I'm trying to customize a main car for Luke. Priorities would be high acceleration to get away from bad situations, since he's not a professional driver (more of a merc type), some armor, and driving additions that will make it easier for him to handle with his ameature skill (reaction 12) in all conditions.

My confusion is this: I wanted to customize some sort of muscle car (hopefully a Mustang, as my RL first car was a '66 Mustang and I have a lot of sentimental attachment to it) seriously beefed up. If you've seen The Punisher, you have a good example of the kind of thing I mean, but the car from Blade would be another good example. Why on earth are the Mustang equivalents (Honda 3220) saddled with a Cargo of 3? That's enough for a whopping single point of Concealed Armor.

Regular Vehicle Armor is out of the question; I want the car to be inconspicuous. I'm considering just adding Personal Armor to the vehicle, but there's ongoing discussion about how useful that is. If my GM and I agree that the only difference between Concealed Armor and Personal Armor is that Concealed Armor is "hardened", then Personal may be the way to go.

I'm less than fluent with Rigger 3, so if I'm missing something obvious to fix the situation, please feel free to point that out. Thank you in advance for your help and even for the inevitable bickering that I must have started

Edit: Thinking on that, is it actually an anethema to have some obvious armor on a vehicle? Is it like driving a big Caddy today, or like driving an APC?

Non-concealed armor is obvious to notice, no test required. Better have a permit.

Personal Armor is like draping the car's inside with an Armor Jacket: effective against non-vehicle weapons for the passengers, but won't help the car any. IMnsHO.

My advice is to get a car that can handle the armor and customize and/or turbocharge the engine.

Vehicle armor doesn't require a permit (at least it shouldn't). However, it will likely get your car a second look by the authorities if it's not a model that has armor on it normally.

Of course, the best getaway vehicle for an urban runner/merc is a Jackrabbit, or an Americar, or something similar. Nothing like trying to chase down one particular vehicle in a sea of cars that look identical.

For that matter, a bike works well too.

Good point, RangerJoe. Throw on a PV paintjob and a transponder library you can click on with a button and you're good to go if you're not trying to run away on deserted streets.

I'm not thinking so much of a vehicle that's hard to follow (except from the accelleration standpoint), as a safe way to escape when the shit hits the fan and I need to be somewhere else; a worst case scenario. On the flip side, I don't want it to stand out just sitting on the street. I might change my mind and get a sedan, but it just seems to be less appropriate for my character.

Then custom build a muscle roadster with better CF and Load. The sportscars in R3 were not like '66 anythings (a special rare collectors 2066 edition of the '66 Mustang!). It will rightly cost more, but then it should.

'66 Mustang Wild Blue
The power and stature to cross the open countries.

Handling 2/8
Speed 190
Accel 18
Body 3
Armor 4 concealed
Sig 0
Autonav 0
Pilot 0
Sensor 0
Cargo 0
Load 20
Seating 2b
Entry 2
Fuel Gasoline ( 60 liters )
Economy 5.415 km/liter
284,400 ¥ IMO

Template Sports Car
Reference The Shop
Features
Concealed Armour (Armour 4)
Acceleration Increase (Level 6)
Turbocharging (Level 2)
Tires (Performance) (Level 1)
Increased Cargo Space (CF 5)
Load Increase (Level 16)
Improved Suspension (Level 2)
Anti-Theft System (Level 6)

You even picked one the color of my old baby ..... I do belive you're about to see a grown man cry.

But enough of that. I came back to the keyboard with the intention of saying that I had decided to go ahead and design one from scratch and see if the GM thinks it's reasonable, since the type of car I wanted to drive just isn't represented in canon.

It's much cheaper to buy the armor afterwards, as having 4 points concealed armor is security vehicle, IMO.

Also, if you're serious about getaways, Drive-By-Wire. Nothing like a base Handling of -1.

~J

Or just give up on low profile entirely.

DAMN YOU POPS!

Are there any rules about putting a Sports Car power plant into a Sedan body? That would seem to be more like what I'm looking for. I was thinking maybe ruling it decreasing speed, accel, load, and econ for the power plant by 10%, keeping the other options for the sedan.

Any word in canon, or any more complete / fair house rules are welcome.

Take any sedan, and install a Nitro Inject system. Instant escapemobile.

[Side note: due to very poorly-worded rules, it seems that one can instantly accelerate to 2.5 times your top speed. Rather that is true or not, the fact is that you can easily get a sports car to reach Mach 1 when using those things. I don't want to see the handling test modifiers when you try this trick; but if you want to leave town in a hurry, that's one way of doing it.]

I've always said that using those things tears your engine to shreds. It'll get you out, but then you've got to stick the thing in the shop for a month.

I don't know how realistic that is, but I see it in a lot of movies.

I'm no mechanic, but as I recall, the reality isn't that it tears your engine to shreds. It's just souped-up fuel, after all. The reality is that if you don't use it in very controlled doses, you'll simply blow yourself to kingdom come. If I was being realistic about it, I wouldn't make someone put the car into the shop after using it-- they'd either have used it safely, or there won't be enough left to bring into a shop.

It probably wouldn't tear anything to shreds, but it probably would make the engine wear out much faster. That's going to happen whenever you squeeze more power out of an engine than you are supposed. With a really high-quality engine it shouldn't matter much, at least not when you're not concerned about the shape of the car in 10 or 5 years, sometimes not even 6 months.

Of course, Shadowrun has Dikote, which should protect engines really well when applied to all the friction surfaces.

But that's not as cool. Especially not in a movie

A mechanic friend of mine spent a dozen or so years street racing, I'll ask him about it next Wednesday.

N20 has two effects on an engine. It's many times more oxygen rich than air, meaning that you can burn much more gasoline at a time (meaning much more HP and RPM's). The second effect is the way it cools the entire engine when it hits the block in a gasious form. More power, and protection from the friction / ignition effects ... pretty convenient.

Read more about Nitrous injectors in gas engines

Generally speaking, the best car for getting away in is the late model Americar you steal in touristville with a maglock passkey. Of course you'll also need Electronics B/R at a reasonable level so you can replace the transponder with your portable transponder generator. A similarly customized morphing plate stuck over the real plate with magnets is also a good idea. When the run is over just park it in a D zone, remove your mods and burn it.

Save your muscle car for the track and picnics.

As i side note, using NOS, to go faster in any car/ vehicle is almost certain to add stress to the engine, thus you get a mechanic to work on it to get rid off said stress..... or risk engine failure a couple of months down the line...