Ok, here goes: If I detonate an airburts grenade from a grenade linked launcher above a group of people, would you get a Chunky-Salsa effect from the blast rebounding from the floor?

The answer entirely depends on what the floor is made up of. Ferrocrete or dirt?

Say a con/ferrocrete warehousing floor?

It only matters if
a) the floor is solid completely (aka ground)
or
b) the material resists the blast (30+ centimeters thick concrete or similar substance)

In any case, chunky salsa is very crazy stuff. Be careful allowing it in your game, if PCs are killing too many guys, you could try doing it to them, but likely you'll kill (outright) half or better of the party.

Heh! That's a good catch. But I would have to rule 'no' in my game.

However, there is text in the book that supports the idea. SR4A, pg. 156 states that, theoretically, a detonating grendade could rebound repeatedly off each of the six surfaces of a small well-built room. That has to imply a four-walled room with floor and ceiling to me, not a hexagonal room.

However, in the provided example of a grenade detonating in a hallway, the character takes additonal damage only from rebound off the walls.

I'd say that RAW is slightly self-contradictory in this instance, but were you to add rebound from the floor, then that means the provided damage codes are really only correct for aerial combat because you'll always be getting a hefty rebound off the floor in normal combat that will substantially increase the effectiveness of grenades, etc. I'd say Earth has a fairly high-barrier rating.

Personally, in the face of rules ambiguity, I'd just ignore floor and ceiling unless it was something very confined like a tunnel, in which case I'd just handwave on a couple of extra points of DV. I mean they're going to be dead anyway.

I know this isn't a unimpeachable answer, but it's what I would do in game.

Hope it helps,

K.

SR4 corebook says 4 walls, SR4A says 6 surfaces; however, the example is recycled unchanged.

Weird.

I'd suggest ignoring chunky sals as the rules for it are a PITA to use. Just use something simple like a +2 DV for a contained blast (with the GM's judgement on what constitutes a contained blast), and things get a lot earier to use.

Note the sr3 tag chummers

Anyway, if something sounds to good to be true, it probaply is.... (as a general rule of thumb)

Oops. Sorry!

K.

I dont apply chunky salsa at all to frags. It adds a bit of realism, but the amount of explosive in a common fragmentation grenade is somewhat nil. They showed a frag explosion on a couple of TV shows against various dummies that are mostly designed to fall werent even budged by the explosion, yet were still peppered with small holes in various lethal places. I would consider applying it to frags in a place where the fragments might actually ricochet vs actually penetrating the surrounding hallways.

My favorite grenade ever was the one that blew up in an elevator full of enemy mercs, several seconds after the door closed.

Nothing to really add to this thread, but it's a fond memory. When we sat down to start doing the chunky salsa math for a small, closed-in, confined, space like that, we just gave up and called them all ker-smooshed. Either the walls and ceiling and floor held and the explosion bounced around like mad, or they didn't and the enemies fell to their deaths anyway.

A typical grenade has less than 200 grams of filler. In SR you should make your demo charges out of grenades, as the Devs have them producing insanely high amounts of damage compared to bulk explosives.

The reason I put this topic on is that grenade-linked launchers give this advantage due to their airburst capability. Also note that it is a 1500 investment (ok, that includes street index). To effectively almost double your mini-grenades effectiveness. Does that sounds reasonable?

I don't see why: if your air burst grenade blast can reflect on the ground, the blast from a grenade lying on the ground should reflect too, shouldn't it? That is the main reason I wouldn't apply it for the ground: a situational modifier that applies 99% of the time should be considered as included in the base damage code to make the game more fluent.

Airburst grenades allow you to perform head shots with grenades. Isn't that enough? Of course, if your GM keeps forgetting about the deviation rules as mine, you won't find much use for that

If blast reflection off the ground is legal and pre-calculated shouldn't reflections off walls only include half the damage of the grenade?

1) No, it shouldn't. The real chunky salsa effect lies in multiple reflections. The blast keeps reflecting untill it has fully decayed. For a grenade on the ground, the first reflection occurs at 0m. What it would do according to these rules is double the decay rate, but if the reflection is already factored in the damage, it is also factored in the decay.

2) The reflection rules are 100% artificial. Physically, the decay of a spherical blast should follow an inverse law, not a linear one. So there is no external knowledge to back this "should". All you can ask from these rules is to be playable.

This why large bombs in SR are crazy lethal. The linear falloff rules hugely increase the damage radius.

To be fair, SR3 uses nonlinear damage codes so a linear drop in power usually causes a nonlinear drop in damage boxes.

Its SR4 that has bizarre explosions. Still better than actually calculating the inverse square for temperature/fragments and inverse cube for pressure.

This is a game, not physics homework.

This is why my chemist/demolition character, Peter, usually carried around a pair of satchels with two kilo's of R15 plastique. 22 and some change at ground zero, plus chunky salsa.

The criteria for what triggers it is pretty vague, I'll admit. Best criteria I came up with for deciding whether to invoke it is thus:
At least three adjacent surfaces. Of those, at least two surfaces must oppose each other. Additionally, If any of the surfaces break, no salsa. One reflection maximum, use the largest one.

I once used Trigonometry to calculate how close someone had to be to a wall to be out of the firing arc of the machine-gun tower on the other side of the wall. I've actually included the formula I worked out in one of my location PDFs to save other GM's the trouble.

I just apply an ad-hoc multiplier to damage based on how enclosed the area is, between 1x and 3x, with .5x increments.

Here's the general breakdown

1x = Open Area
1.5x = Some objects to reflect off of/distant wall
2x = Nearby wall/Many Objects
2.5x = Corner/Hallway
3x = Enclosed in most/all directions.

It's simpler and quicker. It makes using grenades in closed spaces deadly without being ridiculous.