What would be a good way to do the shoulder mounted predator gun in SR4?

I wanted to make a character that had a Pilot run gun that was mounted on his shoulder.

Would it be better to go with a Pilot Modified gun with maybe a limper propulsion mod?

Or go with some kind of drone with a weapon mount that latches onto the shoulder of the character?

My immediate thought is of a cyber weapon on an articulated arm, but that might be a bit pricey essence wise, and above starting availability.

You can get an external weapon mount as cyber wear and I think on mill spec armor its not a articulated arm but a gun mount on your shoulder if its not in arsenal for millspec armor it should be. As you can stick the articulated arm on a set.

He wasnt going to have any cyber. Thinking about a technomancer that wears the gun on a harness and throws a machine sprite into the gun to do the shooting.

I will do some research in Arsenal for articulated external mount possibilities.

ares sentinel 'R' series drone (a minidrone, so it should be small enough), with limited maneuverability. it already has a weapon mount. give it gecko tips and an improved sensor array also, imo, and you've got 6 slots left for any wackiness you might want (1-2 if you decide that you do want it to be self-propelled in the end after all). for example, chameleon skin and signature reduction might make for interesting choices. presto, a drone that you can just stick to anything

as far as choice of gun is concerned, i would go with a gyrojet pistol personally. modified as you see fit, of course

Doing math quickly a External Mount would take up 6 capacity be 10F and cost 1500 nuyen this is because the weapon arm is 0.6 time more expensive than the cyber version I did the same for the External mount.

I was set to think this was cool until I realized it was just some technomancer cheese.

Anyway for flexibility and ease of concealment I'd go with a gecko tipped drone that you keep in a backback. When needed it can poke it's head out or roam on its own.

If you can find a drone small enough that can still pack a punch your set. I'd got for a redline laser with some way to change power packs quickly.

Thanks for all the suggestions. Definitely gives me food for thought.

i just listed one earlier. it's normally a rail mounted gun, but you can just give it the limited maneuverability mod and reflavor it, add in the gecko tip mod and it's now a gun that you can mount anywhere but has no self-propulsion abilities. so for example, you could gecko tip it a harness with a shoulder plate. heck, if you don't want to put the gecko tip mod in, you don't even need the plate, though you do lose some functionality.

Limited maneuverability is only available for minidrones, so putting it instead on a Ferret (which already gets 4 extra slots) will increase significantly what you can pile into it.

Gyro-stabilizer?

I would go with the Smart Weapon platform and up the price to X2 or so to represent the work of remoulding it to be a chest/shoulder attachment instead.

If shoulder-mounted conventional firearms-type weapons were the bee's bloody knees then I strongly suspect that there would be some serious development into their production. This is not the case, so it stands to show that shoulder-harness weapons are the SUXOR and definitely not the ROXOR.

That said, about the only weapon that could work for it would be a laser or similar zero-recoil weapon system. You could mount the power packs lower on the back to minimize the weight focused on the shoulders balance issue but the lack of decent length for your lazing apparatus for a decent sight radius and beam focus would make it mostly a close-in weapon.

It would totally rock to have a SOTA wet-work team running around and whacking bitches using only a helmet-mounted lasing apparatus, however. Just look at them and start blowing chunks out of punks with sub-dermal steam explosions...

hmmm... true enough, i guess. only problem is, weapon mounts as standard mods, and can't go on minidrones like the ferret

so just leave out the limited maneuverability mod, and install a track onto the shoulder mounted plate =P

but yeah, i would definitely not expect to see anything that's gonna be eating a lot of recoil use this... that's partly why i suggested the gyrojet pistol, because presumably in terms of fluff it's gonna have less recoil.

(in terms of rules, it's a drone-mounted weapon and therefore does not suffer from recoil at all, but i for one find that to be rather suspect)