Hey Fallas,

do you know the feeling, when you thought for years, that you knew how things are done, and suddenly somebody comes around the corner with "we did it wrong the whole time"?

Happened to us last week for the above mentioned topic. We usually ruled it like this "if the base damage of the weapon (modified by successes and AP) does not exceed the rating of armor, it bounces of harmlessly".
If you read the few passages about immunity / hardened armor, it is more like "if the base damage, modified by type of fire-mode, successes and AP does not exceed....blablalba".

Completey different topic. This setup also doesn´t fit to the discusscions in the past, where people complained about spirits being so overpowered. According to the latter RAW, i can shoot force 6 spirits with a simple MP (and everything above) quite easily. If just have to go full-auto-fire, 6 round burst or more and...spirit-be-gone.

Have we really been too stupid to read the rules or do we store too much game-information in our brains that we cannot remember the paragraph that clarifies it all?

Please help.

Sometimes I think we've stored so much game info that we can't remember where we originally got it. I also think the ruling on HA/ITNW comes from this bit about Narrow Bursts, SR4a, page 153: "Narrow bursts cause more damage to the target. Increase the attack’s DV by +2. Note that this DV modifier does not apply when comparing the DV to the armor rating."

However, that note is only on Short Bursts, and not mentioned for Long Bursts or Full Bursts, though I figure people follow the logic.

My copy of SR4A has the following for Hardened Armor:

If the modified Damage Value of an attack does not exceed the Armor rating (modified by Armor Penetration), then it bounces harmlessly
off the critter; don’t even bother to make a Damage Resistance Test.

SR5 has the following:
If the modified Damage Value of an attack is less than the Hardened Armor rating (modified by AP), the attack does no damage. Don’t make a Damage Resistance test for the critter; it might not even notice the attack was made in the first place.

Neither case mentions autofire being a factor. It just says modified damage with AP in brackets which may lead one to think the only modification that is a factor is AP.
I could just as easily think the bit in short narrow bursts about the damage boost not being compared to armor should also have been in the long burst and full burst but wasn't due to the awesome editing skills Catalyst routinely displays. It may have seemed redundant to put it after each burst. It perhaps should have been.

I would think after all these years someone from Catalyst would have pointed out we'd been doing it wrong as there is so much controversy over those powers.

I'm probably missing something, but in looking through the combat section in the SR5 book it seems less an issue than it did in SR4. In SR4 you had the choice to either improve your damage or reduce the target's defense depending on how you shot a burst of bullets; in SR5 you only reduce the target's defense pool. Pretty much ends up the Modified Damage being the Base Damage + Net Hits vs. Armor - AP, which is pretty much how I understood it to be when dealing with HA/ITNW previously.

That's a holdover from SR3.
In SR3, you only had the base firepower and then additional dakka from rate of fire.
And if base firepower was equal or less than the hardened armor, it bounced off no matter how fast you shot it at the hardened armor.
So, a vindicator minigun did 7S Damage. Or it would have, if you could have fired it in single shot.
But it only came in Full Auto of 15 shots. So it went from 7 to 22S and then 22D beacuse of the number of bullets.
But hardened military armor with a ballistic armor rating of 7 shrugged off all of the 22D damage, because the 7S original did not supercede the 7 ballistic armor.
Now if you loaded anything but standard pew pew into the minigun to get it up to 8S/23D, then it would have more or less completely ignored armor.
Because then you still needed to roll enough dice to reliably get 8 or more hits against the TN of 15D.

If one Round of ammo will not penetrate the hide of a Vehicle/Creature with Hardened Armor then firing a thousand rounds will not change that fact. This is why you do not add the Burst Fire mods to the calculation for penetration of Hardened Armor. Short Burst or Long Burst... Makes no difference.

or how one of the older shadowtalkers put it when high velocity guns were introduced for the first time:"right, now you can flatten ammo on armor even faster!"

Ain't that the Truth...