I was thinking about something I saw on a discovery program. There they used a bag full of explosives and a copper plate to rip a hole in an armored car, which was riding past, killing only one person, the intended target, in an entire convoy.

The plate was something like 25x25x3 cm massing around 17 kg and an bag of explosives, say TNT or HMX (Better) with the dimensions 25x25x15 cm massing around 15 kg for TNT or 17 kg for HMX.

When the bag exploded, the plate was expelled and hit the car with a total force similar to 6 tonne (tonne = 1000 kg) for TNT or 7.8 tonne for HMX. The copper plate shredded the car and killed the target instantiously. (time 3.3 ms)

How would you stat this to shadowrun?

that's a shaped charge . . they did not really use the copper plate, they used the copper spear that happens to come into existance once you explode it fast enough i would think O.o
if they really used the whole plate then it was kind of a miracle that it did not ricochet off of anything x.x

whats crazy is the water-based shaped charges. i've seen devices big enough to take out cars, and compact enough to breach doors. virtually no colateral damage, just dampness.

A high Demolitions roll, using plans based off of technology that's been around since WWII. Doing damage based upon the materials available, and what they're aiming for the target.

Personally, I think the same people (If I'm thinking the same Discovery show) went a little too high-tech with the detonator, but I'm of the KISS group when it comes to Demo work, having come from a mining town.

We're planning to stop a convoy by blowing a crater in the road to trap the limo and ramming the security cars with rigged stolen vehicles with AT mines gaffered to the front...

You're talking about EFPs or "Explosively Formed Penetrator" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosively_formed_penetrator

An amazingly simple, yet brutally effective means of defeating armored vehicles.

@Shiloh - you might have better luck with drones. Cheaper, more maneuverable and just as effective. Depending on what you need to do with the limo, massive craters and VBIEDs might complicate matters.

That's an interesting notion - airborne drones with internal shaped charges and grapplers to lock onto targets...

-Siege

Well, I can speak from personal experience that a transport truck trailer full of mining explosives, which was also illegally hauling blasting caps, can put a crater in the ground deep enough to swallow a Limo, with some space left over for a few sub-compacts.

It will also vaporize said truck, save for the front axel, which will be found quite a few miles away. Or, slightly less in an urban enviroment, where there's things like buildings it'll have to go through.

To say nothing of anything within close proximity to the blast radius.

Close being measured in city blocks.

-Siege

It's most likely a platter charge (aka EFP or SFF) not a shaped charge. These require skill in explosives and skill in machining the parts to make them work really well. Just like shaped charges, it's easy to make a primitive one, it requires research, skill, experimentation and gear to make ones that really perform optimally.

Explosives are hard to do well in a game. It's a complex area, detailed data is difficult to obtain due to restrictions and people who know how stuff really works tend to not talk about it.

I have been told that people who are really good can do some amazing crap with explosives and achieve exactly what they want with minimal secondary destruction, and on the other hand, if you don't know what you are doing you can use huge amounts of explosive and not accomplish your aim while blowing up everything around it.

I can state for the record that there are people that WELD with explosives.

I have no idea how they do it, and, frankly, don't want to know.

This page (LINK) is a nice intro to explosion welding, the wikipedia page(LINK) on it is kinda sparse.

that said, I prefer thermite welding.

Well Port Chicago Naval Magazine in Port Chicago, Ca circa July 17, 1944, the SS Grandcamp in Texas City, Texas circa April 16th 1947. Really big explosions.

@Shiloh
Why the road why not take down some very large trees to fall across the roadway or telephone poles, with claymores along side.

Take out a bridges support columns. Many wondrous uses explosives have.

WMS

The charge wasn't placed on the car but in a backpack, which was sitting on the baggage carrier of a bike. The explosives 'fired' a copper plate across the street where the target car was driving past.
The plate was fired with a speed of at least 5100m/s (for TNT) (for HMX this speed would be 9100m/s)
In km/h 18360 and 32760.
This way one would get a high velocity projectile (doesn't have to be speas shaped) which has to travel up to 30 m, thus having a very large part of its kinetic energy left when it hits the car with either 42882.84 N or 76516.44 N.
Thus the car is hit with a blow of several metric tonns worth energy.

Having actually seen explosive welding done (my uncle was a 20 year veteran welder doing QA inspections on it; I snuck away as a vo-tech welder; and by seen, it's on a video screen until the parts come back) its more like plate stamping in a machine shop than anything. Really good welds, but like most other hi-tech welding, you've got to know what you're doing before mating the parts together.

For inspiration purposes check what the Cosa Nostra did to judge Falcone: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovanni_Falcone

That ought to do it, fairly low tech for SR standards though

sometimes the SR ways can be over-engineered, to the point of this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rube_Goldberg_device

We're operating out of our home ground with limited contacts and time. I can boost pretty much any cheap auto and we should be able to get the rigger controls and install them relatively easily in the time frame allowed. Snagging drones might draw undue attention, and the ones we anticipate suborning during the attack itself are earmarked for the turbine nacelles of the dust-off unit that we know will get called in. We might be able to get light drones in time, but they've got to be able to catch relatively agile cars and carry enough payload to total well-built executive protection escort sedans. I know we can do it with a small urbancar and an AT-mine, and I'm pretty sure we can get the mines in time; we may even have the explosives to improvise them amongst the group's resources.

The limo is heavily armed (GLs, LMGs and autoshotguns) impenetrable except with explosives (which would likely kill our extraction subject) or cutting gear (probably too slow - killing the dust-off is a secondary position that would probably get other agencies involved). So we want it static while our hacker gets the doors open or we can place contact cutting charges to can-open it with precision.


Good suggestions all. The road is in the Redmond Barrens, so no trees, and we get the impression that barricades less than a building-slide (which we've considered) will hardly slow this convoy down. Don't think we have enough control over the positioning of the target vehicles to get three mobile targets into a (or a set of) killzones with any reliability at all. The problem is that the three elements could be at virtually any spacing and we need to thoroughly neutralise the escort vehicles because they are armed enough to spoil our day even without the contribution of the personnel they're carrying.

We reckon blowing a hole in the road (we can drill charges into the roadbed ahead of time) and letting the limo drop into it, then dealing with the mobile assets with kamikaze remote-control cars is probably our best shot at gaining control of the situation. The subject might be a bit shaken up, but we're relying on the passenger-protection measures being good enough and the rigger driving the limo being pretty good, but constrained by physics to only slowing the speed of the impact. Even uprated brakes are going to have a hard time stopping an armoured limo. Also means we can fill the hole with smoke to sytmie any return fire from the vehicle or the mage. Another thing that makes road-cratering attractive is that there is a large sewer under the road to help. It has to be a *big* hole though, so the rigger can't drive round it.

Just some brainstorming:

Light and agile vehicles still have to stay relatively close to the primary which limits their mobility. A drone need not carry enough C-12 to stomp a tank - kill a tire and the escort is dead in the water. A cheap auto boosted may not be as agile as you need to intercept these escorts, assuming they don't get killed en route.

Any heavy weapons? A dust-off unit without escort is a giant, expensive and usually dead target - especially in an urban environment.

A minor obstacle that forces the convoy to a specific detour, even for seconds, gives you operational control for timing an attack.

-Siege

A good point. If we could determine the sort of reaction we might get to "random tyre loss", we might be able to fake an ambush (I think the force required to fake a blowout on smart tyres might be hard to disguise as "accident") that means one element gets left behind, and we bounce the remaining two shortly thereafter. I think the dustoff vehicle would get called out to pick up the stragglers though, and that would bring them closer to us sooner than we'd perhaps like. Given that we are outnumbered 3 to 1 and the target has combat drones and armed armoured vehicles my instinct is to go for brutal overkill on the escort vehicles because we can't on the subject's vehicle.


The plan is to use them while the escort vehicles are maneuvering in response to the landmine and crash. If the escorts stand off to provide fire support to the stricken limo, the kamikazes don't have to reach them; the pillar of fire will screw vision mods for what's happening at the crater...



No, nor the skills to use them, other than thrown grenades and demolitions.



We're told this one will have at least one chain gun and rocket pods. It's bound to have ECM and decoys. We do have the chance to hack a couple of combat drones though. Killing a privately owned (as opposed to mega-corp or governmental) VTOL is likely to bring a deal of heat we don't want, I'd guess.



A good point. We could look into forcing the principal to detour and the pursuit cars to scramble round trying to find a way to it. We only have 2 minutes though.

Given such specific parameters, are you being set up for something else?

-Siege

Possibly a good question. That's a lot of inside information the Johnson has supplied: how did he get it? We have information that this is a personal crusade, and I aim to address the issues that raises, or maybe get our Face to do so, when we get to the next session.

Hey,Siege,you been reading my super secret GM note book?

Last game I had Team Pink( at least, thats what their fixer has codenamed them) do a simple demo job. Blow a 3.5 M X3.5M bunker out of existence. Just get close ,set the charge and run. they got a little sweaty when they figured out just how much damage 18 kilo's of rating 15 Milspec plastic explosives would do( I think the estimate was about 260P)

Other uses: I know when c-4 is burned the fumes can be used to incapacitate opponents in an enclosed area(as in burning some in the air vents.) dont know if the 2070 stuff would work.

Interrogation comes to mind also. Nothing says" spill your guts." like a det cord belt.

Oh, and don't forget fishing. round here we call a 1'/2 stick tied to a rock a "redneck fish-finder"!

the damage for those 18 kilos would be closer to 64P then 260P...

square root can be a bitch sometimes...

oh, only 64P? is that all? psht.

the most sad thing is that to hit 260P one would need something like 300KG of the stuff...

citation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Herrhausen

hmm, a laser beam...

unless someone was close by and armed it after the first car had passed, that thing would have been fairly random...

There was a hill where supposedly it was armed. It was all very sophisticated for the Red Army Faction.

There is still an unending debate whether or not they actually did it. Herrhausen was not the most popular person in his circles. But I will probably get flamed for even bringing this up.

Math never was my strong point. I kinda lost interest when the teacher started talking about negative numbers. as in " if i have 5 apples and i sell you 10 apples". to me that just means i ripped you off

Hooray for New Math,
New-hoo-hoo Math,
It won't do you a bit of good to review math.
It's so simple,
So very simple,
That only a child can do it!

--Tom Lerher.

Don't forget - Shadowrun has introduced us to the wonderful world of C-12.

For those of you who don't get it, check out Youtube for video of what just a little bit of C-4 can do.

-Siege

I would like to take this time to all inform you of some very important information.

C-4 is very toxic. Don't eat it.

Seriously, it's embarassing when Explosive Ordinance Disposal has to come to the hospital. Seriously.

...
Do I even want to know?
...
Yeah I do.

Why did somebody decide that C-4 was a good snack?

Alcohol+Marines(Any Military Service Member Really)=Failure Cascade.

A bunch of Recon guys got into a drunken argument over wether or not C-4 was toxic. Hiliarty ensued.

Hell, some idiot was chewing on a blasting cap.

For those of you who don't know, blasting caps are smaller explosives designed to trigger larger explosives.

The resulting blast didn't kill him, but the only way you could tell the slab of meat had once been a face was the one blue eye left open and working.

-Siege

I just knew alcohol had to be involved.

I'd pay good money to hear a tape of that phone call.

Hospital: "We need an EOD team here ASAP."
EOD: "What's the emergency?"
Hospital: "A patient got drunk and ate C-4."
EOD: "..."

-Siege

It did however allow you to visualize what a persons sinus cavities look like. That's pretty cool.

They make tools for crimping blasting caps, there is a very solid reason you shouldn't crimp blast caps with your mouth.

Well you can but you're going to end up on Rotten.com and medical personnel the world over are going to go "Dude! You totally have to check out what this dumbass just did!"

Honestly, you couldn't make out anything from the photo - 3/4 of his face was gone. You could identify the flaps skin surrounding the mass of red and one blue eye looking at the camera.

The funny part? The guy is still conscious - wound shock is a funny thing.

-Siege

oh no, I'm almost certain that you can see the sinus cavities. It's all very interesting to see how his face got flayed open but so cleanly. If I recall correctly you can also see most or all of his tongue, something I find intensely amusing given what he did to blow his face off.

Yeah he's definitely still alive, he's holding himself up at least partially and you can just see the "This has to be a really bad dream" look in his eye/eyes. (The picture I'm thinking of he still had both his eyes... i think, it's been awhile).

Or, more than one idiot has seen fit to try the same stunt.

I really, really hate to think there might be two different photos of the same mistake out there.

-Siege

So, what does C-4 decompose into when exposed to digestive acid?

I have no idea, I just know that it made they extremely ill.

Of course the fact that they didn't come in right away didn't help. I'm fairly certain they tried to gut it out for a few hours before they started vomiting and drooling on themselves. Additionally it takes about 30 minutes to get from the base where they pulled this stunt off to the hospital so that's plenty of time for begin the process of digestion.

Yum.

Hmm... MSDS safety sheets.

http://www.omniexplosives.com/PDF/C4%20MSDS.pdf
This says it gives off toxic nitrogen oxides.

http://www.ocsresponds.com/ref/msds/msds-rdx.pdf
RDX which, if I understand correctly, is the boom boom part of plastic explosves is also not very healthy for you. It looks like it messes up your central nervous system pretty bad, which is about in line with what I heard.
I'd also like to draw your attention to section about 3/4 of the way down the page. "First Aid": Ingestion: Not a likely route of exposure.

Way to go from the big win guys...

Nitrogen Oxides are a product of explosion. The sheet doesn't give any clue as to what it produces if it reacts with an acid.

Edit: One source I found suggests that a reaction between HCl and RDX produces Nitrite.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18331858

My favourite plastic explosive trivia is the famous vietnam tales of soldiers using C4 for cooking fires. C4 is incredibly stable, and will not explode when exposed to fire. However, what can detonate C4 is high pressure and high heat.

So while there are stories of Marines lighting their c4 on fire to cook with were pretty safe. The story of the marine who tried to stamp the fire out ended considerably less amiably.

Current thinking it that it was done by a Stasi commando team, called AGM/S, not the RAF. They had the expertise to do the kind of precise planning and explosives design needed.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story...7-23850,00.html

Well the second sheet indicates that it is "Incompatible" with acids and the human and animal studies indicate that ingestion renders it into a toxic chemical that effects the central nervous system. I have a feeling that RDX is inherently toxic and that stomach acid doesn't transform it, merely breaks it down small enough to be absorbed by the body (your stomach and intestines being the ideal place for that). Granted that's all conjecture since I don't have access to the scholarly works I turned up.

This is an interesting article about poisoning that occured in Kosovo. It also mentions that lethal doses were established in rats by using a 4% solution which, if it was injected, would be a pretty firm indicator that RDX by itself causes problems.
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlere...i?artid=1279680

Relative to the current discussion, word is that some soldiers would ingest small amounts of C4 to get sick leave. Although after a while CO's started to recognize the trick and punish the soldier, or even keep him on, despite the ill-health.

Well intentionally hurting yourself is punishable under the Uniform Code of Military Justice so I'm not all surprised that CO's punished them for being retards. Keeping someone from recieving timely medical care is a serious offense so I'd think most officers would be reluctant to deprive them of care.

Besides, you can recieve all the care you need, in the brig, or under restriction.

"Incompatibility" in the chemical sense means that the two produce a very dangerous chemical reaction when combined and must be controlled with great care if used together. This could either be due to a highly violent reaction or highly toxic product, particularly toxic gases.

RDX is a ring of three nitrogen atoms connected by three CH2 (methylene) groups with each nitrogen possessing a N02- ion (nitrite) with a positively charged Nitrogen atom.

http://www.3dchem.com/moremolecules.asp?ID...rname=cyclonite

According to the article I linked to earlier, hydrochloric acid (stomach acid) reduces (adds an electron to) the nitrite ion. This reduction is most likely to occur on the N+, which would probably cause the entire group to break away from the ring.