I was wondering if anyone who has had time to play around with Arsenal has figured out a system for varying the number of slots by weapon type. I just can't see a pistol and a rifle having the same limit to modification.

I guess it's about game balance. Some people want reality and others want to reflect reality. To the latter I'd say, first off, lose magic and metahumanity.

I'd also theorize that, regardless of the size of the weapon, there are just so many parts. Whether it's a hold-out or a rifle, they have the same basic mechanisms and parts that can be adapted.

In short, to answer your question, no.

Well, there are a fair amount of mods that won't fit a pistol.

But perhaps we could put together a stacking table of balanced weapon capacities. Anyone interested in suggesting one?

I just imagine that the ones for a rifle are bigger.

I preferred Cannon Companion's mod rules. Although they were more complicated, they made more sense to me from a weapon size point of view. I also noticed there is no conversion from ammo clips to belt feed in the new system, which is kinda important for vehicle mounted weapons (not everybody wants to mount a machinegun). Anybody figured out a good system for that? I'd like to suggest that holdouts, light pistols, and tasers get only 4 slots; heavy and machine pistols, shotguns and SMGs get the base 6; rifles and LMGs get 8 slots; and Heavy Weapons get 10 slots; anyone think that's a good idea?

I also noticed in the description of the Ferret it mentions that some of them mount weapons, but the standard rules for weapon mounts (although they'd fit slot-wise) don't make sense for a body 1 drone. To solve this problem I added a small size weapon mount (no slot cost, 500 nuyen, can't mount anything as large or larger than a SMG- this is loosely based off what could be mounted in a firmpoint in 3rd ed.) I also noticed that according to the RAW the IBall has 12 slots, I'm just accepting that as an oversight and moving on.

What I find great are the mods that take up a slot when they really shouldn't. Like Gecko Grip, the Chameleon Coating, an Extended Clip, and a few others.

i guess the eye-ball has 12 slots for eye-ware stuff like smartlink and the such for the time it is used as an actual eye

Any weapon mounted on a vehicle weapon mount gets 250 ammo capacity, belt-fed.

As for changing the number of mod-slots - have you any real reason for rationalising this beyond "this gun is larger". A lot of the weapon mods do not take up space so to speak, the main concern is the fact that your weapon is taking replacements parts, and most guns have the same number of parts. And for the larger guns, the mods will be larger. Relative scale must be maintained.

Its just that some mods should not take up apprecable space, like chrome coating your gun, or geko taping the grip, none of this impacts the internal volume of the weapon. Some mods like electronic firing actually remove components from the gun, and in theory free up space, so should add slots.... its just the rules don't make sense.

It's stated in the rules that the mod system is not about how much space there is in the weapon. That's why the rules explicitly allow you to overmod weapons, with unfortunate side effects to be determined by the GM.

Mod slots are about the degree to which you can alter the original design of the weapon before you're trying to modify your own modifications. It's a deliberate abstraction, but it has nothing to do with the mass of kit that you're packing into the frame.

Look at it this way: I have a 3 year old computer. I could keep upgrading that computer, replacing parts like the graphics card, and adding more hard-drives. Running out of space isn't actually a huge issue, because I can always move the internals to a bigger case. Eventually, however, I will have to start replacing parts like the motherboard, which require me to replace pretty much everything else. At this point it's simply easier and cheaper to throw everything out and buy a new machine, from the ground up, with parts all carefully selected to not cause conflicts with each other. I have over-modded my computer.

Sure, there's still room in the case, but there's simply no way to actually alter the original setup any further without making something stop working.

Sure. But some things really don't make sense. Again, take the Gecko Grip Why does that take 1/3rd the space that turning an assault rifle into a hypervelocity weapon does? Or an extended clip. You aren't doing *anything* to the gun to make it take a longer clip, your altering the clip. Or Chameleon Coating, you add it on after everything else is done. Those 3 things together take up as much space as hypervelocity.

Switching to electronic firing and removing the trigger should save space.

It involves adding batteries and control hardware for the Gecko tape. These preclude some volume for vital parts of making the weapon into a supermachinegun, including trigger group modifications. Gecko grip includes the installation of a button iirc, which is going to be on the body of the gun that will involve running lines between the body and the grip. The body is what you modify to change the action to be a supermachinegun. You also need to okay all the components of the geck grip to be alright with the vibrations and additional heat produced by a supermachinegun.

For modding to take longer clips; you need to strengthen the hold that the mag well has on the mag. No, seriously, those things have to be tuned to properly grip the mags but also to let go safely should something try to tear the mag out because losing that component will stop you from firing your weapon. Yeah, this is actually a gun mod and, in 2070, will probably include electronic solutions to avoid changing the ergnomics of the gun. Hell, if one assumes that the mags are still the same length, and just slightly wider instead, then you are actually modding the feed and the magwell size to match the larger clips. This means that your magwell components are beefier and that precludes modifying other bits of the body to deal with other problems that other mods will cause.

Chameleon coating invlves laying a polymer across the entire exterior of the weapon, which adds to the insulation and requires modification of the cooling solution to fit. This complicates the cooling problems that a supermachinegun will create, which will require even further extensive cooling modifications.

Every gun in 2070 is a precision engineered piece of kit specially designed to work perfectly in concert with every other component to achieve a given set of functionality - introducing things to add more functionality is going to cause problems because the overall design is not optimised to compensate for the problems of unforeseen functionality. The fixes that you use to solve the problems will interfere with each other as well as the actual components to implement the functionality and that is why they all share slots without it being related to size.


Electronic firing requires a power source, a high discharge capacitor and a sparkplug, which requires you to actually add stuff and will have you playing around the trigger group, or at least punching additional holes into the gun for power transmission etc. Fewer moving parts does not mean that they require less volume. Equally, removing the trigger does sweet FA for you, not matter what the firing mechanism; the trigger is small and is unlikely to be in a place that might be better used for some other modification.

What the hell can you fit into the space and location of the trigger group on an AR? NOTHING!

Because ultimately Hypervolicity replaces existing parts. It's a huge overhaul, but still one that is based on the existing design.
Chameleon coating will require a powersource, and will have to be integrated with the existing electronic systems of the weapon. You don't just paint it on.
Extending a weapon's clip requires you to completely rebuild the housing for the clip, so that the weight doesn't break it (that's why it's really dumb to tape clips together. The extra weight breaks the housing, except on weapons purposefully designed for this feature).

Some mods do not make sense in their costs, but whatever.

As for all weapons having a fixed 6 slots, think of it like this. The number of slots does not represent how much room a modification will take, which will vary between weapons, but rather the percent of space it requires, which will not vary.

All firearms come with 6 points of "Essence". As you add more modifications, the weapon deviates further and further from the platonic ideal of the original design until the gun's spirit dissapates and its cental nervous system craps out.

I think you were being sarcastic but thats not too far off, actually.

This isn't really about space, its more about Murphy's Law. Its about how far can you push the design beyond what it was actually built to take. Altering the frame weakens it, adding more parts and replacing others with ones that weren't designed from the ground up to be compatible with each other, all this increases the probability that something is going to screw up, no matter how many 'hits' the Armorer rolls. The weapon's essence thing represents the reasonable limit to what can be done to it and be sure its going to consistently function as intended.

Note that you can modify them past six by spending a hell of a lot more money and making much more difficult test which, to me, signifies basically rebuilding the weapon from the ground up with the new features, and the more you add, the harder it gets. Also note that removing the weapon's built-in features doesn't give you any extra essence back.

The system makes allot more sense to me when looked at like this, but YMMV.

While it may have come across as snarky, I actually was proposing it as an alternate way of viewing the ruleset.


Or you could just look at it as getting Delta-Grade versions of some of the modifications.

Now that (the "essence" thing) actually makes sense to me. I can live with that if I play around with the idea of grades for the weapon mods. After all, an auto-adjusting weight and a drum clip shouldn't be the only mods a skilled armorer can make to a LMG.

Can someone give me a reference on the statement made about belt feed being automatic for weapon mounts?

Now we're talking. There's usually a way to add weapon mods, even if it's overmodification. Hell, there are things that aren't exploited, such as a laser sight on the side of a weapon (I've seen this), so I like the idea of weapon mods having a point value like essence and allowing for grades. Although it doesn't fit in with the capacity system, and with certain things I'm loathe to chage that.