When Arsenal was slated to come out, I mentioned a few weapons that I saw on the show Futureweapons. The technology out today as far as weapons are concerned is pretty amazing, and I thought some of it would be awesome in SR4.

Well, I checked Arsenal, and the Metal Storm weapons do exist, as I had hoped, their appearance left me disappointed. See, the Metal Storm type of gun uses an electric pulse to launch the ammunition, and the ROF for the weapon is freaking insane.

When I checked the rules on recoil for the weapon in SR, they gave it the same recoil penalty as a normal weapon. This was a shame, since the entire point to the MS weapon is that the recoil doesn't come until after you've already emptied the clip.

(To check it out: http://www.metalstorm.com/ and look at the Discovery Channel video)

True, but ALL the gun rules are screwed up.

If you want to talk about future weapons, SR has never done effective seeker heads (for anything including missiles), and I have a feeling guided bullets integrated into a smartlink are a lot more likely than "stick and shock".

Ahh, I remember the bullets from 'Runaway' -- those would be cool in Shadowrun as well. Seeker bullets would be pretty interesting, I think the closest I saw was in Tir N'an Og, way back in SR 1E.

Technically, Metal Storm weapons *do* exist in the BBB. Take a look at the Sakura; it loads bullets by the barrel, instead of individually.

The Yamaha Sakura Fubuki of the BBB is a metalstorm weapon (note the low recoil).
And I was kinda expecting Arsenal to have some Assault Rifles/MG version of it.
Ha, well...

this has pretty much been the most disapointing aspect of 4th edition, the fact that the developers havn't kept up with contemporary themes, giving the world a retro-futuristic feel. it would have been nice if they had done a bit more to update things for the 21st century, instead of slapping in a handful of new weapons and keeping all the outdated crap from 10 years ago.

Well, there is the Fubuki, Gauss rifles, Pain inducer, Laser rifles (ok those are old).
But I agree, SR4 lacks some SF weapons...

Personally, I thought they should have gone the other way. They should have kept the somewhat-kitschy, retro-futuristic feel that Shadowrun has always had, as opposed to trying to modernize it and turning the whole thing into a train wreck. Either way, you're absolutely right; trying to go contemporary and sticking with the 80's cyberpunk theme was a bad idea.

Because, you know, stick and shock doesn't exist in real life:

http://www.taser.com/products/law/Pages/XREP.aspx

That's the link I was looking for.

That thing's pretty neat. Though I loathe to think about what they cost(i know, they aren't for regular, civilian use...but still. Curious. )

There was a cool Youtube video of a Metal Storm weapon, too...

http://youtube.com/watch?v=d8hlj4EbdsE


I dunno, as cool as 1,000,000 rounds per minute sounds, there might be a reason they tone it down in-game.

Well, I'm not sure who intends to use this weapon of full on awesome firepower. There is a very valid reason for not having these weapons and that is because there really isn't a significant advantage, militarily, over traditional firearms. The trend in military firearms is better accuracy over volume of fire. For my evidence, look at the M-16. When it first was released, it had fully automatic fire capability. Now they have restricted it to 3 round bursts. And we see this more and more for standard infantry fighting. So the main advantage of metal storm, lots of bullets, is really not a drawing point for the military to use it over the standard battle rifle, so it is never the focus of military funding which looks at improving sighting and accuracy. Plus, all that rate of fire means is that you are going to have to carry around 5x the combat load in ammo. It's really not all that practical in anything but a pistol, ergo the Cherry Blossom Storm. Feel free to make me look like a fool...now

I think metal storm is more meant for point-defense against missiles, where you want a lot of bullets put out in a very short time.

Which means personal weapons are moot and all you need to is assign a threshold for the rigger to hit for them. Makes it far easier to come up with a rule. Like I said, I wasn't sure what they were intended for militarily. Shooting missiles is good

Metalstorm has the capability (similar to the H&K G13) of throwing rounds out the barrel so fast that there is no discernible muzzle climb before the third round of a 3 round burst has been sent on its way. *That*'s where its RoF is potentially useful: making a 3 round burst *really* tight. You could say that a ultra-high RoF weapon can't *do* a "wide" burst, but its narrow bursts have more chance of defeating armour and doing more damage because of the tight grouping. IIRC, shoulder-fired, the G13 put 3 rounds inside a 3 centimetre circle, where an M16 put them in a palm-sized circle at the same range.

But mostly in modern firearms doctrine, the scatter on a 3 round burst for a standard infantryman is there to improve the chance of a hit, so you actually *want* some muzzle shake; most dogfaces will be firing wide bursts, rather than narrow. The increased hurt of a narrow burst would mostly be restricted to special ops types.

Nevertheless, arguing realism in SR firearms remains an exercise in futility. Verisimilitude is the best you can, erm, shoot for.

I know Metal Storm weapons have been introduced to Shadowrun, but their recoil mod and rate of fire don't seem to have been improved that much over conventional weaponry. I would have expected the weapon to, essentially, be a hyper-velocity weapon with a significantly lower recoil penalty.

Essentially, give it a higher burst, and delay the recoil penalty to bursts in the following action.

I don't mind the retro look too much, that's fine and all, but I do want there to be access to cutting edge (or better) technology to coincide with it, and these I want to see at least marginally realistic.

Well, if the MS weapons in Shadowrun have been given short shrift in the recoil and RoF rules, they've been given a great boon in the entire 'reloading and resupplying' area as well, possibly even in the 'inherent inaccuracy' area... its a wash then.

Lets face it: MS technology works in part because there is no cycle of action, the rounds are prestaged in the barrel one on top of the other. This means that to reload you must essentially replace the entire barrel, not just a densely packed (and more effiecently at that....) magazine. In the Fubuki, that's 'four barrels'... four times as much reloading to be done to 'top off'. MS rounds would absolutely not be compatable with conventional rounds (as they are now), making specialty rounds all that much more expensive/hard to get (availability increase) if they were available at all. Inaccuracy comes from the fact that barrel length is no longer used to provide accuracy but simply 'more ammo'... its not available to stabilize the rounds except incidentally in the case of the last few rounds out the barrel, and since it's designed to HOLD ammuntion (and fire it) less energy is spent designing the barrels to provide said accuracy.


If you want 100% accuracy in MS rounds, by all means provide it. But in addition to having to revamp 95% of Shadowrun's combat rules to carry this accuracy to all firearms, understand that you must take the bad along with the good. Don't cry that MS weapons are underpowered but reject the fact that their liabilities are not addressed either.

you know . . with you calling it MS the whole time, i now envision Weapons and Ammo and Stuff with the Windows logo on them . . x.x . .

Useless as a personal weapon, but one *HELL* of a surprise if set up as a boobytrap!

Of course, a Claymore Mine works almost as well.

Almost.

Sure, and fired at 1300 FPS it will do what?

Well, we can assume the Gate Empire is still around in 2070, possibly major shareholders in one or more of the Megas... And do you REALLY think they won't be selling you 'upgrades' of your Smartlink OS every couple of years at full price?

And now I'm thinking of "1-800-Magic"... Ares Tech Support...

well, there WAS that one Gates offspring in Prime Runners i think . .
we once were planning on a whole campaign utilizing that NPC to bring about the change from 3rd to 4th in a different, glorioous corp. war by first using him to ruin other corps and get them to go at each other and have him take the blame . . yes, this as shortly after the SR/CS "game" and the C&D-Order for Shadowrun Online

When I get my campaign started, I'm going to show how MicroDeck is going to hit the market once more...

MicroDeck still exists ... as does the Gates Casino.

that boy was more or less a proto-otaku stats-wise . . use him to take over major matrix mainframes and then start simultanous attack on all the corps that you pissed off once . . or the corps that pissed off you once *g*
first have them think that the other corps did it and then add in a lead pointing into the general direction of microdeck to have it destroyed and the others be weakened like hell ^^

In 60 years? I'd imagine it would. It's fired from a normal shotgun (well it could if that wasn't a terrible idea from a safety stand point) and it sticks and uhm... shocks. It's also the first generation of this sort of tech so I'd assume that it could stand some refinement.

At 1300 FPS it's a device called a "slug", and it will put an inch wide hole all the way through them. That's why an XREP is fired at 260 FPS. This has some rather significant effects on range. Hence the 20 meter maximum range.

The same is true when you fire "gel rounds" at people out of real guns such that you can maintain the same ranges. They get all bloody and fall down as the "gel round" punches holes all the way through their body and out the other side.

"Working as intended".

To be fair, you do have a point (I put that in there because I’m sure you were just aching for the validation provided by a faceless internet goon). The physics of shooting something that maintains all the ballistic profiles of a regular round but doesn’t perform exactly like the original round are daunting, possibly insurmountable. Perhaps firearms in 2070 use lighter materials and are better machined so that it takes less gas to cycle the weapon (thus allowing rounds with smaller propellant charge to be fired normally). Maybe they’ve found a more exotic solution that involves a system for cycling rounds that isn’t feasible in the current day. Maybe they use materials that shape themselves in flight to improve their ballistic properties.

If we wanted to be totally realistic should we develop rules that reduce the accuracy and range of these slower traveling or lower weight rounds? We should if we believe that these are insurmountable limitations; limitations that a half century of development couldn’t overcome. That’s not a totally unreasonable standpoint given that flechette rounds never matured into a workable technology. However, I personally think it’s a bit goofy to believe that it’s “impossible� in the setting of a sci-fi game. We are talking about a world of personal laser pistols, smart materials, commercial suborbital flights, and cybernetic enhancements that let people routinely move 3 times faster than a normal human. In such a setting I find it a bit hard to believe that we have not learned how to:
1. Produce a round that contains the electrical capacity and mechanism to produce debilitating pain or muscle spasm. Or rather, reduce that device to something that can be fired out of most firearms at a velocity appropriate to a less than lethal round.
2. Produce a material that expands on impact to defuse its kinetic energy rapidly enough, that it doesn’t “punch holes through people�.

And relax man, it’s not like I’m coming to your house and forcing you to use stick and shock on babies. I just think that you’re being more than a little unreasonable about the “realism� of such a device existing in 60 years.

I solve this "problem" by not using stick and shock in my pen and paper campaign. "Gel rounds" are hardly used either, but I always saw them as the sort of "Plastic bullet" stuff the israelis used, something with a minimum range, and prone to cause wounds, not something that is idiot-proof for doing stun damage. And flechette I consider a fancy name for shot.

It works out rather well.

So... in other words everybody is shooting the exactly same thing they shot 60 (almost 100 years years in the case of "rubber" steel cored bullets) years ago? Well that's certainly cool.

I'm also not saying that gel rounds can't cause physical damage, if your modified DV is 26 because you used a narrow burst, you've pretty thorougly killed the fuck out of your target even though you used "less than lethal rounds". Ditto for called shot face from a sniper rifle.

For 2, the round has to be assured of decelerating faster than it accelerates or else includes some trigger mechanism otherwise it'll have a habit of expanding in the wrong situation and I suspect such manufacturing methods would be expensive. Also note that Dunkelzahn's will included provisions for a reward for whomever could create a stunning round that may be fired at rifle ranges. Whilst I'm sure there's now additional development being done due to that reward, there are reasons why people would still be using gel rounds that do not have such ranges - it doesn't really matter for most appliations of Gel rounds anyway since your major consumers of Gel ammo are going to be located in urban situations where most ranges are shorter (sometimes due to the fact that warm bodies are in the way rather than hard concrete). Snipers might buy rifle-range gel rounds, but they're not really a big market.

That provision implies that a number of rounds do not have the same ballistic profile as regular rounds, as does the fact that many rounds are resisted with Impact instead of Ballistic armour rating. A ruling I'd put in play is that fired rounds are restricted to heavy pistol ranges unless they can be resistated using Ballistic armour (this oddly-ordered ruling is to cover frangible rounds, which are exceptional in that they can use either rating). I reason that Impact armour is primarily hard armour that deflects blows whilst Ballistic is softer armour that absorbs blows, so if a round is resisted with the Impact rating it's using similar KE to a sword or club attack and therefore should not have the same ballistic profile as a round with a higher KE like an APDS round.

If I have my preference, that's roughly how things work in my games as well.

The necessarily low velocity of 'less than lethal' rounds is a big reason that professionals use shotguns today. These low power rounds don't generate enough energy to cause the action to cycle in autoloading firearms so you would have to rake the slide or charging handle after every shot. Why not use a gun designed to be used that way and take a pump shotgun? Not to mention that smaller projectiles deliver much higher PSI for a given force making them much weaker than large bore guns when trying to avoid penetration. Thats the reason you see them as shotgun shell, not miniaturization problems.

You know, thinking about this has gotten me excited for using Gel rounds in my Panther Cannon.

gel rounds in a panther cannon?
probably anti vehicular gel rounds too?
i thought the panther came with special ammo kinda like the barret sniper?
only exex and APDS or anti vehicular?

Smartlinked Warhawk: A revolver that can turn its safety off, cock its own hammer, and fire itself, all while sitting on a table unattended. You don't need pump-action anymore.

Your second point stands, however. It's a bit hard to envision a 9mm bullet accurate to 60m that doesn't punch through a body at 10m.

And yes, a nonlethal Panther Cannon is beyond hilarious.

i'd probably sooner load an Ares Great Dragon ATGM with Chem-Tech Rockets/Missles o.O
Splash-Grenades full of the nasty with a reach of about 2000m sounds pretty mean to me *g*
but of course, the panther cannon is probably used in more confined spaces, like houses O.o

*sighs and wanders off to use his freeze foam cannon instead*

aaww, poor little doccie *g*
does that foam come in bullet-form? maybe encapsulated into small . . capsules so it can be shot like from a paintball-gun?

I can't believe I forgot about smartlinks... I've had my nose in Arsenal for days...

My GM built a character named Hermann the Sherman (he sounds like Arnold Schwarzenegger) that ended up having to be NPCized because of his extra toys that included Milspec powered armor, an HMG with an underbarrel flamer and an articulated weapon mount with a panther cannon. This sounds like his idea of being gentle.

herman the sherman . . i am so stealing that and trying to build that very concept the next time i get to actually play o.o

I always assumed that Gel rounds were ordinary rounds with Turn to Goo anchored on them.

I want to kill you all with my mind bullets.

That expand rapidly on impact to...
nevermind