Simple question (hopefully);

Do guns in Shadowrun store one shot in the chamber, or do they fire straight from the mag/cart.

Example 1:
A decker expects the clip in my smart gun. Do I still have one round in the chamber to take a shot at him?

Example 2:
I want to change ammo type during a fight, do I need to...
A. Eject clip, insert new clip with new ammo type
Or
B. Expect clip, clear chamber, insert new clip


Just thinking about these. The book never seems to menction it unless I've just glossed over it while reading.

If all else fails, there's always good old Revolvers . .

Otherwise make it perfectly clear to your GM what kind of weapon you are buying.
There are no rules for this. Technically, all Magazine/Clip-Fed guns should have one in the Chamber untill the last bullet is gone.
Without one in there, you should not be able to shoot at all, because the shooting action in SA weapons automagically reloads one into the chamber from the Magazine.
No idea if this would still hold true for the mostly caseless ammo that is supposedly used almost exclusively in the world of shadowrun.
Probably yes, seeing how there's still pressure being excerted.

By the rules... now, there is no mechanic for chambering, you can probably do so for "fluff", but if you have ammunition loaded in the "clip" or internal magazine/cylinder, you can shoot.

Another interpretation is that SR assumes all runners to have a round chambered at all times, so they can quickdraw and shoot, and that the reload action includes chambering by default. In that case, if your clip mysteriously ejects for not good reason, you would still have one round to shoot. Make it count and kill that smug nerd.

Since chambering/clearing is not a specified action in SR, assume it is part of other actions or a free action at most. A smartlink could probably do this extremely fast, maybe as part of removing a clip, as there would not be good reason to keep a bullet chambered when the magazine is removed.

For the sake of sanity, might not want to think about this too much.

....oO( Hmmm thats like if you're asking: do people always wear white underwear ? )

That totally depends on your Char and his Weapon.
there is no clear RAW about that, so just to make sure, tell your GM about it or write it down on your Char sheet.
But if You do that you should stick to it (with all Pros and Cons)

I f.E. declare all my Weapons by default as WiFi off and Caseless.
Firearms are usually loaded but safety on.(well for most of my Chars ,some are still wet behind the Ears and have to learn the hard way)
most Shotguns are NOT because the "Kachunk" of loading a Pumpgun can be used as a modifier to intimidate

HokaHey
Medicineman

Have you tried pistol-whipping the decker? That doesn't need bullets.

In the real world, magazine firearm (whether semiautomatic or not) capacities are often quoted as (magazine capacity) + 1, to reflect that you can have a full magazine plus one round in the chamber.

The debates as to whether or not you can or should carry a weapon with a round in the chamber are legion, and in some cases it might not even matter. For instance, in competition shooting with round limits it doesn't matter how many rounds your magazine can carry in theory, you go to the firing line with an empty chamber, and a limited number of magazines loaded to a limited level.

In a combat shooting scenario (including self defence) the usual argument is that you're in a hurry, might not have both hands free for conveniently charging your weapon (racking the slide), might not have time or might not want to warn your adversary with the mechanical sound of your firearm's action cycling. People who live by that generally have one round in the chamber, a full magazine, and rely upon a series of safety features to ensure that the firearm will not discharge unless and until they hold it and deliberately pull the trigger.

Unsurprisingly, these safety features are also hotly debated.

Your really slick gunbunnies will also speed up their reloads by reloading when they still have one last round in the chamber but an empty magazine in the magazine well. The result is that they drop the empty magazine, slap in a fresh magazine and keep shooting without having to work the action because discharging the round in the chamber will, in a semi-automatic firearm, automatically strip the first round from the top of the magazine and continue operating. It may sound rather far out, but I've seen it done under pressure in real life - it's quite feasible.

With all this in mind, if a player told me that their character were carrying three full magazines, plus a full magazine in the gun, plus a round in the chamber, with the safety on, I would not be particularly surprised or perturbed. I might ask a few questions around whether or not the firearm had a grip safety, a decocker and if so whether it could fire double action from a decocked position, but that's about it.

Alternatively, you could simply decree that all modern firearms are open-bolt designs (meaning a new round only gets chambered when the trigger is pulled) and therefore the extra round in the chamber is not possible, end of story. If you need a justification, caseless ammunition, which is supposed to be the standard ammunition in SR, causes some problems with overheating and open-bolt designs have a far better cooling.

I would just assume that all listed magazine sizes are magazine alone, and that yes, you totally can ride with one in the chamber.

If you are using a magazine, then of course you can have one in the chamber on top.

If you are using a clip, you don't get that extra round on top because if you are too lazy to call it a mag you are too lazy to remember to keep one in the chamber.

Just kidding.

Now if you are using 'lecto-clips you are just outta luck because it's an energy weapon and your battery just fell out.

Edit: This just out by Arachne Arms, a subdivision of Ares, comes the Trojan MagGuard™

Available in a variety of sizes, it is designed to fit around the entry point for the weapon's magazine/clip, clamping over the magazine end (if in the grip) or clamping onto the sides of the exposed magazine (for larger weapons) to prevent premature ejection of the magazine.

With either a physical press of a button or electronic command will release it's hold on the magazine.
Actual ejection of the clip is still a separate action, the plan being a hacker now has to hack two devices to pull this classic hacker favourite.*


*yes it's still easier just turning all wireless off, but folks are funny and will buy gadgets and add-ons so there is a market for this.

Just a note about carrying with one in the chamber: Some firearm safeties operate by preventing the firing pin from actuating. Others work by merely preventing the trigger from moving. The former will usually prevent accidental discharge from a drop or strike against the weapon, the latter, not always.

Just a 'safety' tip.


-k

If the weapon has an electric discharge, that's not gonna be a problem, KarmaInferno. Nor if it's a weapon with an old-school hammer like a revolver. You're certainly not wrong, though.

Yeah, if they are a Metalstorm style electric-discharge primer, a trigger safety is probably good enough. But most SR weapons seem to be of the more traditional mechanically-actuated type, from the various art and lore presented thus far.

Revolvers are actually MORE prone to drop-discharges, if cocked, since they tend to mostly have trigger safeties. But yes, if they are un-cocked they are mostly safe.


-k

I'd say loading a round into the chamber is covered by the Ready Weapon action, and leave it at that.

I wouldn't imagine you'd holster a revolver with the hammer cocked, unless you were a gigantic tool...

Indeed... it takes a very special kind of tool to do that...

Actually, the drop safety of revolvers is a somewhat fraught topic.

Old school single action revolvers were definitely not drop safe, if you had an undischarged cartridge under the hammer. That is why the safe recommendation is to have an empty cylinder chamber under the hammer.

On newer revolver designs this is no longer true. Drop safeties have been explicitly added, so on modern designs you can safely keep a loaded cartridge under the hammer. In fact, many modern revolver designs are drop safe even if the revolver is cocked, because even if the hammer falls it will not drive the firing pin without other action being taken.

Double action revolvers are generally drop safe (although this is not universally true) but it's worth observing that while they have internal safeties against accidental discharges, they do not generally have switch safeties. If you pull the trigger, they go bang. The good side of this is that they tend to make good self defence weapons because a person under stress has less thinking to do along the lines of "Did I disengage the safety?" but of course the bad side is that if incautiously handled they may go bang at inopportune times. The usual solution is to have a holster such that the trigger guard is covered, and/or a thumb break that prevents the hammer from cocking. That way the holster becomes an affirmative safety feature.

In this modern day and age, semi-automatic pistols with first round double action (cock-and-fire) behaviour are fairly common. Some of these have safety switches, while others have (in an effort to emulate the behaviour of revolvers) just a decocker that returns the pistol to an uncocked condition.

You can usefully view all this as a conflict between the principle of safe operation on the one hand, and the insight that when you need a gun (especially a self defence handgun) you need it to go bang in a useful direction as soon as possible.

Edited to add a bit more detail on revolver safety.

Now, this was a case of insta house rule....but what do you think of it? Would it be justifiable to say that by 207x, the regular firearm uses caseless ammunition firing from an open bolt, or a completely different chambering mechanism like the G11?

One time during a tactical shooting competition event, just to see what it was like, I ran with a Ruger P97DC with no round in the chamber. I was also wearing gloves. So, each time, I had to draw, chamber a round, and then engage.

It actually annoyed the other participants because nowadays not having a round in the chamber seems to be a faux pas. The cultural stance is that since modern firearms typically have redundant safeties, it is no longer professional to not have a round in the chamber. Instead, you must carry with a round in the chamber and train extensively with your safeties.

I won't say it's entirely beyond the realms of possibility, but I strongly doubt it.

The basic designs we have right now have mostly stood the test of time for many decades. In some cases over a century. There's no reason to believe that the basic 1911 will be abandoned any time soon, for example. There are many, many other pistols and related designs of similar age and they too will be around for a while.

The question to ask is: why open bolt? You're right that it cools better, but only when there's ventilation in place, and it's largely critical at rapid fire (think machineguns). So your sammie's Ingram is probably an open bolt shooter, but his sidearm probably is not because one major downside of lavishly ventilated, open bolt designs is that when the bolt is open, crap gets into the chamber more easily resulting in malfunctions. And if you ride with the bolt closed then you might as well have one in the chamber, assuming that your weapon design allows that to happen safely - and why would it not?

Honestly, one additional round of capacity, assuming the player bothers to think of it, isn't a game breaker so I'd just deal with it. Also, while the heat issues with caseless ammunition are real, they aren't insuperable with the right materials. I'd be more inclined to assume that before people went caseless, they solved that problem.

this.

even if the decker totally bricks your gun, you can always use it like a brick

To abstract away the bookkeeping over having a round in the chamber or not when changing ammunition types, ejecting a magazine for one reason or another, et cetera. OK, not a good justification in-game, sooo...I have no idea. The best I could come up with is that since firearms in 2070 are caseless and at least partically electrically actuated (see smartgun magazine ejection), they have some new kind of action which makes having a round in the chamber superfluous. But that's really bad handwaving

Another issue to be aware of with open bolt firearms is accuracy. When you pull the trigger on a closed bolt weapon a very small amount of motion occurs before firing - a hammer or striker forces the firing pin into the primer of the cartridge or in electronic systems (most caseless weapons, presumably) the propellant is simply ignited. In either case, the bolt does not appreciably move until after the weapon fires, coupling the shifting mass of the action with the recoil of the weapon. Meanwhile, in an open-bolt weapon, the bolt is held to the rear until released forward when the trigger is pulled, where it must strip a cartridge from a magazine / belt / whatever and chamber it all before firing. While probably not a huge issue at typical engagement ranges, this does disrupt the point of aim somewhat, making it ill-suited to precision applications, especially on larger firearms like rifles, machine guns, etc.

As for in-universe thinking, if every firearm were converted to open-bolt designs I imagine it wouldn't take more than an hour before some marketing executive launched the ARES Precision Predator lineup, "now featuring a closed bolt for superior accuracy!" and this whole mess starts all over again.

Or you have a hammerless revolver.



Lever action, bolt action, and revolving firearms still exist canonically anyway, so the whole question's kinda moot.

I just add a +1 mentally to each magazine capacity except on revolvers or other non-magazine weapons like belt-fed machineguns.

With all the options of Glock-style striker fired (aka semi-DA), SA/DA, SAO and DAO, I think it's a moot point to really drive a 20-questions on each gun a character has. A gun wonk will describe their character's guns, how they are carried, and all sorts of neat little details. Someone that just wants their character to have a piece handy will say "Yeah, I grabbed <insert random gun here>, it sounded cool." Both options, and everything in between, has little or nothing to do with telling a fun, engaging story in the grand scheme of things.

If I can get a general location on where the handgun or other tool is, and any associated reloads...it's close 'nuff for government work.

True enough on the cooling, but you sacrifice accuracy with open-bolt weapons and the only open-bolt weapons you see anymore are machineguns and outdated SMG designs. As budgets get smaller the per-shot lethality and accuracy become bigger and bigger factors for any military/paramilitary purchasers.

While I'm all for the Old Skool feel of SR (to a point), caseless ammunition has along way to go before being serviceable. Remember, only West Germany was going for the G11 and they mostly relied upon the U.S. for their defense. In actually, their military was far from large at the time.

Caseless Ammunition Issues also shows from a person very knowledgeable in the field that caseless weapons have some serious teething issues to get past still. Cased Telescoped Ammunition seems to be firing on all cylinders, however.

At that time 1.2 million including reservists. And reservists were one of the big arguments made for going caseless, it was supposed to be far easier to hit something for people who served a decade ago or just got drafted.


PS: The counter-argument of course was that reservists needed something similar to the weapon they used to train on, and the G11 would be too different...

In semi-auto mode, which is usually the right choice, why would caseless be any different than cased?

The G11 was based upon various theories of firearms combat that didn't really pan out. One of which was the idea of being more effective by firing so fast that a 3-shot burst would effectively have the same chance to hit the target with two or three rounds with a single trigger press as a single semi-automatic shot. Another was the idea of limited engagement timeframes. If the nukes started flying around, the issues with the G11s long-term maintenance were not as acute as if the weapon system was expected to operate everywhere in the world for months or years at a time. Finally, the ammunition was based upon the old Hydrostatic Shock model where the smaller, lighter bullet would still cause a shockwave that would cause massive temporary cavitation that would blow out arteries and organs in the target and disable them. Hydrostatic Shock has since been thoroughly debunked and the issues with lighter projectile ammunition are becoming better understood as our strategic and tactical focus has changed from the Fulda Gap and urban warfare to places where longer-ranged engagements might be far more common.

I'm not sure that I would say that hydrostatic shock has been truly debunked, rather than limited in its applicability to certain cases.

I have had discussions with some high level specialists in this field, as well as having done a lot of hunting and slaughter, and literature review.

Hydrostatic shock can work, but it needs to have a full vessel upon which to operate, to act as a waveguide transmitting the shock somewhere usefully vulnerable. The classic test case was performed by veterinarians culling cape buffalo with heart shots, who figured out that if they hit the heart when it was in the empty phase, the buffalo bled out. Rapidly, but not instantly. If the heart was full, a pressure spike moved straight up the blood vessels to the brain and knocked it out of operation instantly.

The implication is that if hydrostatic shock worked for you, it was great, but you got lucky. If it didn't, you'd have been better off with a big thumper of a round.

Not even that. The legend that the G11 was able to cause some kind of "hydraulic" or "neural" shock only came up afterwards as an urban legend to explain why the G11 wasn't adopted: "It could kill by a grazing shot, that would have violated the Geneva conventions". No engineer ever believed that legend, the kill power of the rifle was supposed to come from the fact that it replaced the semi-auto mode with an rapid triple burst from a "floating" action, which would only have transferred the recoil to the shooter after the third round.

It wasn't a bad concept, but it was overengineered as only German could have done it and geared towards a scenario of green conscripts mowing down Russians in the North German Plain and Fulda Gap...in which case the nonstandard ammunition would also have been of debatable value.

I always assumed it was up to the character.

I know the pistol I carry is striker fired with a trigger and grip safety, and so yes - I carry it with one in the chamber. I always considered it somewhat useless to have a gun without a round chambered on my person.

Remember having one round chambered is not exactly the same thing as having one extra round above magazine capacity - also known as "combat load."

Combat load requires to insert a full magazine once one round has been chambered. This can naturally occur during operation when you insert a new clip before emptying the weapon. With an empty weapon (either emptied by firing at targets, or emptied for security reasons or much needed cleaning), it requires you to insert the magazine, chamber, remove the magazine, add one more round and re-insert the magazine. That's one step more burdensome than chambering one round at all time (especially with magazines that have a sturdy spring, if you're a tad short on physical strength).

Also keep in mind that some weapons are better to down-load by a round or two. M16-type weapons are well known for being hard to reload with a full 30-round magazine if the bolt is closed as the extra tension will often keep the magazine from seating correctly. Many high-speed/low-drag folks download to 28 rounds because of this for safer tactical reloads (using a moment of safety to put a fresh magazine into your weapon to minimize the risk of an ill-timed "click! instead of a "bang!" immediately following your most recent trigger press). Glocks, while well-known for being very reliable have several top-tier trainers saying to down-load their magazines by one as it makes it less likely to have a magazine-based malfunction.

So basically for hydrostatic shock to be a "critical hit" it needs to hit and organ or vessel that is large and full of blood or other fluids, so that there is a vehicle for the shock to affect multiple organ systems?

To put it another way, if the light small round punches through some muscle tissue or fat tissue only, you wouldn't expect anything but a small hole an an exit wound?

One time, I decided to participate in a local tactical pistol competition but with an empty chamber, just to try it out and see how practical it was. The so-called "Israeli carry" which most people on the internet say is retarded. I used a big pistol that is easy to manipulate and which doesn't have a manual safety, a Ruger P97 DC. In terms of engaging the targets, obviously having to manually chamber a round was slower than not having to do so, but I didn't think it was that big of a deal. However, the other people participating evidently thought what I was doing was retarded and kept telling me I didn't have to do it that way. I got the sense that a lot of people are sort of offended by the idea of "Israeli carry".

My feeling is that it's sub-optimal, but that people make too big of a deal out of it. If you have reason to think you realistically might have to defend yourself (for example if you're a cop) and you have a responsibility or duty to deploy your weapon efficiently, then, yes, "Israeli carry" is a liability and potentially letting down the people you have a duty towards. But if you know you're highly unlikely to be attacked and your carry pistol is very much a "just in case" thing, and you have no responsibility or duty to protect the people around you, then I would argue that it's smart if, given the particular gun you have (such as Ruger P97 DC with no manual safeties), it reduces the chance of a ND. You would still be disadvantaged if someone jumped you and you were trying to chamber a round while in hand to hand combat, but if there were an active shooter situation or something like that where someone else is initially being targeted, you'd still have plenty of time to chamber a round after you run to cover and assess the situation.

I really love the history. Thanks for sharing!

Today, it seems so counter-intuitive that a combat rifle would not be designed to be reliable under harsh conditions with sub-optimal maintenance. It tells me just how different the mindset was during the Cold War. I guess the idea was that since you were holding off the Soviets all the long term problems with maintenance and supply (for caseless rifles with high rates of fire) wouldn't be a problem since you'd be at home in Germany and everything you needed and had would be right there.

Caseless weapons would have solved many problems from harsh conditions, no annoying ejection ports and all that. Also it's worth remembering what the state of equipment was back then, the G3s were older than their average user and the MP2 (Uzi) featured a unique non-deterministic burst mode that used to be the semi-auto setting. Not hard to build something more reliable than that

The "at home in Germany" thing would however have meant that the few production sites for the otherwise unavailable ammunition would have been in easy striking distance, and borrowing a mag or two from other NATO troops would have been impossible.


Yes, it's totally applicable if your blood vessels look like this

The biggest issue is that organs and blood vessels proved to be far more elastic and the surrounding tissues much better able to absorb the energy than initially thought. The gelatin tests showed crazy cavitation and stress fractures but actual gunshot wound observations showed that it just wasn't as superfly as they had initially thought...by like, exponents and stuff.

I think people should carry them however they are comfortable (or not at all), but having to rack a round in the very rare (and hopefully) non-existent need for someone to use a concealed weapon - I can't think that will end well. Luckily modern weapons have options for grip and trigger safeties that make it much harder to discharge negligently.