I'm developing an ex-mercenary character and I'm sketching out his gear wish list to get an idea how much cash I'll need.

I was all set to grab an Ingram Valiant when I got a bit of sticker shock. Looking for options, I noticed the Ares Alpha. Specifically, I noticed how much better it seems to be, overall. More firing modes, better base damage, one point worse AP, slightly smaller ammo capacity, about half the price, etc. I get that LMGs (and bigger) aren't really shadowrunner weapons, but is there any reason that they're this much worse than assault rifles?

Am I right in my analysis? Or am I overlooking some crucial advantage that machineguns have over assault rifles (ideally one that would matter to a 'runner)?

The only thing a machine gun is better at than an assault rifle is that it has a higher ammo capacity, and thus is better at putting down suppressing fire.

Other than that, with double recoil and being much more expensive, they are a terrible option.

I am sad they didn't get rid of the double recoil thing. Why on earth a weapon that fires the same round (by damage code) at the same rate of fire (by FA limit), AND is bigger/heavier, would fire with DOUBLE recoil is beyond my understanding or suspension of disbelief.

But, sadly, it's a quirk of Shadowrun.

mostly range.

although i do tend to agree, the machine guns should be better than they are, they do have the advantage of a much greater extreme range.

edit: well that and potentially the fact that you get a heck of a lot more sheer variety of uses from the skill. i mean, automatics is a wonderful skill to have, but it doesn't cover grenade launchers or missile launchers, which are considerably better in 5th edition than in 4th.

so realistically, after the Arsenal book comes out & we likely end up with options for modding the type of ammo feed we use, I imagine Machine Guns will not be used much at all.

While I will grant you they have a longer range, the Ingram Valiant's extreme range of 800 meters as opposed to the 550 meters of the Ares Alpha doesn't make up for the fact that it is twice as expensive, less accurate, generates far more recoil, does LESS damage, and doesn't have a grenade launcher.

I've played Shadowrun for literally decades, and can count on one hand the number of times when I was engaging targets at that range when it wasn't a job that was supposed to get done with a sniper rifle, rather than an LMG.

Your experience may be different, and that's just my opinion, for what its worth.

I once used an LMG to mow down the front of a nightclub in a Caracas, using a machine sprite to assist me in 'rigging' the servo-mounted LMG. Many people died. I was wearing Punisher body armour. Oh, good times. Good times.

Oh, wow. I hadn't even accounted for the double recoil.

Thanks for the replies!
-paws

Machine guns excel at 2 things over assault rifles:
1) Being intimidating. It's a M*****F****** machine gun, and you're lugging it around! Most street-level opposition is going to suddenly remember an appointment and flee in the other direction.
2) Suppression fire. Massive ammunition capacity makes machine guns the go to weapon for pinning your enemy down.

Outside of that, assault rifles so far trump machine guns in most respects.

Personal recommendation: Cavalier arms Crockett EBR. Better damage, accuracy and penetration than an assault rifle OR a machine gun, better range than both. Weaknesses are a lack of full auto and low ammunition (20 in the clip/mag/ammunition thing). Oh, and no underbarrel grenade launcher.

Seconded, battle rifles rock. IRL I love my M1A and 7.6mm AR, I just imagine if I had gyro stabilization or the STR stat to use them recoil free.

Back in SR4, I played a rather Pink Mohawk character with a modded Ingram White Knight, exploiting the massive factory-default RC to get full RC compensation for full bursts. (This in a Bug City Chicago setting, so visual subtlety wasn't as important as not making noise and stirring up the hive until you had to.)

Of course, that was back when you could boost your damage by +9DV with a narrow burst, allowing me to put out massive damage against big insect spirit nasties without suffering any recoil, and I could make proper use of the high ammo capacity to gun down multiple targets without stopping to reload - useful when facing swarms. No assault rifle could come close to that sort of performance.

Now, though... eh... they really missed an opportunity to make machine guns useful niche weapons. At least they made shotties attractive?

~Umi

Hmm. The Crockett is an interesting option. Expensive though. I'll see if I can find the nuyen for it.



Agree on both points.

I miss my old school CMDT, but the Enfield seems like a fair replacement. Shame there's not underbarrel grenade launcher accessory (seems like a strang thing to exclude).

I'm assuming all the add-ons and customizations you could ask for will be in Run and Gun. (at least I would hope they are).

SR has always been very odd about guns. Pistols do virtually (if not exactly) the same damage as rifles, the crazy and ineffectual shotguns, belt-fed MGs pretty much pointless, etc. You either figure out what the 5 guns in the game are worth having or you have to redesign the entire system.

To answer the original question, machine guns (at least in Shadowrun) are best used as defensive weapons. They would also be effective as vehicle mounted weapons to remove the recoil penalty. Since Shadowrunners are rarely playing Defense, it makes them a weapon of the opposition (in this case, guards). Having a well mounted machine gun able to pin runners down with suppressive fire is extremely valuable to keeping Joe Rent-a-Cop alive until his high-threat backup arrives. We were messing around with suppressive fire in the last run we had in my game, and it is pretty nasty- especially the dice penalty to actions to those in the suppressed zone.

A quick example:

Joe Rent-A-Cop has been alerted there are Shadowrunners approaching his position, and is able to actually see them before they grease him. For the sake of argument, let's presume Joe is actually trained on the weapon he is currently using. Joe's Agility is 4, and his skill in Heavy Weapons is 4.

Joe is firing a belt-fed, tripod mounted Stoner-Ares M202. It has a base damage of 10P, AP -2. It also has a top-mounted Laser Sight, which he has activated the Wireless on. His machine gun is also firing Tracer rounds.

Joe's dicepool on his suppressive fire test is 9; his Agility of 4, Heavy Weapons of 4, +1 from the Wireless Laser Sight. His limit is the Accuracy of his Machine Gun, in this case is 7; 5 base from the gun, +1 from the laser sight, +1 from the tracer rounds.

Presuming 3 hits on his 9 dice, everyone in the suppressed zone (and immediately adjacent to it) takes a -3 to all actions.
Any character in the field (but not behind cover or prone) must make an Edge + Reaction (3) test, or take 10P, AP -2 damage. Bear in mind that roll is subject to the suppressed zone penalty of -3, making it no cakewalk. If Joe gets just a little lucky, that penalty (and threshold to avoid the damage) can become a -4, -5, -6: extremely handy for keeping runners pinned down.

Joe can do this *all day*. And as insane as it sounds, he can do this up to 1,200 meters away with no penalty. Presume he doesn't see the runners until they're at the edge of his medium range; that's still Long range (-3) to fight back with an assault rifle, plus the penalties from the suppressed zone.

Machine guns aren't great for runners, but they're solid as a choice for a GM to use.

It seems weird a rentacop would be trained in heavy weapons, at least to me it does.

Its more likely to be attached to a drone, smartfire platform, or an autoturret.

"Happiness is a belt-fed weapon and a target rich environment!!!"

"Who hired Kane?"

"Mungo. Apparently they are on each other's Speeddial."

That explains more than I care to think about.

At the moment the Ares alpha is better than most MGs at being an MG. I'm sure after the Arsenal equivalent is out you would be able to mod it to being belt fed. And those that say blah blah blah that's not realistic there is an M-16 mod kit out there that makes it a better SAW than the SAW is.

MGs should be horrifying, unfortunately right now they just aren't.

Long guns in general should be horrifying compared to pistols too.

Skill softs. Rent-a-cop doesn't know jack, but that doesn't mean the corp didn't stuff him with a few augs to put him in debt to the corp while allowing him to do his job better.

and suddenly mr rent-a-cop's corpse is worth nigh on a hundred grand instead of fifty bucks (of the UCAS variety). smart thinking rent-a-cop corporation. turn your employees into a gigantic payday for any group of gangers looking to score big.

To paraphrase Bill Gates from Simpsons: "How do you think we became a rich corporation? Do you think we PAID for that skill soft?"

Nah, but my fence'll sure pay me for it!

exactly. it doesn't matter if the security corp payed full price or not. the simple fact is, it's worth that much to sell to everyone else (well, everyone else who isn't a megacorp anyways). obviously, you won't get full price for it (although you're getting full value if you wanted a set of skillwires yourself), but it still sells for quite a bit.

then add in the fact that it's a rent-a-cop, and can reasonably expect to be making the sort of people who are low on morals angry (ie the sort of people who are reasonably likely to kill you for the cyberware you've got implanted) on a semi-regular basis, well... i for one wouldn't want to be the manager who made that choice

(although that said, i wouldn't take this sort of thing to a generic fence... this is the sort of thing that you really want an organlegger contact for).

How would someone know that the rent-a-cop had skillwires and a chipped heavy though? I would think that the level of opponent who can figure that out (by scanning or matrix or visual perception or whatever) isn't the sort of opponent who's going to rip cyberware out of a corpse. You know, the professional level. Street level runners are much more likely to, but much less likely to know it's there in the first place. Especially if obtaining said cyberware means storming a machinegun nest, which I think was the scenario we were going with.

"This is a machine gun. We're going to teach you how to use it."

Occam's razor. A philosophy seldom appreciated these days.

I prefer the Descartes Dualing Sword. Higher base damage than the razor, even if it has lower AP.

Also if you do go down this route, please take the time to run a tag eraser over the goodies and power down/remove any backup power cells they may have.

You would be surprised at the number of gangers who have decided to play 'chop the cop' and are caught with the still bloody parts in the trunk of their ride because it was still transmitting it's ID.

One other problem with suppressive fire. The penalty is to skill checks. Not being hit isn't a skill check, so the suppressive fire penalty doesn't apply.

Beyond that, machineguns are completely terrible. My Missions character is humping around an M202 and I've gotten disgusted that firing it is so completely a waste of time and nuyen. 10P with an AP of -2 is going to moderately wound a random mook in an armored jacket. To step up to a round that actually hurts (APDS or explosive) means you're spending 160 to 240 nuyen per action of suppressive fire. For 300Y, a semi-auto burst from an MGL-12 will put 20S with an AP of -4 into everyone in an area much larger than the suppression zone, with none of them getting any sort of defense test at all.

Buy a Crockett for range, and MGL-12 for engaging large numbers of targets, and put your MG on the shelf. Even in a vehicle mount, the superior damage code of assault rifles like the Alpha and Raiden mean you come out ahead.

I think it comes down to ammo usage, though. I'd imagine with a belt-fed weapon you'd be more willing to throw down more long bursts or full auto actions- making your weapon more effective than it's limited ammo alternative. So it's a trade off- slightly higher damage, or a weapon that won't run out of ammo? Time spent reloading your Ares Alpha is time you aren't putting lead downrange, and I don't believe 100% of all encounters are completed in 1 box of ammo.

Don't get me wrong- machine guns are pretty awful. But I can see their usefulness, at least in limited circumstances.

It really depends on the definition of "professional". It is not as if there is a code of conduct for people who do illegal things for other people who cannot be linked to such illegal carrying-ons. A more sensible approach would be to ask if such a highly skilled person would earn more if he did so than if he did not.

I heavily disagree that an M16 converted to FA and Belt Feed would make a better SAW than the SAW... I really liked my M16A2... I LOVED my SAW...

This discussion is a disconnect, though, from Reality to Game. In reality, very few people are willing to risk getting dead by operating in a suppressive fire zone. In the game, hoewver, all it takes is the decision to do so (since no one really dies), and a character with a semi-competant design to almost completely ignore the ramifications of the Suppresion zone. Unfortunately, the mechanics do not support the reality. Suppressive fire from fully automatic weapons designed for sustained fire is a devastating thing. Suppressive fire from fully automatic weapons using grenades is truly horrifying.

because they broadcast their existence. it's a basic matrix perception test, and it doesn't take a heavy investment to make said test successfully (and there is significant motivation to find out in advance whether the cop in question is augmented or not). furthermore, unless you're wiring *all* employees, you're stuck in the same situation as before; your one guy who is (essentially) "trained" to be your heavy weapons specialist gets taken out, and there goes any value your heavy weapons were bringing to the security force. which means you need to chip the whole force (now, they may not know he's running a heavy weapons skillsoft, but the skillwires and skilljack, well, those have to be wireless enabled if you want them to work well).

in SR4, chipping your employees made a lot of sense. it was cheap (quite likely far cheaper than training), it was fast (almost definitely far faster than training), and it meant that the employee was both in debt to you and had no actual skills to take elsewhere; it would be cheaper for someone to wire up their own personnel rather than extracting yours, and the benefit was significant because you could basically have a small workforce that can instantly change their skillset to emulate a very broad range of training.

in SR5, rating 4 skillwires + skilljack represents a 160,000 nuyen value in the person that receives it. 120,000 if you consider that once you've ripped them out, they will undoubtedly count as used cyberware i suppose. that's a pretty significant investment, and i don't care how you look at it, with the level of brutal competition the megas have against each other, even the price for themselves isn't going to be chump change (otherwise someone would offer them at a lower price to take over the market, until they reach roughly the point where the value is correct, since this is basically a luxury item that people can just choose to not buy anyways; 160,000 will buy you an awful lot of education, so it's not like there's a huge market of people getting them implanted as a replacement to education at those costs).

I have said it before, and I will say it again. ANY security/Military/Govenrment Agent, etc. that advertises their 'ware via activated wireless enabled capabilities deserves to be shot. That is about as dumb as you can get... Anyone in the industry would NEVER have such glaring security holes enabled.

And yet that still seems to be one of the foundations of this edition of Deckerrun; everything wireless with some kind of [bad] enticement to make you want to run wireless for [mostly] peanuts in benefits.

And a bank would never put any money in an ATM, where just anyone could come by and steal it.

Those are retail prices. If you wanted to fudge it, you could say that megas (in particular, those that are known for software/cyber) could produce / implant their operators at cost- in this case, an out-patient procedure and a 5 nuyen chip.

-DrZ

Well, let's consider the actual fencing value for a second...

At Rating 4, retail is 160000. Modify by x0.75 because it qualifies now as used. Now apply the x0.25 modifier for the base fencing value, and that's only 30000 for some very hot 'ware. The PR1 Ganger Lieutenant can just BARELY find a buyer, and he damn well best hope he doesn't glitch. Then he gets to default on negotiation against the closest thing he knows to a Fixer - the book's sample Bartender. He gets to put 3 Negotiation dice against the Bartender's 9, meaning that the Bartender gets to reduce the price modifier to x0.15. That leaves 18000 to split between everyone involved in getting this stuff. And in order to get it, they take a big ass risk and then have to try to hock some seriously hot merch. Frankly, I'd apply a further price reduction based on how much heat is on this stuff.

And then, in response, a Corp team comes along and wipes out their gang, because that crap is bad for business and productivi- I mean morale. And always remember two things: The corp that put it in there didn't pay retail, and they mean to recycle the whole thing once they're done with that guard.

Something that also came to mind. How skilled at removing said wires will any of these gangers be? Certainly wouldn't be like removing a cyberarm where you could rip it off and leave fleshy bits on the chrome.

Not to mention the time involved. Or how much dead weight dragging around the whole body would be. Not to mention the DocWagon style biomonitor that's telling HRT exactly where the dead employee is. Just not worth it, imho.

Heck, were I GM'ing things I'd probably give a high chance that the 'ware was ruined by whatever killed the guy... *shrug*

Thats why Jesus invemted Flesh to Goop. Or is that not in the new edition?

Flesh-To-Goo was invented by Aztechnology?

Actually, that makes a lot of sick, twisted sense!

No Turn To Goo yet - and the addition of a mage to do that takes us well beyond the simple, basic, common threat that was being suggested as making this such a bad idea, especially giving that spells are resisted with two Attributes rather than one in SR5, so the roll would become harder to win (demanding a decent Spellcasting+Magic and a reasonable Force).

Yeah, removing skillwires wouldn't be a simple task. It's a complex system of dozens of parts, and if you break anything the wires would be ruined. You'd need a full cybersurgery shop and expertise to do it, even if you didn't care to keep the subject alive.

Double post. Stupid phone.

A reasonable (but not fair) extension of the Not Enough Bullets rule for Suppressive Fire suggests you only need to fire two bullets per 1m wide zone, so if you want to go super crazy let your players suppress a 2m hallway with 4 bullets per Combat Turn.

I am not too sure about that. I was an automatic weapons gunner too, except I was trained on the Ultimax instead of the American SAW. And I must say that apart from the ability to put more rounds in the air in a short period of time, I don't really like my SAW as compared to my M-16. Any burst more than 3 rounds almost always saw the rest of the rounds flying off some place else other than the target/s. And if I wanted to suppress, multiple 3 round bursts from my 16 worked better. Maybe if I was using drum mags for my SAW, it would be better, but I really doubt it. In any case, I was issued magazines with same ammo capacity as the M-16's.