Am I the first person to notice this? Available at character creation. Cheap as dirt. 22P(f), -2/m. It's on ARS 125. But it doesn't say how much it weighs. Can I levitate the damn thing? It seems to me to be equivalent to a 250 pound bomb, which would mean, yes, I can levitate it. Why not just fill up the back of the pickup truck with these things, and use sorcery to fling them at anyone who annoys me?

Sure you can have it...And yes it is just an iron ball... (and a bit of whatever they use to break it apart)

It is an gravity bomb... you need to have a highflying plane to use it at all. (Well maybe you could just smash people with it... but you can do that with a big stone too *g*. No need to buy anything for a big rock. (Yes the Series 5 is of course a bit more complicated. (set to fragment on impact and such) But this will only happen when it is going terminal velocity.

You are not. My group has used these as easy to get explosives and purchased a few dozen. The fireworks could be seen from across the bay. It was real purty.

(Didn't do much but it was a good distraction)

My players modded a bunch of them with the Drone Walker upgrades, along with a few other drone upgrades- mainly Gecko grip and Chameleon coating.

They used them for a hit. The Hacker/rigger opened a window by hacking a household drone, and drove the bomb in. The mage made it a silent bomb, and parked it under a bed, while the face had the person out of the town.

Exactly how big do you imagine this device to be?

I was just wondering the same... I mean i have no idea HOW big they really are. But i would set them at least at 150KG if not more.

Also i just read about them again... And they seem to be bit mixed up: They are described as normal bombs... even with traditional parachute (so the plane can escape the damage) But this is not neccesarry for a 22DV bomb -2 per meter. And a big explosion is worth more than the 400 Nuyen it costs. The description is off on that one.

Either it is a normal dumb Bomb with loads of explodey (And should cost way more than 400). OR it is a big bomb which scatters on impact (or shortly before) and showers the area in metal fragment like i want it to be. It can't be both. NEED ERRATA on it NOW.

Come to think of it, even as just a block of iron 400NY is too cheap. Hmpfs... something definitly wrong here.

You put a 250 lb bomb under someone's bed? That's... evil! Wait until the target is having sex and make it one hell of an explosive orgasm!

Agreed, except the average 250# bomb will never fit under a bed...
but the visual is entertaining...

Don't forget about the Zapper Rocket either; 8P for a dead-on hit, followed by an explosion of 12S(e) at -half AP and -4/m? For only 1,150 at chargen? Yus pweese.

Yep, That is a good one too...

I feel stupid for asking this but which book are these in? I'm pretty sure I read through my friends copy of Arsenal and didn't see these.

iron bomb, pages 124-125 arsenal.
zapper rocket, page 38 arsenal.

and i don't think it was the jabberwocky... thought the jabberwocky was more electronic warfare, the one i'm thinking of is actually quite a bit like the zapper rocket... that may be them...

I feel it necessary to mention that even dumb iron bombs have a fuzing system that tells them to go off either on impact or at a specific altitude. Even in WWII dumb bombs had sophisticated (for the time) fuzes. Modern dumb bombs are really not all that dumb. Laser guided bombs have no self propulsion. I find it hard to belive that in the 70's, given the prevalence of wireless technology, that dumb bombs are only detonated via impact.

A little background here, I was in the USAF, and loaded bombs on military aircraft for a few years of my life.

I had assumed that the Series 5 was a 500lb bomb, given the 5 in the bomb name, but it really does not matter. The first thing to realize is that these are in the Launch Weapons section of Arsenal, which has the following description:

"The following weapons are large, self-propelled projectiles that can be fired from specialized launch platforms or released from the wings of aircraft and helicopters."

If you look at it from a RAW perspective, you should only be able to use one of these bombs in game if you have an aircraft with available weapon mounts.

IRL though, bombs meant to be used from aircraft do sometimes explode when those aircraft are still on the ground, or before being loaded on the aircraft. The more rudimentary the fuse, the more likely that this is going to happen. The most dangerous bomb you will ever load on an airplane is a 50lb practice bomb, which has a simple plunger on the front of the bomb as a fuse. Smack it hard enough with you hand, and it will go off. Fortunately enough, any bomb larger than a practice bomb is going to have a fairly sophisticated fuse. The fuse is almost always packed separately, and attached to the bomb as one of the last steps of the bomb loading process (cluster bombs being one common exception).

That is not to say that a determined individual would not be able to set off an aircraft bomb without a fuse. Pack the fuse well with a bit of C4, and the bomb might explode when the C4 is detonated. This leads me to the next thing that anyone wanting to use an aircraft bomb without actually mounting it on an aircraft should know...

The most common bomb in use by the USAF today (OK, 20 years ago when I was active) is from the mk80 series of bombs, and only about 45% of the bombs weight is the actual explosive. So, say that the Series 5 is a 250lb bomb, like the mk82 (250lb bomb in the mk80 series), this means that there is only about 112lbs of explosives in the bomb. The bomb itself is about 6 feet long and a foot or so in diameter. So for your 4000 nuyen, you are lugging around 112 pounds of explosives encased in a 6 foot long, 138 pound tube of metal, and you are going to have to rig a fuse and hope it does the trick. Not very versatile.

On the other hand, TNT sells for 200 nuyen per kilogram (which is about 2.2 pounds) in Arsenal. You can buy 440 lbs of TNT for the same price, blow more things up more reliably, and not have to break your back lugging around the wrong bomb for the job.

Given that this is an RPG forum, I'm shocked by how many people here are incredibly cool people. To make sure my manner is not lost to the vagaries of textual communication, I will clarify; my point is that your answer indicates a background of incredible badassery that is surprisingly (but in a positive way) common on these forums.

Given that the bombs lethal radius is roughly 10 meters, I'd assume is supposed to be a 250 pound class bomb (actual bomb may weight slightly more). It'll be around 6 feet long and 7-8 inches in diameter. If you are buying it for the explosive content, no more than half of the bomb weight will be actual explosives. If the bomb is also meant to be used to penetrate concrete, etc an even smaller percentage of the bomb weight will be made of actual explosives (~25% or less).

I'd also expect any bombs sold in 2070 to be smart 'winged' bombs, rather than the simple drop and hope type bombs of the past.

Also, if you are planning to buy bombs, you'll need to look into forging your self and end-user certificate, and arms sales aren't just 'a couple of bombs'. You'd need to buy a whole lot of them too.

The entry for the Aztechnology Series 5 Iron Bomb is quite specific in describing it as an "unguided gravity bomb". And the availability and procurement rules show that this weapon can be had one at a time, at character creation and in play, rather easily, with an availability of 12F and a price of 400 nuyen. Arsenal 124.

note the F, while "easy", you should in no way transport something like that openly, unless both you and the vehicle your transporting it in is somehow related to government (or maybe big corp).

and if one want a laser guided bomb, or similar, grab the mortar seeker head from p38, arsenal (house rule, but why make it hard on the group?).

I don't see a problem w/ it.

Don't forget it has a (f) damage code... so that's an automatic +5 armor boost for barriers and those hit by it... if the targets wearing 8 points of armor 13... 5m away is enough to downgrade the damage to stun.


Quite frankly... I see it as an overgrown frag grenade. There's no reason drop safeties can't be disabled in the same manner as a grenade launcher round removing the min range safeties. In fact, I doubt the bomb itself even has much in the way of safeties. If it's anything like the Mk80's the bomb itself is just a big slick iron casing filled w/ a highly stable explosive. The fuzing, guidance, and retardation(parachute) packages would then be bought and bolted on seperately. (that's how it's done today) To keep the headache to a minimum, I'd probably include a basic fuse for each bomb w/ the package.

Given the size of the yield probably 100lb (50kg), 250lb at the outside but that seems a bit large for the effect. I see no reason it couldn't be contact, altitude, or command detonated.


Compared to what someone w/ the demolitions skill and explosives can do it's not out of line. I see it mostly as a cheap way for groups w/o a demo specialists to get a big bang IMO.


Another way to think of this... if someone chucks 3 bound frag grenades into a space together and sets them off together... can he get a similar effect? 3 grenades is pretty cheap (compared to the bomb) and not a stretch at all. If the ratings were simply to add... then you'd be at 24P pretty quickly as well. So I don't think that's correct, but it serves to illustrate the point.

Given that this is an RPG forum, I'm not shocked at how many people here are incredibly cool people. There are some great people in this hobby. And Shadowrun does seem to attract a good share of them.

K.

Amen Brother...

Keep the Faith

Um, a 105mm artillery HE round (which weights 35 pounds) has a much bigger lethal radius.

the awakening did something to explosives of all kind, from gunpowder on up to hydrogen bombs...

Oh, right...

oops, forgot my typical there, sorry kzt.

or let me say it in another way, yes i understand explosives are apparently weaker in SR then in real life, but frankly, i dont care as long as SR is at least internally consistent. And with SR4 it seems to be, as one can turn of the shelf explosives into grenades now, rather then observe grenades pull tricks that one could never do with available explosives.

another thing to consider is that shrapnel damage is random as hell. and when explosives destroy buildings and similar, its rarely that its reduced to bits by the explosion directly, and more likely that it took out some vital support structure and the place imitated a house of cards...