Ok, auto-fire is deadly. It's even more than deadly it's ridiculous at some time. Why bother with normal assault rifle when you can have a squadron of gyro-mounted MMG for a reasonable price that could easily kill any runner, prime or not.

Also, both a troll and a human are considered equal when compensating the recoil of such weapons, which is, i believe, absurd. I hereby present you my house-rule for auto-fire.

The important thing about auto-fire isn't accuracy. Probably many bullets will miss it's target. What you really want is to shoot as many bullets as possible, hoping at least one will hit. Considering how SR combat works, increasing the number if die rolled for an attack increases the likelyhood of damage, and also increase the damage dealt to a target because the net hits are added to the weapon's DV. Auto-fire would thus be somehow realistic if all he did was adding die to the attack dice pool. Now, how many die?

A character's recoil compensation is equal to his strength plus the weapon's recoil compensation. If the weapon is held with both hand, add 2 to the total. If the character's recoil compensation is lower than the weapon damage, the weapon is to heavy and bulky for him to use. The only way to shoot with it is by using the longshot edge rule. (Hold-out pistols is an exception to this rule. Anybody may fire with an holdout pistol)

If the character's recoil compensation is equal to the weapon's damage, the character may shoot one bullet per initiative phase. Any point of recoil compensation above the weapon damage means the character may shoot one additional bullet oer phase, up to a maximum equal to the weapon's highest fire rating (SS, SA, BF, FA) If the character fires more than one bullet in a single action (with BF or FA), every bullet after the firsts add one dice to the attack pool.

COmments?

I think it was 'Fields of Fire' from second edition that actually had a chart with rules regarding the use of strength to reduce recoil.

Cannon Companion had them too.

edit: Having actually read the fill OP now, I see you're not talking about how strenght should provide recoil comensation.

I find your rules far too clunky to be realistically used, and of little use anyway. If you're looking to reduce access to weapons based on the strenght of characters. just stick a limit on weapon classes (i.e, light pistol needs strenght 2, heavy pistols need strenght 3, etc.) Overall though, I wouldn't bother.

The problem I see is with sporting rifles, they usually don't have much rc in SR4 (0 or 1), but they have high damage ratings, like 7. So even if a character uses both hands he would need a strength of 5 to fire a rifle once per pass. Str 5 is also the strenght needed to fire the Ingram White Knight LMG, twice per pass one-handed.

Nah, the houserule would replace easy-to-use and not entirely realistic rules with other, almost-as-easy-to-use and also not entirely realistic rules, so I don't really see the advantage .