For flechette only weapons and shotguns (f) is the same a regular ammo for them in my games.



Flechette and shot have different rules on one point, shot can use different chokes. Your silver gun fire little metal barbs. Your Room Sweeper fires a blast of shot that blast of shot can hit multiple people if your are luck.

I personally am puzzled as to why armor designed to resist knives (impact) is also used to resist shotgun blasts.


-karma

I wasn't aware that Flechette and Shot differed (re: choke). I assumed it simply meant that only real shotguns had the option of choke settings, but that they still used Flechette ammo. See SR4A, p154.

The Roomsweeper, then, *isn't* as I described it earlier (normal Heavy Pistol). Instead, it explicitly has access to choke rules, unlike other non-shotguns. That seems fair and functional.

It's my understanding that Flechette can mean anything from single metal 'spikes' to bundles of metal spikes/discs/bits: "Flechette Rounds: Tiny, tightly packed metal slivers function as the business end of a flechette round." The Slivergun indeed seems to fire single slivers instead of shot. In SR4, they all do the same damage, though, and access to choke effects seems to be a function of the gun (=shotgun, specific exceptions like the Roomsweeper), not the ammo.

KarmaInferno, because all shotgun blasts in SR4 *are* Flechette (i.e., 'knives').

Well the is it the gun or the ammo issue is in the air but it's kind of both. Flechettes tend to be only one per shot in most normal ammo loads. As when packed as multiple rounds per shot you end up with a shotgun. But this can be a heated issue so lets not get in to it more so seeing that small-arms flechette are designed to defeat body armour but the "smaller size" leads to lesser wounds.

Yeah, but the damage characteristics of flechette in general is a lot closer to getting hit with a burst of regular ammo fire than it is to getting sliced with a knife.

Personally, if I was re-writing the rules, I'd have given shot flechette a damage and AP bonus, but have it resisted by Ballistic. Leave Impact armor for melee attack resistance.



-karma

Oh, sure. I'm not trying to defend the realism, just the in-game logic.

Similarly, Dumori, I'm only talking about how Flechette works in-game: it's defined as a bunch of tiny bits, except for specific weapons (Slivergun). Choke rules only apply to shotguns, except for specific weapons (Roomsweeper). Shotguns fire Flechette (tiny bits), and that's it (except for the Street Sweeper, of course).