I was just curious to how many players arm their runners with older weapon designs. In particular I was thinking of guns. For example, my only active character at the moment, uses a M14 (check Raygun's site, its under Assault Rifles built by Springfield). Its a nice gun, though in my character's case, he's used Cannon Companion build rules to shorten the barrel and improve base recoil compensation.

It does respectable single shot fire, and since its already a base 9S damage, when you start rocking with burst fire or FA, it can get pretty dangerous. If I read Raygun's site correctly, the M14 has been in service since 1957

I credit Raygun's site alot for my character's use of weapons based in an 'older' era. The stats he gives them seem reasonable (and possible through CC creation rules) and seem more effective for my char than your standard weapons found in current SR. Plus, it helps to have pictures I like weapons that also look cool.

well the colt m1911 is pretty damn old in 2004, using modern weapons in 2064 doesnt seem too odd to me

EDIT: also raygun doesnt use the CC, but a custom set of rules that work much nicer, especially with his system

I had aplayer who was a bit of a history buff. He always tried to talk up how damaging older weapons were by giving examples, and then wanting to have his character rebuild them because he saw them as more effective the SR's guns. If I'd known of Raygun's site at the time it might not have been such a big deal but as it was it turned out to be really annoying.

Both are true. Advancement in firearms is, in a lot of ways, somewhat unique. It has progressed dramatically over the past 100 years, but a gun made 200 year ago can still kill you just as well today as it could then. There's a dichotomy, yes, but that's only weird if you oversimplify.

Raygun's guns really aren't unbalanced in and of themselves; they're just unbalanced if you try and mesh them with canon weapons, which function by a completely different metric (namely, insanity). Any imbalances purely within Raygun's guns, however, are pretty much existent in real life, too. That's worth clarifying.

There's also the fact that the bullets of yesteryear tended to be bigger and slower, which certainly ups the intimidation factor.

Hey, if a player wants a 3D rifle with an effective range of ~40 meters, by all means give it to them. How many complex actions does it take to reload one of those?

~J

The funny thing is Kagetenshi runners might freak out thinking its some esoteric BFG9000 or something since they've probably never seen it before, LOL.

So true. Get a large, modern-looking metal framework, a few barrels worth of old-school musket action, and some special effects gear. They'll never know what hit them 'till you stop to reload

~J

the problem, doc, is that firearms in shadowrun haven't improved significantly--they've just changed, usually with no discernable benefit. this isn't a case of dinosaurs giving way to mammals; it's a case of dinosaurs giving way to trilobites--and not just any trilobites, trilobites with non-functional wings.

Well, there's also that.

Also, just popping in to mention that really big, really soft, really heavy, and really slow projectiles tended to create really nasty wounds that would not have been possible with faster projectiles.

sure--when they don't miss completely, when the target isn't outside your range, when there's no armor involved, and when your firearm doesn't blow up in your face.

A trained person can reload and fire a Civil War-era rifle three times in 10 seconds (I've seen it done), so SS Simple Action reload seems appropriate. This wasn't just some random Civil War reenactor though, this was a Ph.D in American History that wrote several books on 17th-19th century firearms, so you can up it some if you want.

One thing to note, however, is that the old rifles were HORRIBLE for aiming. Sure, they were rifled by the time of the Civil War rather than smooth bore, but they were all done more or less by hand and many had uneven rifling, thus causing the bullet to spin funny. That's not even mentioning that many of the ball rounds they used were lop-sided and the edge of a ball in contact with the rifling is MUCH less than the contact of a modern shaped bullet.

For the time, though, those were some very accurate guns. If you look at fatality figures for the Revolutionary War (smooth-bore rifles from the British and a mix of smooth-bore and rifled guns from the Colonials) vs. the Civil War, it's just insane.

Just some food for thought.

The Abstruse One

I just changed its base Damage Code to 6M(f) [9S(f) in BF] and, lo and behold, it just became a balanced Machine Pistol that's still a nice but not as broken as it is as a Heavy Pistol.

riding... muscle grain.

The thing about following muscle grain is that it tends to rip large tissues apart. As a smaller projectile, it would just cause a lot of bleeding and superficial wounding, but at .72 caliber, instead of punching clean through tissue and bone as a modern weapon will almost always do, a bullet hitting you in the upper leg could impact the bone and ride from your pelvic area to our ankle, shattering every bone and joint along the way, not to mention stripping tissue all along. Crude medical techniques weren't the only reason there were so many amputations; in a lot of of ways, it was crude medical techniques combined with very complex wounds.

i, personally, have never heard of a bullet skipping off of bone and following the grain of the muscle. i'm not seeing anything like that in most of my google-searching, either--most of what i see talks about civil war bullets shattering bone on their way through (which, in and of itself, makes for a pretty complex wound).

the most relevant page i've found in google is this conversation between several black powder hunters. it talks about penetration and muzzle velocity and delivering energy to the target, but nothing about ricocheting along muscle grain lines.

It may be a myth, I'll admit, but I have read it in several books, had a teacher mention it, and seen it in a couple documentaries. That doesn't make it right, but if it is a myth, it would have to be an oddly widespread one.

heh. if it weren't widespread, it wouldn't be a myth!

i'm not saying it didn't happen; i'm just not sure it happened often enough to be considered a feature of civil war-era arms. there are stories about bullets in WW1 and 2 zinging through both sides of a helmet without touching the head of the man wearing the helmet; soldiers didn't, however, poke their heads up from the trenches in expectation that their helmets would magically route bullets around their skulls.

And there are some pretty fantastic stories even contained in books about single modern battles; still, in this case, it wasn't presented as a freak accident so much as an appreciably common behavior of big bore muskets.

My personal opinion about the improvement of firearm technology is that firearms aren't bound to change a whole lot between now and 2064, in the same way that they haven't changed much between 1944 and now.

Concerning the firearms themselves, what has changed between now and 1944? Materials and manufacturing technologies. That's about it. We use aluminum, titanium, and scandium alloys as well as polymers in order to decrease the weight of firearms. We use Computer Numeric Controlled machinery to manufacture firearms to unprecedented tolerance levels in very short amounts of time. But in the practical use of these weapons, does this make any difference? Does it make them more powerful? No. Does it make them more accurate? No. It makes them lighter weight, which means that they will actually recoil more in the same cartridge is used, and in some cases, it makes them more reliable and robust.

In fact, the laws of physics have not changed. Because of this and the changes in the way militaries operate, we have actually chosen to make the majority of firearms less powerful, and are just now beginning a trend that will split the difference between the power of WWII-era small arms and the small arms of the last 30 years. If this trend takes hold, infantry small arms will still be less powerful than they were 60 years ago.

The things that have changed about the use of firearms over the last 60 years really don't have a lot to do with the technology of firearms themselves. Supporting technologies like scopes, reflex sights, laser designators, etc... have improved substantially. We have increased our ability to engage targets quicker and more accurately through these technologies. But more importantly, we have changed the way we think about combat.

Ammunition technology has improved, but not by the leaps and bounds manufacturers would like you to believe. Today we have bullets that have been maximized for external ballistics, meaning that they fly about as far, as fast and as flat as we can make an cost-effective bullet go, within the our ability to deal with recoil, chamber pressure, and the ability to see the target and engage it quickly. However, I do think terminal ballistics have some room to improve. If you buy into the whole nanotechnology thing (and you would have to in order to accept most of the cyberware in this game), bullets that actively change density and hardness in flight or on contact with the target shouldn't be that difficult to fathom. Explosive bullets with incredibly small fuses should also be possible. (But incredibly small explosive bullets will always be impractical. The explosion itself is not what does the damage. What's being blown into several tiny bits does. You'll get the same target effect with a bigger bullet.) But at the level of technology Shadowrun is at, nanotechnology might also be too expensive to implement in that way. On top of that, there are several problems to overcome when you really get to thinking about implementing technologies like that.

Technology will certainly improve. But I honestly don't feel that firearms will be one of those areas that will be revolutionized by new technology. The main ideas behind combat firearm technology are: practicality, simplicity, and cost-effectiveness. It's an object you stake your like on. The more complex you make it, the more likely it is to fail. There's still a little room to grow, but in the overall picture, I think we've pretty much reached the apex of rock-throwing. Other technologies will supplant it.

Honestly, Shadowrun has become far too comic-booky for me. I don't like a lot of the ideas in the game, so I disregard them and don't implement them in my game or on my site. I'm sure this will make some of you cringe, but that's okay. You can play the game your way and you can implement the rules I've come up with in any way you see fit. I'm sure you're capable of figuring what works and doesn't work all by yourselves. Balance is something you feel. No one else can tell you, no matter how hard they try, what is and isn't balanced. You should find out for yourself.

Oddly enough, I was getting ready to add Springfield Armory's SOCOM 16 rifle to my site, which seems to be a lot like the type of thing that started the idea for this coversation.

PS: I've killed a few animals in my time, and I've never seen a bullet "follow muscle grain".

Not saying that it does or it doesn't, but were any of these animals killed with a musket?

~J

indeed. a single operating system for all PCs would make life a lot easier in the world of computing than a single cartridge for all weapons of a given class would for the world of firearms. failing some sort of massive reboot, like the Crash, i don't see that happening ever, much less within the next 30 years.

after all, who gets to decide what cartridge each class of weapon uses? what incentive is there for all weapons manufacturers to use that cartridge? hell, right here in this thread, we're arguing about the usefulness and applicability of weapons from the american civil war--how in the world is anyone going to convince the entire planet to use just one single cartridge for all weapons of a single type?

By force

~J

Was the arm at his side, or was he holding it out? IE, was there significant bullet redirection?

Sure, a powerful enough bullet will go up one arm and down the other if you're standing with both arms out straight directly away from each other, but there's no redirection there.

~J, devil's advocate

Bullets definitely can follow bone. That much has been documented, and while it's an incredibly rare occurrence and does only happen at certain angles, it's not nearly as far fetched as a musket ball travelling along muscle. It's a claim I admit I myself am skeptical of, but given the number of sources I've seen backing it up, I tend to take it as tentative fact.

well, sure, but it'd be silly to claim that .22 rounds are better because they have a better chance of following a bone they strike. in the end, a 9mm in the chest cavity is going to to more damage, more often, than a .22 will--even when the .22 does richochet.

I could probably find a copy of the report from the Warren Commission.

There are enough firearm varieties in the game. What I'd like to see developed for SR are weapons/rules for the new weapons you hear about, like crowd contol microwaves and other things sinister - such as "lasers".

Lasers of all man-portable varieties are in Cannon Companion, vehicle lasers in Rigger 3.

~J

I knew a forensics guy (proff) in my college days that told of an attempted suicide. The poor slot pointed the gut at the side of his head and pulled the trigger. The bullet followed the curve of his skull up, over, and down but didn't kill him. I don't have proof but after the other slides he'd shown us, his word was good enough for me.

Thanks, kevyn. Very nice of you to say.

As for requests, I've never been big on them, but tell me what you're thinking. I may put it up if it's something I'm interested in.

Sounds more like a riochet, rather than 'following'. Ah well, without the ME report, it's all speculation.

{Edit} Actually, it sounds more like the cop had his arm out in front of his heart while aiming/steadying his firearm. The bullet just happened to come in along that path, tearing through tissue and possibly glancing off the bone, before emerging and then plunging into the chest and heart.{/Edit}

Personally, I'd say electronics and new materials would be the biggest innovations in firearms over the next 50 years. The most innovative thing I've ever seen was the Glock 17 when it was introduced, and all it did was take advantage of materials already on-hand (plastics and ceramics with the metal parts), plus use a new safety/firing system.

Better recoil control, stronger/lighter materials and possibly new innovations in loading or firing would be most likely. Electronics could be useful once power supplies become a non-issue (but would still need to function without them).