I have been combing through the search trying to see if anyone has addressed this, but my search-fu is weak...

I've got a City Master loaded with an Ares Screech on it and want to increase the ammo capacity, but don't really know how that will work. Anyone have a clue? I'm leaning towards simply allowing the Ammo Bins mod to house a back-pack, but maybe I'm overlooking something obvious in the rules?

Seems reasonable to me.

RAW, you're right: ammo bins would do the 'double capacity' option, if anything. Given the sheer size of the Citymaster, though, you can literally just wire a backpack to the thing. A drone would be a trickier question, but easy enough to houserule.

Just fill the inside of the vehicle with a huge friggin battery.

Or, you know, the power output of the vehicle itself...

If there were rules for that. The closest thing is 'local grid, as part of permanent emplacements' (i.e., handwaving but only within reason).

Unless the goal is literally to maximize Screech ammo, a backpack or two is probably plenty. They hold 80 power and are already 20F. The Screech only uses *1* per shot.

In which case then you just stack on as many additional fuel tanks as the vehicle supports..... so 16 mod slots. 16 Additional Fuel Tanks for 16,000 and you can run the Roadmaster for 102 hours which should provide adequate power for your laser weaponry.

I think the best route would be to figure out the effect number of shots that a "fuel tank" would support, figure it as a battery and mod it in.

We need several things.

One, vehicle design rules.

Two, "Power Factor" rules - how much power does a given clip, etc, hold? How much power does a vehicle generate - and which vehicles are pure-electric drive? How much power does a 10cm^2 area of solar panels generate - per Turn, per minute, per hour?

And of course, how many units of power does each shot from X or Y weapon consume? How about each turn that a minigun's barrels are kept spinning?

Finally, "how much power does "extra ammo bins" allow you to store, when the weapon mount holds something that requires energy?

Truly. Vehicle design rules would be nice, but unless you want to go full-on Traveller, they'll be problematic or inconsistent. And if you do go the Traveller route, no one will want to bother.

This power pack thing is really driving me a little nuts. What if someone wanted to stick a Thunderstruck on their vehicle of choice? That beastie uses both power and ammo...I see two choices, double the capacity or allow the backpack. It makes more sense to me to allow the backpack and I'm confident it is the right choice based on some of these posts, thanks all!

Actually, I think that was the one thing our group liked about Traveller.

That and writing a program to automatically determine how much of which cargo to haul from [current location] to [where we want to go] and the expected profit margin.

Just take a page from the vehicle lasers in Arsenal.

They give the charge per shot in battery pack PP. Then say a vehicle will recharge 1 point per 6 seconds (2 combat turns per point recharge).

Toss on say a satchel or backpacks worth of charge... and you got more than enough to keep the screech going for a while... especially with a slow recharge like that.


We have vehicle design rules... you just need to go back to a prior edition... then update the vehicle to modern specs. Too bad the current system doesn't still give us cargo factors, payload, and other critical factors like fuel burn rates for vehicles anymore. SR4 has a bit too much handwavium for me in that regard.

I prefer to look at it as "a lot less tedious Bookkeeping."

I'm gonna go with "too much handwavium" as the answer. Still!

Speed, for your purposes, I'd say that a Citymaster (an Ares heavy security vehicle) would have no problems generating enough power to charge a weapon's power pack by 1 every 6 seconds. If you want your ammo to go even further, you can use the ammo bin option to double the capacity the weapon has at its disposal even if the vehicle's engine is off

For the Thunderstruck, I'd say that the ammo bin vehicle mod affects both physical and power capacity. Just 'cause.