So that's what the 10% price hike is for then?

But as I said, will it be at anywhere near the same velocity? Pretty obviously not, unless the explosion happens much faster than I think it does (which is possible).

~J

That is so sigged.

1. The BFTG IS a modified bigger gun, just in production quantities

2. Yes you would for mass-produced Saturday night specials. You also need the very latest and best in materials and recoil systems for a human to fire a very powerful handgun. This isn't, in relative terms, a powerful handgun. It is a modified rifle used a pistol by a being who's arm is likely to mass more than an entire human. The recoil (based on RL physics) is scaled up from a Glock22 using .40S&W ammo.

3. Every gun ever owned by a troll is a custom design. Every gun every owned by a dwarf is a custom design. Trolls and dwarfs are not the same size or shape as humans. There is a massive market shift in SR compared to now towards customization. My team has 4 troll PCs and access to another 7 troll NPCs. 2 pistols each, that is 22 guns already.

4. In SR version of the USA, the troll population is 3% of how many millions and can anyone dispute that they live in a more violent world than humans. 40% of Americans buy guns today, you agree a safer time, no? That is a lot of armed trolls.

Why do trolls have to pay a 25% premium on a gun for troll modification, surely if a gun manufacturer makes 100,000 pistols a year and 3% are bought by trolls that is 3,000 pistols a year that need larger grips and new trigger systems. That's a range all by itself, but it isn't in the rules probably because canon suggests that all trolls are thick as sh*t and just hit things.

In SR's developed countries there are millions and millions of trolls. What are the world handgun sales for last year? Say only 1 in 9 trolls will bother to buy the gun that actually fits their hand and is capable of slowing a troll. Even at just 0.1% of developed world sales, sales of the BFTG amounts to a lot of guns.

Honda Viking - Expensive troll motorbike for poor trolls to buy, they exist and they can never be mass produced. 40% of people in the USA have a gun; out of a total 120,000,000 commuters in USA 158,059 of them ride motorcycles to work regularly. That's only 0.12%, figures are from US Department of Census. So just how many Honda Vikings do you think are sold and they made it into canon.

5. What specialty rounds? The BFTG uses .50 Alaskan rimless rifle rounds, a common enough round, one of the reasons you have be a troll is use the gun is that the grip is massive to accomodate a standard rifle round in a pistol chassis format. Other (meta)humans simply cannot get their hands around the grip. .50 rifle and automatic pistol designs will have been about for around 2 centuries in SR, remember this is not a SOTA handgun.

6. A gun is not just about damage, its shape is defined by its function. A pistol is pistol shaped because that is the best shape for a side-arm. Vehicle weapons are inherently cumbersome, use a lot of and/or very expensive ammo and are resticted to military (battlefield) use only. Quite frankly, who is most likely to take on a troll, a troll; (Tanks fight tanks) I don't know about you, but who tries to take out an armoured troll with a pistol.

Oh, and I can think of at least one place where the military would invest in troll sized equipment ,if just for the PR, a certain state in Germany.

Damage is about how much energy can be passed into a target. The damaging energy in a standard round is caused by kinetic energy over time.

Kinetic energy is mass*speed so a heavy bullet travelling at a slower speed can impart the same damage as a light bullet travelling at a high speed.

Also there is scale to take into account, even a shorter barrelled troll pistol would have a human SMG barrel length.

No. Damage is about how well/quickly you can kill something.

You can't just chopdown a rifled/semi-auto gun and expect it to work properly.

This is how I understand guns to work.

1. The angle of rifling in a barrel needs to adjusted for barrel length and bullet mass and velocity otherwise the incorrect rate of spin will decrease accuracy and power.

2. The mechanisms that correct recoil and chamber the next round are designed to work with a set gun balance. Chop a gun about and you lose some recoil compensasion and increase the chance of jamming a round.

3. The M16 carbine uses gas venting as a recoil reduction system. Chop the end off the barrel and kiss goodbye to the venting

I seriously doubt this. I'm not an expert in this, but you have M16-family weapons with the exact same 1-in-7" twist with barrel lengths ranging from 533mm to 213mm designed to fire the same M855 ammunition. My understanding is that you only need a very short barrel to give sufficient spin to the bullet, and the rate of spin will always be the same.

Only with a recoil-operated weapon. Theoretically speaking, a gas-operated firearm (with the piston and everything) will work just fine as long as you cut the barrel in front of the gas valve.

It has a flash hider/muzzle brake, which is probably not very effective at reducing felt recoil. If that worries you, just smack the same flash hider back onto the shortened barrel.

Anyway, you could just use a La France M16K or even a Colt M177E2 and simply modify the lower receiver.

Not that I think a 200mm barreled 5.56x45mm weapon with a pistol grip would be that scary. Cutting down a semi-automatic, box magazine-fed shotgun and adding a huge pistol grip would make a much more troll-like weapon.

Right, I've read through 2 pages now.

Is this right. Only simple comparisons in the damage the damage between two different guns can be made. To ensure a simple comparison the bullets must be of a similar design with little variation composition.

But all the good comparisons use kinetic energy, mass, density, size, shape and frangibility. There is just disagreement over the actual formula.

For a simple explanation of why the BFTG would compare in damage potential with a light sniper rifle we can assume that the density, shape and frangibility would remain constant (ie. standard SR bullet). Therefore the variables are speed and mass. Faster-lighter bullet compared to slower-heavier bullet. 'Bout the same then for game purposes.

For game purposes nymph's have just as many damage boxes as giants and are attacked with the same damage codes.

Not really. The BTFG fires a bullet that is very likely to be blunter, closer to a round nosed shape than a spitzer like what most long range rifles fire. The bullet is also much larger in diameter. Both of these have a huge effect on the size of the cavity it crushes into a living thing.

Also, comparing 150gr @ 3000fps vs 600gr @ 1500fps with solids is completely different from comparing the two with expanding, let alone fragmenting, bullets. With solid rounds, you just get deeper and larger holes with different kinds of temporary cavities and a bit of tumbling and such. With expanding rounds there's a whole lot more going on.

There is also disagreement over whether we need an actual formula right now, when nobody seems to have a clue how to do it, and we've got lots of ballistic gelatin to shoot holes into.

I know. But this isn't necessary. You've already got vehicles which do Damage Resistance against -1DL, ½ Power unless fired at with AV weapons. To simply declare that Huge critters do something similar is not a big deal. Not that I'll do it, because trolls are only ~2.2-2.3 meters tall and weigh around 200kg in my games, but it would make perfect sense. Something as large as a canon troll would stand up to a lot more punishment than what a paltry +6 DamRes dice represents.

Yeah, sorry forgot about size halfway through the post, but I did decide to skip shape to retain some simplisity.

Not in SR we haven't! If you were forced to pick one, which one would it be?

In our game trolls weigh nigh-on a ton (imp), giants get close to 2 tons and are penalised everywhere they go because of it. A 200kg troll in your world couldn't fire a BFTG without serious recoil and probable injury, they're just too small.

And they won't. They're just large enough to look like really bad motherfuckers, but they aren't too large to run into seriously problems everywhere.

This one, because it seems like the only one that's down to earth. It doesn't claim it can tell you how well it kills something, it just tells you approximately how big a hole the projectile will make. It's quite limited, however, and probably shouldn't be used for rifle rounds, and certainly not for expanding or fragmenting ones.

People far smarter than me who've studied these things for decades don't trust any of the formulas, so I won't either.

Nothing special. The rounds simply penetrate less, as well as maybe expanding too much or fragmenting significantly. Assuming troll flesh and internal organs are very similar to those of humans, that's all the layer of bone will do.

Not that it isn't significant. You already have to penetrate very far into a troll to get to the vital organs and the large arteries. With a thick layer of bone in front of them, you can forget about killing them with most pistol-caliber expanding or fragmenting ammunition.

Maybe treat trolls as always armoured for flechette rules when shot with smaller than a hunting rifle?

The "need to be able to stop a troll" argument is not valid, because only trolls can carry this weapon, and they worry about that least of all races, becayse they *are* trolls. Also, This weapon has the velocity and penetration so high that shooting at anothinbg other than a troll, which 96.7% of the world is, it's going to overpenetrate immensely which is exactly what you do NOT want in a self defense weapon.

Somehting already posessed by all the troll modified pistols out there including the 300 dollar Ares Predator after street index. Correct me if I'm wrong, the availability doesnt go up for a troll modded weapon, making them just as available as a normal weapon, just more expensive.

All of which meaning that in shadowrunning it's a significantly unique weapon, easier to track, harder to get parts for and it stands out.

It definitely is using fancy ammunition, ammunition that's not standard to any postil other than this one and some high powered hunting rifles which don't see close to the mass production of ammo you get for any kind of normal pistol.

I would wager that the nonstandard ammo this thing takes may fall into military ammo by the standards that SR uses for these things.

Actually I doubt it's more powerful then the .50bmg handguns that some *insane* people shoot today. I dont think it can live up to this claim.

Above you claimed it was a semi auto non-military system, not it's a man portable heavy weapon system. You don;t get it both ways. A pistol will not work as a heavy weapon system anyway, the barrel is too short to make it accurate at range. Either way you contradicted an earlier statement.

{EDIT} I probably agree with Doc on the troll size issue, but since I've only ever had one troll PC in the last 7 years, it has never really become an issue.

Now those would be some seriously fucked up standards indeed. The kinds of ammunition considered for this have no military applications whatsoever. They're meant for hunting, and sometimes defense against big, dangerous critters. To restrict such ammunition, or such weapons, to militaries would make even less sense than not allowing Barretts to have AV ammunition when hold-out pistols can.

Well then call it the Most Powerful Serious Hand Gun In The World. Those .50BMG revolvers and, yes, "pistols" look ridiculous, and nobody in their right mind would ever consider using one for anything. The current holder of the MPSHGITW title is probably the .500S&W, which the Big Fucking Troll Gun could easily beat.

I don't think this would be illegal, but neither would I think it would be commonplace or cheap. It certainly wouldn't be a "heavy weapon system", any more than .700NE rifles are.

Hey, they can't all be winners.


and AE, I didn't know that was the round's primary purpose when I made the comment about military ammo.

Even worse than the arguments over the Ares Viper Slivergun?

~J

Hmmm. Assuming that the various VITAS epidemics kept world population at about the same level it is now -- say, six and a half billion people -- then .04% of that number is 2.6 million people.

Looks like a substantial enough worldwide market to me, given how prevalent ordering via cyberspace is even today.

It's a .223 pistol sawed down to pistol size. Shows up in both games. Completely insane as a human-usable pistol, but totally sweet in-game.

Edit: Meant to say that it's a rifle sawed down.

Kinda my point. But a mini-gun is seriously scary.

At the moment there is not one troll gun in production at all. With all the talk on the thread the happy optimistic runners will find their bright business plans start to fall apart as the market niche fills faster than expected and transport of goods across borders becomes problematical. Then of course there's protecting the business against underworld as well as minor corp interest and we all know what type of people they could send.

According to the sixth world web site in 2063 there are around 270 million trolls world wide. A sizeable group of people significantly different from everybody else. The internet has become the matrix.

Here's a quick quiz.

How many troll-specific items or product lines in canon literature can you name?

Example; The Honda Viking motorbike.