The french book lists his damage code at 14F. The English version is 14G. What is the truth?

He has specific ammo that is treated like APDS. But does it add a damage level or what?

I suspect we are seeing a translation issue because I am not sure how you are seeing F or G as 3rd ed damages still used the (L)ight, (M)edium, (S)erious, (D)eadly staging codes for damage.

The lists I can see from Cannon Companion (think its pg 21) show the Barrett as doing 14D.

Edit: APDS ammo halves any Ballistic Armor (round down) of a person or normal barrier.

Against vehicles/drones it was still treated at normal ammo and not anti-vehicular so still suffered from the staging loss vs hardened amor.

ok so it's really Deadly the Damage Code.

That's quite high (not that it made that much of a difference as a snipr bullet is uually lethal anyways).

The barret is an anti material rifle. Using it against soft targets (i.e. living stuff) is overkill.
Also, the barret is basically what the PAC is based on, seeing how the Cobra Assault Gun from Robocop, on which the Shadowrun Panther Assault Cannon is based was modeled after in the Movie.

The PAC btw has an SR3 DMG Code of 18D. For some reason.

To clear some things up, French rules translated damage codes, D(eadly) as F(atal) and S(erious) as G(rave). So 14D in Fields of Fire became 14F in French version Les chiens de guerre. I can't tell for SR3 Cannon Companion, as I don't have the French version to compare.

Exactly. The real weapon the Barret is based on, the Barret m90, is a .50 BMG anti-materiel rifle, designed for use against unarmored and lightly armored vehicles. They can punch through engine blocks to disable vehicles.

Then, too bad it wasn't designed that way, 'cause thir bullets are treated as APDS and not anti-vehicle bullets. And as the weapon has his own specific type of ammo, I don't think you can use anti-vehicles (which probably makes an Ranger Arms with anti-vehicle ammo more efficient at taking down vehicles).

Good ol' AV rounds, turned a holdout into a vehicle killer...while anything without AV ammo was comically inefficient

That is, sadly, an artifact of the game design. Blame whoever did the writeup in Cannon Companion and decided that AV rounds needed to be absurd. Actual APDS rounds exist, although they prefer the term SLAP as APDS was reserved for tank scale rounds.

SR3's gun conception philosophy was that any gun could have any ammo and any accessory. I guess the idea was to provide versatility, but it just led to a general blandness and most weapons being essentially useless.

The idea was to not have people have to bother with the minutia of having dedicated ammo for every weapon.
And the rationalization was something along the lines of:"if you want to buy it, somebody is making it"
Oh how i loved Shotgun Slugs ExEx in a Burst Fire Shotgun.
10S Base Damage. 15D ExEx Burst. Yes, hillariously OP and red mist tended to happen often.
Ruger Thunderbolt: Base Damage: 9M. With ExEx 11M. With Burst 14D. FROM A HANDGUN!
It. Was. Nuts! And Armor was mostly impossible to get above 8.

It was a pretty letal system. Without even min-maxing.

I liked that it was lethal. I didn't like that in the end, no one would ever buy a SMG, and most people would just rely on a predator for black trenchcoat and the Ares Alpha or the best shotgun (which I don't remember which it was, but there's one) for other situations. There are like 6 or 7 assault rifles described in BBB and CC, and though you had zero interest in taking anything but the alpha. Maybe you could want a High Velocity one for niche applications, but not really.

But basically, your choice is: do you want an AR, a Shotgun or a pistol as your main weapon? And then, you just choose the best one in that category.

You get a bit more variety when you go to heavy and launch weapons =^.^=
Big Boys Toys.
Firing a vindicator Minigun is practically impossible due to the hueg liek xbwaks TargetNumbers to actually hit what you are aiming at, but it still is cool.
Even cooler when you, as a Troll, can do so one handed. With 2 such Miniguns. Aawww Yeah!

I always hated the AV rounds. Like others have said they kind of made the choice of firearm pointless, and of course they didn't make any sense.

I'm not saying it was a good thing in terms of interesting gameplay, tactical realism, or anything like that, but there was something uniquely like a stupid 80s action movie where suddenly a typical pistol firing AV rounds could blow up a car or helicopter.

Of course if you even try to think of that realistically it makes no sense. Even if for some reason you went through the effort to hand-make, say, .44 magnum cartridges with a tungsten carbide core or something like that, would you expect that you could blow up a car or something with that handgun? Actually I'm not really sure how such a cartridge would hypothetically perform in terms of penetrating specific parts of a typical car engine that otherwise wouldn't be vulnerable to similar FMJ handgun cartridges, but the point is how expensive, painstaking, and impractical something like that would be at the end of the day compared to simply buying a Barret or using some other means to attack the car, or simply using other tactics like using a rifle against the driver rather than trying to shoot the car into an inoperable state. There's a reason no one talks about efforts to make a pistol that can defeat a car due to magical specialty ammunition.

You could say the same of the Ruger Super Warhawk, which was the big revolver dealing 10M rather than 9M. Except it was single shot, and thus useless.

The worse is they actually created shotgun specific ammos. Why couldn't they do the same with rifle is past my understanding. That was a single line to add to some ammos and quite sensible to everybody even people not using gun…

Ruger Super Warhawk is/was far from useless. My Troll loved the hell out of his. Big Intimidating Handgun for a Big Intimidating Thug.

And if you load that up with ExEx, you are looking at 12M Damage.
Which is fucking hard to resist!

Indeed...

The key to that was to simply use a Take Aim action before firing. The lower TN could make a big difference.

You could convert it to SA via Cannon Companion if you want. I did this at one point because I wanted a Mateba auto-revolver statline.

They made sense from a meta perspective: Regular weapons had zero chance against vehicles, some fix was needed. It's just that this fix was a bit too much in the opposite direction...

It doesn't really matter i think, because going from non AV WEAPON to AV WEAPON has exactly the same effect:
You don't manage to scratch the Paint. YOU TOTALED THE TRUCK!