How dead is a person who's been chopped up into small, easy-to-carry pieces?

3 physical damage.

trick question! you don't run through monowire--monowire runs through you.

Well, the damage would depend on how much monowire there is, if it's moving (moving monowire way more deadly then stationary), and how much your GM wants to keep you out of that area.

Presuming they fail their perception, soak 8P. (SR4, p 252)

Don't forget to add all those wonderful penalties for being distracted, wounded, in smoke, etc.

technically a threshold of 3 which means you need on average a dice pool of 9 to see it in normal lighting conditions without stressful modifiers, 12 if you just buy successes.

If you want to scale damage for the person being moving, driving into or running into the wire. I THINK this was adressed somewehre in the SR3 books.

Even if it wasnt you can sorta take a page out of the vehicle collision and falling rules. Like say.. walking into it or at a light jog is base damage. But running full out into it adds say.. 1-2 power. And driving a bike to it adds +1 power every 10kph you were going.

That makes it incredibly deadly.. but then.. it's monowire. It's -supposed- to be ultra deadly in my mind.

What if they fall 10 meters into it, but hit a house's rooftop first?

I would also think that the number of strands would also affect the damage.
Say, for every extra strand, add 1 or 2 to the DV. But also add in the same as a dice pool modifier for perception?

I would adjudicate based on the amount of damage the troll took and how fast he was going. The less damage and the higher the speed, the higher chance he broke through the monowire. The more damage and the lower the speed, the higher the chance he hit it and stopped.

In either event, you now have a very angry, heavily armored troll. Enjoy!

The troll could swat the wires away, nevermind what happens when he runs into one. Carbon nanotube strands at a thickness of a human hair will snap with a free hanging weight of 65kg (less than the troll's arms), and already at that point you have to press bare skin forcefully against the wire to achieve any kind of cutting. If it's thicker than that it'll just trip you.

However, if we assume that monowire does what it says it does, rather than what science says, you would have the troll take damage from the wire, but also have the wire suffer damage, using the rules for attacking barriers. I would probably base it loosely on the ramming rules, using Body to determine the DV that the monowire suffers. If it suffers pretty much any damage (the wire might have a high Armor, but it wouldn't have a Structure higher than 1), the wire snaps.

That's probably how I'd run it.

I also rule, though, that monowire attacks (and lasers, or anything similar that doesn't hit with a lot of force) do not damage at all if the DV doesn't beat the armor. (Monowire causing stun damage doesn't work for me.) If that happened (the troll would have to be wearing some heavy duty armor), I would give him a bonus to the DV the wire suffers.

actually, the stun damage thing isn't completely stupid even with monowire, because it would mean that even if you're not actually cut, you are still bruised because you have hit something at a run: if you run headlong into barb wire, even if you don't take damage from the barbs (say you have heavy clothes), the shock still knocks your breath out.

I'll give you that. The rule was largely intended for combat with monowhips, anyway, where it really wouldn't make sense to suffer stun damage.

So monowire must be illogically difficult to break the rules say so, but a monowhip mustn't do stun damage through armor, because "it really wouldn't make sense"?

As written, a monowhip almost has to be a weapon focus. 8P _and_ slices effortlessly through 4 pts of armor?

I see Monowire being sharp as the edge on the finest razor blades (pretty close to a 1 mol edge IIRC), but relatively weak. It would pull right through clothing and flesh, but would hang up on anything denser.

So, IMO, when you run through monowire, your snap it like a spiderweb, but it cuts unarmored locations to the bone first.

Would snapped nanotube shrivel into a little ball, or is it stable enough to exist w/o an end cap?

I meant the heavily armored troll's arms together weighing 65kg. Count out the weight of armor, and that's about 1/4th - 1/5th the body weight of a troll, which doesn't seem much.

Does SR4 no longer make any mention of carbon nanotubes anywhere? That was the canon explanation of monowire in SR3 anyway.

Alas, this breaks down (yet again) to the classic argument of realism vs. "realism". I'm all for "realism", which means I have a particular (and decidedly cinematic) vision of the way stuff is supposed to go, so I want to rules to serve as a simulation of that, rather than as a simulation of actual reality. Knowing the real monowhips don't work doesn't change that in my SR "reality", there's some kind of compound/alloy/weird-ass material or chemical process that produces ultra-fine strands that cut through stuff effortlessly. In that vision, a man getting the wind knocked out of him (but no other injury) from the impact of that ultra-fine strand just doesn't fit.

Wow. We're not just beating a dead horse here. The horse died, got zombified, got killed again, and then we hit it with the bat.

Don't suppose it would help the discussion to mention that simple standard carbon nanotubes aren't the end-all and be-all of materials sciences regarding nanostructures, and that there are structures harder and more resilient to shock such as polymerized single-walled nanotubes (P-SWNT), with hardness equal to or exceeding diamond.

I'm sure that materials science research will be much more advanced in the next 50-60 years, if we've already come up with materials which can scratch diamond, who knows what will come up with by then...

At any rate, I would probably use GM fiat to hand-wave a rule, using base damage of the monowhip (8P, -4AP), and give it a number of dice "to hit" based on the placement and anchorage of the monowire, the amount of wire involved, and the speed of the soon-to-be-salsa victim. If the target manages to perceive it, they can try to "dodge" the "attack", otherwise it's soak damage time, and soaking may involve sponges...

This way, you can let the dice tell the story -- if the runner decides to Edge out on either the dodge or soak, or the wire's "to hit" roll comes up Critical Glitch, you can have either the wire break due to manufacturing flaws (damn those atomic vacancies and Stone-Wales defects), or the placement of the wires failed to take into account the next weakest point of the wire -- the anchorage, therefore the wires pull loose. OTOH, if the runner is going full-tilt into a nest of wires without looking and critglitches a soak roll, there might not be enough big chunks left to interest a ghoul...

I get the impression that alot of you not only fail to understand that this is science fiction and thus the technologies get to do things that are impossible today. In shadowrun we have fully functional cybernetic replacements for nearly every body part. You can get retinal enhancements onto natural eyes to give you thermos vision and other such things.

But some high strength razor sharp fishing line is beyond the technologies of 2070? That's basicly what monowire is the whip has a weight tip so it can be used in combat. Monofilament is a thin string made from a single fiber. Barbed wire is actually monofilament. So if your going to debuk science fiction with real science at at least use real sicience.

That being said running or falling into the wire should deal just 8P. Just like a knife it can't deal damage unless their is some force behind it. If someone using a monowhip critcally glitchs they take 8P damage so that should be coudl enougth for runing into monowire or falling into it.


Dakhran above me really has some good ideas.

Dakhran the Dark: Fullerites clearly handle much better than multi-walled nanotubes under compression, but is there some reason to expect them to be much better for tensile strength? I couldn't find anything on that.

Of course if you do want monowire to "make sense" by making it consist of something orders of magnitude harder than diamond, you just know you're going to have someone wanting to make body armor out of it no matter how expensive.

Yeah I thought I pointed that out in my post. A monowhip is just monowire modified to be used as a weapon.

The likely problem with making an armor out of the same material is at man sized it be to heavy and the person would be still be liquified in his own indestructible armor from high yield explosives.
A suit of bullet proof 10,000,000 nuyen armor doesn't do much good if you can still kill the guy in side with 10,000 in explosives.

I think the issue is in the game Emo is running on IRC we want to set up a monowire or 14 directly in the path of someone jumping off a bridge and through the roof and second story of a house. Typicly an armor spell would be cast on him making it safe. This time there would be no armor spell, and there will be some sort of deadly trap involved. The bridge is roughly 10-15 meters above the house. So just falling damage alone wouldn't work, and monowhip's stats don't mesh well with a static wire(s) being held taunt with a guy falling into them.

Wouldn't you have the same problem if he feel onto a spear?.

Open up the book and look at microwire unless gripped with special rappeling gloves the user takes
8P damage from trying to climb it. Can you say same material as the monowhip?

So just take 8P damage and add on the falling damage. If you need damage from extra wire just remember the rules for burst fire. Each extra wire adds 2P

Actually, wouldn't the wires increase the amount of area that the weight is spread out over and lessen the damage?

Not that I'll actually play it that way.

Now what can we do about making a monowire garotte? I've allways wanted one.

My guy has skillwires loaded with rating 4 infiltration and 8 agility and a chameleon suit on shipping.
(Plus 5 ranks on exotic weapon monowhip and a reflex recorder for it)
He'll really be able to sneak up on foes after that.

Well see thats the thing. The idea first entered my mind when I started playing that SR3 adept sniper. I was in the process of getting him an R12 Twinkinium suit. Add on the fact that he had 6 dice in stealth and I think improved ability stealth 2 if I recall ontop of that. And invisble walk.

Well suffice it to say he was a real sneaky bugger. Never could seem to get him so much as a garotte wire though, dispite my best efforts.

Use exotic weapon (mono-garotte), reach -1 to facilitate to need to get in close to actually use it. Does damage as per a monowhip but at -2AP or 0 AP for microwire.

For a non-lethal version, it does (Str/2 +1) S resisted by body only unless the character has neck/head protection such as a helmet.

With an internal airtank, there is no need to worry about suffocation. Without the airtank, apply the rules for holding one's breath from p 119.

Having an int. airtank would still let oxygen get into the blood if you were being garotted, but since the garotte is also pinching off the blood vessels in your neck, you still pass out in 15 sec or so.

Reinforced blood vessels should be easy to do. It would essentially be dermal plate or orthoskin on a much more limited scale.

Uh guys, it's MONOWIRE, you're not strangling some-one with it, their head is likely coming clean off.

Also you should stage down the damage if the character doesn't perform a called shot, because really a garotte is only effective on the neck.

Sorry, I wasn't clear that the Airtank only applied for the non-lethal version. The stun damage would facilitate the constriction of the blood vessels. When the stun track filled in, person falls unconscious.

Actually a monowire/microwire garrote could also be used to slice off limbs at the joints, unless that person has reinforced bones or cyberlimbs. I wonder how you would rule that? What about a monowire saw?

That would be pretty damned hard to do in a combat situation, where-as if you sneak up with a monowire, once you have it around their neck they're most likely fucked.