That would be a good choice.

Pffsh.

Dude, carry ALL.

EX-Explosive are -the- best at ripping through anything.
Explosive are good at ripping through most things
Normal is good and cheap
Gel is nice to not kill them, and to deal Stun, which is BETTER than physical. Also resisted by Impact.
Flechette is glorious to bloody them up a bit.

It's never a bad idea to carry a couple of guns, including your OH SHIT gun w/EXEX, your Everyday gun w/Gel or normal, and your Every Other Day gun with Flechette or Explosive.

You missed one two:

APDS is the best at penetrating hardened armour without having to burn Edge to keep a Glitch from blowing up the weapon in your face

Stick'n'Shock is the best at turning your easily concealed Hammerli 620S into a nastly little sting that makes Baby Jesus and heavily armoured Trolls cry.

I'm glad I wasn't the only one who noticed that. It's one of my favorite combos.

Thanks for reminding me, i went back and added it in.

Shoot the bastard in the face! Visor? What visor?

Ya, likely though i'm really curious if those ratings are suppose to also add on top of the normal armour rating for determining encumberance. I have a sneaking suspition that they should. So most folks are going to have a serious think about what they want the most protection from; fire, chem, or electrical.

P.S. None of that ammo stacks up to a RAW squirt gun with a Narcojet loadout.

I thought EX-EX is better than APDS for going through hardened armor? Or is it just better for NORMAL armor?


I know and love stick'n'shock - my gunbunny adept's light pistol is filled with it, it's the only ammo I bought for it (the light fills the role of hold out, just I hate what hold outs look like, so I went for an L36)

A Troll wearing hardened armour? 'Round these parts we call that a spirit!

P.S. If you don't exceed the hardened armour you do no damage. That's the "hard" part.

RAW doesn't explicitly say that it affects encumbrance, and generally the default ruling is don't make up stuff that isn't there when it would have made sense for it to be stated explicitly.

However most of them (though not chem since armour does help with chem ) add their rating to the armour value [of Impact, though the Impact part is generally 1/2 ignored by those]. So there's a slight hinting of it, and in some ways makes a bit of sense physically. That's why i was wondering if it is another one of those intended rules that were fumbled when written out or something got dropped for brevity that really shouldn't have been. *shrug*

As written, EX-EX is better than APDS even against hardened armor. It is just as likely to penetrate and does more damage when it does. Many people play with or consider a house rule where hardened armor is simply subtracted from DV (essentially turning it into auto-successes, but also allowing heavily armored vehicles to be slightly damaged by being stuck in a vulnerable spot). Under that house rule, APDS is simply as good as EX-EX against hard targets.

And that, of course, makes it better. APDS is more reliable, less susceptible to fire attacks (which are really common in SR4), quieter, and cheaper. So against any target that it does equal damage it is the superior choice. But remember, while apparently common - that's still a house rule. By the book, Ex-Ex does more damage against all targets.

-Frank

Oh, i thought you were still talking about hardened armor because that's what i said APDS was good for. For normal armour where penetration isn't as important, ya it's tougher to say that the benefits of ex-ex don't outweigh the chances of blowing yourself up with a Glitch unless you have a low skill/attr that'll lead to a lot more Glitches.

Note that situations like trying to shoot someone behind an opaque barrier, which really cuts into your die pool and where penetration is good again, can tip to APDS favour too.

As you can see APDS is a rather limited use ammo, and you can get by substituting with Ex-ex (and even deal better damage as Frank points out) if you are willing to take the Glitch risk.

P.S. No, there is no hardened personal armour [in the BBB]. That's why i made the comment about spirits.

In a world where guns have a wifi connection to the laser range finder in the eye of the shooter, the answer is no.

-Frank

Yes. It's done regularly today. Given, it's not done with anything less than a .50 caliber rifle, but it's still done. It would be nice if they'd give it a different name in Shadowrun (like say, HEAP), but I suppose we can't have everything.

Which in turn begs the question: Why, if there's a laser rangefinder small enough to fit in a person's eye, would one bother to put it there when they could simply attach it to the gun and forget about surgery and broadcast RFs? Trés stupide.

Not yet. Keep in mind that milspec armor was in canon companion tho, so it might be forthcoming.

In SR4, a laser rangefinder is an external sensor - there is no implant, nor Vision Enhancement - thus, it can be neither implanted directly under normal rules nor integrated into googles or cybereyes... it would take an additional, attached sensor package to do so.

After Sensor rules, a Smartgun would be a small sensor package (3 sensors, easily carried in the palm), as it includes the smartgun, a camera and the laser rangefinder - such pov would limit the effective range of camera and rangefinder to about 400m.

And also mechanically nearly identical to APDS and Flechette, but cheaper. Don't waste your money on either of the latter.

~J

If that was in a single run, I hope to god that completely trashed that gun. Firing a few rounds out of a weapon can loosen some of the pieces. Accuracy is completely shot after firing too many rounds. Also, how in the hell did they hold that much ammo? Sounds like your friend is a representative of the Lollipop Guild.

Carrying 300 rounds isnt too far off. I used to have 46 rounds in my duty belt and gun (16 in Glock, 2 extra Mags w/ 15 rnds) and that can easily scale upwards when you start having to have extra Smg or machine gun mags that have nearly 50 rounds each in them.

Suppressive Fire takes 20 rounds also, so it could get burned up quick. I also have fired over 1,000 rnds through my pistol in one afternoon and it functioned prefectly afterwards. I've even heard many real gun buffs state that a gun dosen't really need to be cleaned until you've shot over 300 rnds through it, because newer ammo uses cleaner components.....

Unless you have a cheap-ass gun, it should function fine.

http://www.defence.gov.au/teamaustralia/index87e7.html also gives some info on gel rounds, and as you can see, they're for a 27mm barrel, which is quite large.

You know, one of the pictures on the page you've linked to could so be taken out of context. If I didn't know those were bullets and I found that image in my browser cache, I'd assume my lady love had been [ahem] toy shopping again.

Please note that the hold-out pistol design shown is the 'lemon-squeezer' design of the Raecor Sting. The streetline special probably looks like a standard, albeit small pistol. As the Sting can only fire flechette ammo, you wouldn't be able to use it with stick'n'shock anyway.

If you simply want your weapon to look a particular way, ask your GM if you can get one of the ordinary pistols and have it custom-designed at a slight markup to look like something else. Raygun's firearms page has lots of SR3 weapons, but also lots of pretty pictures of weapons. Anything with a concealability of 8 or more from SR3 could realistically be considered a light pistol, and I think you'll agree that the Beretta Model 21 "Bobcat" looks pretty sweet.

Why thank you. I hope I seem cute to you people. But AM I a he? Or am I a she?

As far as machine guns go, yes they do handle hundreds, sometimes thousands of rounds before any wear and tear to your gun. However, I still see no real justification for holding that much ammo unless with a belt fed weapon. My character is a very weapon intensive person. Always carrying 6 to 8 pistols at the same time(all of which expressed exactly where they are held). Let's assume that the person is carrying SIX Ceska Black Scorpions(for what reason, I do not know). They hold 35 rounds in a clip.
That's 210 rounds in the weapons alone. Now you could hold spare magazines for each weapon. So that makes 420 rounds.

Or more realistically an Ares Alpha with 42 in the clip and 8 spare mags. That would be 378 rounds. Would any runner really be walking around with this kind of ammo? I would hate to see a fireball go off on them and see all the ammo go EVERYWHERE.

Holding as many guns as my character does(which is far too many and just stupid), I hold no more than 100 rounds, if that.

Edit: And in case anyone is wondering, no I do not consider myself a gun expert. I have fired a few weapons off and cleaned a few weapons. But I am NOT an expert. Most of my arguement here is coming from common sense. Obviously...

You're saying that's perfectly reasonable, but carrying just one (machine) pistol and 8 spare magazines for it (all of which expressed exactly where they are held) somehow makes you a representative of the Lollipop Guild?

And if Rifleman was talking about any long arm, then carrying 9 spare magazines is almost a non-issue concealability-wise. If you think you might need to lay down suppressive fire, why not carry 300 rounds? That'd weigh 18lbs with 30-round magazines of 5.56x45mm, which is not that much more than you're likely to be carrying with those 6-8 pistols.