I believe it is somewhere in the Cannon Companion, I know it was in Fields of Fire for the 2nd ed. Could someone help me out with page references.

I want to know the multipliers basicly. However I can't seem to find it. With there being no index it seems hard to find. Maybe I'm just sleepy.

No worries, mate. SR3, p. 276, FIREARMS, first paragraph.

No multipliers, modifiers, nothing. It's pretty silly, of course, but them's the rules if you want to use them.

also:
Pg. 84 CC, but that's for making your own.

Well, maybe it's not silly. I mean, with all the shadowrunners running about wreaking havoc they just might be buying enough guns to make it worthwhile to produce two totally different but identical-looking versions of the same gun. You know, between their rock concerts.

~J

That's why I included it

On a tangent, would it be possible (and any less expensive) to get saboted ammo that wasn't AP? Lack of contact between bullet and rifling=good, but using APDS rounds all of the time gets expensive...

~J

Given that using a discarding sabot on a round will decrease the weight of the round and subsequently increase its velocity, all other things being equal, you'll get at least some increased armor penetration whether you want it or not. That's basically what discarding sabots were developed for, after all. Yes, you could, say, shove a lighter bullet inside the sabot and hollow point it, but you're going to get some bizarre ballistics and for no good reason. For that matter, can't imagine why it'd be less expensive.

Anyway, don't forget the sneaker endorsements. Ah well; I came to SR looking for gritty, immersive cyberpunk, but now I know better.

I've got no problem with it penetrating armor, I'm just looking for something cheap that won't have ballistic data from the gun.

How traceable are the ballistics on MMGs/HMGs/etc? I can't think of any reason why they wouldn't be just as identifiable as always, but it never hurts to ask...

~J

Okay, I'm about as far from a gun nut as you can get, but... the ammo is discarding sabot. Doesn't that mean it's going to discard something... something with traceable ballistics characteristics? And I sincerely doubt that the discarded sabot is going to poop out the gun like a gumdrop while the projectile rockets away at ballistic speed...

Glories of the internet, http://www.tpub.com/content/USMC/mcwp3141/...mcwp3141_10.htm says they're going to be 100M away, within a 34 degree arc from the muzzle of the gun -- and that anyone in that area is in danger of being hit by a sabot petal. Something to think about next time you fire APDS into a crowd.

For a time, at least, rifling was very important to accuracy. Do modern guns circumvent that somehow? Seeing as they produce Fin Stabilized Discarding Sabot, and that non-Fin Stabilized is referred to as "spin stabilized," I don't think so.

In short, if you want to be able to hit your target, you're going to be ejecting something that can be traced.

Of course, there are advantages to that tracing being on discarded sabot petals some distance away from the actual target... but in situations where it's really important, that's not going to matter as much.

I believe they have sabot that fragments into pieces too small to be effectively pieced back together and studied. I may be wrong, though.

~J

If they don't now, they will in 2064 for just the reasons you're looking for it.

What you want are target practice rounds.

http://www.tpub.com/content/USMC/mcwp3141/...mcwp3141_12.htm

(Starting on bottom right).

They use steel instead of tungsten as the projectile, and have similar ballistic characteristics as the APDS.

Remington makes non-AP discarding sabot ammunition today, marketed under the "Accelerator" moniker. The idea is to be able to use big game rifle cartridges for varmint/small game hunting. All are .30-caliber rifle cartridges sabotted to a .224" bullet; a 55 grain pointed soft point. It was originally available in .30-06, .308 Win and .30-30 Win. The concept hasn't sold very well, to the point that only the .30-06 load is available today (55 grain PSP @ 4080 fps = 2032 fpe). The cost is comparable to other high-end .30-06 loads.

The problem is one of accuracy. The smaller bullets used need a faster rate of twist than most larger caliber rifle barrels provide in order to stabilize the bullet in flight. As a result, long range accuracy tends to suffer. Fortunately, in the case of the .30-06 Accelerator, most .30-06 barrels have a twist of 1/10 inches. Working out the twist rate for a 55 grain PSP, I come up with 1/10.5 inches using the Greenhill formula. So that bullet through that rifle will be stabilized properly.

If you're talking about using sabots to avoid identification, fctarbox3 is right. You'd better be picking up your sabots. Rifling marks will be all over them. Small arms sabots are usually a single piece of nylon (except for shotgun slug loads). With small arms, the distance the sabot travels is going to be a lot shorter than that of a 25mm cannon. According to Cartridges Of The World, 8th Edition, about 30-50 feet. While there may be a danger of hitting someone unintentionally, the sabot itself doesn't weight very much and it is designed to decellerate very rapidly after it clears the muzzle. It's pretty unlikely that skin would be punctured through clothing.

Oi, totally missed that I was looking at a 25mm gun. Whoops, yeah, that's a little different from standard side arms.

"No, boss, it's just a heavy pistol! Really heavy..."

I stand by my comment that by 2064, somecorp will have invented a Disintegrating Sabot round for assassination and black market purposes.

Sure, is call a smooth bore. No rifling marks on the sabot. If the projectile is fin stabilize rather than spin stabilized you don't even need the riflings. M1 Abram fire a 120MM smooth bore. No reason you couldn't make a 25mm smooth bore. The would be just a touch bigger than the old 4-bore shotguns.

This gun is smoothbore as well, and quite a lot smaller than 25mm. Still not very handy, though.

In regards to ballistic information good CSI types can pick up from your spent rounds filling the walls of that Ares lab....

1. Does a silencer affect the markings left on the bullet so if you ditch the silencer/suppressor after using it in a run, the bullets couldn't be traced back to your actual gun?

2. I've also seen some attachments on guns that seem to add another inch or so to the barrel. Descriptions usually say its a balancing attachment to help with recoil or somesuch.. Is it possible to change the marking of your bullets by adding a piece similar to that recoil modifier, and gives it slightly better spin/range? Is one inch extra of a barrel enough to add anything significant to a bullet range wise, or marking wise?

I think they alter it a little but not much.

Why keep the gun anyway, what is a Predator 450 ? Trash the damn thing. Keep one around for protection when not on a run, and then have a run stash. When the run is over throw that pile of evidence in the Sound. Don't forget to wear your gloves while loading though. People have been caught because the gun was found in a river, later finger printed, lifting several ggod prints off the gun oil and the guy was covicted. The gun was still in good shape after a year or two in the river.

If you're worried about forensics, just use Explosive or Gel Ammo.

I am also not a gun expert but I have a hard time believing they could get rifling marks off of shattered fragments or a flatted blob of gel.

But there's less explosive floating around, making that easier to trace. :\

Ahh! A caseless smoothbore shotgun is what you need. Smoothbore so the projectiles are not uniquely marked and no spent shell to leave more ballistic evidence traceable to a particular weapon.

I thought using caseless ammo increased clip capacity and there was a price increase.

Is that from SR2??

Apparently. It does not happen with any canon SR3 weapon, for certain.

The only rules-wise differences between cased and caseless in 3rd Ed SR seemingly have to do with manufacturing ammunition.

The majority of actual explosive ammunition would still probably come from commercial sources, such as Armed Forces contractors. And while making bombs from common components is easy enough, many shadowrunners might tend to go for the high-end stuff, like C-12, which is quite a lot more difficult to cook at home.

And not all shadowrunning teams have members or know people who can readily make large amounts of effective and useful explosives in a short time. Thus they would tend to have explosives that come from commercial sources every now and then.

And this is nothing compared to the Improvised Explosives thread.

In the CC section about making ammo, there is a part explaining how much harder it is to make caseless.

What about the bit where after you shoot someone, run a rat tail file down the barrel of your gun a few times. Gun's pretty much a paper weight now, but if crime reinactment shows can be believed, the bullet can't be traced to that gun. Right?

Yeah, sure, but you might as well throw the gun into a river. Or if you take this thing really seriously, you could use some thermite...

The amount of filing it takes to completely hide the original patterns would, as you said, screw the accuracy to a point where the weapon would be almost useless.

I've got government sponsored files on my computer, downloaded from the homepage of the Finnish Defense Forces, that tell me how I can stop tanks with home-made materials and how to build and effectively use chemical weapons, so I've never bothered with that kinda stuff.

Neat, care to post?

http://www.mil.fi/reservilainen/pdf/suojel...unkasikirja.pdf
Only in Finnish, sorry. Doesn't even appear to be a Swedish version, even though that's (supposedly) our second official language.

The AT stuff is here. Same thing with the languages.

I'm not gonna translate the few hundred pages and post them, either.

Now if only I had maintained contact with that Finnish tech i used to work with...

So what would be the best bet for a SR criminal to do to avoid ballistic fingerprints? Change the barrel after every run?

OT: Which language group does Finnish reside in. I an read (with varying degrees of fluency) most Romance languages, along with German. Finnish seems to from another planet.

Finnish is Finno-Ugric, subset Finnic/Baltic-Finnic; a group which includes other, well known languages such as Karelian, Ludian, Vepsian, Ingrian, Votian, Estonian and Livonian.

The larger group, Finno-Ugric, also includes the different Sámi languages and Hungarian and a lot of other, really small languages from all over Russia, Eastern Europe and all the -stans.

Finno-Ugric FAQ

you could just use wepons without a ballistic fingerprint, like: bows, grenade launchers, spray weapons...

or you could buy cheap guns and use a different one each time. or you could pick up your cases, and dig the bullets out of your enemies, and the walls

-Mike R.

Maybe since for APDS the sabot is discarded, the sabots can be "collected" be a screwed on silencer or some sort of muzzle attachment.

Would it be too expensive to make the sabot self-destruct (burn away, for example) after it's been fired? If it's made of 2 pieces, it could be a chemical reaction triggered by the 2 pieces separating.

And even if it was possible, would any ammo manufacturers do it? Do they mind the discarded sabots much?