What happens when you ram a rotodrone into a metahuman?

Does the human resist (bod x 2) damage or should he have to resist more because of two sets of whirling blades that the drone has when it rams stuff?

( Yes, fisty3.0 this is about my Christian Bale, American Psycho Elven Paladin/crossdressing loungesinger)

Well, I can see why you'd ask. Something smacking into you at 100m/turn and doing 6DV seems... anticlimactic.

There is the issue of the rigger. If the rigger wants to boost the damage, I would rule a DV increase if they chose to have the blades hit... but the problem then becomes the damage taken by the rotors means you have a remote controlled trashcan. The nice thing about 4th edition is drones are surprisingly affordable, so if you have to suicide one it's not like you just lost a 15k drone for a 5k payout run.

I'd think you'd have a better time chasing your players with a rotodrone and then just bouncing the lower part off them, making them take damage, making the rigger make crash tests, and then repeating the process a few more times. The ramming rules really favor the rammer, and the rammee would have a tough time outrunning a drone with a 100 meter movement rate at full clip.

This then begs the question, why not replace that assault rifle in your rotodrone with say, a combat axe or something similar? What's cooler than rotodrones armed with katanas!?

Or you could set up the rotors with a loop of monofilament at the end (imagine the very end of the rotor is flat like this |, now with the loop it looks like this D ) so if you did accidentally clip an object with your drone you'd have a better chance of the drone's rotor not fouling or catching... instead you have a remote controlled monofilament chainsaw that moves at 100 meters a combat turn and has a katana. It doesn't even need to be packed with explosives, it's too cool to merely explode.

Incidentally, if any of my players reads this, no, you cannot have a remote controlled monofilament chainsaw that moves at 100 meters a combat turn and has a katana. NOT YOURS.

I see those monowhips getting tangled up really well when starting and/or stopping the drone.

Not with a small motor reeling in the slack and letting it out again when you're moving. With shadowrun tech, I don't see something like that having a noticable effect on the rotor.

Or, even better, have it be spring loaded with a very small weight at the end of the loop of monowire. It'll retract itself when the blades slow down.

Hmmmm. You know those little party poppers that go bang and launch little streamers everywhere....

Monofilaments don't have enough mass to actually cut you just by falling on you.

If they snagged on to something, and you got tangled up in them however, ouch.

Monofilament web/net (like spiderweb or cladiador net) with weight.. or maybe better one is monofilament bola... thrown it and look how heads drops... sorry oftopic but ...

All I was suggesting is a small loop, a few inches long, that goes from the leading edge of the tip of the rotor to the trailing edge.

So instead of a rotor blade that ended flat, it would have the small loop at the end. I'm not suggesting the meter long variant with the weighted tip. If you looked down on the drone, the rotor radius would look like this: O

When he drone has the monotips added, it would simply have a slightly larger radius of monofillament to help keep the rotorblade from hitting anything that might damage it, like lightpoles, wires, metahumans... and the same overhead radius would look like this: (O)
So anything that came in range of the parenthesis but not the O would be subject to the monofilament. It was more tongue-in-cheek than serious, but I intensely dislike not making myself clear when I describe something.

...there is a good amount of turbulence at the tip of a rotor blade. They also tend to flex as well. Keeping a mono line stretched out would require weighting which in turn would create drag and possibly undesirable flutter.

Flutter from prop blades produced by gearbox vibrations in the Allison turboshafts of Lockheed L188s aggravated a condition known as "Whirl Mode" in which eventually the powerplant separated from it's mounts thus resulting in catastrophic wing failure and the loss of several aircraft back in the 1950s.

The characteristic loud "whup whup" of older helicopters was due to the square blade tips approaching the speed of sound and thus being subjected to transonic buffeting.

The mild "bump" which passengers on the Concorde experienced as the plane approached and exceeded Mach 1 was due to passing through the transonic envelope.

Heck why not just DiKote the rotor blades. That will put an edge on them.

Yeah, the biggest problem with the monofilament whip is that the only visual guide to how it operates was in (IIRC) Johnny Mnemonic and even there, the way it acted doesn't match the SR4 description. The movie version acted like it was 'stiffer' than the rules would indicate, plus the user mainly wielded it like a garotte. Even the name seems to be a misnomer, as to use it effectively the last thing you'd want to hit them with is the weighted tip. It's more like one of those gymnastics ribbon things, to use it effectively you want as much contact with the line as possible. Or intentionally send the weight past them to entangle a limb, torso, whatever... and then just pull real hard.

And even if we did work out a method that the monofilament tipped rotor blade was as effective as we could make it, it's still moot as I was kidding and would never let one near my game. I've already had enough nightmares due to the con I was at where some physical adept (with extra dice in whip skill) had what was basically a monofilament weedwhacker built into the back of his hand. I recall the whip being only a meter long, but with the weighted tip he basically was a sentient version of the old 'giant sawblade running around off the axle' schtick you saw in early cartoons.

Back on target, the dikote technique might help the rotors do more damage and avoid rotor damage if it hits something, but now we're back to the old SR3 rules where a drone that expensive isn't worth risking.

Once the rigger book for SR4 comes out and we can once again make quiet rotodrones, then any real chance of smacking opponents with them becomes much more viable. And maybe the writers will take pity on us and mention casually (even in the runner comments section) what the DV will be if someone's body checked by a rotodrone.

If they cleaned up this thread into a few short sentences per, it would make for a pretty good comment section already. My only fear is if they used my 'remote control monofilament chainsaw wielding katanas' line I'd be fueling munchkin GMs and players all over the world.

...With the old edition microskimmer (described as being a flying trash can lid) I frequently thought about putting a dikote sawblade edge on a couple & having them spin as they attacked characters.

[edit]

The old BattleBots programme was a cool influence for designing nasty but simple little attack drones that didn't need weapon mounts or firearms to be dangerous.

WOW this thread took a wild turn. MonofiliDikoWhat?

I was mostly talking about sacrificeing a drone, ie, if my psychotic elf character ever went over the edge, how much damage would it do to ram a body with whirling propeler blades. I'm not sure it requires accesories to do more than DV6. I'm pretty sure that it would hurt more than geting rammed by a body 3 crawler. Right?

...Dumpshock, it's like the old party game Rumour where a rumour is passed from one person to the next. By the time it gets to the last person, it rarely if ever resembles the original statement.

so would the command test be more difficult because you're asking the drone to countermand its own programing?

The car doesn't have any programing. I guess I just confused myself with the old verbiage; "captains chair"

I recall now that captains chair was the equivelent of twiddeling joystics in sr3. I was actually thinking about the SR4 process where you give a drone a comand using the command utility then let it go about it's business while you do something else. What's that called now? Autopilot?

I know that an autopilot in an airplane tries to keep the airplane from contact with the ground. I'm thinking that for realitie's sake that if I command my drone to "chase that guy until you run into him really hard" my drone might argue being that it's probably programed not to run into things. "yeah right! as if! If i run into that guy my rotors will shatter and I'm going to explode. My firmware says I'm not supposed to run into things."
my own computer often tells me not to tell it to do stupid stuff. Sometimes we argue for hours until one of us goes to sleep.

Actually, the operant modes available to 4th ed. riggers are roughly the same as those available to their 3rd ed. counterparts. You could jump into the drone for that full-simsense experience, of course. But Captains' Chair mode included both issuing commands for the drones to carry out on their own (secondary mode - presumably, this is where you use the Command utility in SR4) and driving a single drone virtually (primary mode).

In the former situation, it stands to reason that when given an order to ram something deliberately (or anything similarly likely to endanger the drone), the Pilot is going to at least ask for confirmation before doing it. But even if you're in Primary mode with a virtual joystick and all, the Pilot is still running in the background (it'd have to be, in case something happens to the operator): coordinating any autosofts you've installed/uploaded, interpreting and passing along the commands you're issuing, and, more than likely, functioning as co-pilot to make sure you don't do anything dumb like ramming somebody (similar to the way 3rd ed. autonav systems applied a penalty to performing risky maneuvers). And as even motorcycles in 2070 have at least a rating 1 pilot, it'll probably nag you even if you're physically behind the wheel. Of course, that latter function hasn't been codified in this edition yet (and there would, no doubt, be an option to turn it off, if it were), but it's still something to consider.

actually, the command program is not used for giving orders, it is used for remote controlling the drones directly.

so what do you roll to see how well a drone understands it's instructions?

I thought it would work like
Computer+Command = net hits,
net hits = complexity of instructions,
Complexity of instructions = number of clauses in command

so the player who rolls 3 hits can say; "IF sensors detect an elf IN THIS quadrant then SHOOT at elf."
A player who rolls 4 hits can say "IF sensors detect and elf IN THIS quadrant, AND elf is armed then SHOOT armed elf."
A player who rolls 5 hits can say "GO TO this area, SCANN this quadrant, IF sensors detect elf AND elf is armed then SHOOT armed elf."

well Aaalllrighty then.
The comand program truely is useless no need to waste a system slot