I was thinking about one of the more annoying traits of Shadowrun, vehicle damage codes.
Vehicles seem to only have two states when it comes to weapons. Either the weapon bounces off like rice thrown at a turtle or the vehicle is totally destroyed in a single hit.
To remedy this I came up with a homeruled damage code system as follows:
Standard Damage: Unchanged
Vehicular Damage: All damage codes are ended with a V, such as 7LV. Vs.
Naval Damage: All damage codes are ended with an N.
AV weapons against vehicles act exactly like normal weapons against metahumans. The same is true of Naval weapons against Ships or Main Battle Tanks. Where the possibility of confusion exists, Armor will also have a V or N to mark it as Vehicular armor or Naval Armor. This will allow, for instance, drones equipped with metahuman-grade armor which are good against small arms but are not classed as vehicular, finally making the lower-grade armor in Rigger 3 useful.
When going from a lower damage system to a higher:
All armor is always hardened vs. a weaker damage code.
No Armor is ever hardened to a higher damage code.
Armor is halved against a higher damage code.
The power of a weapon doubles when fired at a lower code object. What's worse, The code is automatically D in any hit against a lesser target, for instance a Light Railgun inflicts 14D damage to any Vehicle and 28D to metahumans.
It requires double successes to stage down a hit from a higher code, for instance if a Troll were shot by an Anti-Vehicular missile he would need 4 successes to stage MV damage to LV. Similarly for that Troll to stage down Naval Damage would require 8 successes per stagedown.
Fat Tony, a Troll Street Samurai, thinks he's pretty tough. In fact with various cyber-mods he's got a body of 22. Unfortunately he just took a hit from light Railgun and now he needs 8 successes against a TN of 28 to survive. Good luck Chummer.
So, good idea, bad idea? Probably I won't actually implement this as it'd require practically rewriting the entire system's worth of charts. But I think it'd work better than the current one.