He did say 'trying'.

Or 18ish bullets.

They are one use, but the prices on grenades are pretty wonky. (But that is a SR thing. Bullets are 2 a piece, etc.)

Because one shot can potentially hit multiple targets.

And do zero damage to all of them, oh joy.

depends on the kind of target. gangers can be shredded.

Even gangers will most likely have the needed 9 dice to negate the damage consistantly.
Using those damage codes a grenade launcher might kill a bunch of fluffy bunnies if their close enought to each other.

Bunnies are a clear and present danger!

huh? 3 body, and 2 from leather jackets? or are we talking habitual kamikaze users?

Well, of course there is no "right" or "wrong" way to equip gangers - it really depends on how the GM seems them in his world.

For me, however, body 3 + leather jacket sounds more like a human pedestrian than a street tough. Life on the streets and in a gang is supposed to be tough and should weed out the weak and stupid ones fast. So in a world where the streets are a LOT unsafer than they are today (at least in that areas that HAVE gangers), I'd expect a ganger to at least wear some basic armor.
He might not have a school education, but he's not a D&D goblin either, and he will probably have put a lot of thought into daily survival on the street.

Maybe, maybe not. Look at bikers. Higher BOD and STR, sure, but not necessarily careful, rational equipment choices. Possibly intentionally *bad* choices, for machismo. It all depends on the gang.

daily survival dealing with knifes and the odd pistol, not explosives.

also, while life may be rough, they probably are not eating that well or getting their meds. Basically, a ganger may be 3, but the pedestrian may be 2 or even 1, depending on how harsh the environment is around their place.

interesting tho, the halloweener example in SR4a have bod 3, but is given a armored vest rather then a leather jacket.

Especially when you consider that 2¥ is the equivalent of $10 US...

I can never keep track of the exchange rates.

You do realise that makes no sense as even a hold-out pistol does more damage then a grenade launcher in house rules where talking about.

Actually, we're talking about what gangers wear.

I agree with you, where the AP version is concerned, though I might be extremely charitable and call it a light AV round. However, the Frag and HE rounds supposedly have a kill radius of 3 meters. It's likely more like 1 meter with a wounding radus of 3 meters, but they said 3 meters, and in SR I'd give it the full 3 meters and just assume the 2070 version has a more powerful explosive.

An error I just noticed, the frag grenades should be 8P/5P, not 6P/3P.



I disagree with that conversion rate, as that would make a baseball bat cost $150 equivalent, or diner for one in an average restaurant $100-125 equivalent. While 1¥ may equal $5 in UCAS dollars, it does not compare to $5 US.



You are forgetting to factor in that grenades go against impact armor, not ballistic armor, and HE grenades have AP-2. A Holloweener grunt shot with a hold-out has 9 (BOD 3 + Armor 6) dice to resist 4S damage, while the same ganger that is within 1 meter of the grenade will have 5 (BOD 3 + Armor 4 - AP 2) dice to resist 3P damage.

Well i would still call that grenade useless, when even a ganger with only little armor wont most of the time take more then 1 point of damage, meaning you have to shoot him with 9 more grenades before he goes down.
And of cource your example is completdly omiting the fact that hold-out pistol damages increases with 1 for every net hit the shooter gets and they can also load that pistol with better ammo.
For example using explosive rounds and getting one net hit(minimum needed to actually hit the enemy) does 6S damage that the ganger has to resist with 9 dice

Honestly, I wouldn't mind micro-grenades at a very low strength, but a Mk67 should still be a big old lethal grenade. Micro (maybe = Frag-12, maybe not), 20mm, 40mm, Mk67, etc.… my whole point is that there should be a progression.

Well, it's actually $4 UCAS according to the wiki (which is sometimes up to date).

Adjusting for inflation (and oligopolies forcing prices up through collusion) I'd say it's about $2 US.

$60 isn't much for a good alloy bat that won't break over the first troll skull it strikes,
and the luxury of Genuine Food™ in a world of soy ought to cost just about $40-$50 a head.

According to the sympathetic detonation rules in Arsenal, regular grenades use rating 8 explosives while microgrenades use rating 12 explosives.

Getting less of a better thing for the same price seems like it ought to produce about the same effect, especially when you consider how the demo rules have explosive damage sliding on an exponential scale.

For the record, 12ga. = 18.53mm. Reduce by 1/2 mm (though it's actally a little less) to account for the shell wall and call it 18mm.

Yes, but I'm saying there's room in my game for grenades of varying power, not that different sizes are necessarily how that works. The explanation really doesn't matter, see? After all, you could always make the bigger ones with the good stuff, and pay for it, and so on.

Tachi, it depends on the length and everything. I was thinking of the OICW 20mm, but I recall now that they actually bumped that to 25mm… anyway, the point is, range of powers.

Yeah, shotgun shells and grenades of different types vary significantly in length. I merely put those numbers out there to illustrate to anyone who doesn't know that there's not much difference in the diameter of a 12ga and a 20mm, and while some of that length difference adds to the payload, much of it is propellant, significantly increasing the range.

BTW: The XM25, a derivative of the XM29 OCIW, does fire 25mm, but the OCIW itself is 20mm.

I understand your premise, and I agree, in principle. SR, however, tries to keeps things simple ( ) by standardizing grenades. In order to do as you're suggesting you'd almost have to rewrite the entire projectile/grenade weapons part of standard SR. Personally, I hate the way guns and grenades are done in SR4 and am considering rewriting the whole thing to account for differing calibers of ammo and grenades of differing sizes and types, for use in my own games. In the process I'd write a weapon creation 'guide' similar SR3's.

But, as mentioned by Saint Sithney, the way things stand, the difference in explosives could easily account for the lack of difference between grenades of different sizes, think ANFO vs. C4. But yeah, I'm not really disagreeing with you.

So the regular HE grenade is approximately 1.5 kg of rating 8 explosive, or 1,200¥ equivalent plus detonator, and the microgrenade is approximately 0.7 kg of rating 12 explosive, or 840¥ equivalent plus detonator.

And I'm with Tachi in wanting to get more detail in the weapons/ammo/grenades section.

I find that the bullet DVs match up nicely to real-world bullet-power *categories* (9mm, 5.56, 7.62 short, 7.62 long), but I couldn't say if they match up in a linear way. The best correlation formula (R^2=0.9799) that I got from muzzle energy to DV is a power curve, but obviously muzzle energy is only one of a dozen measures.

There are three factors that determine ballistic damage effect; The frontal cross section of the round, the velocity of the round, and the impact energy transfer. A .45 Long Colt with a lead flat nose bullet has the first and third in spades, however the second is significantly lacking, especially when compared to a round like the 5.56 mm NATO or the .270 Winchester. In '01 I worked up a fairly complex formula for determining recoil, power, staging, and an armor penetration rating for firearms in SR3 using some fairly complex algebra 2 kind of math that I can only partially remember at this time. I've got some more simplified simplified formulas for SR4 that I'm working on, but I'm not completely satisfied with them.

Yeah, and that 1.5 kg of rating 8 explosive puts a standard grenade at about the size of a grapefruit.

This damage system definitely needs work, but I don't think reducing grenades to 1/3rd of their original effectiveness does it. Maybe raising them to 3x original cost and making better claymore-style explosives rules would help. Scaling DV is such a pain in the ass though..

[quote name='Saint Sithney' date='Jun 11 2010, 03:47 PM' post='941023']
Yeah, and that 1.5 kg of rating 8 explosive puts a standard grenade at about the size of a grapefruit.
[quote]

Yes, and that's just the explosive. Add in the detonator and shell and you'll get about another inch to the total diameter and half kilo to the weight. Have you ever thrown a 2 kilo object? A real life hand grenade weighs around a half kilo and has a quarter kilo of explosive in it, while a GL grenade is about a third of a kilo and has only 15-20 grams of explosive in it.

So, I just re-read the rules for creating an IED.
It's an extended test, where all hits over threshold count towards the DV of the device. I don't even know how to handle such a situation. Could a player keep taking tests until his DP is reduced to an unreasonable number? Could someone with logic boosters and a decent demo skill prep a grenade which does 20DV or more with just a kilo of commercial explosives? Taking 18 tests with 18 dice means atomic grenades are on the menu...

It seems like you just stop after you succeed. The net hits (on the last roll) is just a minor random element under any normal circumstances, a +2 or +4, maybe.

RAW is a bit absurd in that aspect (i was able to build a character with a dicepool of 27 on demolitions, and on a related knowledge skill, which would be able to buy 264 hits or average 363 hits rolled in a little over 19 hours using the book recommended limit on extended tests), however, if you limit it by disallowing overrolling (once the threshold is met, no further rolls can be made), it makes it much more acceptable (same character would buy 18 hits, or average 22 hits rolled in just over an hour).



It is possible that that is RAI, it isn't RAW.

I guess. I've never heard that you're allowed to continue Extended Tests after reaching the Threshold. It seems like deliberate rule-mangling. RAUnintended, if you will. Anyway, it makes no difference, because all games will have GMs.

In most cases you never have need to overroll but its deffently RAW if not RAI in demo tests.

how net hits from an extended test works have never been established in the rules, iirc. I think this may be the only place where its outright stated tho, but i think there may be one or two places where such a test could come out of corner cases.

Once the threshold is met, you do not continue rolling... any hits remaining over the Threshold (when that threshold was met) will add to DV...

EDIT: As multiple others have pointed out... what I get for not reading to the end of the Topic.

Keep the Faith