same all through the 500+ rounds that the aircraft carry. But then the 30mm rounds the GAU-8 fires weigh a lot more (twice as much?) than the 20mm ones, and the muzzle velocity is greater. The 30mm projectile weighs ~100 times as much as an assault rifle bullet, and leaves the barrel just as fast if not faster.

So, comparing that 6.4 meter, 300kg monster to a 5.56x45 or 7.62x51 minigun weighing 15-20kg hardly makes sense. It's like comparing full-auto Assault Cannons with Assault Rifles.

Don't Forget that with each of your extra bursts you'd be strafing to a new target (adding +2 TN each time).

Your TNs for that (assuming you have a smartlink) would go 2, 4, 6, 8, 10 or under your system 2, 4, 6, 11, 16.

This weapon is also not the A-10's minigun which, if my memory serves me correctly, is an anti-tank weapon. The victory assault cannon (at 7s base damage) is nowhere near. (I think Austere Emancipator said it best)

Anyhow. I might house-rule it when I'm GMing that recoil is neither halved nor doubbled when dealing with heavy weapons on fixed mounts... A 30D full-auto shot from a minigun is somewhat fearsome.

Earlier in the thread somone mentioned firing 6 round bursts. I understand walking to targets but they were refering to firing bursts.

Bursts are definately not possible. Walking fire is but you'd take a +2 on each target after the first.

When you walk autofire from target to target, the book refers to them as bursts. There will be less confusion here if people refer to "burst-fire bursts" and "auto-fire bursts".

Given that the thing spews out fire at an insane rate, and that the Ruger T-bolt heavy pistol has low recoil because of the fact that it doesn't experience recoil til after the third round in a burst, I'd say the canon rules as applied to the Vindicator are semi-screwed up. But that's just me.

Still good for suppressive fire, though.

Never mind the insane pucker factor.

Let's face it, if you hear the whirrrr of a minigun the next coherent thought to pass through your head will be "ohdrekohdrekohdrekohdrekohdrekohdrekohdrek".

-Siege

Which is why one of my characters carried an audio player with a recording of the whirrrr of a minigun.

Revamped autofire rules

I was bored so I decided to add my contribution to the FA discussion. Most of this idea is something I ripped out from the top of my head. My main concern with the FA rules is that it should be EASIER to hit your target with a shitload of lead instead of impossible due to recoil modifiers through the roof.

True, recoil WILL make it harder to hit your target but there must be a limit for how hard. No matter how many rounds you fire in a Complex Action that should only be four 3 seconds (for a non-enhanced human.)

The biggest change is that there is no staging of the damage code for the attack, instead you gain extra D6 for your attack test and the target gains extra D6 for their dodge test due to your characters recoil.

Semi Automatic
As per standard SR3 rules

Burst Fire
Attacker gains 3D6 to their attack roll. Defender gains 3D6 –RC amount of D6 to their Dodge test.

Full Automatic
Attacker gains XD6 to their attack roll. X represents the amount of bullets fired. Defender gains Recoil –RC D6 to their dodge test.

Recoil & Recoil Compensation
Recoil makes it harder to hit ones target and Recoil Compensation makes it easer to aim and thus they cancel each other out.

Firing modifiers
Semi Automatic: Standard Dodge test
Burst Fire: Dodge test at +1 TN
Full Auto: Dodge test at +1TN/3 rounds fired.
Switching target +2TN

Attack test modifier
Semi Automatic: +0D6
Burst Fire: +3D6
Full Automatic: +XD6
Skill: +XD6
Combat Pool: +XD6

Dodge test modifiers
Combat Pool: +XD6
Recoil: +XD6
Recoil Compensation: -XD6


Attacking a single target
Example: A character firing a Vindicator Minigun against a single target with full recoil compensation would have the following attack profile. The defender (just below) would most likely be quite dead.

Attacker D6: 27 TN: 2 D6 / Attack: 27
Defender D6: 4 TN: 9

If the same character used a Vindicator Minigun WITHOUT any recoil compensation the situation would be quite different. The defender would gain the entire uncompensated recoil to his dodge test in ADDITION to his combat pool (since this is a heavy weapon it would be TWICE the bullets fired).

Attacker D6: 27 TN: 2 D6 / Attack: 27
Defender D6: 34 TN: 9

Attacking multiple targets
A Vindicator Minigun with fifteen shots and full recoil compensation against three equal targets the TN and D6’s would look like this. Attacker has a skill and pool of 6. For this example we split the dice evenly amongst the targets.

Attacker D6: 27 TN: 2 / 4 / 6 D6 / Attack: 9 / 9 / 9
Defender D6: 4 TN: 7
Defender D6: 4 TN: 7
Defender D6: 4 TN: 7

The same situation without any recoil compensation for the Minigun.

Attacker D6: 27 TN: 2 / 4 / 6 D6 / Attack: 9 / 9 / 9
Defender D6: 14 TN: 7
Defender D6: 14 TN: 7
Defender D6: 14 TN: 7

Just want to add in here:

I never said anything about walking the fire. In the full auto rules:

p. 115

Quoteing Athenor
"Now if you decide to "walk" the gun off of your target, and waste the bullets, so be it -- you are still using 15, even if not all 15 are hitting anything substantive."
End quote


With a Smartgun system you don't waste ammo when you walk fire. I don't know the page reference, but you don't have to fire if you don't have a target. or something like that. I smoked my breakfast so excuse me if I'm wrong.

If that applies to miniguns, then something is seriously wrong.. it's not like you can "pause" the barrel, or keep it from firing, like you can a full-auto gun (by stopping the firing mechanism for a split second)...

But I don't have my CC on me either.

Athenor

I'm not going to sit here and try to say that I am an expert in automatic weapons but I have wielded just about every model of M16 and 50 cal machine gun, along with a wide asortment of other weapons.

I can say that it is almost impossiable to hit a man size target more than 20 paces away when fireing almost any weapon on full auto. The first three bullets might hit, but then again thats what burst fire is for.
THe BFG that we are talking about though cannot be used on anything but full auto. Lets consider why weapons are even desinged to fire at full auto.

1. Surpression fire/intimidation
If you want to scare the derk out of an enemy let them come face to face with a vindicator. You might not be able to hit an enemy... but I can promise you that the target will not stand in place, nor are they very likely to close on your position. They are going to run, and hide. Which brings me to the next point

2. Stopping power
There are very few things that will protect someone who is faced with a vindicator. The weapon simply does too much damage too quickly. Weapons with fully auto are not always desinged with the applications of a runner in mind. A minigun like this is meant to kill the movement of formations of troops. Preventing them from advancing or even in most cases returning fire.
The logisitcs of the weapon are also desinged with this in mind, it is meant to be used from a hardend location by a trained operator, with adequete ammo stores in place. Most machine guns like this are crew serviced. Now the advents of the awakened world probably don't require this it is still something to keep in mind.

3. Colateral damage
Bullets don't just stop existing just because they don't hit the target. Those rounds will move, and will continue to move until they come in contact with something. Be it the car, the enemy hideing behind the car, the wall, or the family of four behind the wall.
This comes into factor when (provided you have an interesting or playful GM) you fail to hit the initail target, but instead destroy the wall behind them, forcing a rain of masonry and plasteel down on them.

The vindicator is also known by name by every shadowrunner. They know what it is and what it is capeable of under the right circumstances. The threat of the vindicator is as powerful as one of it's bullets. The same can be said about other high profile weapons.

Keep in mind the foundation of attack
Choose your target
Your target determines your weapon
Your weapon determines your motion/action

This applies in every situation from unarmed combat to the deployment of high explosives.
If the target is the eyes, then taking the head will meet your goal... but do you have to take the head?
But then these are just my ideas, how I play the game, or at least how I think about it.

I'd imagine that with a high volume-of-fire weapon it'd be somewhat easier to hit at long range due to spread, though if you hit the number of bullets hitting will be, as you say, lower.
Or that could just be the misperception of someone who has never fired anything larger than a pistol.

~J

You're right, and this is partly why I ranted about SR suppressive fire getting nowhere near the actual damage caused with really high volume-of-fire weapons (like miniguns) earlier in this thread.

Even without aiming specifically at it but the area around it, you'd score many, many hits on a man sized target with a minigun, let alone if you really do aim at the target. At long ranges, the latter is not really possible, and you're stuck with attacking just area targets; but a character standing in the area target of a minigun would still get riddled, several hundred meters away.

Houserule time... does the following sound reasonable?
Minigun still takes one turn to spin up, afterwards it must be fired at a rate of 200 rounds/turn, divided up evenly amongst all of the initiative passes of a character. All normal recoil modifiers apply, and if used by a character they must make a knockdown test against a TN equal to 1/2 modified recoil (even if used for area denial). Proper mounting (GM discretion as to how much work this is, but it should be immobile for the duration) will prevent the knockdown test.
On the one hand, if you try to point it at someone it should still turn them into swiss cheese, but with rules like this no one is ever going to actually try to aim it. It also makes the weapon a lot less likely to be used by runners, as the minimum cost of firing this weapon once is ¥400 (less street index, but still).
Thoughts?

~J

edit: Or I might just require that firing this consumes all Complex Actions, leaving the character open to make Free Actions but nothing else for the remainder of the turn.

edit^2: I might also increase the power of the round with respect to hardened armor by 1 for every 50 rounds, or possibly for every 40.

This is how we houserule autofire & miniguns.

Autofire

1. All autofire uses the supressive fire rules.

2. Max rnds/metre is shooters skill + recoil compensation.
eg UCAS Army Grunt with assault rifles 5 firing M23 (RC 3 iirc) can concentrate a maximum of 8 rnds/m

3. This Number is divided by 2 if the weapon has +2/rnd recoil or by 3 if the weapon has +3/rnd recoil.
eg UCAS Army Grunt with Heavy Weapons 4 firing a Bipod mounted MMG (RC 2) gets (4+2)/2 = 3 rnds/metre.

4. The concentration is per metre at short range, per 2m at medium range, per 3m at long range, and per 4m at extreme range.

5. When making the dodge test against the suppressive fire, each success lets you dodge one of the bullets. No successes means that all the bullets in that metre hit.
eg If the Grunt with the M23 is concentrating his fire on you at short range, you need 8 successes to dodge completely, if you get 3 successes you get hit by 5 bullets for 13S base damage.

6. If you're using tracer rounds the tn to stage damage up is reduced by 1 to 5.

Vindicator Minigun

1. Since it's a LMG scale minigun it's recoil mod should IMO be +1/rnd not +2, but...

2. As minigun ROF in Shadowrun is far too low, instead of 15 shots they now fire a fixed 15 "3 rnd groups."
Each of these "groups" is treated as a separate +2 recoil shot for 9D damage if using tracer/regular ammo or 10D if using regular.

So for example, the UCAS Army Grunts above with heavy weapons 4 firing a Vindicator from a Helicopter door mount (RC 6) could concentrate (4+6)/2=5 "3 rnd groups" per metre at short range.

A troll street-sami with 12 points of recoil comp and skill 6 would get (6+12)/2= 9 "groups"/metre.

Changing miniguns in this way increases their ROF to 900rpm per action which seems more reasonable.

And as it's difficult to dodge all the bullets with short & medium range autofire everybody tends to duck for cover very quickly (especially if they hear minigun barrels start to spin )

What do think.

Sorry, I'd forgotten the Suppressive Fire rules didn't account for staging. After CSSE I'll get to working on a way to stage it.
Either that or I might just give miniguns their own initiative, always 40, 50 rounds/pass. 7S damage ought to be enough if it's done 4 times every 3 seconds.
Well, except for trolls... well, I'll post some better thought-out rules later.

~J

It may not have horrible shake-the-airplane-apart recoil, but it's still launching quite a bit of mass forwards at high speeds, which means it's going to get pushed back. Do that in the air at too low a speed and you've got problems.

~J

I use a system where the amount of rounds in a meter reduces the TN to hit with suppressive fire, as well as adding damage. Currently, suppressive fire is declared in 2 meter areas, but I think 1 meter/range category (like Raiko put it) might be better. I think it was every 10 rounds in the char's 2 meter area that lowered the TN by 1, and every 15 that added 1 round for damage purposes. However, every dodge success (TN 4) reduces the amount of potential rounds by 4. Using Meter/Category areas, that should probably be 3 potential hits in char's meter for TN reduction and 5 for extra damage round.

UCAS Army Grunt fires his Vindicator Minigun at full auto (200/CT, 4000rpm) at a bush where he thinks an enemy might be lurking, 500 meters away. That's extreme range, thus the 50 rounds per meter. The unlucky Joe OpFor rolls his 5 CP dice vs TN 4, getting 3 successes, bringing the amount of potential hits down to just 38. UCAS AG now rolls his Gunnery skill (4) against a TN of 6 (the base TN for extreme range suppressive fire in my games) - 12 (38/3 = 12.6666) = 2, getting 4 successes.

Joe OpFor is thus taking 15D+1 damage; 7S (base damage of the Vindicator with FMJ rounds at extreme ranges in my games), 8 rounds (1 + 38/5 = 8.6). Good luck with that.

The A-10 carries 1100 ready rounds, ~300 gram projectiles each, 1067m/sec, 320.1 kgm/s momentum each, 65 per second (3900rpm), for a thrust of 20806.5 Newtons. Assuming a combat weight of 20,000kg, that's 1m/s^2 acceleration backwards, or one tenth of the gravitational pull. Doesn't seem like something that will make the plane stall. But, again, physics work in mysterious ways.

However, put that on a TROLL and you've got a ~900kg creature (225kg + 300kg (GAU-8 ) + ~375kg (half the weight of the 1100 rounds, or the average over the period of shooting)) being pushed back at 23m/s^2, or twice the gravitational pull, for a duration of 17 seconds.

Or think of a KLEINBUS...

CC pg. 26

Yeah, but the second you crank down on the trigger, the muzzle flashes and the rain of spent ammo will be equally evident.

Besides, allowing for ambient sounds the whirrr may not be that easy to detect.

-Siege

Ignore this post.

CC Page 107 (Suppressive Fire):

Whoops, sorry about that success thingy. But I guess it shouldn't shouldn't surprise me that that bit TOO is just a house rule of mine...

Yeah, wasted rounds rock

Two engines at 9,000 lbs each are together less than one counterforce at 19,000.
So, slow the rate of fire or only apply it for short portions of a strafe.

Not hard to work around, but a real problem for the novice.

Your source.

It also says that at 4200rpm, the average recoil force is 9,000lbs (40,000N, not THAT different from what I got, considering that the round weights were also off by up to 50%). That's the actual force that the engines will have to work against, when considering acceleration. Currently, the A-10 GAU-8s are set to 3900rpm, so that force will go down to ~8,360lbs (37,000N, not a significant drop but worth mentioning). That's well under a half of the thrust of the engines.

Now, if the A-10 opened up with the GAU-8 while flying straight up, or when flying very slow (engine malfunction, or simply having the engines powered down), that might cause problems. In the kind of situation where the weapon is supposed to be used, in a dive, the recoil will certainly not stall the plane.

Oh, and thanks for the nice info packet on the GAU-8.

PS. What is it with the "kilogram" force figures you can see on US sites? The rest of the world has NEWTONs (1kgm/s^2) to measure force with. If these guys can't be bothered to do the conversion to a reasonable unit, they might as well not do it at all.

PPS. Yes, I know that kilogram-force is an actual unit of force, but I at least have never seen it used anywhere but on american sites as "metrifications" of their units.

Oh, right, so you did. So we agree completely. Wow. That's a rare outcome of discussions like these.

Do we get to snuggle now?

How absurd and unbalancing would this house rule be:

Burst-fire and Autofire (p.115, SR3; p.103, CC)
Rather than staging up the Power and Damage Level of an attack, a burst adds a number of dice equal to the number of bullets being fired to the attack test. Thus, a 3-round burst would add 3 dice to the attack test, while a 15-round burst would add 15 dice to the attack test. This makes bursts much harder to dodge, and somewhat easier to hit with ‘spray and pray’ tactics, without having to compute and compare different attack Powers for armor and barriers. Successes from these dice stage damage up normally, and must be overcome by any Dodge test for the target to completely avoid damage.