I am putting together a shadowrun game that is equal parts SR, star wars, and mass effect. lots of no worry ftl hopping, collapsible weapons, and things of that sort.
What I am looking for input on are cool ideas for gear.
I was thinking about making Lasers more powerful and much more efficient, making the thing you are replacing a heat discharge device, and not worrying about batteries overmuch.
one of my favorite book series is John ringo's legacy of the Aldenta, and would like to see some of the antimatter powered guns from there fleshed out. They had a hmg where the explosion that propelled the shot was a matter/antimatter reaction.

Gotta run for now, will post more later.

Well, one of the conclusions I came to when I was creating a setting a long time ago is that a combination of energy/kinetic weapons would be very popular. In SR terms, that'd probably be similar to a laser assault rifle with an underbarrel shotgun. That way if you come across something that was resistant to the beam weapons, you'd still have a good, old-fashion kick-in-the-face attack available. It would be doubly desirable if all of the old specialty shotgun ammo were still around, like Big D's dragonbreath shells and the one that knocks down doors.

That said, try to get your hands on a copy of Eclipse Phase. It has a huge collection of gear that fits in with exactly what you're after, considering that's pretty much what the setting is (SR in space; just instead of metahumans, you have custom bodies and instead of magic, you have psionics).

If I found a group of true transhumanists, I might go with eclipse phase, but I think that it goes a bit too far for my taste.

@Kronk

You should really check out Eclipse Phase ( http://www.eclipsephase.com/ ). Even if you use the SR 4.0 rules, the setting is pretty much what your describing. The best part is the PDF only costs $10.

Or, as it was released under the CC license, free, as my sig shows

I got the pdf at full price months ago, I found it free on the CGL site the other day.

That was my first impression. A little too much transhumanism for me. EP reminds me of Animes like GitS. I prefere the good old Space Operas.

Concerning SiFi weapons, in the setting I've created myself the most common guns are railguns loaded with tracers. Both pistol sized and as main guns for space battleships. The later ones will splinter upon reaching the target's calculated position based on course and speed vectors, while the trace allows visual aiming adjustments.

I could always go with a non tech Blaster, and not bother with the physics of it.

The problem with laser's the aiming. If you miss a target in open space, you have no idea how far you were off target as you don't see the beam. Star Wars Blasters aren't lasers but guns like the quadlaser should actually have invisible beams. I can accept this as a part of the SW setting, but I came up with another approach in my setting.

Isn't that true with kinetic weapons, too, though? I don't see how an invisible laser is any more difficult to track than a bullet traveling so fast that you can't see it.

That said, you can easily skip past all the transhumanism in Eclipse Phase if you're just looking for ideas. The combat rules, general equipment, and social interaction rules are all really nice for most any kind of space opera game. You can ignore the whole ego/morph bit and still get a lot out of it.

That's why "my" railguns use tracer bullets, like old WW2 fighter planes.

Another related question. If I wanted to give a dog a companion AI, what would its resulting mental stats be. I mean the dog is still a dog, but just a bit smarter, and posses its own encyclopedia.

<starts coughing> Both of those things are covered in Eclipse Phase. <finishes coughing>

That said, I'm pretty sure that an AI is more than just an encyclopedia. A datasoft is just an encyclopedia and it does jack-all for you. If he had an actual AI, however, it would be more accurant to say that he had a professional trainer/master that was always guiding or ordering him 24/7. If you also wanted that dog to be faithful to someone else, you'd better hope the AI was faithful to them first and foremost.

...back in the SR2 days I wrote my own Neo-Anarchist's Guide to Space supplement as my campaign was moving in that direction. It came to around thirty five pages in WordPerfect 5.1 (single spaced single column, no illos but did include several tables).

Included were space related equipment spacecraft, & vehicles, several new skills and a couple concentrations (like Zero G for Athletics and Pilot: Spacecraft), how to get up there, how to deal with life up there (like space sickness, claustrophobia, solar radiation, emergency procedures, etc), do's & dont's, and a lunar base and geosynch station setting.

Unfortunately it was SR2 and is now on some unlabelled 3.5 floppy disk in a box somewhere.

I considered reconstructing it for 3rd edition but abandoned the project as there seemed little interest at the time in 3rd ed. with 4th out (plus, there was already the Up the Gravity Well chapter in Target Wastelands which covered much of the same basic material).

The T:W writeup is rubbish if you ask me; I vastly preferred the CP2020 Space book.

You might want to hook up with Tzeentch, who is working on an SR4 space supplement.

-- Shadowrun laser weapons are already quite efficient, although their development has stagnated since second edition. Development only occurs when a freelancer happens to read up on some directed energy weapon development, hence the recent introduction of electrolasers (the Ares Shockbeam, p. 155, War!). Amusingly these have been in GURPS since first edition Ultra-Tech I believe (like 1996).

-- Railguns have gotten progressively more powerful, but there are no portable examples in canon (well, maybe in the wilder German sourcebooks I don't know). There's no real reason they don't show up except that in the game rules they wouldn't be substantially different from any other projectile weapon, so there is probably a conscious decision to keep them a hallmark of vehicle heavy weapons.

-- Eclipse Phase is a bit too techno-fantasy to integrate very well into Shadowrun, and most of the tech assumptions related to space travel are incompatible with current Shadowrun (which has rather anemic space infrastructure, especially since the Probe Race is long over). Some interesting ideas there that could be explained by cutting-edge nanotech though.

-- I would recommend CP2020's Deep Space, Transhuman Space (particularly the core book and High Frontier), and (if you are military oriented) perhaps Heavy Gear's Tactical Space Support for rules ideas and tech that is more directly applicable to Shadowrun. There's also my thread here on Shadowrun space development. Target: Wastelands is the only (somewhat) detailed coverage of space in Shadowrun though, so you should start with that.

-- The travel times in T: W are hard to decipher because I'm uncertain how the numbers were derived. They seem to imply that transfer craft in Shadowrun can only manage extremely anemic delta-Vs (like 0.1G burns for less than an hour). And that's for the relatively fast (in Shadowrun) LEO to Lagrange runs. The Lagrange-Moon runs are even slower. Maybe I'm misreading things though.

There's the Ares Thunderstruck in Arsenal, which is the only known portable railgun so far. It indeed is hardly different from the Panther cannon.

I beg to differ.
If you take the Arsenal Errata in consideration, the Panther Cannon has AP -5, damage code 10P and single shot costing 5.5k
The Ares Thunderstruck Gaussrifle (which I like to call 'The Trollslayer') has AP -4, damage code 9P and semi-automatic costing 13k BUT according to errata: Add the following sentence to the end of the weapon description: “Halve all armor but smart armor against the gauss rifle (before applying the AP modifier)”.
Like I said. The Trollslayer (or Dragonslayer, Tominoslayer, etc...)

-- I completely forgot about the Thunderstruck! Yeah, the halving armor bit makes it extremely nice

Okay, with the Errata it makes sense to have.