I found a description for a modification for a ruger super warhawk that was listed as "high powered". Searching here didnt seem to get me anywhere. Which book is it from because I cant find it in arsenal.

Nevermind. Found it in War.

Love me a High Powered Warhawk...

I was kind of hoping high powered was a stand alone addon, and could then use exex ammo. But I suppose a 7p -3ap sa handgun will have to work.

Too bad hp ammo is 200ny apeice.

Any standard Pistol, SMG, Rifle, AR, HMG, etc. can use Ex-Ex Ammunition by default.
There is some debate whether you can add the special ammunition properties to HP Ammunition, though.

Besides, a Ruger Warhawk is 8P, -3 AP with the HP Modification. Booyah!!!

Yeah, but if you're getting a high-powered revolver you may as well get the sheriff from gun haven 2. better bang for your buck, and better AP than the hp warhawk.

What he said. Cavalier Sheriff.

Enh, don't have that book. Just gun heaven 1. Besides the ruger has such a history behind it.

The most important aspect of a gun isn't it's history, but rather it's future...

Just make sure that you and your GM match up on how the -2 DP from HP chambering works. Some say it's a flat recoil mod, others think it's a 2 recoil per shot, still others think it's not even recoil and you cannot reduce the penalty.

Yeah, if they carry over HP rounds into 5E, they should really explain them better next time. You have to be either incredibly skilled or incredibly inept to achieve that level of linguistic ambiguity in wording a rule.

~Umi

Sadly, I still do not have that resource.

I would highly recommend people buy GH2, I did and it's pretty awesome. I've actually started using some of Shiawase and S-K's stuff as default weapons for both PCs and NPCs. (The Urban Hunter is absolutely vicious.) As an example, here's the Cavalier Arms Sheriff (apologies if posting stuff from sourcebooks isn't cool):

Any author who gets upset over such a casual referencing is deluding themselves. If people are really going to get the books without buying them, they'll simply download them as entire pirated PDFs without much effort. It's not as if people scrapbook entire books together from single paragraph quotations and references made on web forums like Dumpshock.

~Umi

On the other hand, here's my personal philosophy with ANY gun:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTQSBm5A_FI

Slight discovery! I was just browsing over the Urban Hunter's listing, since Freya mentioned it and I couldn't remember which gun it was, and I found this little nugget.


At last, clear evidence on whether you can get HP versions of other ammo types!

Now, of course, one should bear in mind that it's fluff rather than crunch, but to the best of my knowledge this is the only bit of wording I've seen anywhere that serves as evidence in either direction. Not quite an official ruling, but it does seem to give a lot more heft to the school of thought favoring HP being a variant of existing ammo types, rather than a mutually exclusive category all it's own.

~Umi

Oh geez, I was pretty well stuck on "burst-fire assault cannon" and missed the AV rounds reference entirely. So yeah, make the Urban Hunter even more vicious than I first mentioned. (And yay for evidence!)

Totally makes me think of: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QGeMApnBQQ

So that's... 8P, -8/-10AP, burst fire capable, and even moddable for FA if you really want?

And people still argue against a Full Auto Panther XXL Assault Cannon...

~Umi

Considering that the entire Black Lagoon anime is supposed to be inspired by Tarantino movies, I'm not surprised.

(by the way, too all Dumpshockers: if for some ungodly reason you haven't seen this anime, please do. It's gloriously awesome, and if you have new players that still have no idea what the hell pink mohawk is, point them towards this anime)

To be fair, the stats for the Urban Hunter and the implications of high-powered AV ammo take a lot more digging to find than the Panther. Then again, after seeing those numbers I'd be tempted to argue against it myself: "Why would I use a Panther when I can get an Urban Hunter with AV ammo instead?"

Oh, I agree. An FA Panther is a suboptimal choice in every regard. But I feel it ought to at least be possible, based purely on the Arsenal rules for weapon modifications. The biggest argument I've heard against it is that because AC rounds are their own separate category of ammunition, people treat them as Exotic Ammunition, despite the clear examples of Exotic Ammunition being things like Lasers and Flamethrowers, et cetera.

But I'm dangerously close to reviving that argument, and this is neither the time nor the place for it! I shouldn't have brought it up, I suppose, so if anyone wishes to continue this subdiscussion, we can take it up again in the other thread.

~Umi

And weapons technology continues its progression.

There's also the discussion in the Sheriff itself about "experimental explosive ammunition" as well:

"Cavalier does not recommend the use of experimental explosive ammunition..."

and

> I’ve seen demos of high-powered explosive ammunition; it works fine. Cavalier
was concerned with the round exiting the target before detonation at close
range. It’s only happened twice to me so far, and at that point it really doesn’t
matter to the target if the explosive went off.
> Hard Exit

Yeah, again more fluff than crunch, but does add more that there'd be additional types of HP ammo.

I treat HP ammo as an ammo modification, with +60nY (per 10) and avail +18F. So HP AV ammo would cost 180nY (per 10) and has an avail of 36F.

Additionally, i removed the "recoil" part of HP ammo, it is now a modifier due to inherent inaccuracy.

Inherent inaccuracy? That's absurd.

You're essentially saying that hot loading - putting more, or more powerful, propellant than normal into a cartridge, a not uncommon practice - ends up ruining the ballistic trajectory of the round; so much so in fact that it produces a negative effect large enough to cancel out the benefits of a smartgun system, which "makes use of advanced calculation software, allowing the user to aim even weapons with a highly ballistic firing arc (like grenades) with tremendous precision over any distance".

If your intention is to balance out the benefits and detriments of HP rounds, I would have to say that your method isn't the proper way to do it. From a mechanical standpoint the dice penalty may or may not be balanced, but the underlying reasoning for the penalty is flawed and doesn't fit with the lore of the game world or with common sense. If this was a case of balancing magic, you could get away with just arguing "because, Magic" and I'd not cry foul, but in this case, we're dealing with a mechanical device that operates through an abstracted version of real world physics. Losing dice in this case doesn't just impose a mechanical penalty, it also defies logic and reason, as there isn't any rational justification for it in terms of the operation of firearms.

~Umi

It...it's Shadowrun Umi. Proper ballistics goes out the window when you have sniper rifles that can't hit targets far away. I mean, at least SR ain't as bad as 40k or something, but still.

Since when can't Sniper Rifles hit targets far away? Never had a probelm with it in our games. In fact, I think that the Sniper Rifles are TOO ACCURATE at those ranges, in a lot of cases. It is the rare Sniper that can consistently hit at 1500 Meters, and yet in game it happens all too frequently.

The best analogue I can come up with off the top of my head would be crossbows. If there was a "high-powered" crossbow available which used some sort of expensive special materials to increase the draw weight, would it make any sense to say it suffers from "inherent inaccuracy"?

For two crossbows of the same physical dimensions, the one made with stronger materials and which produces a greater draw weight will actually be more accurate when fired, due to inertial stabilization. The physics of crossbows don't scale perfectly to firearms, but they scale well enough. Adding more power to a round simply does not make it less accurate. You'd need to have other factors, like shortened or smoothbore barrels, to have any sort of negative effect on weapon accuracy.

~Umi

Depending on the ranges you were talking about a smartgun might foul high-powered bullets if you failed to give it the requisite details. If the gun is expecting that the bullet will have a drop of x over 10 metres and due to the higher velocity it drops at y instead, that could mess with its calculations pretty heavily. But at that point you're probably heading towards sniper ranges, I'd hardly expect an Ingram fired down a corridor to make swiss cheese out of the roof instead of the corpsec just because there's some more gunpowder packed into the case.

If your smartgun system can compensate for grenades, it can compensate for hot loads. At the very worst, you could require a player to tweak the software.

~Umi

Why the hassle? In the future - actually we could do that today -, each and every round is chipped and can tell the gun its characteristics.

And even if you don't have it chipped (perhaps you don't want identifying RFIDs in your ammunition?), any runner should have a DNI to be able to tell it what rounds its using as part of the reload.

Hot loads have more "kick" and therefore more recoil to absorb. However thats all irrelevant as I'm going to go mod a thunderstruck gauss rifle with high powered, load it with anti vehicle rounds, mount It on my heavy turret and go hunting lonestar/armoured corp vehicles.

12p ap-10 vs vehicles. With a halfdecent sprite manning it, things go boom.

Edit: I understand the change to a -2 penalty to attack, but disagree on the basis that by the time you add enough recoil modifiers for burst or full auto a weapons capacity should be full, or very close. The recoil penalty now starts at 3 and goes up to 11, without accounting for the unmodified heavy weapons penalty. Even a pistol, by the time you stick in hp (2) elec firing (1), personalized grip (1), and folding stock (1) has only one slot of modification left, requires two hands to use and basically cannot be hidden. Cheaper, faster, easier, and much less "distinctive style" than, say, a sawed off ak or other smg.

Ammunition is a quantity of 10 for a given price unless noted otherwise.

That's merely your interpretation of how the penalty works.

1. Not stated as a recoil mod
2. Not stated if it's a flat -2 or -2 per shot fired
3. No real reason why it would add such an absurd amount of recoil
4. In addition, if you fire only 1 shot in the round, recoil doesn't apply, which should make it great on pistols, in theory. However, see point 1.

Let's not get into hashing out the rules themselves again. We've all agreed that the wording is notoriously ambiguous.

~Umi

@stealthsigma: You're right, how did i forget that? Suddenly not so bad.

@Umi: Sounds like the best course of action.