If only I had my big book of RL guns with me at work....

I thought the Robocop Cobra Assault Cannon was based on the 30mm anti-materiale "rifle" produced by Steyr(or was it Sig-Sauer?..it was one of those S named Euro-gun makers)?

I think it's the Barrett from FoF. Specialised ammo and scope required, and it's about the right length.

No. Here's a link to a pic of the Barrett M82

Here's a pic of the Cobra Assault Cannon in Robocop

The similarities are pretty obvious, with the main difference being the futuristic scope on the Cobra.

The Walther MA-2100 is powerful, but it's your standard military style sniper rifle with your average sniper rifle style bullets. It does huge amounts of damage (14S) to a person. Like any super-sonic, decent caliber rifle, it takes a person apart.

The Barrett Model 121 is similar in description and damage to the real-world 50 Cal Barrett with it's 14D damage. Not only is it for all intents and perposes a sniper rifle, but it fires whopping huge machine gun bullets at ridiculous velocities and can not only take a person apart limb from limb, but will do similar damage if that person is behind a very, very solid object, say a wall or vehicle armor.

I've never particularly needed to use the firing through barriers rules, but with a code of 14D and compulsory APDS (Half Ballistic and Barrier ratings), what's the base damage of some-one firing a Barrett into metahuman inside a Devil Rat APC? A Devil Rat has a body of 7 and an armor of 12.

The hunting rifles and their damage codes of 7S and 9S make this a relatively poorly-defensible line of reasoning—your standard military style sniper rifle with your average sniper rifle style bullets tend to be pretty similar to your average anything style bullets, sometimes a little heavier—a quick look around world.guns.ru shows lots of 7.62mm, some 5.56mm, and other than that mostly bigger calibers like .338 Lapua but still not anti-materiel, all around the range used for hunting—if the sniper rifles were really supposed to be in this range, we'd see the hunting rifles there too.

Edit: as for the damage code, IIRC that'd be 8D before the target's armor.

~J

Of course I'm generalising in "movie style" terms.

I usually have SWAT teams and some military forces use the Remington 950 as a sniper rifle, with apds. Of course the decision is just so characters aren't instantly shredded, and also, i'm not a gun nut or a military nut, but don't the USMC scout snipers (if that's even what they're called) use remington bolt action rifles most of the time? Only whipping out a barret for special occasions? The christmas parties and so on?

If anyone's seen Shooter (opinion withheld) Mark Wahlberg goes and picks up a couple of the favoured sniper rifles of the US Military for a spot of "hunting".

We're getting odiously off topic here, but I think we agree that the Panther is not equivalent to a 50 rifle. Personally I'm not aware of any real gun analogous to the panther.

Yep! Even the new M-40A3 begins life as a Remington 700. They're given a fiberglass stock, customized and fitted with a very expensive scope, but in terms of firepower they're not really all that different from civilian remis. Even the ammunition used isn't that much terribly different than the old .30-06 used by the military and civilian hunters for decades. I mean, don't get me wrong, it IS a different round, but that has more to do with advancements in efficient manufacturing and some ballistics tweaks than it does with the damage done in the end. I mean, really, there's nothing stopping you from taking an old 1960's remington and happily taking out a moose, so it's not like these things are all screaming to be higher caliber for killing people.

Not directly analogous, but close. The 50 cal Anti-material Rifle does everything you'd want out of the Panther, with a similar performance profile (e.g., aimed shots instead of full-auto).

Eh? I'm not sure how you reconcile that with, well, every picture of the Panther ever. The thing is huge!

I'm not sure what I can say, other than that I'm wondering what kind of situations you're running into. A mega-Troll can probably survive a hit with the SR Barret, though I'm pretty sure they'll be taking damage most of the time. I can't see a way to legally layer enough armor to make the answer more than marginally different for an Assault Cannon, and anything but nearly-maxed armor plus the non-AP cannon round will still cut right through.

~J

My 1st meatshield troll did soak a headshot from a Barrett, but he was behind armored glass at the time and was wearing a helmet plus packing a clear riot shield. And it still took a few lucky rolls on my part. I can't say that he's ever managed the same trick from a Panther.

Agreed. I always pictured the LMG as a SAW or M60, the MMG as a M240 Golf, and the HMG as a .50cal. (The SAW being 5.56 and the M60 being 7.62, but both being individual weapons, whereas the M240 is crew-served and the .50cal is typically vehicle mounted.)

Going back to anti-tank rifles in WWII, there were some 7.62mm rifles designed to penetrate tank armor, but if you see the cartridges they used they had 5 times as much propellent as regular rifle rounds.

In addition to the Type 97, there were the 20mm rCarl Gustav m/42 developed by Sweden (actually a light recoilless rifle), the Solothrun (Swiss), and the Lahti (Finland).

The German 7.92mm anti-tank rifle was largely converted to being a grenade launcher by then. Tough they did have the 2.8 cm sPzB 41 which some people sometimes call an anti-tank rifle (probably should be called a very-light cannon instead).

In my personal experience as a GM characters with 10+ karma pool and 7 points of ballistic armor are often able to completely withstand most guns up to and including some of the most damaging ones when the guns are fired by regular soldiers or security forces. (So let's say skill 5 plus 5 pool, 10 dice.)

I don't really like that.

Then your proper solution is to eliminate or drastically tone down Karma Pool, as it is the only factor here capable of multiplying effective dice to a sufficient degree to permit this (since there is an upper limit to the amount of non-spell armor one can wear, and stacking barriers in front of you is presumably the desired realistic response).

Give me a bit to fix up my probability range calculator, and I'll throw some numbers into the mix.

~J

Yes. I haven't GMed now in over 2 years, but if I ever GM SR3 again I'll be sure to make each scenario much more statistically dangerous so that player characters are burning their pool as fast as they gain it. There will be no more chest-blocking the antimateriel rifles.

Well, I don't know. In my salad days perhaps I was a little too easy on the players after all. Perhaps I did not adequately portray the downward spiral of the cyberpunk genre. Maybe it would be philosophically better for me to present the players with greater statistical difficulty.

I understand that. My suggest was to make those rules more restrictive.

The Panther Assault Cannon was inspired by a nasty weapon held by John Connor in Terminator II. Here, here and here

It is, actually. With 25 dice rolling against 9s, Mr. Troll has just better than even odds of coming out not dying (soak to S damage). To soak completely (sans karma), his odds are just shy of 0.1%—literally a one in a thousand chance. It is still within the range where karma makes a big swing, though—overvaluing karma somewhat (simply multiplying the number of dice instead of removing those that got one success), it gives him a better than 90% chance of staying conscious and mobile, but still only just shy of 10% chance of coming out unscathed. Remember, this is with a metatype so big and tough that they have a substantially different set of rules from all the others (smaller penalty for using a two-hand melee weapon one-handed, no penalty for using a two-handed firearm one-handed, only need to be slightly on the fit and strong side for the metatype to be able to use heavy weapons on the go without penalty, lower Signature, etc.).

More when I don't have to do it by hand.

WR: my advice is actually to make karma pool stronger. Rather, to make any use of it that burns karma stronger. Right now its strongest use by far is non-burning, and simple reusability goes a long way towards compensating for comparative loss of strength. A good place to start might be allowing the Hooper-Nelson rule to be used to any degree at any TN range, and permitting karma pool that has been spent (in the reusable sense) to be burned, even if there's unspent karma pool left.

~J

As you can see, if you can get ten points of armor, you end up standing a pretty decent chance against a PAC. Of course, that's not so easy, and you tend to lose Combat Pool when you try. Still, it's doable.

For the mid-20s Body crew, armor ranging between 6 and 13 (and no, I don't know of a way to get 13 armor without a spell or barrier). Again, this is for S wound instead of D:

So you can get good odds of survival if you get sufficient armor. What about total soak, though? Threshold of 9?

In short, not very likely for anything below 13 armor. Even going for Moderate (Threshold 5) is difficult for anyone with less than about 10 points of ballistic. Also remember that this is for total soak pools in the mid-high 20s. I'll include some other ranges under a spoiler tag, 'cause this post is table-happy as it is.

Edit: oops, apparently you can't spoiler code tags. Oh well.

Mere survival (threshold 3):

Better survival (M wound, threshold 5):

Free and clear (no damage, threshold 9):

And finally, to simulate giant karma pools, some ridiculously high dicecounts looking for no damage:

So yeah, I really think the first way to go if you're really concerned about this would be to lower the maximum armor that gets thrown around, but while it is true that certain builds can soak to a surprising degree with a surprising regularity, in general I'm not sure I see a problem—all of the builds that can do that are essentially walking armored cars.

~J