I never really understood that though. If I hit someone hard enough with shock gloves I should both break bones and short out their nervous system.

then coat high explosive rounds in poison, and you can have your cake and shoot it too.

Just enchant them to be one use do-hickies. I think the game has suggestions for stuff like that maybe just as unique enchantments.

double post

You mean like anchoring a knockout spell to your capsule rounds designed to trigger when the capsule breaks?

It's just a game balance thing. Everyone and their gramma strutted around in shock gloves in late SR3, punching the bejeezus out of anyone that needed a good punching. Also, a whole lot of characters found out that laying that much stun damage on someone -- a solid shot from a dedicated hitter plus the stun damage of the glove/baton -- overflowed real fast into physical, and was a good way to accidentally kill someone (like a double tap with a taser often did, as well).

If you don't think it'll be an issue at your game table, feel free to make shock gloves and stun batons do regular and shock damage at the same time.

The way I explained not double dipping on damage with stun batons and gloves, is that you are either going for a quick hard hit (club or punch damage), or you are going for sustained contact (electrical damage).

Well, the game already has a precedent for how damage adds up when you get more than one attack simultaneously in the form of burst damage (and many of the weapons with special rules that work like burst-damage-light such as the double barrel weapons). So, what I have decided to do that adds potency to the shock gloves but isn't overpowered is to treat it like burst damage.

In general I've decided to give the player a choice of any 2 of the following benefits

+1 Damage, -Half Impact, Electricity damage effects

Or you could give them the electricity damage effects and their choice of half impact or +1 damage (would probably be more balanced in preventing abuse to gain raw damage)

And if you find that is still too good, just give them the choice of only 1 benefit.

No, Mordinvan,I'd want them to do bullet damage, poison damage, AND then explode; not 'mere' explosive rounds.

I would like to make the Shiskebob from Fallout 3.

Weighted balls attached to monofilament wire which are attached to feed reels at the player's belt and have powered winch capabilities, slapped on a throwing adept. Designed to wrap the opponent or object and create long lengths of kill zone between the player and its target. Then the winch to create powered tension with Rooted adept power to cleave things in half.

Oh, the balls would be in the consistency of a Spy Ball, capable of bouncing so usually you'd ricochet it behind your opponent to wrap them up effectively. For safety, the reels and winch and various other components would be wired to various powered attachments that run on your PAN to avoid snagging.

All I can think is shock batons don't have the weight behind them like a club does?


What is FAB?

I'd argue, that since astral beings move at the speed of thought, and physical arrows move significantly slower, that astral beings could dodge without a test assuming they're aware of the attack. But that's just an reason to enforce the "no astral ranged weapons" concept. If it enhanced the game, and had a significant cost, I'd allow it.

Actually, the Smartgun mod in arsenal has no such restriction in its textbox - some guns are (smartgun only) or (cannot be used on certain types of pistol) - it is simply an internal version of the one in the core book.
The description -there- says "the smartgun system connects a firearm or projectile weapon directly to a users smartlink."
Swords and knives may be thrown, so they are projectile systems( improvised throwing weapons, p20 arsenal).
So, uh, yeah. Smartblade systems are RAW. They are, however, pretty silly.


The worst thing I've come up for them is Volatile Memory Storage. Take.... twenty or so Grenades, high explosive i think it is, that cost 35 each. Smartlink it for double cost. This costs 1400 nuyen. Smartlinks are device rating 3, so you then Cluster them all. Take an Agent 3, with Common use 6(optimized 3) and the necessary hacking programs at 5 with Optimized 2, and viola! If you're ever traced, all you have to do is shoot your cluster, and BAM! there goes the evidence. Volatile memory indeed.

In my current game, our hacker bought an old Fairlight Excalibur case off a collector's side - you know, future ebay. Just the case, no guts or anything,- and modified it pretty heavily. Extra armor, powered breakdown, enough room for an emergency commlink inside - and basically turned it into a flip open ballistic shield.
Seriously. Those old decks are huge.
He hasn't had a chance to brain anyone with it yet(when not deployed)- sure, its an improvised weapon - but one day, someone's going to get whacked over the head by the hacker's retrodeck, and not see it coming at all.

I what thinking for a nasty smartblade having a UB hold out. Give the gun a pilot. Throw the blade. The pilot when it knows its stuck in a target then shoots. Atcutally using piloted smartguns for tasks is very useful. IE ejecting empty clips swapping to another ammo clip when you run dry ect.

Oh, come on, we can do better than that.

Smartblade throwing knife with Voice Activation/Response - what, its cheap.
Now our knife can yell at people!
It can taunt them!
It can shout "I hit!" when it does.
It can play Marco-Polo with its thrower!
It can constantly yell "I'm here! hit me again! " to its thrower, who has earbuds with a Spatial Recognizer in his earbuds.
We can put another knife on the knife (via Advanced Safety), so when someone unfortunate enough to get hit with this creation tries to pull it out of their thigh or whatever - they get a knife in the hand.
In fact, we're going to add insult to injury - by using a Survival Knife, which includes a GPS.
And smartguns can use Information Targeting to guide remote weapons platforms.

Survival Knife: 50
Smartknife: Another 50.
Voice activation-response: 50 more
Spring trigger spike fuck-you? 300 nuyen
Throwing a knife into someone, and having it call for an airstrike?
Priceless.

the poison and bullet damage is easy enough. I don't know to add in the explosion, cause really if a grenade detonates inside a human body is an anti-mater device, because noting matters once its gone off.

Well, it has to have a blast radius, too (natch). No point in not completely destroying the game, after all.

Hn, melee weapons I've come up with? Glove, chemically sealed on the inside with two chemical reservoirs (As she is female, these are actually under the boobs with tubing going down the sleeve to her glove), that can be triggered to seep a mixture of them across the palm side of the hand. This is for slapping someone with ones favored chemical cocktail literally.


Now the hilarious thing about this is my character is ..lets call it twitchy. She shes constantly touching her equipment, rubbing her arms, rubbing her hand against her leg, the upshot of which is occasionally by the end of the mission no one can touch her because shes managed to smear contact knock out chemicals all over everything she owns. (-she- has a very nice chemically sealed suit and gloves and boots..no skin showing, so its not particularly a problem for her but..)

Why not just pre-mix them and put that in the glove itself? And have it only be dosed on demand, via command? Unless you get BP for handicaps.

Versatility, and some chemicals have to be mixed right before use

And its not that it isn't dosed on command- its that she'd been using the derned thing and got residue on all her drek

When you hook a smartlink up to a smart weapon, you are able to get a crosshair in your field of vision showing where your bullet will fly, because the bullet's trajectory is known to the smart system based on the weapon's statistics: its power, its ammo type, etc. It's not perfect, but it works very well.

This will not work with a thrown weapon, because the wielder's throw is not consistent or known to the smart system. It has insufficient data to calculate a crosshair. It doesn't know where you're aiming or how hard you'll throw at that particular moment. Can you put together a silly system to make it work with your skillwires or cyberarm? That's up to you and your GM to try. I'd say don't waste time.

Mesh

Thrown isn't projectile. Crossbow and rocket launchers are projectile weapons.

My favorite definition of "projectile" on the net:

In Mekanimo, projectile is a rigid body (usually a circle) thrown with an initial velocity.

Mesh

For what it's worth -- silly as it may seem -- there IS a canon example of a throwing smartweapon. Shadowbeat established a precedent for "'smartball' technology, a chipped-in combination of a ballistic computer and cyberoptic scanner that boosts accuracy in passing and shooting" amongst basketball players.

I remember smartlinking up a projectile weapon (a bow or crossbow) was also canonically possible.

Whether these things mean you can apply every single smartlink perk to an individual projectile fired from that weapon -- a ball, a bolt, an arrow, a throwing knife? -- is the sort of thing likely best left to individual GMs. My gut tells me it's ridiculous and stupid, and furthermore my gut says I'd just tell my players to be happy if I gave them the base targeting bonus (TN mods in SR1-3, bonus dice in SR4, instead of letting them see out of a knife blade and stuff). Other guts may say different, though, and if it flies at your game table then so be it.

Your 'insufficient data' arguement is easily fixed by a Datasoft 6 - for 60 nuyen. Bzzt, try again.

And, really, the skill test to install a smartgun on a weapon would include calibrating the weapon for the smartgun hardware. So you arguement is double-bullshit, because you're saying that when you install it on a weapon(A Threshold 8 hardware test, remember?). you don't, in fact, configure it to work properly. Therefore, by your logic, a smartgun system should not work on a real gun like a ruger warhawk, because it doesn't come with the data necessary to make ballistic calculations.


That being said, i kind of agree with you. I probably wouldn't allow the +2 to be applied to stabbing people(Then again, with the smartfootball example, are kinetic calculations really that different than ballistic ones?) - but the issue isn't whether you get the bonus or not its whether you can smartgun upgrade it, and thus apply smartgun only mods. On second thought, for my example, a survival knive has a GPS, which means a device rating, which means it doesn't actually need a smartgun to run programs and scripts, and you could just slap a microphone/speaker on it via the Commlink/Electronics Mods rules in unwired.

I don't think that's what a 'Datasoft' is. He said: exactly where your hand is aiming, how hard, etc. … And guns do, dunno why you say they wouldn't in your counter example.

Because if a smartlink is auto-configured to work with a gun when the modification is installed - then the same must hold true for other weapons its installed on, otherwise you have a double standard for the same piece of equipment.
Such a knife.
Or a sword.
or a grenade launcher
or a rocket launcher.
Changing how a mod works, just because 'DERP! Its on something non-standard, clearly the hardware doesn't work somehow'..... doesn't make sense at all.


And...yes, actually, it is a Datasoft. Weaponspecs certainly aren't a mapsoft. or a tutorsoft. Or an IC. Ditto BTL or VR gaming programs. Therefore, the catch-all-library-of-data-on-asubject Datasoft category is the most appropriate.

Er, no. The point is that there *is* no data on where your *arm* is aiming/going to throw/how hard/etc., not that you *don't have* data that does exist somewhere. He clearly explained.

With a gun, you aim high and low, and left and right. Range differentials -- extreme ranges, here -- mean that the smartlink also has to adjust your "high and low" part for distance and gravity, and your "left and right" part for windage...but the fact remains that a given type of bullet fired from a given barrel is going to propel itself with a given amount of force. Period.

With a projectile weapon like a compound bow (with a given draw length) or a crossbow (ditto), that remains the same. With a regular bow where the draw can vary from shot to shot, the power will vary. Wildly. That means new calculations for the "high and low" aiming, new calculations for how much gravity and wind will affect the target...but, as long as the smartlink gear built into the bow is able to be calibrated for arrow weight (same as bullet weight), and has some way to built-in measure draw length and do the math for the power of the bow...you're still -- theoretically -- fine. You point and draw, it can tell you about where the arrow's gonna be, and what path it'll take to get there.

The momentum thing gets thrown all out of wack when it comes to...well...throwing things. Suddenly instead of a reliable amount of force sending a projectile down a straight barrel in a known direction, you've got a billion and one variables. Look at a major league pitcher, or a pro basketball player, or a quarterback. How many different ways do they throw? How many different ways do they release a ball, vary their grip (one hand versus two versus just a few fingers versus matching fingertips to seams in a certain way)? How many different ways can they angle their arm (overhand versus underhand versus sidearm versus a hook shot and on and on and on)? Even WITH the same grip, the same release, and the same angle of arm...how much power will be behind every throw, based on how fast and hard their arm whips forward?

A gun always sends projectile x forward at y velocity. That it does so is a technological marvel, and modern firearms are engineering masterpieces that constantly amaze me.

A human body -- fingertips to palm to wrist to elbow to shoulder to all the weight and balance behind it -- is infinitely more complex, and as such unpredictable.

How's a smartlink supposed to wrap it's head around that?

At most I see these sort of "smartball" gigs displaying (on the linked cyberoptics mentioned) a potential arc and path of travel, the way most FPS video games might show you for a lobbed grenade or other thrown weapon, for most users. Toss in Move By Wire, Skillwires, or a linked-up Cyberarm, and maybe the smartball/smartgrenade/smartknife can adjust accuracy (by taking over your arm, pretty much) a little better...but really I just don't see how smartpitching is supposed to work.

Can anyone justify it? Explain it in common sense terms?

I agree, its completely absurd - but the rules and common sense are two completely seperate things.

Critias, we've had inertial guidance and gyroscopes for years now, and shadowrun has radar scanners small enough to fit in microdrones. How hard would it be, really, for a weapon or device to discern its own movement and velocity?

Additionally - while throwing is well and good, what about melee?

Shadowrun already has predictive software good enough to observe, analyze, and offer expert output on the best possible course of action when it comes to movement and weapons - its called a tacnet, and it does add to both dodge tests and melee attacks. The point being, that shadowrun software is advanced enough to handle split second biophysics calculations.

If you are using real-world logic, then I shall too.
The current guiness book of world records for speed punching is Robert Ardito, with 805 is one minute, an augmented human. Thats about 13 per second.
I think its fair to say an adept or cybersam can match that.
The time for one of those punches is 0.07 second.
A shadowrun Combat Turn is 3 seconds.
In the time it takes one punc h to start and finish, a Tactical AR soft is capable of seeing where the punch is going, at what speed, and telling the person its aimed at how to avoid it.
That means, in less than a tenth of a second, the computer deals with all the motion and musculature physics that go into a punch, the follow up, the recovery, whether its going to potentially be followed with a one-two punch, a kick, a knee or elbow strike - all very detailed skeletal and motion phyics, and give an answer. And this is without any sort of sensor components on the person throwing the punch.
These same kind of calculations - motion, muscles, what goes where, how fast, at what speed, stance, which hand is doing what - are exactly the same kind of calculations that go into throwing and pitching.

So yes. Shadowrun software is certainly advanced enough to predict and process throwing motions.

Sorry, I'm still reeling from the mental gymnastics of 'a smartlink should work the same on a sword as on a grenade launcher'.

Yes, sensors can easily calculate the path of a thrown weapon… after you throw it. A smartlink calculates the path *before*, so you can aim.

I was working an edit in while you replied. See that post.

I think the Tacnet actually predicts fighting styles ahead of time, instead of warning about blows. People probably couldn't react to a warning fast enough anyway.

The point is that there is vastly more variation in a thrown weapon's path than in a fired bullet's path. In addition, there's no muzzle to point for the basis of the calculation.

I don't understand, are you arguing that RAW says smartlinks can be used on thrown or melee weapons? I ask because the rules clearly state that only firearms or projectile (bow, crossbow) can have smartgun systems. (Smart *gun*).

If you're proposing a new house rule for some kind of 'smart melee' or 'smart throwing' software system, that's quite different.

Shishkebab

The shishkebab is a sword that has a reservior of a phosphorus-based liquid in the blade. When activated the liquid is forced through pores onto the surface of the blade, coating it. In normal atmosphere this causes the liquid to combust, sheathing the blade in flames. Of course such a weapon is incredibly dangerous to use. Of course this is offset for some users by the awesomeness of a flaming sword.

Game Rules
Damage Str/2+4P | AP -1 | Reach 1 | Avail 9F | Price 3500
Notes: A glitch with this weapon indicates that some of the phosphorus mixture has spilt onto the user resulting in 4P AP -1/2 damage. If a critical glitch occurs the weapon explodes in the users hand. Treat as a white phosphorus grenade.

Dragon's Tooth Sword

The Dragon's Tooth is a weapon consisting of a nanotechnologically created blade, which is dynamically 'forged' on command into a non-eutactic solid. Nanoscale whetting devices ensure that the blade is both unbreakable and lethally sharp.

Game Rules
Damage Str/2+4P | AP -3 | Reach 1 | Avail 24F | Price 32250

Yo dawg....




But of course they are.

I was just thinking, do y'all think AP -3 is enough for the Dragon's Tooth? Maybe it whould be -1/2 or something.

That's a fair point, the ranged weapons with -1/2 AP can be incredibly destructive and tend to eliminate any melee considerations from the game. A melee weapon with this sort of AP would definitely even the playing field. But as it's made completely of nanotech, I would think it would be quite fragile.

How does the smartgun system account for a smartbow user pulling on the string with different strengths or even differ angles?

In any case, the issue is not whether the smartgun system can calculate the trajectory; just whether it can be installed at all in order to install dependant upgrades.

Not to get into the definition of "is", but given that the tables distinguish between projectile and thrown weapons, I do not believe, by RAW, that smartknives are kosher. I don't have an issue with installing it anyway with the understanding that it will not provide any bonuses.

I feel like the length of pull and the angle of arrow are eminently reasonable for a sensor/computer to calculate. They're deterministic.

Agreed, though: I'm happy with any 'smart' weapon, when 'smart' means 'peripheral device'. But a Smartgun/Smartlink +2 is only for guns, rocket-type launchers, and projectile launchers.

The same way it can detect heat buildup, ammo levels and stress somethings in a normal gun, I imagine. (AFB)

Um, I was just using the smartlink modification out of arsenal as a prerequisite to getting the explosive self destruct. I wouldn't ask the GM to let me actually USE the smartlink bonuses when I threw the bloody thing... just use the wifi link to set it off.

Honestly, if doing the exploding knife trick this way is stretching the RAW too far for a missions game, I'd use a different method to do it. Granted, at that point it's COMPLETE GM fiat whether I can get the stupid things manufactured, but at least I can probably get someone to sign off on it if I build them up custom. Just thought that the weapon mod rules would be the easiest way to cover it.

That makes sense, then. However, it's still not the right solution (to me). You're paying way too much for what you're now getting, see? All you really need is the cheapest little wifi-on-a-chip + chewing-gum-stick-of-C4, not a Smartgun System, or a Commlink.

I was thinking about suggesting commlink + explosive but after some thought, I would recommend explosive + radio detonator + firewall. Much cheaper than smartlink route.

How d'ya figure? The internal smartlink mod doubles the cost of the weapon. Lets see, for a throwing knife thats... 20.

And the explosive self-destruct costs all of an extra :nuyen:400. Given that using this method, I get a listed damage value for the explosive, rather than having to calculate it from the demolitions rules (and thus open up the whole question of what would be a reasonable amount of explosive), I just figured that this would be the easy option.


EDIT:BTW, Mmmmmm, NERPS.

Fine, if you think 420¥ per knife is fair, when a real grenade costs like 25¥…

Use shocking or the knife in a knife mod.

+100 for the advanced safety system and 400 for the explosive self-destruct. So it's actually 520 versus 40 for the detonator plus cost of explosives. Though, it gets tricky there. I don't have BBB on my phone; just arsenal, nut it looks like the cost of raw explosives for the same damage value, 10P(f), would run you over the smarting version, but I would think there would be a way to get explosive cost down to the same range as a frag grenade (35) per knife.

Edit: if my phone's so smart, why can't it spell "frag"?

Crowbar
Str/2+1P | AP 0 | Reach 1 | Avail 2 | Price 30
Note: Glasses not included

-

Chain
Str/2+1P | AP 0 | Reach 2 | Avail 1 | Price 25

-

Pata
Str/2+3P | AP 0 | Reach 1 | Avail 6 | Price 450
Note: When wielding the Pata the user gains 1 point of impact armor. Cannot be combined (or even worn with) forearm guards.

Sure, I'll pay that much for an explosive that doesn't scatter as long as I get 1 net hit on my throwing test ('cuz I stuck 'im!) I have terrible luck with scatter rolls.

Granted you could probably make it cheaper. If there's a way to build it that I could still use in a missions game, I'd be all over it.