Until now, it seems.

I know(or think I know) how it works when a player has several different drones that will fire during combat. What has me confused is if a single vehicle has multiple turrets. How does that work? Say he's got 4 light machine guns mounted on a boat? Can he fire all 4 at once? Using his gunnery skill? Using a Command program?

Do you roll each turret separately and treat it as a separate attack? Do you roll them all together and treat it as one attack with a higher base DV? Can he attack multiple targets at once this way? Would that split the dicepool?

edit: Also, can you put multiple guns on one turret? it seems like you can. Any pros/cons?

technically, the rules say somewhere that only one gun can be fired per vehicle, no matter how many turrets or controllers there are.

mind you, that's generally considered to be a pretty stupid rule. a more reasonable one would require you to split your dicepool just like a person using 2 guns or 2 melee weapons, except divide by the appropriate number of weapons being used (in your example that would be 4 of course), and count it as 4 separate attacks.

it would definitely use gunnery, and provided you're not using manual controls i see no problems using the command program (if you're actually using manual controls and only have 2 limbs, i'd limit you to controlling 2 at a time).

pretty sure you can't technically put multiple weapons on the same turret without using underbarrel weapon mounts. that said, i for one would have no real problems if you decided to pay the price of 2 turrets (including the vehicle having room etc) and saying that it's two guns mounted on one turret.

Sure, you can put two or more weapons in a turret. It just depends on the size of the turret. Main gun with coaxial machine gun is the default configuration for just about every turreted military vehicle in existence. Some ADA turrets have four or more weapons. Typically, however, all these weapons are linked together and will fire on parallel trajectories if they are of the same caliber. Missile mounts tend to be fired individually.

i got the impression he was asking about in shadowrun rules, not for real life...

I just looked at Arsenal, and I can see why he's wondering. The rules there (pp146-47) are excessively vague. Rigger 3 had much better rules for customization. As far as the number of weapons that may be fired, I found SR4:160 stating that firing a weapon while rigging is a Complex Action, but nothing further about the number of weapons (I may be missing something). I think if you had a vehicle with two weapons mounted in a linked configuration, firing both together would be no issue. I think having a single gunner fire four weapons at separate targets is stretching things a bit.

One of the things to look out for with multiple turrets is overlapping fields of fire. If all of the turrets are stacked, they won't interfere (much) with each other, but that's a very unlikely configuration unless the stack is a series of progressively smaller turrets (i.e., a main turret with a cupola for the commander, common for main battle tanks). If you had four separate turrets on a vehicle, say in a line like a naval battleship or destroyer, each turret will be restricted because each cannot fire through the other turrets or any superstructures above the turrets.

Except those big naval guns almost never fire over the bow or aft. The swing out for an old school broadside...just like 15 miles away instead of a couple hundred yards.

Of course, each turret has it's own gun crew.

The simple solution for the rigger on-the-go who doesn't want to divide his dice pools is to buy a commlink and gunnery autosoft and install them in each of the turrets, with instructions to pick their own targets according to his RoE, unless he manually fires a turret, in which case the turrets that also have line-of-sight to his target focus their fire on that target as well.


There definitely should be rules as regards coaxial weapons or multiple weapons of the same type mounted together to fire together.

The recoil on a 16" gun tends to be a bit higher, too. I wish I'd gotten to see one doing a live fire before they were decommissioned. Watching a video just isn't the same.

Even with all the years that have passed I´d not call R3 customization "better". The level of detail was higher, as was the potential for abuse.

To each their own. I think SR3 was a better ruleset. Rules that are too vague can be easily abused as well.

I would. (Call Rigger 3 better.) While the potential for abuse was there, I prefer a more highly-detailed system than one which is not.