http://www.theblaze.com/stories/want-to-se...ifle-in-action/

OK, Holland & Holland stopped making the .600 Nitro Express as being "Too excessive", only to bring it back due to popular demand, and then created the .700 Nitro Express for the same reason.

Now THIS? Honestly, this has to be a case of "I need something bigger to make up for something that I have that is very, very small."

So… why don't they just take emplaced weapons and put grips on them? Let the users take the consequences.

Anyway, isn't this kind of thing basically what assault cannons are?

I always thought of the assault cannons as low-to-mid-pressure weapons, more like a grenade launcher with 20-25mm ammunition. This thing is is just under 23mm, so the caliber is about right, even if it's really more of an undersized anti-materiel rifle. Which, I guess, makes it a good stand in for the SR assault cannons.... Just need some Raufoss rounds. Pushing mere slugs through it is a waste of potential.

*looks at link* Well, that there's the granddaddy of the EX-Explosive round...

Nah, assault cannons are 'light tank guns'. I don't really know the difference between a big rifle and a small tank gun (explosives?). So I guess the Raufoss clearly fits the bill. We do know that assault cannons fire 'special assault cannon ammo', after all.

And, of course, the 'Cobra Assault Cannon' was a Barrett with explosive shells (in the movie).

State-of-the-Art Bang Bang.

And for comparison, look up the 2-Bore Rifle. It is bigger than the .905 linked in the OP.

3500 Grain Bullet (1/2 lb. of Lead in the bullet)
320 grains of Black Powder in the Charge (Cannot use Smokeless powder due to excessive recoil, and engineering issues - the barrel would need to be able to withstand several TONS/Inch - Crazy, fortunately, Black Powder does not produce the same pressure issues as smokeless does)
1.326 Inch Diameter Bore (33.68mm)
1500 fps at the bore, 17,487 ft/lbs of Energy
Rounds cost between $80 and $85 per shot.
Rifle weighs 32 pounds, and has a 3 foot long barrel.
It is custom made on order (With quoted prices STARTING at $26,000)

IIRC, The total cased Round is about the size of a Red-Bull can in Diameter and length

Light tank cannons normally range from 20mm to 37mm, exept some crazy russian bmp which has a 105mm cannon.

Yeah, the 2-Bore is more like a Light Anti-Tank Weapon from an earlier era. Not sure why I would buy one over a .375 Holland and Holland (which I MIGHT actually be able to afford, though I would have no place to actually use it to hunt), but wow, what a gun.

So… we're agreed that this is a (low-tech) assault cannon? It certainly seems to be Heavy Weapons, SS, etc. Everything fits, except maybe the need for explosive shells?

That is what I would call it, personally.
Heavy Weapon Indeed. Not sure about the need for explosive shells on that one, but who knows. They would be impressive, I think.

"Because who wants to be known as "that underkill guy"?"

Heh. Maxim 6: If violence wasn't your last resort, you failed to resort to enough of it.

(Schlock Mercenary)

I always figured the Assault Cannon was a recoiless rifle.

Man-portable, fires cannon rounds, little recoil.

That's not a bad thought, but recoilless rifles tend to be fairly large calibers (75mm+), and have backblast issues. The recoil is compensated by diverting some of the propellent gasses.

And we know that they're not; they're described as 'light tank cannons' and having 'massive recoil'.

My understanding of assault cannons in Shadowrun is that they fire something very like Raufoss rounds - "shells equivalent to explosive bullets, but without the inherent instability." And then they have huge barrels on them, presumably full of heat sink, so they can handle belted ammunition. But my understanding could be highly outdated.

I always figured that "Assault Cannon" was an Ares Arms marketing way of trademarking an autocannon that wound up as a generic trademark itself.

So I always saw the things as basically firing something between 20mm and 40mm high-explosive penetrating (HEAT) rounds belt-fed, fully-automatic, if not particularly quickly for a fully-automatic weapon.

Except they've always (okay, mostly) been single shot. An SA assault cannon is the fast version, barring any questionable player modding.

As man-portable weapons, anyway. Autocannons existed in SR3. [Rigger 3, p91.] They were, we're told, "extremely popular," which is a phrase you don't hear often enough being applied to fully automatic cannons.

In that case, 3278, they exist in Arsenal too. But assault cannons are inherently defined as man-portable, while autocannons are Vehicular.

If you cyber up a troll enough, is he considered vehicular?

well, the cyborg drone bodies are considered vehicles, so yes - but then, a cyborg gnome is also a vehicle ^^

So this is for hunting what, several moose in a row? Mack trucks? Regardless, its awesome and that's all it needs to be.

But there are also vehicle body requirements! Ha. Granted, the cyborg bodies *break* most of the vehicle body standards, but oh well.

Well, I think assault cannons are actually man-portable versions of light tank guns, OR modern version of old anti-tank rifles, like this, for instanc:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solothurn_S-18/100

Perfect. Presumably there's no real difference between that and a tiny tank gun.

Well, with a minute's research, I think of this:

http://robocop.wikia.com/wiki/Cobra_assault_cannon

The funny part is, that's a Barret M82, which shoots .50BMG / 12.7mm. And yes, they do make Raufoss rounds for it.

What rounds don't they make for .50 BMG?

EDIT: Other than "Low Lethal".

Flechette

From the wiki entry on Raufoss rounds.
"The International Committee of the Red Cross has sought to have the ammunition banned, due to concern over the incendiary and explosive components and their effect on personnel." - isn't that the point of using them?

No, the Raufoss rounds intended use is against light armored vehicles and helicopters.

You mean they kill folk dead...

I'm pretty sure that getting shot with a .50 cal wadcutter would kill a guy dead, assuming they made wadcutters in .50 BMG. (They don't.) That's kind of the point of a .50 BMG, after all.

I'm pretty sure that's the same kind of bellyaching that leads to soldiers filing reports stating that they were shooting their .50s at an enemy soldier's uniform, because it was allowed to shoot at equipment and materiel, but not at men, or some bullshit like that.

This is some presentation done for whatever, arms aquisition program of some sort, comparing .50 raufoss to 20mmx110 HEI rounds. I'm thinking an Assault gun from SR would definitely be using the bigger calibre.

http://www.dtic.mil/ndia/2009infantrysmall...ssionxi8503.pdf

There are also rifles that fire 20x102 rounds designed for the Vulcan 20mm, but they have electric priming, while the 110 have percussion, as far as I could take from the slides.

Now these are ALL AMR/sniper rilfes, which basically means they are precision rifles used to take down lightly armoured vehicles. An assault gun I would think is a more rugged, less precision design. More recoil dampening, more optimisation for firing from the standing position.

However, basically having trolls to carry your weapons completely changes the paradigm of weapon design, just because instead of 200lb of man you have 600lbs of troll holding the gun. A assault gun could be as heavy as a 40mm Bofors configured for man-portable use .

Sounds like an embarrassingly thin excuse for intentionally committing a war crime. Either follow the rule or refuse to, but don't *weasel*.

It's not a war crime if you're an American soldier...

See war crimes can only happen if you (actually the country you're fighting for) have previously agreed not to commit any, and what constitutes one. If you haven't, then only your own domestic judicial system can hold you accountable.

Hehe. Whoever the authority is, I'm just saying don't be a weasel. It sounds like a five-year-old, except they killed someone.

Given that the guys being shot in that example have guns and are actively attempting to kill you, I don't blame someone for shooting at them with whatever they happen to have on hand.

And honestly, shooting someone with a bigger bullet is hardly a "war crime." Grabbing a guy and torturing him is, but putting a .50 cal hole in him as opposed to a .30 cal hole?

I have no opinion on what *should* be legal or illegal. I'm only talking about the nature of the excuse.

For example, they should say, 'He was trying to kill me and all I had was this gun; who made this stupid rule?', and not 'I was damaging the materiel he happened to be wearing'.

When your options are "protect myself with this handy .50 cal machine gun I was issued to shoot vehicles but all I see is a horde of Charlie, and then weasel around saying I shot at men with my .50 cal machine gun, thus getting in no trouble for it," "deliberately choose not to shoot the enemy, putting myself and my friends in physical jeopardy," and "protect myself with this handy .50 cal machine gun I was issued to shoot vehicles but all I see is a horde of Charlie, and then say I did it in those words, thus being hauled up on charges, seeing the dishonorable end of my military career and spending hard time in prison, thus fucking my life over after I get out, adamantly in the name of 'not being a weasel'," I'm going to go with the well-armed weasel option.

There are a number of weapons and rounds which are banned because their effect on personnel is either, a) disfiguring but not lethal, or, b) is typically lethal but is gratuitously injurious to survivors. Incendiary and explosive rounds do maiming damage of such type to those who do survive that they're considered unreasonably cruel, particularly when they're neither designed for human targets nor additionally effective against them.

Also, it's worth noting that many anti-materiel rounds are actually much less lethal against people than anti-personnel rounds, due to their velocity, hardness, and cross-section, among other things. To kill the other guy, you want a round that's just fast enough to get to him with just enough energy to get into him and bounce around a bit, something fat and slow and tumbling about, that'll fall to pieces once it gets inside him. Shooting a penetrator into a person just makes a hole in that person; shooting a burning penetrator into them just makes a burning hole that's really hard to heal or treat, and thus is widely considered a dick move.

Well, that's why nothing gets better, ShadowDragon.

Anyway, the discussion on why explosive bullets are worse than just normal bullets... just ridiculous. I mean, if anti-personel shrapnel weapons aren't forbidden, why are certain direct fire weapons? What's the difference? You can only make a guy dead.

And the entire deal with not using excessive cruelty... that's just as ridiculous. For instance, from a cruelty perspective, there is nothing worse than 5.56 Nato. These are crap bullets that tumble and burst inside tissue so easily that they can completely mangle a thick organ. If that organ is a leg, that's excessive cruelty right there. If it's your liver... tough luck, either way.

A .50 Raufoss will likely as not blow off a limb at any range, if it ignites, which isn't a given. (Actually the manufacturer says it's not supposed to ignite on a human, because the resistance is too low, but it will ignite more reliably if the target is wearing body armour.) If it doesn't ignite, then you've got one huge gaping hole. Likely as not, you'll go out from Hydrostatic shock, too. If you survive you probably have fewer problems than from the hundreds of itty bitty pieces of metal you got from the 5.56 shrapnel bomb in your leg.

In Iraq, it was quite common to use the 25mm Bushmaster mounted on Bradleys against civilian vehicles that tried to run a checkpoint. And to paraphrase a quote from "CBS Deadline Iraq", a documentary from a few years ago: When you shoot people with these big calibre weapons, they just come apart. I don't remember who says it on the show, I think it's an embedded journalist.

So, overall point: It's not excessive cruelty if they die. Then it's just overkill :

No, things don't get better because soldiers keep shooting other soldiers, rather than LAWYERS.

Then there wouldn't be any need for weaseling.

But CanRay, the forms must be obeyed!

Shoot the bureaucrats too. And I used to be one.

But then you lost your job in a botched frame-up and fell into the shadows; somehow, you clung to life, adapted to your strange new world, and befriended a bartender/fixer. Yay! … Also, you're secretly an escaped super-soldier prototype, natch.

I'd hope folks here would know me better than that.

Aw crap, now I want to re-watch Black Lagoon. I will never get any work done.