What Diesel said.

The dikoting process heats up fart gas (methane) and some excess hydrogen to about 1200C (2200F) with microwaves. The environment is designed to cause methane to decompose into carbon and hydrogen. The released hydrogen bonds with the excess hydrogen, leaving carbon to fly around in the gas until it slams into something solid, like the chamber walls or the target. In those conditions, the carbon will form diamond rather than soot.

Depending on the exact technique, the decomposition may be concentrated near the target, minimizing diamond build-up on the target. These are actually pictures of "plasma nitriding", but they're examples of how the dikoting plasmas can be concentrated (and they're cool pics):

Gear and Drive Shaft
Other Parts being Coated
They're not really the heads of maces, but just pretend...

Those conditions are also ideal for decomposing other things, like most organic materials (polymers, plastics, leather). Stick an armor jacket in a dikoting chamber and you'll have a big, thick layer of soot all over the interior when you're done, but no jacket. And probably one pissed dikoting operator, too. Low melting point metals like magnesium, tin, lead and aluminum will melt. The (obsolete in RL) process described for dikoting in SR takes quite a few hours, too, because the deposition rate is low so you can bet the target will reach ambient temperatures.

So, basically, ask yourself: would the object survive being heated to yellow heat for several hours on end? If the answer is "No," don't stick it in the dikoting chamber.

A short list of survivable materials:
Titanium
Steel
Ballistic Ceramics (like used in milgrade armor)

Except for the plates in "vest with plates," the only armors I allow to be dikoted in my game are military grade armors.

(Yes, putting metal in this microwave chamber is safe - the chamber is probably metal. I know the dikoting system at Georgia Tech used stainless steel construction and dikoted titanium targets).

The diamond is NOT melted. It starts out as methane, is turned into free flying carbon, and then only forms diamond when it smacks into a target. There's never a point where the diamond is melted in the dikoting process. It's more like frost condensing out of atmospheric humidity on a cold morning.

Plating is not the process of dipping something in a melted volume of metal. Well, not often. These days, more often than not, Electroplating is used. I am sure by the time your characters want these things done, more advanced methods of plating have come along.

However, Electroplating uses a weak acid that melts the metals, or other components, and what it is to bond to. Then an electrical current is used to add electrons and force them to bond.

For shoes, basically you metallize them by spraying them with a two-component silvering solution. One part is a soluble silver salt, and the other part is a reducing agent; when they meet on the surface of the shoes, metallic silver is deposited. Then you carefully electroplate the silver with Bronze.

Hope this helps.
S.Grimm
Son of two Master Jewelers.

Weeeellll... There's only two canon suits of armor that use rigid armor plates as part of the armor (and not as the WHOLE of the armor, like Secure and MilGrade etc): Armored Vest with Plates and the Lined Coat. The rest use flexible armor fibers, like Kevlar, or are completely made out of rigid metal plates.

Those two (LC & AV+P) certainly don't have the same kind of plates, since the plates in an Armored Vest look something like this, while the ones in a Lined Coat are supposed to only protect vital areas. Additionally, the Lined Coat has a worse armor rating (4/2 vs 4/3) than the AV+P, so it cannot possibly be as thick, because it certainly covers more area than the AV+P.

Oh, well, I let the vest benefit from dikoting since it's so out in your face about having plates, while the long coat just mumbles about them in its text and provides less armor despite more coverage.

Very logical, neh?

And your local finger-reattachment specialist. =D

Orichalcum does not need to permeate the entire weapon for it to be made into a Focus. It just needs to be present. It could be incorporated into the weight at the end of the whip, or the handle/ring/whatever that you use to wield it.

Ammo is designed in the same chapter that describes customizing firearms, so I just use the Custom Finish (Silver) customization with Regular Ammo. 1,020 nuyen for 10 silver bullets.

Its amazing how effective those silver bullets are against Orks

You should be able to make silver bullets. It is right there with lead and copper in mechanical performance, and you can tweak it with a bit of alloying (I mean, fractions of a percent additions, not major dilution) to get the performance you want.

Separate topic: IMO, if a weapon focus was dikoted prior to being enchanted, the dikoting bonus does translate to astral space. It's part and parcel of the object's pattern. I mean, if you can't translate dikote over when dikote was part of the original object, you probably can't translate over sharp edges or other integral, basic features of the weapon, and all weapon foci would just have a single damage code.

Exactly what I wanted to hear. Thanks.

Well...if you were feeling rich, you could melt down some diamonds to obtain the carbon you need, but for most shadowrunners, your probably better off with graphite

We've always ruled that the "Raw materials" indicates barely past ore stage and "Refined Materials" represents the minimum needed to work with. At refined each unit is still 5kg and one troy ounce of gold is 125 . A little more reasonable - the rest we'll account to supply/demand/inflation/conversion.

That's what I think, too, I simply think that you get better results by using common sense than by changing existing rules. I know I should've put a smily on the end of the "Oh, nevermind." bit, because I really don't care if people use modified Custom Finish rules to make silver bullets. I just wanted to make it clear why that is not an optimal solution, and that are other ways of doing it. And got carried away, like I always do.

And if you read the actual rules for Custom Finish, you'll find the following text:

The last time I checked, ammo constitutes a part of a firearm, albeit an external part. You need to have an Ammunition Shop to do so -- a kit won't suffice -- and it takes a base time of 24 hours with a TN of 4 to do it on top of the normal time to create the base ammunition type. The exact same skill is also being used (B/R for the appropriate firearm). If you just add it to the price of the ammo, it comes to the equivalence of a +100 nuyen cost, hence 120 nuyen for 10 regular silver bullets (I apply the mod to each bullet individually, hence my original 1,020 nuyen, and I'm sure if I had stated 120 originally, many of the same people would have complained that it wasn't expensive enough).

But yes, that's just silly. It's called "Custom Finish" and does everything you need, so naturally it's better to just make up some rules on your own even though a perfectly sensible and approriate rule already fits the bill. I really need to learn to be more open-minded.

I can think of exactly one situation where Dikoting a bullet might help, albeit by a rather insignificant amount: APDS. If you only Dikoted the penetrator part (obviously not the plastic sabot), it might help the penetrator to stay intact when it hits something very hard. The penetrator wouldn't expand or fragment when hitting flesh anyway, so you wouldn't be screwing with its terminal ballistics, either. How much Dikoting a tungsten carbide penetrator would actually help, Cray might know.

In just about any other case, you wouldn't want to Dikote a bullet. Completely useless and counter-productive on an expanding or fragmenting bullet, cannot be used on the jacket anyway (because it'd ruin the barrel).

It didn't seem to stop you from ignoring what I was actually writing to, as pointed out in the original post. So welcome to the club.