Wimp. Use a REAL gun. A 12 pound Mountain Howitzer loaded with canister. It's one of the most insane gun stories I've ever read.

Awesome...

"I fully support Gun Control. Frankly, I find it hard to believe that Civilians have a use for Artillery."

Actually, just said this line at my local FLGS/Army Surplus Store to the Ex-Military Owner (Who looked like I sprouted a second head there for a moment) when I started examining the 81mm Mortar Shell cases that he was selling. (Just the cases, no mortars or shells were available. I asked.). He smiled at the second part and agreed.

That said, there is a friend of the family that scares off the US Military with his cannon, so I might be wrong in that theory.

Yep, I got to say, I heard several high ranking officers in the Corps discussing that very dilemma. One of these days they are going to get that lunatic, and then Canada will not be safe.

The cost of the gun is usually nothing. It's the cost of ammo that's the problem, if you want to develop FPS-hero like levels of skill, which are absolutely necessary in this day and age.

You know how we always like to talk about friendly neighborhood game shops? You need a friendly neighborhood gun shop. I was able to get a Kimber TLE2 custom, used, for only $600 or so one time at one.

Nice...

Rage! The big differences are weight, reliability, recoil characteristics, trigger pull, and which one feels more comfortable in your hand.




RAAAGGEEEEEE! Firstly, reliability. Secondly, durability. The vintage 1911 is going to be made with a softer steel and won't last for as many hundreds of thousands as rounds as the USP before the slide starts to crack. A true vintage 1911 will also be made with loose tolerances and will probably be less accurate than the USP, and more prone to failures especially when using hollow point or other speciality ammunition.

Thirdly, especially if we're talking about modern 1911s, a slender, comfortable grip, and a crisp trigger pull, and a safety you can ride. Why is it that all the top USPSA competitors shoot either glock or 1911 variants, and none of them shoot USP? Because the ones that they do use are better in all the small, right ways to make the difference between a champion and second place. I cannot believe you are even making a comparison between a USP and a 1911. They're completely different beasts which are used today by people with completely different things that they want from their weapons.

Have you ever tried to ride the decocker on a USP? As a 1911 shooter I've done that in the past. The result is causing a malfunction of the USP. The USP has got a characteristic Euro-wuss mushy trigger pull, and a huge part of the reason someone would use a 1911 instead is because they want a nice crisp trigger pull.

I really cannot believe you said they're similar.



RRRAAAAAGGGGGEEEEEEEEEEE! There's huge differences between the weapons! Reliability, and accuracy for the 400 yard headshot. Trauma and wounding, and penetration of solid objects, are all going to be different based on the different cartridges used by the respective rifles.

The M-16s nowadays come with nice accessories, but with an old AK 47 you're going to have to duct tape them on. This would really affect how easy it is to use the weapon and longer and longer ranges if you start adding the expensive optics.

The AK is a lot shorter than a full length M16 and is probably easier to use indoors. I would feel a lot more comfortable using my AK as a melee weapon than I would my AR.

With my AR I baby it a little bit. With the AK I use it cheerfully content in the knowledge that since it's not that accurate in the first place I don't need to stress as much when running around with it. I have a bayonet for the AK but not for the AR.



See, if you really wanted to do it right, running a crisp high end 1911 would let you shoot just a little earlier than you normally would in the turn, representing superior handling and a crisp trigger pull, but then there'd be a 1% chance every time you pulled the trigger of getting a type 2 or type 3 malfunction.

The USP would have a lower chance of malfunction but that mushy trigger pull would not boost your initiative.

If you were running a Sig 226 and you fired your first double action shot, you'd take a very slight penalty to your initiative to represent the looooonnnngggg trigger pull and the need to adjust your finger position.

It's not really complicated once you've had the chance to go out and shoot. Once you've experienced a bunch of different firearms it's not complicated since you remember your experiences instead of having to abstract everything.

Why don't you come and take a vacation in Las Vegas? You'll be able to rent and fire a variety of guns, including handguns, rifles, submachine guns, rifles, automatic rifles, and even .30 caliber machine guns, at the local ranges.

If I want a 1911... Er, was ever allowed to OWN a 1911, I should say, I'd get a Para-Ordinance myself.

Y'know, I looked into flechette weapons, and from what I read it seems that they should have HIGHER AP and LOWER base damage - needle type rounds tend to go cleanly through an unarmored target, conserving more momentum than traditional bullets, but penetrate a vest better. Am I mistaken in this? Maybe they should be -1 DV, -5 AP (Impact).

[Edit:] Reversed an erroneous plus sign

You mean -AP, I think. Yup, if you were 'realistic' about it, flechette should pierce soft armor (but, of course, not hard armor). SR doesn't do it that way; instead, it's just techno-whizbang shotguns. *shrug*

I think the best fix would be to keep shotguns as they are and make flechettes -1DV/-5AP (Impact). Thoughts?

Too good. That's the same as APDS, except 2R. Nothing wrong with the basic idea, though.

Right off the rails.

None of those things are modeled in the game, as with everything else in your post. Unless you want to model a few dozen more aspects of firearms in the game, there's nowhere to put any of that information.

Can you rent those in Canada? How did you come to realize that you wanted that particular 1911? Were you in the military?

I'd consider getting rid of certain things that are already in the game, such as super-awesome cumulative recoil compensation of headshotting death, and maybe instead implement some of this other stuff in its place. I mean as long as we're talking about messing with the rules in the first place.

Regarding these two posts:

Impact armor is already relatively weak compared to Ballistic armor, so the grace of using Impact armor is usually worth a few points of AP on its own. It's only when you move up into high-grade combat armor or heavy modification that Impact armor is higher than the 4-6 range.

On top of that, +2 DV is probably worth negative 6-8 points of armor, strictly from a damage standpoint. So against your average target wearing a 6/4 armored vest, +2DV +5AP vs Impact is (conservatively) worth something like 3 gross AP in the shooter's favor (+6 damage mod -5 AP mod +2 Impact benefit, from the shooter's perspective).

More to the point, the 9 DV of the flechette shotgun is going to tie outright with the 4 +5 Impact armor, meaning any net hits gives you physical damage. On 1 net hit (10 DV), that target gets his 9 armor dice +3 (average) body, for 3-4 expected hits, or 6-7P damage. Comparatively, the 7 DV -1AP non-flechette shotgun with 1 net hit is going to do 8 DV against 5 Ballistic +3 Body, for 2-3 net hits, or 5-6P damage.

Against someone in an Armored Jacket (8/6), however, it skews a little differently. With 10 DV from the flechette round, you're looking at Stun damage (against Impact 11) and 14 dice (4ish hits), for an expected 6S. The slug, however, will only do its 8P, but that will breach the modified Ballistic 7, giving you an expected 3-ish hits, or 5P.

Beyond that, flechettes will need a lot of hits to cross into Physical damage.

What this amounts to is what we knew all along: flechettes are preferred against lightly armored or unarmored targets, while other ammo types are preferred against moderate to heavy armored targets, presuming you actually want your target to be physically injured and die. Flechettes still always come out ahead in the DV bonus vs AP penalty fight if all you're considering is raw damage, and don't care if it's S or P. The major downside to flechettes is that they will routinely fail against hardened armor.

You're right: shotguns are (and should be) be good at causing Stun damage (against armored people). I'd say more 6 than 8, by the way, which is presumably why they made the +AP 5.

Flechette, on the other hand, is supposedly designed to *pierce* soft armor (anything that's not literally solid plates). It's a mistake of terminology that SR uses flechette for shot.

I'd also be fine with the possibility of flechette ammo not having Spread; the Slivergun always sounded to me like it shot little spikes, not clouds of them. This aspect is up for grabs, though, because the canon for flechette is a cloud of spikes (IIRC?).

Let's not even mention SnS, except that it's fundamentally superior to Stun-inflicting shotguns in every way.

Things like accuracy modifiers just don't mean very much compared to other things in the system. When the computer on your gun that predicts where to shoot based on range and target motion only grants you a +2 bonus, what do you think would be a fair bonus for being able to shoot a 4 inch group instead of a 6 inch group at 10 meters?

As a note, personal preference could be indicated by a focusing Specializations down to a single model of firearm (like "Ares Predator") instead of a loose collection (like "Semi-Automatics").

Other factors like durability and reliability would simply add unnecessary rolls and bookkeeping to the game. "Says on your sheet that you've fired 8000 rounds with that gun, time to put in for a replacement barrel!" Or, "You fire a shot. Now roll the weapon's chance to jam." Jams and more serious weapon issues are already designed to pop up on glitches and critical glitches. If you wanted to model an extremely unreliable gun, you could add in a quirk that the weapon needs one less '1' than usual to qualify for a glitch or critical glitch, or that glitches are worse than usual and critical glitches are beyond catastrophic (as with weapons like the Monowhip).

Now I'm usually a big house-ruler and I love designing new ways of doing things, but messing around with the firearms system is playing with fire. At best, you'll probably just manage to make it annoying.

Flechettes actually do pierce soft armor pretty well -- that +2 DV is nothing to sneeze at. You're at a better damage-to-soak ratio with +2DV +5AP than a flat -1AP. You're actually slightly better off than you would be with no DV modifier and -6AP. What you see, though, is that when you get to moderately-armored and better targets (Impact of 5+ or so), flechettes end up converted to Stun more often. They're still likely to do more raw damage.

I'm interested to see the final result of this, as it appears to be a much more detailed version of a revision I was doing (basically, I was going to revise damage & ap values slightly, & change ammunition tracking from by weapon category to by caliber, based on damage & ap).

At the very least, you gave me what I needed to finish my revision - ammunition types (not being a major gun enthusiast myself).

I would think flechettes would pierce plates better than bullets would - they don't deform nearly as much on impact, they have superior velocity, and they hit a much smaller surface area - thus, greater force per area, IIRC the defining trait of armor-piercing ammunition.

Also, as flechettes have negligible recoil (or should, anyway, based on what I've read), I should think they'd have less spread when fired in bursts or full auto, which ALSO improves AP capability.

APDS is DV +0, AP -4. I'm proposing DV -1, AP -5. I would also change flechettes (not shot) to Ballistic resistance, as they're actually going faster than most bullets. Basically a net AP -2 on average, with a greater chance of doing physical damage than normal bullets.

I would think flechettes would pierce plates better than bullets would - they don't deform nearly as much on impact, they have superior velocity, and they hit a much smaller surface area - thus, greater force per area, IIRC the defining trait of armor-piercing ammunition.

Also, as flechettes have negligible recoil (or should, anyway, based on what I've read), I should think they'd have less spread when fired in bursts or full auto, which ALSO improves AP capability.

As I mentioned before, fin-stabilized darts (which is essentially what things like the Tiffani Needler fire) tend to go cleanly through unarmored or lightly-armored targets and do less damage than bullets would.

This houserule (DV -1, AP -5) would make flechettes into cheaper, easier to find, but less effective AP ammo, and encourage the use of shotguns for less armored targets - a good thing in my book, as shotguns are rather underpowered in this edition compared to SMGs and assault rifles.

[Edit:] I should have said up front, I propose splitting flechettes into shot (shotguns) and darts (needle guns), superseding the SR4A description of flechette ammunition on page 323.

It comes down to the same force as a solid shot distributed over a wider area. You can get a little back from shaping the flechettes to maximize their individual force vs individual area, but the overall energy of each flechette will be much lower.

What you're thinking of is more like an APDS round.

I'm basing my view of flechettes on things like the needler, which sounds more like it fires fin-stabilized darts than a bunch of razor shards. I've looked into RL examples of flechette weapons, and the ones that were actually worth something all used that type of ammunition.

[Edit:] I should have said up front, I propose splitting flechettes into shot (shotguns) and darts (needle guns), superseding the SR4A description of flechette ammunition on page 323.

They also have a tenth of the mass & are easier to divert.

Theoretically, the advantages of a needlegun over other projectile weapons are its compact size, high rate of fire, and ultra-high muzzle velocity. A needlegun takes advantage of the principles of kinetic energy and conservation of momentum, allowing a low-recoil delivery system to inflict significant damage to a target. Recoil is governed by momentum, which is the product of velocity and mass. By conservation of momentum, the change in momentum of the gun must equal the change in momentum of the projectile. The needle projectile has a very small mass, so its large change in velocity does not result in much recoil (change in velocity of the gun itself) since the gun has a mass much larger than the mass of the needle. Damage inflicted is related to the kinetic energy imparted by the projectile on the target, which is 1/2 the projectile's mass multiplied by its velocity squared. Since the needle has a very high velocity and a negligible mass, recoil is minimized at little cost to the kinetic energy of the projectile and its damage potential. The high rate of fire allows the user to fire many needles quickly with a minimal loss of accuracy due to recoil effects, giving the needlegun supposedly large damage potential and precision in combat.

-Wikipedia article on needleguns, emphasis mine

Except SR flechette rounds are described as:



So SR flechette rounds are your tiny shards. I don't see a weapon in SR4 or Arsenal that disagrees with this description.

If you want to go all RL on the topic, that same Wikipedia article also says that the US developed several flechette weapons, but none had significant advantages over the M-16, so they didn't bother with them after. Not exactly a ringing endorsement for making super-AP flechette weapons.

Use APDS instead. It's exactly what you want.

Actually, it says they didn't meet the 100% improvement over the M-16 the military required.

Rent a firearm, in Canada? HA! I can't even legally TOUCH someone's rifle without the right licenses. The likelihood of me getting one feels less likely every year, too.

As for why I know I want that particular type, a few reasons. Research for once. Secondly, they're Canadian. With the new laws about magazine size, I'd probably get their version of the 1911 rather than the high capacity models they started the company with. (They actually started making conversion kits for original 1911s to give them 14-round magazines.). Cripple magazines are not a good idea.

As for learning about them in the military, the Canadian Armed Forces still uses Browning Hi-Powers. I remember hearing somewhere that they're still issuing pistols that were manufactured for WWII, which are still waiting in the original crates, still in the packing grease. So I doubt I'd be able to play around with other options there. But to answer your question, no, I was never in the Canadian Armed Forces. I would never have been able to pass the physical.

"Although all the designs worked well, none managed to meet or even approach the 100% improvement over the M16A2 that the program demanded." If you drill down ever further.

Oddly enough, Ares Incorporated submitted an entry.

Steyr put in one of the more successful entries, but the round their weapon fired is definitely APDS.

Epicedion, you never actually read people's posts. Tyro was saying that he'd *like* flechette to shoot individual 'needles', as opposed to a *cloud* of tiny shards.

'Flechette' derives from something like 'little arrow', whereas SR4 flechette is something like 'sharpened shot' (instead of lead spheres).

Tyro, I don't value the -1DV as heavily as you do, that's all. The ability to breach -5 armor is a really big deal, compared to the highly-illegal APDS. For me, just being able to do P damage massively more often is enough to justify -2DV. Combine this injection toxins or something if you need more damage. I also *really* don't agree that they'd pierce 'hard' armor at all, but SR4 doesn't model that category anyway.

I'm on your side for the concept of low-damage, soft-armor-piercing flechette. It makes sense, because there are a lot of people out there in 2070 wearing armor clothing and the like. It's also a step against the basic SR4 system of the 'if it gets through armor at all, it's enough to kill you' problem. I continue to find it very strange than all the weapons have AP much lower than DV, ensuring large amounts of Stun damage, or the above 'catastrophic kill' situation.

Easily solvable, quad rails, AR style buffer tubes to mount AR stocks on, grips with storage and most other AR like accessories are readily available for AK and AK variants on top of thier own unique style accessories like side rail scope mounts. Granted AK 47 rounds do tend to have a lot more drop and are affected more by windage, but this is where a smartgun system would really shine, close the gap in accuracy and raw power becomes a much more important factor (althouh at longer ranges the AK 47 loses a lot of that raw power).

You need to make some trips to the states. I'll supply the ammo, though I don't have a 1911 yet, its on my list right up there with an AK47, AK 74, or Desert Eagle.

Someday...

Random idea to the OP:

One other attribute you could add to your mega-chart is Quick-Draw ability- Smaller, lighter, or lower-ammo-capacity pistols should be slightly easier to get out of the holster than the big honking Ares Predator.

One way to model this is just have a single number for each frame, or each individual gun that represents the quick-draw threshold, the standard is 3, a machine-pistol might need 4 hits, or a specifically designed easy-to-draw light pistol might only need a 1. Furthermore, if the balance was right, there might be certain specialized SMGs that -could- be quick-drawn, but the threshold would be quite tougher - 5

You might need to re-work the quick-draw holster rules to add dice to the test as opposed to lower the threshold (threshold 0 tests are rather undramatic).

This could be a nice way to help balance-out the heavy-pistol vs. light pistol choices.

I do read the posts. What he wants is for SR4 flechettes to resemble certain kinds of RL flechettes, that SR4 already effectively models as APDS.

As for low-damage/armor-piercing: why? You seem to want a bullet that's specifically designed not to do Stun damage, but also not to kill people.

I'd call it a subsonic round, better for use in enclosed spaces since it's quieter leaving the barrel.

Those are in Arsenal. They exchange an AP penalty for better Perception penalties, especially with a suppressor.

Anything that transfers less energy is going to do less damage and be worse against armor. There's no way to make something that's awesome at penetrating body armor but then poor against the flesh inside, unless you make slow-moving highly elastic teleporting bullets.

You're right, Epicedion. Tyro is talking about something that is in some ways similar to APDS. And I addressed the *numbers* in my post, but the concept is the same.

As for this bit ("There's no way to make something that's awesome at penetrating body armor but then poor against the flesh inside")… Sure there is. We're specifically talking about something that pierces. It goes through the soft armor, but then makes small holes in the flesh. So, you're right again: we *are* talking about something that's good at Physical, but is *balanced* by being less total damage (in boxes). Do you find that ridiculous?

At the moment, we're specifically talking about the Slivergun; it's weird (at least to me) that the slivergun is an automatic hand-shotgun, instead of a needle gun. I personally think it would be interesting if at least this one weapon had a funky piercing (and perhaps non-spread) attack. I'm pretty sick of everything doing Stun, or just murdering you outright. The fact that real-life flechette exists (even just as a concept) provides a nice opportunity to tweak things.

Actually, I do. Your steel/ceramic/duraplast/kevlar/ferrocrete/whatever shell of armor, even if it's just armored clothing, is orders of magnitude tougher than human skin. Its job is to absorb and distribute the force of a projectile impact, because the only way the projectile does serious damage is by concentrating its force on a small area. The better a projectile is at piercing the armor, the more energy that projectile is going to carry beyond the armor. The more damage it's going to do to whatever soft target is behind the tougher exterior.

Even in the case of overpenetration, the bullet is going to go clear through the target, causing rip-roaring entrance and exit damage.

What might do what you're thinking would be a bullet specifically designed to penetrate a certain kind/quantity of armor. We're talking exceedingly fine-tuned, beyond what would be reliably practical. This hypothetical bullet would be designed to breach that specific kind of armor, and then still have just enough leftover kinetic energy to do light damage.

But it would never function in the "real world."



The Slivergun isn't a shotgun, so doesn't use the shotgun spread rules (those rules are specific to shotguns, not all flechette weaponry). My view of the Slivergun, based on its description, is that it fires a light spray of small shards as opposed to bullets -- this isn't exactly the same as a shotgun firing flechettes, but the idea is that it has equivalent DV and AP mods. These shards lack any armor penetrating punch, but work well against bare skin.

The Slivergun is an assassin's weapon -- integral suppressor, burst fire, and the tiny fragments probably can't be analyzed and matched to a specific firearm.

I'm not really worried about the 'real world', though. The SR game world has this crazy Stun issue, and it would interest me to change it. I don't particularly like the unclear spread-flechette vs. non-spread flechette issue (is it explained anywhere?), either. AFAIK, anything firing flechette that's not a shotgun is simply limited to Narrow Spread (mechanically identical), so I'm not saying there's a rules problem there.

I certainly don't like weapons that function totally differently against bare skin vs. Rating 1 armor clothing (the famous leather jacket phenomenon). I also think that standard spherical shot fully covers the 'high damage, terrible against armor' paradigm, without wasting the flechette concept.

I understand that this thread is ostensibly about realism, and this might not go here, of course.

That is simply not true. This creates a kind of bullet wound called a through and through. This is typically a high velocity bullet that passes completely though the body. Typically the bullet remains completely stable, traveling point first, exits fully intact at high velocity and the very small amount of tissue it destroys holds nothing important. And the guy struck is largely unaffected. .30 cal carbine bullets were notorious for this in WW2.

Stable, solid, deeply penetrating are exactly what you want from an AP bullet. This is NOT what you want to maximize incapacitation.

Ideally, you want a bullet that penetrates armor with little to no lost energy, and then expands and ricochets around the innards, tumbling wildly.

In otherwords, a magic bullet.




-k

Indeed, kzt. I'm certainly not saying it would be optimal; far from it. I just think it would be an interesting, balanced alternative option in the game. The sort of opposite of a gel round. Especially with an injection poison gimmick option, or someone immune to Stun, or possibly a spirit's armor (tough call, there).

Oh, good to know. About .30 cal carbines I mean.

How does that compare to .357 magnum FMJ?

I don't see what the big deal about physical damage is. Stun incapacitates as well or better (orks and trolls especially tend to have fewer stun boxes than physical ones), is better for your public image, is good for taking hostages/prisoners, and you can easily kill them later in many cases. 1 DV is equivalent to 3 AP on average, assuming you don't have more AP than they have armor. Needle ammo as I've suggested is less effective at damaging targets than EX-EX, but is relatively silent, essentially recoilless, has BF/FA capability in a small package, and is compact enough for very large magazine capacity; I see it as balanced. Changing needle-type flechettes to ballistic only makes sense, as they actually go significantly FASTER than standard bullets.

Incidentally, if you want something with great AP capabilities which also does massive internal damage, your best bet is probably a fin-stabilized dart which explodes once it pierces armor (maybe some kind of sensor to detonate it a hair after the resistance changes).

The funny thing about physical damage is... it kills you.

If they go faster than normal bullets, they're not silent (-er, -ish, anything).

The thing is, there are already plenty of options for stun: SnS, Gel, Capsule, shotguns (effectively), etc. I'd like something that could reliably do Physical, without being brokenly powerful. Just for kicks. Physical is harder to heal, for one thing.