I don't have my book with me but I am remembering something about smartlinks and I don't know if it is from shadowrun or another game that has something similar. I remember something about being able to use a smartlink to do a wide burst and the smartlink would not fire when your gun was pointed at a friend. Basically it would skip firing for a moment to keep from hitting something you didn't want to hit.

Am I remembering that correctly?

Biometric safety IIRC. Essentially everyone in your group has a little transponder on them. If the gun goes within one meter of pointing at them, it engages the safety.

they had something like that in sr3. i don't think it's out in 4th ed yet

You don't really have to walk your fire any more. It's been chopped up into three- or six-round bursts. Unless you count suppressive fire; maybe there will be something in Arsenal about being able to, with a smartlink, use suppressive fire into an area and not hitting your friends (like jamming, only with bullets).

I think that I do remember it from an earlier edition.

So if it is something that a smartlink can still do then why is there recoil with a smartlink? I mean why not program the thing to stop firing when it goes off target? Make it stutter just enough when the guns goes off target to let it go down again.

That was the FF-Transponder set in Cannon Compedium - and it sucked.

In SR4, your SmartGun has a small camera, so you just could program it to stop when it's pointing at a certain person.

In Shadowrun 2nd Edition (and 3rd, if I remember right) you had to walk your fire when using Full Automatic - a shooter "wasted" 1 shot for every meter between two targets. Smartlink users, however, could ignore that and never wasted ammo.

Cannon Companion (an SR3 sourcebook) had a beacon type system that was supposed to prevent friendly fire among properly setup systems - however it prevented you from shooting at anything within 1 meter of anyone wearing a beacon so it could potentially lock out your gun when you really need it (you know, when you have to shoot your friend).

That happens more than you think.

>>>>> Naw, it only happens to short-sighted fools who didn't think ahead far enough to bribe the Street Doc to implant a Cortex Bomb. <<<<< -Bot

I wouldn't assume that it would be easy to do that, Demon Bob. If a player wanted to do that, I would require they create or buy some software and probably hardware expressly for that purpose.

Hence, the FF Transponder. (Whether or not it's worth bothering with it would be a different matter.)

Ya it never is. Would introducing the Smart-Link v2.0 with FF Transponder work?

Higher difficulty. Primarily military use.

The FF Transponder prevented you to fire within a 3m radius around your comrade.
That included things in a straight line behind him.

Better take an optical aproach.

Would believe that a 1m radius would be enough. Higher tech level and all.

Although optical recognition has come further, and programs are more complex allowing them to recognize more variables. Having them able to obtain visual recognition with all the lighting, smoke, disguise possibilities still seems a bit much.

Besides you shouldn't be firing past you buddy that is not your zone.

So what about using the optical recognition to recognize that the shot has jumped off target and stop it from firing?

How do you program it to account for lead, windage and bullet drop? What happens when you want to do suppressing fire or blindfire?

I think that it's gone because it never really made much sense. It was some late 80s gaming geeks way of making the smartlink "the coolest thing EVAR" to include a 'cookie cutter' (see CP Solo of Fortune sourcebook) function despite it not making any real sense in a game except as "yeah...neat".

Mark(psycho)Phipps( HAHAHA! )

Why does it not make sense? I thought it was the whole point of a smartlink. We have the beginnings of target identification right now. We have cameras that are getting to the point of facial recognition as it is. Why is it so strange that it would be able to identify a humanoid outline?

One of the things that I thought should be a part of a smartlink system is that heartbeat targeting system that they have recently created. Basically it can identify a heartbeat with a directional mike and give a pin point location through walls in order to tell people that there is someone on the other side of the door and you can use it to aim through the wall. It can tell if there are no heart beats in the room so you know if you got them or not.

So put something like that in the smartlink system and overlay a visual target with a heartbeat location over it. The pull of the trigger designates a target. It uses audio and visual targeting to track the target. If the system is set to target one person pull trigger pull instead of wide burst then it would deactivate the trigger once the line of sight had gotten within a certain amount of space of the outline of the target. Once the heart beat stops then the firing stops. This would probably increase the effect of a burst (more bullets on target) and reduce the recoil through software. It would also lead to savings on bullets. No more wasted ones.

I can see how you could tie this information with your commlink and put up friend or foe tags around other people. Then you could set your smartlink to not fire if your friend passes in front of you while you are firing.

The problem isn't that it doesn't make sense. The problem is that it is very powerful and potentially imbalencing which is not the same thing.