I'm working on making some custom drones based on the Stratospheric Weapons Platform idea in the LZ2065 entry in Arsenal.

I've also been reading the Sensors discussion in various threads over the last couple of days, which led me to spot a flaw with my drones and sensors in general.

Both the Large Gauss Cannon and the Ship Laser super-weapons in Arsenal have pointless extreme ranges. Even with an Extra-large Vehicle Sensor Array the maximum range one can target anything is 10,000m (signal 6).

A weapons platform hovering at 30,000m is pretty useless if it can't get a sensor lock on anything worth shooting...

I'm kinda new to the whole rigger/vehicle thing so perhaps I've missed rules on remote-targeting or something, otherwise maximum sensor range is something that also needs to be errata'd.

Well, I guess you could shoot to a GPS location, a couple meters here and there should not matter if you are shooting with a ship laser.

Cheers,

Max

Yeah, the easiest answer would be to use indirect fire rules starting on page 162.

Hard to say whether the authors intended this or if it really is an oversight.

If you're trying to hit things more than 10km away, you're probably dealing with a military-grade situation, requiring military sensor packages, something we don't have any stats or guidelines on. Chances are those sensor suites are equivalent grade 8 or something and have significantly longer ranges and greater accuracy.

These are 'Military Grade' weapons presented in the same book as several 'Military Grade' vehicles, none of which have a sensor signal rating in excess of 6 and none of them have been given any option to have a sensor signal in excess of 6.

Handwaving such issues away with the mythical 'Military Grade'-ium is not what I would call an ideal solution, not least because it removes such tech from the reach of PC's with an arbitrary mechanic that owes more to game balance than it does to realism.

I prefer to look at role-playing as an extremely complex version of chess. The rules are the same for both sides, victory is decided by superior tactics and intelligence. Arbitrary rules that exist solely to deny players options that they, logically, ought to have, never have sat right with me.

As I have mentioned elsewhere the vehicles and sensor packages presented in Arsenal are not intended to represent field-level miltech. They represent the basic vehicle and arrays as sold by the manufacturer on the open market to civilian, security, paramilitary, and corporate military forces—such as those a shadowrunner is likely to encounter. Every military-grade vehicle can be expected to be further modified to spec and function either by the contractor or the military fielding it. Evidently some military and some corporate military vehicles and devices will have ranges above and beyond 1-6 (they are sufficiently rare and comparatively useless in context of a typical urban shadowrunning environment that we opted to leave them out of what was an already crowded book).

If and when we do a military/merc sourcebook we will be addressing military-grade sensors, battlefield armor, communications and tactical systems of various sorts.

So how would you recommend we deal with the 'field level mil-tech'-Weapons you did include in Arsenal, in the meantime?

I really don't see the issue that continually pops up that "the book says only rating 1-6". The book also says that there are ratings available that are even higher, but those are EXTREMELY hard to get (no reason to put a Availability on them because the PCs have no real capability to acquire them). I mean, signal itself goes from rating 1-10. It gives you the fragging example when it goes through the signal range. I guess it's just a case of RtFM.

Here's a thought...
Make a targeting scope that does cover the distance...
That wasn't that hard, was it?

I spent the longest time staring at SR4, p162...

Doh!

Eeek! You can make a normal ranged combat attack with a Smartgun to target off-board artillery. Net hits add to DP of artillery attack which suffers a -4 penalty for indirect fire.

Don't tangle with Lone Star in the open.....

Precisely....

The weapons in arsenal only cover low- to mid-grade weapons for the military. They didn't put in info on howitzers or tank cannons or whatever new crud has evolved by this point. No info for cruise missiles, or proper armament for aircraft and the like. They went just far enough and then called it quits. A merc might be able to obtain low-level military gear, but the high level stuff is gonna get noticed if it falls off the truck. I figure that was their reasoning for not including the full range of everything in Arsenal.

Plus it tends to make headlines...

In this case it was only the guidance systems for the ballistic missiles, which you could say are equivalent to a level 7 or 8 Pilot.

If the Itzcoatl or Mercury are mid-range then the 'rumoured' merc book ought to be a laugh....

Since alot of this is based off SR3, I'll put my 2 cents in, though I can't promise how well it translates, they are coming from the same rules.

According to 3rd edition, a sensor 6 system has a flux of 9, a 25 km range, add in a high altitude (+4 flux), giving it a flux of 13 or a 36km range.
In addition you can increase the flux by up to 1/2 the body of the vehicle its attached to, making it extend 2km for each point of flux added, it would be reasonable to assume it'd have a range of 40km.

The thing that bugs me the most is sensor ambiguity. Leads to whacky shit like jammers screaming out cameras.. what?