Okay, this is a constant topic of debate both on these forums, and in my own play group...

What is the best way to blow up a vehicle using...
Magic?
Man-pack weapons?
Another vehicle?
(God Forbid) a melee weapon?
mines\traps\environmental hazards?

What is the coolest way to toast one?

What is your favorite?

What is the best way to blow up a vehicle using...
Magic?
Premeditated:
Snap off antenna and use it in ritual wreck spell
Random Violence:
Force 6 Stun Ball while in heavy traffic, bumper cars anyone?
Man-pack weapons?
Hunting rifle, cheap, legal, common, starts at @ Serious
Another vehicle?
Flying drones into teh rotors or engine
(God Forbid) a melee weapon?
Troll + combat axe
mines\traps\environmental hazards?
Thermite charges, 2200 degrees celcius in under 1 second melts even the hardest of material fast.

What is the coolest way to toast one?
Had to slow down some gangers pouring out from their flop hosue, was high speed on Rapier, no grenades but I had a lighter. Pop the fuel cap, dump teh bike and light the trail. (then I was introduced to Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man)

Note:

My favorite for anything up to and including APCs is the Wallhacker.

I'm the always GM, and thus don't have to worry about anything heavier. If I did, I suppose ASMs fired from aircraft would be my weapon of choice.

Not stunball, ice sheet. With all the cars going through an intersection (at the moment you cast if timed right), some of them are going to fail their crash tests.

Nice touch, I like that. Problem is, it's a control test which, unless there are 18 other things going on, a competent rigger will generally ease their way through.

How many drivers (or gridlinked drone pilots) would you classify as riggers? If you get ten cars around the rigger to crash, you may get the rigger too, but you did a lot of "Random Violence." (in accordance with the category I was correcting)

The rigger eases through the control test no sweat. The unskilled commuters who are defaulting to Car from their 3 reaction don't. Neither do their cars with Autonav 1.

I've gotta' say my favorite magical way was a manabarrier for motorcycles back in 2nd Ed. Driver stops. Bike doesn't. 'Nuff said

For light cars and trucks, an assault rifle/smg on full auto works fine for me. Guess I'm just old fashioned.

Does slashing tires count as using a melee weapon? Otherwise, adept with smashing blow and strength boost please.

Have a spirit materialise inside it. Many kinds of mayhem.

I don’t know if t works but barrier spells in front of it probably have an interesting effect.

Great dragon ATGM. When you absolutely must kill it now.

Get a grenade to burst under it and the reflection rules will shred a tank.

Melee only if you have that heroic edge, you’re going to need the extra combat pool dice.

AV pistols. One bit at a time.

Edward

Drop a cow on it, from orbit.

Coolest way was using a rigged rapier driven off a 10 story parking garage as a crude bomb to hit the limo. I'm lucky I got my rolls I did for that test with estimating falling rate, + limo speed and all that factored in. Was quite fun though.

Dikoted Pole Arms are always good at hacking away at the engine block.

Cast improved invisibility on the offending vehicle when in heavy traffic (might be difficult to get it to stick though).

I have been known to preach a bit to my players on the dangers of driving on the highway while invisible.

Fast Medium Transport, VCR-3, ramming rules.

You can easily get them resisting 25D without armor while you're resisting 2D.

~J

I'd say, for magic, get a group of shamans together and summon a bunch of city spirits. Then wait for the vehicle to cross a bridge, then get the spirits to take the bridge out. ( It might work. Not much a rigger can do if the whole road drops out from under him. )

Another, which is a lot of fun, is to load up a drone with C4. ( I find that the gazniki works the best ) and then pilot it under the vehicle. That always livens up an evening.

Satchel charge delivered via Elemental Express.

Great Dragon rolling a botch on a quickness test while trying to land in an adjacent parking lot.

It has to be another vehicle fitted with mechanical arms. Preferably something with a high body like a heavy caterpillar (body 10) for a base strength of 100. Give it a pair of heavy-caterpillar-sized dikoted spurs (or a no-dachi) and laugh as you're doing 150S or 100D damage.

Magic-wise I'd say Great Form spirit with storm power and several others with the accident power. A storm will probably be sufficient to give people terrible conditions, the accident power makes them make crash tests.

My favorite ways aren't quite canon, so I'm not gonna bring them up, but some of the best are:

salamander manifesting inside the engine
a grenade rolled under it using chunky salsa rules...
casting a levitate variant on one tire....
and, all time fave, casting flame aura on the car and watching the driver burn himself.

Back in SR2, one of my players had his troll with a dikoted Wallacher combat axe swing for 18S. That did a number on most vehicles.

I don't think that quite qualifies for 'blowing up' vehicles.

A personal favourite from a recent game involved an Osprey-II (being used by the FBI response team as a sniper platform) and an IPE concussion grenade. Player got the grenade through the sliding side door, KO'ing the sniper and the piloting rigger, causing one hell of a mess when the Osprey realised it couldn't fly on its own...
...We'll ignore, at this point, said player exercising his Daredevil edge to run under the crashing tilt-wing to rescue his injured team-mate from several tons of incoming less-than-airborne vehicle...
Of course, nothing says 'frag you' like a troll with a scoped, AV-loaded Assault Cannon on a bipod (can we say anti-materiel rifle?). Or, at a pinch, a Gyrojet pistol firing Seeker-Plus rockets.

-JH.

If it's anything like the first Osprey, you could have probably just waited around for a little while, until it crashed on its own...

Ouch!

Cool method: a troll magician's way adept with a weapon focus dikoted pole arm and Flame Aura cast on himself.

Funniest way I've seen my players use: called shot the grenade inside a closing door. Wasn't using a grenade link so it went off just after the rigger had begun to accelerate.

We had a troll take his 16S axe to the windshield of an armored hovercraft. After he made the hole, he reached in and grabbed the driver by the neck. Guy was rigged in, so he never noticed. Was about to unplug the guy rather forcefully but that's when the rest of the party succeeded in blowing it up with a panther cannon. Shrapnal all over the troll, (I don't care that he rolled like crazy on his body check, I still made him take a light.)

Amateurs , Not just one, but quite a few vehicles by one character (not mine but a friends). Troll speed down freeway outside Seattle on a Viking needs to stop quickly but a controlled stop will take to long. He thows himself to the ground bouncing across the asphalt, scratch one Honda Viking. The reason for the stop, he is on top of on overpass and a helicopter coming down following a semi we were trying to get, did I mention it had invisibility cast on it. Trolls jumps off overpass through window of helicopter rips rigger out, and grabs stick. Sudden realization he doesn't know how to pilot a helicopter. Well he manages to hold it up enough to crash it into the yakuza roadblock killing most of them and destroying their vehicles in the explosion. So far he has taken all of a light wound, maybe a moderate, but I don't remember exactly.

With sirens coming down the Troll then rolls himself down a cliff to get away (faster then walking). Fairly screwed up at this point he finds a roadside hotel outside tacoma and calls for a pickup. While we got away with the truck.

Total vehicles destroyed:
1 honda viking
1 yakuza helicopter
multiple yak black sedans

Game Time Spent: around 60 seconds from viking to cliff dive

Look on GMs face when it all happened and he realized his big plan had been tossed, priceless.

What can I say, I'm something of a traditionalist. Anti-vehicle mines or something like a Great Dragon. With possibly a machine gun for anything else.

:: grins :: Now that's a tradition I can respect.

Anyone know what exactly happens if a vehicle drives through a firewall? What if one is cast in the middle of a vehicle?

I prefer invisible anti-vehicle mines, myself.

As for the firewall, I imagine the paint job is ruined but not much else. The vehicle would have to sit in the wall to take any kind of damage that might affect its operation, this being the only kind that counts for the condition monitor. It's just a house rule, but we give vehicles a stun monitor as well representing cosmetic damage. Boxes are checked off as the GM sees fit depending on what kind of pounding the vehicle takes, and cosmetic repairs are priced according to damage level. Naturally, it's not worth tracking for temporary vehicles, but our rigger's priceless baby... Let's just say he's become quite protective of his new finish.

oh just summon any odd city spirit and have it use conceal on anything hard that you put in the middle of the street, like a trash can filled with rocks or something..
works wonders against anything going fast..

oh and for a double whammy, have a spirit conceal a stop sign, make it look like you have preference, and also try accident while he is at it..

DS

well, the issue is that firewall is a wall of magical flame that doesn't deform... so it'd fill hollow objects, since elemental effect manipulations with area effects do not require LoS to affect those within the AoE if you take the strict interpretation.

(sustained area spells maintain their area of effect)

Then it becomes orders of magnitude more dangerous, because when a person passes through the flame fills their lungs, sinuses, ears, and other airspaces.

~J

I can't really think of a cohesive answer to that, and it worries me.

IMHO The area of effect for a firewall does not magically penetrate the vehicle. It will surround or envelop things that pass through, but not penetrate them unless there are large openings through which the fire can flow. The fire will eventually penetrate small openings if the vehicle stays within the area of affect for an extended period.

The flames don't magically appear in air spaces inside a character's armor or body either, so a Helmet is useful when passing through a firewall, and lungs and farts are not filled with flame.

I once had an adept, who had maxed levels of barior, a decent body and APPS...his favorite way of blowing up cars: Running into things at 200+ meters/turn! He walked away from every crash.

Basically a non-rigged version of my high-velocity rigger crash tactic.

~J

Uhh question actually...

" -- dual dikoted spurs--

Damage is [(28+x)*1.5]S where x is Str increases from temporary boosts like Kamikaze and Adrenal Pump.

Therefore base damage is 42S. With boosts from Kamikaze and Adrenal Pump, 48S Have fun and sweet dreams. "
from the wallhacker thread...
where the heck does that *1.5 come from?

SR3. Dual spurs get their Power multiplied by 1.5.

~J

SR3 Dual Cyber-Implant Weapons

[edit]Too slow.

:: sighs :: Sometimes I hate the layout of the SR rule books...Thanks. Now I feel like a total idiot..

Don't worry about it Zen, it's been contradicted by Cannon Companion. In the advanced melee rules it says that you should ignore the STR*1.5 if you use those rules... and to be honest I prefer it that way. How does having two hands make you do more damage, it should be easier to hit.

ah! I use the cannon companion rules, that's why I couldn't find the cite, though are you sure that it annuls the 1.5* ?

Back on the subject of vehicle destruction, I once had a troll who stopped an incoming sedan by grabbing a parked motorcycle off the side of the road and throwing it through the windshield. Crushed the driver, turned the car, car went into the side of a building, sparked the gas tank.

Glorious, glorious. The ability to throw huge objects at hapless victims is one of my favorite qualities of trolls. Like, orks, you can throw orks at people.