.45ACP for the win!

Seriously, though, in most of the RPGs I have encountered, bullet damage seems to be modeled on instant trauma, rather than long term disability & blood loss. In this aspect, I think most bullets are fairly close.

I believe gunfights are usually decided long before blood loss and organ damage become an issue.

Also, since psychology has so much to do with the "1-shot stop", Willpower might have a place in the roll to resist damage. An 800-lb troll who gets woozy at the blood bank will go down a lot sooner after being shot than a 98lb ganger who is on PCP and has been beaten up regularly his entire life.

True, but only until the temporary cavity exceeds the elastic limit of body tissues. Which is why small animals explode when you hit them with varmint rounds. I'm told that at the 2500-3000 FPS you start seeing some damage to humans from the temporary cavity.

However, all the reputable wound ballistic "round effectiveness" analysis I have seen focus on handguns rounds. Apparently shotguns, 5.56 and 7.62 are generally considered so much more effective on stopping bad guys right now that nobody will pay for the analysis. So I'm not sure that really true.

That's fine if you are writing a gunfight simulation system, but I'd kind of like there to be some effects that become significant after the shootout, as the is supposed to be an RPG and not an FPS.

It really does seem that psychology is hugely important. Motivated people can be really hard to stop even when rather shot up, and poorly motivated people can be incapacitate/move to give up by a fairly superficial wound. Not sure how to effectively simulate this, but some sort of factor based on will and mental state makes sense. People who have no idea that someone is shooting at them seem (in my totally non-systematic and non-scientific observations) to be more likely to be immediately dropped than those who know there is a fight on.

I am behind you 100% there. I would leave it as it is before I totally ignored the after effects. I also don't want this to become a sci-fi Phoenix Command or Harpoon.

I would like to end up with a smooth mechanism for a person with a non critical gunshot wound to have a chance of passing out/giving up, and some degree of blood loss to deal with after the combat is over.

Obviously if you take a CNS hit, you are done, and some blood vessel hits give you enough time to say goodbye. Most of the time, you have time for some medkit/DocWagon/street doc drama.

I, as I have kept saying am not after an 100 % actuate depiction, The reason I started this was to switch range and damage, as the way round they are didn't make sense.

Range was fairly easy to do, and is based on the figures already used in shadowrun. I could with Ammo just create my own 2070 variants of ammo and leave it there, but I would like it based on real world statistics if I can (I had an idea of running a campaign 2015ish with UGE and the awakening going on) as this enables people to create their own ammo base on modern ballistics if they want.

Temporary wound cavity and fragmentation of the round starts to take effect in bullets with a velocity over 2000fps, that is only rifle rounds, and as such will be taken in to account.

As far as the number of different ammos I will have to stat, I will just give out the equation (eg, (Round diameter (mm) + 1/2 Penetration (cm)/4 x1 + 1 for every 1000 fps over 2000) please note theses are pretty arbitrary figures that I just pulled out of my . . .) and people can stat their ammo, same with the rules for range.

FWIW, The Box O' Truth has some interesting ballistics test.
http://www.theboxotruth.com/

Most of them involve waterjugs, but water to flesh is about 2|1.

16 inches of water penetration is about 8 inches of flesh penetration. (get your mind out of the gutter)

I also included some other goodies in Wounded Ronin's post...
Here.
http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?showtopic=19090


And to whoever said "Most of us gun nuts want realism in our SR guns", I'm one of the exceptions.

I just want to get my SR on. I'll worry about 9/.40/.45 at the range.

Heck with powder go with mercury fills. Very nice wounds they make.

WMS

Given the cyberlimbs and other similar stuff, SR is a game that cries out for hit locations.

You'll also take a considerable hit on effective range...much more so with subsonic rifle ammo than with subsonic pistol ammo.

A 230 grain .45 ACP bullet leaves a 4" barrel at somewhere around 900 fps...that's already subsonic.

However, a 55 grain 5.56x45mm bullet fired from a 20" barrel is going about 3200 fps at the muzzle. Slowing that bad-boy down to ~1000 fps is not only going to murder your penetration, it's also going to drastically reduce your effective range and throw off your zero.

Of course, if you want true and effective subsonic rifle cartridges, I suggest you google the Whisper™ line of cartridges.

Mercury fills? WTF? Do you even have a clue what you are talking about?

KZT was talking about download the powder charge to make a cartridge subsonic. WTF does that have to do with mercury?

I was actually contemplating something like this...sorta.

My thoughts were as follows: a Hit Location chart that looks something like this:

1D6 roll:
1: Extremity (leg) [base DV + movement penalties]
2: Extremity (arm) [base DV + Agi/Str penalties]
3-4: Center mass (torso) [DV + 1]
5: Center mass (vital area) [DV +2]
6: Head [DV + 4]

Instead of net hits adding to DV, you handle it this way:

Roll a number of D6s = to your net hits, take the highest single die, and that's where you hit. For example, if you score 4 net hits, then you roll those 4 dice and get 2, 3, 3, 5, then you take the best die (5), and you've got a center mass vitals hit.

Disclaimer: I haven't done ANY amount of real research or testing on this system, and I'm not even sure that 1D6 is the right way to do it, or that the chart shouldn't be expanded. Maybe something like 2D6 and make the range 2-12, and head shots only happen on a 12 or something. At any rate, I think all of you get the idea.

True.

I wish when people talk about the high points of the glaser family, they would start with "It almost never ricochets" and "It almost never overpenetrates.", not it's Hollywood reputation for turning targets into cube steak with one hit.

I saw an episode of Mythbusters (Yeah, great science, I know...) where they tested airliner depressurization from handgun fire.

They took an old airliner body, made it airtight, then pressurized it to the relative inside/outside pressure at cruising altitude. They then shot the window and the fuselage.

Basically, all they saw was an annoying whistling noise as the air left the little hole. This may be why air marshals aren't using low pen rounds anymore. Stopping the hijacker and putting a few little holes in the plane probably puts the passengers in less risk than what the hijackers had in mind.

You completely missed my point. For the record, I do have at least a passing familiarity with the technique of using mercury to aid in bullet expansion. But "bullet effectiveness/expansion" had NOTHING to do with the post you originally quoted. Here, let me show you (emphasis mine):

Okay, in the above post, KZT is talking about velocity controlled ammunition which is used to reduce the sound signature of a firearm by keeping the muzzle velocity of the projectile below the speed of sound. Then he mentions that one way (a poor way to go about it) to make a bullet subsonic is to under-load the powder in something like a JHP round. Under-loading the powder reduces the muzzle velocity of the projectile, but will have several other undesirable effects as well.

Your follow-up comment said "Heck with powder go with mercury fills."

1. Mercury fills have NOTHING whatsoever to do with attempts to make a bullet subsonic.

2. KZT's comment about powder had NOTHING whatsoever to do with bullet lethality. If you would have thoroughly read his post, you should have gathered that.

3. My guess is you keyed off the words "powder" and "hollowpoints" and figured you'd make a witty comment about how "mercury fills" adds more lethality than messing with the "powder" charge in a cartridge.

4. You seem to have learned everything you know about firearms by repeated viewings of Die Hard and Lethal Weapon.

I apologize if my post seems hostile, but there is so much misinformation and crap out on the net, and it irks me when people post crap that they think makes them look cool when all it really does is A.) spread misinformation to those that don't know better, B.) not have anything at all to do with original post/quoted post, or C.) both.

You look less dumb by asking a question like "Would the lethality of mercury fills mitigate the loss of velocity due to using subsonic ammunition?", than you would by posting what you posted.

The thing that will save most of us from being put against the wall is that most of us have no actual experience with violence. Gamers tend to be very low threat when we don't have dice and a GM screen protecting us from that horror.

.357 SIG is HARDLY the most over-penetrating round... Far from it, in fact....

As for Glasers, they were invented back in about '74.

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/sys...s/frangible.htm

It's kind of an interesting read. And you're right, it doesn't mention the cube-steak effect.

You end up with very ugly, but non-critical wounds, because unless your target is facing you and wearing nothing more than a t-shirt, most of the fragmentation is stopped inside the muscle layer.

The volume of meat perforated is probably larger than with a good JHP, but since less of that volume would be good old organ meat, you have less chance of major internal bleeding.