It's easier to assume that they meant what they said. Furthermore the entirety of the bizarreness's in SR's gun rules is most easily explained by assuming that the people who wrote them are clueless, hence their attempt to translate their comic book understanding of guns into rules fails because they never learned that dictionaries and encyclopaedia's are useful tools for writing about something that you have only seen in the movies. And they are unwilling to actually listen to people who have a clue and can keep them from using velocity to mean "rate of fire", etc, etc, etc.

let me preface this post by saying that i think the technology i'm about to talk about--APLP rounds, aka blended metal ammunition--is probably bullshit. i can't say that with any authority, because i don't keep close tabs on such things, but what i have seen looks like mostly hype and very little hard data.

that said, it sure as hell sounds really cool, and it's what i think of now when i think of EX and EX-EX rounds (possibly because both set off my bullshit detector!). basically, APLP rounds (armor piercing limited penetration) are designed so that when they hit armor, they punch through it; but when they hit flesh, they fragment. basically, they work exactly the way EX and EX-EX ammo in SR does. APLP ammo achieves this wondrous feat purportedly through the use of 'blended metal', as i said above. apparently, this particular blend of metal smashes through solid resistance, but shatters when it meets softer, warmer resistance, such as flesh. ...like i said, sounds like bullshit to me.

you can google around for it. here is the first article i read on it; you can also find a lot of anecdotal evidence and many forum posts on the subject.

http://www.metacafe.com/watch/180211/blend...d_metal_vs_ham/

Just watch the video.

It's been a while since I heard about Dragon Skin... Isn't the problem with that stuff mostly due to degradation in some climates and coverage issues? Like a "large" dragonskin vest covers only what a "medium" traditional vest would? I guess I'll just quit being lazy and check it out myself, but if anyone has any cool links (pro and con) on that stuff I'd be appreciative.

Ok, here's what the "blended metal" bullets really are
lightweight, high-velocity, lead nosed JSP’s

Once again, David Crane is made to look like an idiot.

Blended metal? What the hell is that even supposed to mean? I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that alloys aren't at terribly new idea, if that's what they mean. I guess I'll have to read the article and THEN laugh at them.


As far as the dragon skin thing goes, forget I even asked. I looked around some and the first thing that jumped out was how ridiculously heavy and thick dragonskin is. I'm pretty certain that they could also make "higher performing" interceptor armor if they were willing to accept more than 40% increases in weight and thickness.

yeah, like i said, i find the concept hard to buy. but as near-future quasi-realistic cool-sounding semi-believable lines of bull go, it's... a near-future, quasi-realistic, cool-sounding, semi-believable line of bull. i like a lot better than "i shoots you with my asplodin' bullets".

Yeah I don't buy a lot of those hype things on those sites...

Anyhow, firstly... APDS isn't a redundant acronym. Not all AP rounds discard their sabots. Discarding the sabot makes the round lighter and more aerodynamic... but you don't get spin stabilization on a round once it's length/diameter gets too large. So sometimes what you see is that the projectile will be soft aluminum, but w/ a hard penetrator up in the tip. When it hits... the soft metal is obliterated but the sub-diameter penetrator keeps chugging. Look at the M855 ball for an example of this. (sometimes these rounds are termed semi-AP)

SLAP rounds are for MG's only in todays day and age. Put simply it's too hard to keep the bullet centered perfectly in the barreled and consistently mounted so every shot is nearly the same, so they don't have good single shot accuracy. But if you're using full auto on a target... you're spraying an area anyhow. So shadowrun has made these a lot improved (and available in a lot smaller calibres)...

I don't believe as OP states that EX are simply hotloads... even hotloads are problematic. HOTLOADS DON"T SILENCE!!! (remember truly silenced 9mm have gas bleed systems or fire UNDERLOADED 9mm ammo to keep the rounds subsonic). Hotloading just got rid of that benefit. Even if not aiming for subsonic, you now need to cool/deal w/ more net volume of gas in your suppressor, vastly degrading it's performance barring a much larger suppressor.

Ex rounds in Srun I think are just that... explosive.. we ALREADY have frangible rounds in the form of flechettes in the game. Furthermore, w/ modern tech they've never done a HE type round smaller than a .50cal that I can recall reading about. So it's kinda whizbang that you can get them for smallarms in 70 years...

But right here is where I think some of the other posters are on crack... in order for such a projectile to be worthwhile you'd need something better than RDX or the like to use as a bursting charge for the round!

RDX is a secondary explosive. Blackpowder is a propellant (at absolute best a low-explosive). A firecracker like a squib is just finely ground blackpowder wrapped in cardboard, it's hardly optomized to make noise, it's optomized to be cheap to produce and still make noise. Even if 90% of the energy of the high explosive goes into bursting/fragmenting the casing and first order damage effects, that 10% leftover is still probably louder than a squib! Now consider that in order for a smallbore weapon to get good use out of it you'd need something better than RDX... very sci-fi whizbang.

Finally, shooting w/ a suppressor at metal silhouettes at 100-200m you can CLEARLY hear a NORMAL bullet 'ping' off the target on a hit. If I can hear a NORMAL bullet hit something... why the hell wouldn't I hear one which is being blown up w/ high explosives? I very much liked that comment "well it was quiet when it left the gun." classic that one .

Also, it's not as if there aren't plenty of other ammo picks. Flechette is good, if they're truly unaware of you, a called shot ignoring armor is a great option (no reaction, no armor, no AP+5 penalty). APDS again, -4AP is mathematically the same as +1DV/-1AP Ex-Ex and far more likely to be lethal! (ignoring the fact that the sabot would discard in the silencer and destroy the baffles! we can assume SRun tech has fixed that little problem). Good old basic cheap slug ammo also. I don't think anyone would argue that tracer rounds would be self-defeating! I'm fond of gel.. (surprise knockout in the first round... you don't always want casualties).

Also there's a side benefit in this... lets say you have a silenced SMG, you could use the noise produced by your ex-ex rounds to create a diversion a good distance away from you. Even take advantage of the smartguns ability to calculate a high angle ballistic arc to place it accurately a good distance away.

It strikes me that currently in SRun, about the only major ammo types unacounted for are the incendieries, armor piercing incendieries (API), and basic stuff like soft-point vs. FMJ hard point rounds. (assuming standard ball is the norm, a -2AP 8R AP round would be nice, same goes for a +1DV/+2AP hollow-point). But shadowrun places itself in a tough position, it tries to be beyond bleedingly edge, but as we see the bleeding edge moves pretty fast in 20 years... and the game gets more advanced with it staying far out ahead of the tech cure.

No they're not, but the damage codes wouldn't be all that different now would they. If the damage codes are identical or nearly so... is it worth wasting ink to publish them?


Flechette is a large dart... basically while most guns go for kinetic energy... flechettes go for momentum in a smallarm. In a shotgun, you fire a bunch of them at once. They do lousy against armor... they hit impact armor because they're big and slow relative to normal bullets. Get a nice DV bonus... probably got errated to +5AP because most things have 2 less points of impact armor anyhow... so they were freebie damage for no real cost pre-errata. There's no range penalty for most things firing flechetes so they're probably not firing a cloud of them like a shotgun which has a special range chart just for them.

Frangible is a bullet made out of pressed metal powder, or otherwise made to prefragment. On impact w/ a hard surface the bullet 'wastes' kinetic energy to turn to powder or breakup so as not to overpenetrate. Again absolutely lousy against armor as their primary selling point is they won't penetrate! The fragmentation aspect can be good against unarmored targets. Net effect, the damage code is nigh identical as the bullet 'expands' nicely on impact w/ an unarmored target, but any armor is going to give it a really hard time.

Alloys are solid solutions of metal, generally created by melting two metals and mixing the molten materials together in precise quantities before letting them solidify again.
Blended metals are not alloys in that they are not solutions and are not created by melting. Rather, they are powdered metals held together by some binding agent, usually a low-melting point metal such as tin but possibly a polymer or a glue.

In other words, it is a bunch of very tiny gains of different metals glued together in a tight, compact, bullet shape.

Yeah, I just pulled up wiki... I had that backwards... and I'm trying to think why? Mental block I guess.... I know, I blame the armaments table w/ it's misleading inferior armor penetration . Oh well, I am not infallible.

Nice paraphrase of the wiki artical, I think you got all of it's points .

If you check the artical comments section:
"While you wouldn't hear them until after they hit you, flechette are pretty survivable, and the sound can be heard from areas that are safe, such as under cover. The low lethality of the individual flechette is one of the reasons the ACR and CAWS programs were canceled, the idea of a flechette firing individual weapon wasn't as attractive when you consider that a single flechette hit does very little damage. " goes on to discuss beehive rounds..., by one of the articals principal authors.

Makes me wonder, did the SRun authors intend that the ammo we see as flechette be a 'shotgunized' ammo load for non-shotguns. (I've tried firing some of that mini-shotgun load for a .45ACP once, it was pretty disappointing). Notice how we don't have any buckshot or similar listed. Then again this is sci-fi, so why not wave hands and have a working flechette based weapon.

As far as the physics... (one of my degrees is in it please).
Lightweight projectiles decelerate faster (F=ma)
Finned projectiles have higher drag coefficients
Drag is proportional to velocity^2, combined with the higher drag coefficient
flechettes lose their sabot at the end of the barrel (they lose mass)

Add up all the above, and you end up with something which leaves the barrel with higher KE but loses it VERY quickly.

Now if you add in internal ballistics things get even nastier.
Here's an example from some of Dunn's work (the HARP gun), "For example, in the case of a 16 inch naval gun which normally fires shells in the 3,000 lb. class at velocities of 2,800 fps, velocities as high as 6,000 fps can be obtained with shot weights of the order of 400 lbs., the sub-caliber vehicle in this case having a ballistic coefficient considerably higher than the normal shell. By re-design of the gun (i.e. extending the chamber and barrel) to optimize at this lighter shot weight, velocities approaching 7,000 fps are possible."

Do the math, you'll see for an equal length barrel momentums are not the same. Mass does not cancel out like your simple equation claims. You can see, cutting the projectile mass by 7, did NOT result in a 7X increase in muzzle velocity. This gets worse in smaller bores. The problem is your math assumes ideal conditions.

hard to say. maybe the flechettes are all made of blended metal!

The game design theory behind flechettes, and the Ares Viper Slivergun, was "We want to have Molly Millions' pistol in the game, 'cause it's cooool. Consistency with the other rules and compliance with the laws of physics are both secondary to this."

just a sec as i double-check to make sure i'm in the right thread...

what's funny is, Molly Millions' flechette pistol didn't work at all like the AVS. Molly's pistol didn't shoot a spray of flechettes, like a shotgun fires pellets--it fired a stream of them, like a machine gun, or even one flechette at a time.

in SR3, flechette weapons fire "several small, sharp, metal fragments". the description in SR4 makes them sound almost more like glaser rounds than anything.

and, well... single flechettes aren't going to do much damage. Molly had to fire through her target's eye, and coat it in nerve agent, in order to kill someone with a single flechette.

Yeah, but I seem to also recall a listing from one of the editions that describes the AVS ammunition as a single large sliver.

I know that Cyberpunk (the game) depicts this type of gun as shaving plastic slivers off a disc as it fires, but Shadowrun itself has never really gone into as much detail.

yeah, no kidding.