The order of books was changed around. SR5 is after Unwired

It's also important to remember that encumbrance penalties for being just a couple points of armor higher than your bodyx2 aren't really -that-debilitating provided your character has decent reaction and agility scores to begin with; I wouldn't go over my encumbrance limit for just a point or two, but for four ballistic, I'd start considering it. For example, even an elf or a human with only 4 body could potentially get quite a bit of mileage out of an armored jacket, form fitting halfsuit and a Pain Editor or Trauma Damper. 12 ballistic before cybermods are considered is nothing to sneeze at.

...I just don't like penalties to begin with. There are enough conditional ones to deal with that I have no desire to load any more on considering my characters usually don't have outrageous double digit DPs to begin with (well...with the exception of Kat Markova's First Aid Skill, but then that group doesn't have a mage).

It all depends on the dicepool ranges and where your primary skills lie. A couch potato Hacker/Rigger or Mage may still be better off taking a -1 Agility/Reaction penalty in exchange for 4 armor rather than hoping their modest meat skills will always be enough to prevent them from catching a bullet, especially since their jobs sometime include leaving their shoes briefly unattended whereas my Covert Ops character would be much happier simply wearing some shin and forearm guards under her chameleon suit and avoiding the penalty. To each their own.

You could do a search for your specific post and then use that link.

Maybe this isn't the right place to ask this question, but still, I will:
Will there be any other gear/vehicle books for SR4? Are there any plans for something? Like catalogs of sorts. I mean, everybody and their mama loved Street Samurai Catalog and the Rigger Black Book. Kinda like CP2020 had Chromebooks...

cant say there have been any announcements, and i suspect its a bit far ahead to say.

they still need to get unwired out there to cover the last of bit of expanded base rules before one can really start to do sota:xx style books again imo.

So far they have done a great job of keeping the power level. Too many systems have sourcebook power creep. Once Unwired is finished, theory demands that they only publish background books.

Additional gear could easily be handled by the Holostreets subscription service.

Sorry to jump way ahead, but with Arsenal out, where does the release queue stand, and what's the approximate date on Unwired?

Arsenal is great, btw. So much in there that it boggles the mind!

...yeah when I fired up the PDF last night I felt like the proverbial kid in a candy store.

I absolutely love the fashion armour. Some old faves are back - like the Victory Industrial and Zoé Heritage lines - and a couple new ones, in particular the Vashon "SteamPunk" line (boy, is Violet gonna like that one...) Also glad to see the forearm guards are back along with Shin Guards.

The Weapons section is excellent, a lot of choices and styles (already made some adjustments fo the Short One's armoury). I especially like that little revolver that can fire wither LP or HP rounds and The Gyrojet is back (though I expected it to be just a little more nasty though the upside is you can get it a chargen now)

Still not sure about the advantage of having a Cougar Fineblade though, given the weapon's high cost compared to other blades with the same stats (or the vibro blade).

Skimmed through the explosives section & it looks pretty good at first glance, particularly when it comes to "home cooking". Makes the appropriate Knowledge skills actually somewhat more useful.

The vehicle offerings are OK. Didn't see some of the venerable old timers like the C-60 Titan or the Ares Dragon, Also passenger/cargo capacity (except where obvious like with cycles) seems to be a hazy area as someone already pointed out. I actually kind of like the uni-motorcycle that is one huge wheel (Violet may have to get one of these too, just because it's so odd). And drones? She's already making a shopping list.

I actually have mixed feelings on the martial arts section. They did good on streamlining it somewhat, and a number of manouvres like Finishing Move, Reposte and Two Weapon Technique are rather cool. However, I would rather this was kept more closely tied to Armed/Unarmed combat skill (as it was in CC) instead of being made a Quality. Because of the higher cost (particularly after chargen) I don't see many adepts dumping points this way when they have initiation and MA improvement to deal with.

....ahhh, so much to still go through, so it's off to home and my big easy chair and my notebook comp.

am i the only person who noticed the ares dragon in the core rulebook? isn't that like the second time someone has grumbled about it not being in arsenal? seriously, before you grumble about what *isn't* in arsenal, open the main book and look what *is* in there =P

(in all seriousness, just about anything that isn't in arsenal could probably be fairly easily adaptated from what is in arsenal)

i have to say, i personally like arsenal. sure, there's a few things i could have wished for in there, but i can survive =P

(i would really have like new rules for vehicle combat, but as has been noted, that's the harbinger of a new edition!)

especially considering that corporate enclaves there being 3 delta clinics in and around chiba O.o

Oh man, I was up way too late last night reading Arsenal. There's way more good stuff in there than I had time to absorb. As a preliminary review: awesome.
Informed nitpicks and proper bitching take time.

I haven't said it properly yet, so now I am saying that Arsenal is a real achievement among supplements. It easily buries all previous SR gear catalogs. I love it.

I hope Running Wild is similarly awesome.

I'm very happy with Arsenal, for the record. I'm posting errors I find, sure, but the product as a whole makes me quite pleased

No but Airships with more armour than MBT's always caused issues...

What's Running Wild?

KK, it's easy enough for the GM to design his own vehicles. just take one of the core vehicles as a basis, apply a few of the modifications to it, declare it to be a new vehicle (and therefore it counts as unmodified even with those modifications included) and presto! a new vehicle is created. naturally, this wouldn't be possible for players to do unless they have a research facility and a crudload of various employees who can do all the research needed to create a new base vehicle... but i suppose if they somehow managed to pull it off, they could develop an ubergun that counts as unmodded, provided they can get GM approval =P

[edit] running wild is the working title for the rulebook on various critters, iirc. also iirc, they have said it's not going to be like paranormal critters of <location>, but will somehow be different (for one thing, i think they implied some will include rules for playing as characters). in fact, you should probably just put iirc at the start of this whole statement about running wild... i am too lazy to track down where i got this information from =P [/edit]

Hehe, the old weapon customization rules were super-broken. There were no tradeoffs, so if you allow yourself any amount of money you can crank up the capacity and then put any goody you might possibly want into a weapon with room to spare. Then when you finally calculate the cost, sure, it's more than most guns, but it's not out of a runner's price range. Not when you consider what you're getting.

The vehicle rules at least generally required tradeoffs, and typically got prohibitively expensive before becoming too broken. Okay, there are exceptions, but the old vehicle rules were flawed, but not bad.

There's 3 GM's in my group, and we were hanging out last night talking about exactly this...

It occurred to us that ships and the like might better be represented as structures. As might tanks.

...well in Rigger 3 they had Bulwark ratings for large ships. Don't know how this would translate to 4th.

a common saying when rigger3 included carriers and other warships:
"these are things runners fight in, not with or against"

It just occurred to me to ask. I play a troll truck driver. Are there any tractor trailer rigs in the book? Rules for large vehicles? How much cargo I can pack into a trailer? Smuggling compartments? Thanx guys.

With Arsenal out but no Unwired yet I'm one set of AI rules short of building KITT. Doesn't stop me from letting a race driver "disappear" and stuff his brain into a CCU though...

Pretty sure you could just check online for shipping container volumes. I know they come in a few standard lengths...

Containers on Wiki

Thats not going to change anytime soon. Just assume road trains are build for 40ft, which is most likely due to intermodal transport chains.

Oh my god. This is by far the best, my most favorite, "stuff" supplement I've read for SR or any other RPG I play. It is so cool. I especially love the manatech, which I didn't realize was so thorough and just really really cool. It is the diametric opposite of my reaction to Corp Enclaves. I love it.

But what really tipped it and made me giddy was the Bust-A-Move's description. That was priceless.

Still waiting for that PDF preview.

DUDE, me too.

Come on guys, give us a preview!

No argument about the Cooper (particularly the Cooper S) being fast. Where I get a bit stymied is with the lack of passenger/cargo space quantification. Maybe not so much in the case of cars & vans but when you get to larger vehicles such as transport aircraft & such I feel I am kind of left with a lot of hand-waving.

Not surprised the Ku class Corvette and Marathon M-7/C-45 threw you for a loop. These were homegrown vehicle types from my campaign world. As I have mentioned in the past I like a lot of background colour and to that end designed a "healthy" compendium of vehicles aircraft and watercraft to provide the players (and NPCs) with more options.

For example The Aeon/Marathon Marine Tek Ku Class fast attack corvette employed MHD propulsion (hinted at in R3 for submersibles) and was developed for the Royal Hawai'ian Navy.

The Marathon Aerotek M-7/C-45 was based loosely on the Lockheed C-60 Titan (which was also omitted in both the core book and Arsenal). It was a large capacity VSTOL (Very Short Takeoff/Landing) submach transport that employed an "active lift wing"® and overwing engines similar in configuration to the AN-72/74

The two corporations above were members of a consortium of several technological firms known as The Olympus Group™.

Part of this comes from my love of engineering which hit a dead end when Boeing nearly shut its (and the city of Seattle's) doors back in the early 70s.

would a skytrain (p113) do the trick?

funny thing is that its statted with improved takeoff and landing 2, so its vtol. but if one strip that down to 1 you have vstol.

btw, the skytrain lists a renraku titan as a similar model aircraft.

as for the corvette, would the striker on p115 be a start?
as you already seems to do a bit of rules bending on it by it having a MHD drive (only really available on nuclear powered subs in R3 iirc), i would go for a ducted waterjet. by the description it gives a -4 dice pool mod on detection tests, and i think thats a similar effect to what is the main reason for wanting to use a MHD drive.