Various weapons and weapon modifications reference "caseless" ammunition.

A simple question: where are the rules (if there are any) for caseless ammunition?

There aren't any. There's a blurb in the core about how each weapon can only use one or the other (cased or caseless), but that's it. Costs are the same, stats are the same, et al.

Thank you kindly for your quick and coherent responses.

So effectively, it is only a distinction that makes it harder for PCs or NPCs to scavenge ammo. Interesting.

It's mostly flavor, as far as I can tell.

Not so much, as anyone would probably have changed to caseless by 2070. There are no longer the drawbacks (higher cost, less safety) of today's caseless ammunition, while the advantages should remain (less weight, less space). Also the scavenging problem is mitigated by the sharing of ammunition between weapons of the same category.

One of the advantages of the caseless ammo is that it leaves less forsenic evidences to be used against the PCs. But it's also true when PCs are tracking some other people.

But it doesn't jingle prettily when you fire.

This so much. I usually insist on belt-fed weapons using cased rounds just so I can narrate that wonderful sound.

i can see this if the PCs were in a deep Shadowrun mission, or if it was in a Post Apoc setting where ammo was limited. if the Players had stated that their weapons used caseless, and they found an ammo supply full of cased ammo, then yeah,. they would not be able to use it. but for the most part, i don't see it coming into play that often.

I ruled that revolvers use Cased Ammo. I like the idea of Belt-Fed weapons using Cased as well.

As for a Post Apoc setting... Oh man, the cursing my group did when they were paid in pistol ammo... All they had were rifles, and considered full-auto to be something to avoid at all costs except in vehicular combat.

Cased vs Caseless has always been mostly fluff in Shadowrun. Said written fluff implies caseless is more common, but the art usually implies the latter.

Regardless the fluff also states that a caseless weapon holds a few more rounds than a cased one, so if you convert a weapon you would gain or lose some ammo capacity depending on which way you went.

IMHO it is only even in the fluff because the H&K G11 was still new and cool when the game was originally being developed. The actual G11 was cool, but the ammo had production cost issues, and was not adopted. In SR we do have the "G12"

Anyway, in my games we assume the stats are for cased ammo unless the specific weapon's fluff says otherwise (the "G12" for example), and a weapon cannot be converted from one type to the other. This makes caseless a curiosity in most games.

P.S. in especially realistic games, spent cases as evidence, might change the desires of the runners in this respect. But if caseless is unusual, the bullets might end up being more traceable than a common case would be.

P.P.S. if the bullets are the same, and caseless versions of common weapons can simply be ordered, than any smart runner should go for those (even if the capacity is the same), since there would be less evidence left behind.

There's also the issue of replacing all the old cased ammo stockpiles that countries have, and NATO agreements on standardization of ammunition and magazine styles.

The Colt Government Model 2066 is caseless as well, BTW.

So at the very least any weapon is available in caseless and cased setup.

According to the book all assault rifles do share the same ammunition, but by RAW not even the Colt M22A3 and M23 share magazines, not to mention all the other weapons whose predecessors had STANAG magazines.

Or the AK-97 and AK-97 "Carbine" can't use the same ammo or magazines either.

Really needs to be a carbine class of firearm, methinks.

my understanding is that all weapons use caseless ammo by default.

guns using cased ammo is old or "special" case

my 2cnts

I'd include "Civilian" weapons in that list. Shotguns and Hunting Rifles, for example, without "Special Order" items in caseless. Something to help the authorities if it gets stolen of course...

Shadowrun has always been hilarious about not differentiating really between cased and caseless.

Back when SR was first written they thought we'd all go caseless eventually.

If you wanted to be realistic caseless weapons would have extremely high rates of automatic fire compared to cased. They should be able to spit out over a thousand rounds per minute, and theoretically the first few rounds in your long burst would be mostly unaffected by recoil because they'd be through the action and out the barrel so fast.

Cons to caseless systems are ridiculously high rates of ammo expenditure, questionable safety, problems with overheating, and costly ammo.

Turns out expelling hot brass also helps keep your action cooler.

So actually it's kind of a big difference.

The question is whether you want to deal with suchs a difference ingame.

Chamber and slide still has to cycle to get a new round into the barrel and also push the firing pin back (electrical firing mod not withstanding..). So while I do think there would be a bit of firing speed increase I don't believe it will be enough to make that big a difference. If you want stupidly fast fire rates for your weapons use the High Velocity mod.

As I recall, caseless gave you a minor increase in ammo capacity in SR2. I think it did the same in SR3. I guess the extra 5 bullets (it was like a 10% increase) wasn't worth the hassel of having to deal with it in 4th ed. You could always house rule it that way.

The answer to the question is a resounding yes. Micro management of gear helps me get in-character.

Wikipedia lists the cyclic rate of fire for 3 round burst mode in a G11 as 2000 rounds per minute.

The G11 cycled ammo so fast that in the time the floating block fully recoiled once, the weapon had loaded and fired three times.

Reports from people observing stated that a burst from the G11 sounded like a single gunshot.



-k

In that case (hyuk), each weapon basically has to be cased or caseless from the design phase up, right? So it's not a player decision in terms of ammo at all. A weapon modification might be available.

I'm currently playing SR3, but I still like to use the rules from SR2 Fields of Fire:



I really like these rules, as it gives an advantage to caseless ammunition, but at an additional cost. I don't want everyone running around with caseless weapons, as I much prefer the paranoia involved with leaving brass and other evidence behind at the scene...

The extra capacity is nice, if you have a firearms-oriented character. The additional cost per 10 rounds will really eat up your nuyen though, if you're trigger happy. It's a nice trade-off, just like many other aspects of Shadowrun.

Need a brass catcher mod now.

That's easy... It's called a revolver.

Unless you're using that Nerfgun... I mean the Enfield Merlin.

Athough the new Super Warhawk artwork does look like a Maverick...

Or a Bolt-Action Rifle, if you're only going to use one shot.

But for anything else, yes, brass catcher.

I guess the fact caseless never caught on just goes to show that rate of fire isn't everything.

After reading the wiki write up I think it was a technical limitation (complexity of the chamber mechanism) along with the fact that it would have pretty much been the only caseless ammo weapon in common use that kept it from being adopted.

One of the biggest barriers was simple lack of need.

Most nations at the time had supply chains with normal weapons that worked just fine, and saw no need to spend a large amount of cash and adopt a new untried technology, that had a unique ammo requirement not compatible with anything else.

It was an answer to a question nobody was asking.

I understand in Germany local politics had a hand in killing the project as well.

The only way caseless ammo is going to gain significant traction is if it works with existing weapons with little to no modification.

And that will be hard to engineer, since most firearms depend on the cartridge case to form a proper seal during firing - when a round goes off, the pressure from the exploding propellant expands the case slightly, sealing it against the chamber walls ensuring a clean delivery of propelling force out the one direction it's supposed to go, rather than leaking pressure out the seams. Additionally, ejecting the spent case also ejects the powder residue, whereas in a caseless system the residue sits in the firing chamber and can foul later shots.



-k

I recall in my teenage years playing SR2 that one GM i had ruled that Caseless ammo was more flammable, so more susceptible to being ignited by Fireball spells and flamethrowers.

No idea if that was just a house rule based on his ignorance of the differences been Cased and Caseless or not.

Well, AFAIK it was about money. At least going from the information available on the webpages of HK and the Bundesamt für Wehrtechnik und Beschaffung (Federal Office of Defense Technology and Procurement), the G11 was ready for production in 1990. But German reunification with it's ensuing budget strains and the demise of the Warsaw Pact made such a large-scale armaments purchase politically unfeasible.

And NATO dropping cased ammo to everyone that wanted them, and Soviet stockpiles going out at fire sale prices...

An interesting tidbit in the G11 wiki page is that it's a 3 round 'serial shotgun' burst, at least in someone's eyes. In SR4 terms, I understand this to mean that the G11 only fires Narrow short bursts (that's the 2000rpm figure); for wide bursts, you have to use its 'Full Auto' setting, which has a much lower RoF. Neat! Honestly, it'd be interesting if Narrow bursts were only an option for specific weapons in SR… hmm.

Caseless weapon systems have essentially a faster rate of fire since two steps of the cycle of operation are removed. Extracting and ejecting, a source of potential reliability issues, but also a primary indicator of a safety issue. In most semiautomatic/automatic firearms, an extracting or ejecting issue is a function of worn parts, excessive dirt, lack of lubrication (and really keeping it well lubricated overcomes most dirt issues), or lastly an underpowered round which failed to produce enough pressure to cycle. This last point is the big safety issue as an underpowered round or a squib load will often result in what is commonly referred to as a stovepiped casing. Another common occurrence is for the weapon to completely fail to cycle. These visual cues will likely be missing in any caseless design. The problem being that often the projectile will still be lodged in the barrel, and when another projectile heads down the barrel we have an interesting potential catastrophic failure of the weapon an explosive situation, and this situation is much more likely with a caseless system. Traditional brass also removes a lot of the heat of firing from the weapon, caseless does not. Cased ammunition is more resistant to environmental factors such as air, or water. So while in the baseline SR caseless is awesome cool and standard, I have made house fluff and I am working on house rules for different ammo types. The standard is cased, unless you are looking at the military since they want to save weight for logistical reasons, however even they usually use telescoped since it is lighter than cased, but more reliable than caseless. In my SR caseless is for people who want to show off.

These tradeoffs sound great for SR. +RoF, Increased Glitching, Increased Ammo Capacity, Increased Cost(?), etc.

Oh dear, not another loosely defined weapons category squeezed somewhere in the space between 4 and 7 damage. If you want more realistic ammo sharing, just use some common sense.

RE: G11, there were many factors which contributed to its demise:
- Like the POMCUS depots and blasting holes in all major bridges, the G11 was designed with one scenario in mind, a scenario which somewhat fell out of fashion in 1989
- German reunification was a costly affair, so procuring a weapon system with a very high unit cost was off the cards
- The G11 was designed as a radical new step. But military decision makers like to stick to stuff they know
- Exotic ammunition equals unreliable supply lines
- I guess handing the G11 would have been quite different from more conventional rifles. So if your defence strategy relies on reservists who learned to shoot with the G3 10-20 years ago...

As I said, the answer to a question nobody was asking.

The tech worked. It was even fairly reliable. There was just no market for it.



-k

I don't remember any mention of that regarding caseless ammunition, but there were similar rules in place for explosive and EX explosive ammunition.

All ammo will "Cook Off" if heated up enough. Percussion caps (What sets off the gunpowder/caseless charge) aren't exactly the most stable of explosives.

It sees a therapist a lot.

Actually many early caseless variants were utilizing different types of flammable lacquers. Cooking off is a lot harder than setting something on fire if it is flammable.

Wow, squib rounds etc would be really likely to cause catastrophic failure in a caseless system. When participating in shooting sports with normal cased weapons, you're always so careful to look and listen and feel for those types of malfunctions, and not to pull the trigger if you think something is lodged in the barrel.

It was the first thing that went through my mind when I looked at the design of the G11. There is no easy to perform remediation for a malfunction, based on the concept that it should never malfunction, which sends all sorts of flares up for me. I can just imagine having to field strip that gun, or having ammo go bad because of air exposure.

*Pouts* I really want calibers.

Calibers add so much flavor to the game. They really put the game in a social and historical context. For example if in a game everyone is running around with 10mm pistols, that means that it came out when the FBI adopted 10mm pistols and everyone thought 10mm was the wave of the future. If everyone is running around with 9mm glocks and berettas it means that it's the era of the wondernines and everyone thinks that double stack magazines are the future. If someone made a game today everyone would be running around with .40 S&W and .357 sig and we'd all LOL at it in ten years. You play a World War II game and everyone gets misty eyed and nostalgic over shooting people with .45 ACP FMJ, and then you go out and practice with your 1911. And damn, if you want to pretend it's the 30s, nothing says 30s like .38 Special LRN. No wonder people generally weren't able to kill Lovecraftian horrors with handguns back then.

Nostalgia leads to flavor, flavor leads to calibers, and calibers lead to ballistic charts for various cartridges, bullets, and powder loads. Which is how it should be in a role playing game.

If I had to shoot people for a living in real life, I'd obsess over the little details. How can I feel like I'm in character if my character in a Shadowrun game, by virtue of the limitations of the game engine, has no concept of these things?

None of that is necessary so that you can obsess over them. My characters obsess over them all the time, and they don't veven exist in game. There are Thousands of variations on the guns in the game. None of them have stats except the "Standard" flavor guns, already present. Does not mean you cannot obsess over them.

The G11 actually had the capacity to eject misfired rounds., at least from the rotating firing block. There was a port on the bottom for this, which could also be used to inspect the firing chamber.

The port was normally kept closed under regular firing operations.

I had a minor obsession with the weapon when I was younger.



~k