So, you've got basically four different ways in which you can control a vehicle:

1) "Set It And..." Pilot - Basically giving orders to a drone Pilot or machine Sprite, and letting it do the work. Very good for very high-level Technomancers (who have access to rating 12 sprites), or riggers with obscene amounts of cash to spend on upgrades and autosofts, but mostly a secondary mode of operation. Rolls are generally Pilot/Sprite Force + Autosoft.
2) "9.6V Turbo Power" RC Car - Using the Command program to give orders to a car without jumping in. May be optimal for a focused, Threading-based technomancer, but a good backup option if you don't want to trust your biofeedback filters. Rolls are generally Command rating + skill.
3) "I can drive a tank with my MIND, baby" Rigging - The traditional rigger jumping in, using control rigs and Hot Sim VR to gather lots of bonuses. Rolls are generally vehicle attribute + skill
4) "Mad Max" Physical Driving - Using manual controls to drive around. May be a good idea for people with twinked-out Reaction and Wired Reflexes. Rolls are generally physical attribute + skill

This thread is dedicated to making the last one work well. There are a few issues that jump immediately to mind:

A) Controlling weapon systems: Can you do this, get your Agi+Gunnery rather than Sensor+Gunnery, and still physically drive the vehicle? How would that work, hopefully wasting the fewest actions possible? Can AR help with this?
B) Same goes for controlling mechanical arms, specifically articulated arms with monofilament chainsaws attached to them ()
C) If you intend on ramming multiple people, say entire rows of people in a single action with your tricked-out reinforced ram plate, do you need to make separate tests for each person you're running over? Does this take up multiple actions? If it does, how do you deal with the fact that your car passed over 20 people in that one pass?

SR3 or 4?

Oh, right, didn't hit the Icon, did I?

SR4, definitely. In SR3 if you're not using a VCR you basically just lose, unless you're an adept with many power points invested into vehicle skills, and the Attunement metamagic with a car attuned to you.

I'm assuming SR4

A) you can't control weapons systems physically, unless they are manual controlled. Now its up to a GM whether you could actually manually control it WHILE driving the vehicle. Chances are its probably a no. I don't think there's anyway for this to work, since you'll probably have to climb out of the drivers seat to the manually operated turret and control it. As a driver the only thing you can do is Sensor + Gunnery, or Command + Gunnery.

B) Again not likely to be usable while driving. You can't physically control these while trying to drive the car at the same time. And I'm not sure if arms can even be physically controlled...

C) Depends how close together they are, and how mobile. If your planning on doing donuts in order to hit them all: Split dice pool
If you're just blazing through the crowd: single roll everyone dodges it.

These are my opinions, and no where mentioned in the books.

Fighter pilots seem to have been doing a credible job of this for nearly three quarters of a century now, so I don't think it ought to be impossible, just require a little engineering and a little forethought.

But then it begs the question of how a crane or dumptruck work today. Or am I wrong, and we've had AR since the early 1920s?

No comment on the response to C, as I have no idea how the rules would look myself.

Do you have to spend every IP driving, or just one per phase? Because that would more or less work.



It's pretty unusual for a crane or dumptruck to be lifting/dumping while driving. In fact, I think they may have safeties engineered to prevent them doing those things.

Also a well-designed dashboard (gauges etc) is pretty much AR, in a way.

OK, as for A):
I remember reading somewhere in the BBB that you could drive a car(or vehicle) through a DNI connection such as being jacked into the car but not being in VR. IIRC this also gives you a +1 bonus to your reaction + pilot skill + handling pool because you can respond that much quicker when you don't actually need to physically operate the controls. This should free up your hands. Which can then be on the grip of that pintle(or otherwise) mounted ares alpha. So you spend one action per combat turn piloting as is needed to remain in control, and you spend you other IPs manning the guns.
Edit: I looked it up and I was wrong, you get the +1 for physically driving while using AR and the vehicle is subscribed. So I guess your best bet here is to get a conveniently located mount that you can fire with one hand while driving with the other. But technically the rules do allow you to drive/pilot for 1 IP and then take your hands off the wheel and shoot for 3 IPs and then just put your hands back on the wheel at the start of the next combat turn. I think that if I were GMing I might allow you to move your hands as a free action provided the weapon is already in the proper position/arrangement (otherwise its a ready weapon). Note: that on p. 160 of SR4 it says Which strongly implies that drivers can fire weapons "while" driving.
B) I think an arm mounted chainsaw or monofilament whip, or any meele weapon or similar device should be treated as just another weapon mount and thus use rules similar to normal gunnery.
C) Well, I have found that the rules for ramming make way more sense in chase combat then in tactical combat. Especially the restriction on only being able to ram entities within your acceleration rate, irregardless of speed is particularly incomprehensible unless the relative velocity between the entities is low (such as in chase combat). By the BBB, in which nearly all the vehicles have a max speed of 4 times their "running" acceleration, this means that when traveling at top speed you can only attempt a ram against 1/4th of the people you pass on the street in that combat turn. Wait, actually, that works out perfectly if you break down the turn into 4 initiative passes, calculate movement after each IP and let each character hold their actions across IPs (so that the pilots with 1 IP can still attempt to ram anyone along there path). Now, as far as trying to ram more people than you have actions, the rules really don't support this at all. You will need to come up with a system for working it out. Might I suggest something similar to the blast effect for grenades? In this way you first determine the path that you want the vehicle to follow for the Initiative Pass, work out any penalties or threshold modifiers that that path is going to impose on your vehicle test, then you make the vehicle test to ram. The first person along your path is considered the point of targeting and they resolve the ram as normal. However, for each of your secondary targets, for something like every 1 meter along the path taken they get an extra +1 to their dodge test (more time to get out of the way, etc.). Optimally playtesting would determine what exactly the ratio of bonus to distance should be. You might want to start out trying +1 per 2 meters. I definately recommend running some simulations of typical use before deciding on a rule though. I hope this helps.

Edit: another suggested house rule to make things more comprehensible: change the range determination on ramming to be: no penalty if the vehicle can reach the target using only walking acceleration, -3 if it has to resort to running, and impossible if it would require more than running acceleration. (Assume 0 relative velocity for chase combat, so these distances mirror exactly what is written in the book) To me this makes so much more sense and uses such little word change that I would hope it is actually what the Devs intended.

When operating a vehicle you need to spend one complex action each turn or the vehicle goes out of control. There are a variety of actions that may be substituted for this complex action depending on of it is tactical or chase combat.

An combat turn is made out of multiple passes. So, therefore if the driver has multiple passes he can perform his one mandatory action to keep the vehicle in control, and then use his other passes for whatever.

For any weapon that is on a mount controlled via the vehicle's interface I would not allow the pilot to use agility. If you have a front mounted fixed weapon, I could feasibly see a piltot using agility to line up such a gun and fire. As of yet I can not find any specific rules on a front mounted weapon however if I was running the game I would consider it a complex action and the terrain table threshold modifier as a penalty to the roll (This might be overly harsh) to the roll and allow this complex action to count as one spent keeping the vehicle under control since you actively steer it towards your target to fire off that shot. This would allow your fighter jet pilots from the 20th century to attack each other without flying out of control instantly. Since such a fixed mounted front weapon is dependant on your ability to steer the vehicle straight and your knowledge of gunnery I would handle the check as agi+gunnery (assuming he's doing this in meatspace), but cap the gunnery skill by your pilot skill. So, if you have 5 ranks gunnery and 1 rank pilot and you want to shoot a front mounted fixed gun in a vehicle you are driving, you are fresh out of luck.

Naturally, only the driver should be able to fire such a weapon. However if you are doing all the driving, and shooting from the front turret and there is some sort of computer controlled turret mounted on the vehicle, then your pilot program is not doing anything at the moment, you could order it to take control of that gun and target specific enemies. This allows a single driver to do more multitasking in vehicle combat. And suddenly it starts to feel a lot like good ol' Auto Assault. Of course there's the obvious assumptions such as you cannot shoot things behind you with such a weapon and you need to be driving in the direction of the target. The general stuff you wouldn't think you'd have to say but some power game will try to twist your arm if you don't say it.

I do like that rule on fixed weapons. One thing that's been annoying me about vehicles in SR4 is that there is no mechanical difference between fixed and flexible mounted weapons; this rule makes both of them useful.

OTOH maybe it would make sense for the vehicle to become uncontrolled half the time in a dogfight...