When determining final DV that would pass hardened armor, is number of rounds in a burst or auto fire used or just ap,round bonus's and players sucess's?

Just seems to make more sense not useing number of rounds fired if one round wouldnt get through why would others?

Obviously could be wrong here but after going over some of the numbers used with critters and vehicles it wouldnt take more then round or two with autofire weapon to beat them down useing number of rounds in final DV.

I agree that it makes sense that it would not penetrate, but the description for the power explicitly states that it is the modifed damage value of the attack. In fact this is kind of necessary as spirits count as having hardened armour against normal weapons and if it weren't the modified value, a powerful spirit (force 6) would be blanket immune to almost anything the players had.

I would rationalise it as (a) accuracy finding weakpoints in the armour for multiple hits, e.g. the Smaug effect, and (b) the increased power of being hit in the same place multiple times or being battered back by the sheer force of the hail of bullets for burst and auto-fire. I had a karate sensei that would never settle for hitting me once if he could sneak two blows in in the same place. Believe me, the repetition makes a difference. I'd guess a machine gun would, too.

Hope this helps,

-K.

Any sort of armor, on people or on vehicles, will have weaker spots. If, in a RPG, you hit "well" (with a good margin, doing more damage, whatever) or hit repeatedly, you stand a better chance of getting an impact on one of those weaker spots and hence getting a penetration. No need to bring up blunt trauma, which always causes injuries far less severe than penetrations.

Still, there will clearly be situations where autofire hugely increasing the probability of getting serious damage done just wouldn't make sense. Just rule it how you think makes the game better for your group.

SR uses an abstracted system for damage. In it, the extra shots increase the power of damage. That would true on living targets since I have read that each shot after the first is number of hits cubed worse than a single hit. So, getting shot once is a value or 1, a second hit is 8 times (2x2x2) as bad and so on. Or was it squared? I'm not sure, it has been a long time.

Against armor it is a bit different. While you could eventually weaken armor by pounding on it with lesser shot, a more powerful single shot is more likely to get through. For example: a dozen 5.56 probably would not penetrate an inch of steel, but a single .50 probably would.

I think SR 3 or SR2 stated that only the base value of the round was used to see if hardened armor was penetrated. If not, no damage was possible. This required the use of called shots to hit vulnerable spots like electronics, sensors, drive train, engines, or exposed crewman. That seemed quite realistic to me. After all, you could plaster the side of a tank all day with machine gun fire and not do anything but annoy the crew. However, if you aimed at the sensors you could blind the tank and take it out of the fight.

On page 143, the very top, it notes that the DV modifier from narrow bursts does not apply when comparing the DV to the armor rating. Then it gives an example, of someone firing a narrow burst, where 6 is what is compared to the target's armor rating, but the target resists 8 damage.

The above rule is for burst fire mode. It doesn't specifically mention the same rule for narrow bursts in full auto mode, but it's logical to assume that the same rule would apply. Otherwise, an Ares Alpha firing a full narrow burst would penetrate armor better than a Panther Assault Cannon would.

Now only Narrow bursts add to the DV of the weapon but hit a narrow area so the "more likly" to hit a weak spot argument is mute in the case of narrow bursts.

Wide bursts subtract from the targets ability to dodge. This actually helps against harden armor. As your hits do count towards the Modified DV to overcome armor.

Thats why you use a wide burst instead of narrow. At first glance it appears that narrow is always better as it grants a bonus to damage while wide bursts grant an equal penalty to the targets dodging. But if the target has hardend armor, is immune to stun or is otherwise really really hard to hit you pick a wide burst

According to the RAW the modified DV from firing in narrow bursts DOES NOT apply when comparing the DV to the armor rating. So if you have an Aries Alpha 6P -1AP and you fire in a long narrow burst +5 DV and you net a total of four hits. That is a DV of 15. (6+5+4)

However when comparing it to armor, You only have 11, 6P from the weapon, 4 from your hits and the AP reduced the targets armor by 1.

Thats the rules.

EDIT: i've got to type faster, two people posted a head of me while I was writing this.