Note that he was probably using Shot ammo and forgot that he was (I've done that a few times myself!). That makes it 10D, albeit reduced by twice Impact armor (which a standard vehicle doesn't have -- I know, I know). So yes, it'll do a Serious wound with a single net success. With a Called Shot, a single success would disable the vehicle.

In terms of volume, BOD doesn't always describe just size. It is all about mass, though. RL tracked APCs can weigh 20-25+ metric tons, compared to well under 20 metric tons for most trucks (M2 Bradley 22,700kg, Warrior IFV 24,500kg, M977 HEMTT 17,200kg) -- although tracked APCs are generally smaller in volume to Heavy Transports, they are often heavier, and incidentally have 1 higher BOD.

I could do a similar comparison of jet fighters (BOD 7) vs twin engine commercial/private aircraft (BOD 6) -- for an example, check the max Loads of the two with jet turbine power plants: 12,500kg vs 5,000kg. And the same could be said about Attack vs utility helos (5,000kg vs 3,6000kg in max Loads), etc.

Looking at these figures, the apparently higher Body ratings of military vehicles are due only to their mass. They do not get any extra Body compared to civilian vehicles.

just as an aside, while I would never transfer a deadly wound to a non-critical location like an arm, I have never seen anywhere that the system 'assumes' you're aiming for any particular part of the metahuman body. As far as I know its a totally abstract system, so as long as the damage result is comparable I think its ok to describe the area which is hit if you want (i.e. a deadly wound should not result in an arm getting blown off, while a light wound shouldn't hit you in the eye).

I tend to play damage descriptions by ear, based on the level the target soaked down from. if someone is hit with a D, but soaks it down to an M, I may well say they've been hit in the arm. Maybe they turned at the last minute and the shot which previously would have hit them in the throat and taken their head off hit them in the shoulder, instead only causing a moderate wound. If someone was hit with a D and staged down to serious, then they may well have just lost an arm (but then, we also play that you start to bleed out if you take a Serious wound all in one go at 1 box per turn). It's flavour text, the modifiers from the wound apply as normal, but maybe he also dropped his gun held in that arm as a result - though it would be very, very rare for me to do that as there are rules for determining limb loss already. I've never randomly taken a limb from a PC, I use it mainly for non-critical goon-types. I think it adds to the game more in terms of atmosphere than it takes away in 'non-consistency'. I agree with everything else you said though.

I do like the triple body dice vs small arms though. As for AV rounds for small arms - I agree realistically they probably shouldn't be available - but dammit, I LIKED Lethal Weapon two (or was it three? Meh, they're all good.)....

Torso? yes.
Head? hell no. Take a friggen called shot for that if you're in the middle of combat!

If you are staked out prone about to snipe you can just tell me your shooting his head, but I'll be a dumb-asses pet monkey if I've ever seen a sniper NOT AIM and instead just tell me that their shooting for the head.

Torso is the most commonly aimed area.
Heads are not really ever aimed at if you know what the hell you're doing!
Do you have any idea how easy it is to miss a head on a target?

Just try going to a timed pop-up range that has silloettes(sp) and try only shooting at the heads.

Sure, 50 meters is simple enough if your fast enough.
100 meters might even be probable if you're a good aim and laying prone.
200 meters is really starting to stretch it on a timed pop-up range.
By 300 meters you have to be the dumbest sob to be generally aiming for a head shot!

Now...to bring it more to a realistic style.
Take that same timed pop-up range except this time stand in front of ONE of the firing lines that holds the targets (presently laying down waiting the start of the session). Note that there are 3 more of these firing lanes on the range, all of which are waiting for your session to start.
The session starts and you have to shoot the target that pops up at lane 1, run over to lane 2 and shoot the target that will pop up there along your way to it, and then on to 3 and the final 4th.
All the targets on all 4 lanes were randomly between 50, 100, 200, and 300 meters in distance while you were speed-walking/running/crouching/in prone.
You had to run back and forth shooting these until the targets stopped popping up.

Now, just with that. Would you ever bother to aim for anything but the torso?

Now do some justice and let the targets start firing back at you while you do all of that.
Still want to try for head shots?

All personal armor and preferably tune firearm Damage Codes. Then you should decide on some rulings relating to cover and concealability, and perhaps introduce some things like semi-called shots (Aim Low/Aim High, that sort of thing). Am I forgetting about something?

That's no more affected than any other type of gunfire. Roll as normal. No extra ruling required.

Unless you want to add hit locations for vehicles -- which using hit locations for people absolutely does not require -- you do not need to change any rules regarding vehicles.

You don't need to touch these. The only related thing is possible separate wound effects from hit locations -- such as no Over-Damage from limb hits. The condition monitor can stay the same.

No difference whatsoever.

Instead of calling a shot for special effect or for +1 DL, you're now calling a shot to a body part. Apart from what I said above, no extra ruling required.

No they wouldn't. When you're not hitting someone extremely well, your chances of hitting a particular body part are in no way affected by recoil, visibility, movement, etc. You'll hit a guy in the arms just as much when it's dark as in daylight.

No change.

Cut them into bursts, other than that no change.

Play them like spells, grenades, and all other types of large area damage -- ie play them exactly like they are played in canon. No extra ruling required.

Hit locations have absolutely nothing to do with recoil. Nothing. Nada. Zip.

If you use random hit locations, you need to have a hit location table. I thought that much was obvious.

I already said you need to re-do armor. Factoring in armor weak spots is as ridiculous as factoring in the aorta and the spine on the hit location table. Such things are covered by the dice rolls as always.

Easy: Use any of the great house rule suggestions abound in the shotgun-related threads and you don't need any extra ruling for shotguns and hit locations. It's a good idea to do this regardless of whether you use hit locations.

Just what the hell have these got to do with hit locations? "Because people now have hit locations, we also need special rules for weapons which have a chain-driven belt feed with a separate delinker/feeder"? Eh?

No they don't. Just like separating Firearms skills doesn't mean you need to separate Computer skills or Sorcery skills, just because one part of a game is more detailed doesn't mean every other part has to as well.

Thrown weapons are in no way affected. They function as they always have.

Nope. Not one single targeting system needs to be changed in any way. Smartlinks, laser sights, vision magnification, even Naval Weapon Control Networks, everything functions exactly like they always have.

Looking at these, maybe it's better you forget about the rest. Other than the ones I already mentioned, only shotguns firing shot at significant ranges and burst/FA fire could be considered to be a problem, but only if you want to completely forget about GM's job of describing combat.

If that were the case, staging wouldn't be based on the skill you use to take down an opponent (be it a metahuman, vehicle, or anything else).

Glad you dig it. But after reading Catsnightmare's post, I might try playtesting his suggestion about allowing the Armor Rating to add extra dice for the test on top of that (though only on a one-to-one ratio, not triple the armor). Seems really good on the surface and after a little number crunching.

The 10mm Auto is far from a hand cannon. It's certainly a powerful pistol caliber, with about as much kinetic energy at the muzzle as a .357 Magnum at the same barrel length. But, considering all small arms, it's still very close to the Sucky end of the metal penetration scale. The 10mm Auto is also very much a "normal round", being in use by FBI in their Glocks, among others. Whether you consider "Heavy Pistol Ammunition" "normal rounds" or not is, of course, another matter entirely.

I'm sure it's entirely possible to disable a car with a single shot with a 10mm Auto pistol. Firing from a distance of 1 meter at a parked car, it might even be likely in the hands of someone who knows where to hit it. However, that seems to me like a worse chance of "making a kill" than you'd have with a .22 LR pistol firing at a human. Nearly anyone can kill a human with a .22 LR pistol if the human is still, 1 meter away. Thus I have no problem with the average sedan dealing better with Heavy Pistols than humans deal with Hold-Out Pistols.

but your not shooting centre of mass. To do so would be stupid.

On a meta human you shoot centre of mass because that is where most of the organs are.

If your shooting a vehicle centre of mass is a big empty aria so you shoot the enjun bay assuming the vehicle is not armoured you have to shoot threw 1 or 2 layers of light steel not strong enough to reliably hold the weight of human (I have seen people destroy car hoods by siting on them). The enjun bays on most modem cars are tightly packed with hoses, electronic leads and components not strong enough to stop a bullet.

As to the normality of a predator it is the 2nd most powerful light weapon in the game. (heavy pistols can reach 10M base shotguns are not really light weapons) if that’s not a hand canon then what is.

Edward

A Conc 6 Sporting Rifle. The Ruger Super Warhawk firing APDS or EX-Ex.

If you want to base your argument on how easily cars break down in the real world, then you also have to take into account how guns work in the real world. In the real world, you can't fit 15 rounds of "hand cannon" caliber ammunition in a through-grip pistol magazine and still expect the gun to be wieldable by anything but a troll. In the real world, handguns suck for penetrating lots of metal compared to rifles -- low velocities, large projectile diameters, rather soft projectiles.

Unless you hit some of the heavier supports, this is not true. Most of the body of the car does not slow down even your average handgun shot that much. With deforming/fragmenting ammunition it would make a significant difference to the amount of steel the round can penetrate afterwards, but since you are probably not depending on penetrating a lot of metal to stop the average sedan with a handgun, this wouldn't matter much.

There are, of course, a lot of thicker spots in a car's body. Rigid crash bars and what have you. Hitting these would stop many handgun rounds, especially deforming and fragmenting kinds. But the sheet metal/plastic covering offers no protection against firearms, as witnessed by the fact that nearly any firearm will cleanly penetrate a non-armored car door. Some handgun and many center-fire rifle loads will penetrate two car doors just fine, and still seriously wound or kill anyone foolish enough to hide behind them.

The 9 Power limit for double down-staging seems a bit artificial, since that means a 10M pistol is better at disabling vehicles than a 9S Sporting Rifle or MMG (5L vs 4L), and that just plain doesn't make sense. I like adding more dice to the Damage Resistance test, because of scalability issues like that.

Also, using experiences with antitank rifles in WW2 as a source for what happens to your average vehicle when shot is not a good idea. Unlike most drones, cars, motorcycles, etc, armored vehicles are designed so that their vulnerable spots are hard to hit. Shooting at tanks at any of the common engagement angles, you are basically relying on hitting the crewmen, machinery operating the main weapon or the turret, or, with massive luck, the ammunition in such a way as to detonate it.

Since the insides of tanks are complicated and very hard to visualize from the outside, most AT riflemen would just fire at the front center of the hull, hoping there's something important behind there (unless they're giving up on penetrating/damaging the hull and turret, in which case they're just firing holes in the tracks). There's a whole lot of space inside a tank, and very little of it is filled with absolutely critical targets. Shooting 14mm holes through it won't get you very good results. In most vehicles, the "critical target density" in the area where most of the shots are concentrated is much higher.

Modern tanks are a bit different, and most modern tankers would probably be screwed after a 14mm incendiary projectile penetrates the interiors. Fortunately, that will never happen.

Perhaps I could have phrased that better. An attack without a specific declared target is going for expected point of most effect. The higher the skill of the shooter, the better they are at getting that bullet consistantly to the target's center (instead of a shot that takes a chunk off a rib (M), you get a clean penetration and the bullet gets to bounce of various internal parts, doing even more damage (D) ).

With a car, it might not be center of mass. Instead, most shots will probably be directed towards the cab / engine compartment (which like center of mass on a humanoid, would be location of expected most effect on a vehicle). And aside from empty space, there's a lot of heavy metal stuff in there that can take a bullet and stop it cold.

So, summation. One man, with predator vs car is a contest where the odds should be on the car.

When I said a 10mm Auto pushes about as much kinetic energy out the barrel as a .357 Magnum, I was talking about the "heavy hitting" loadings. No matter what you put into a 10mm Auto, it won't get anywhere near the kind of energy levels a .44 Magnum is at, unless you like exploding handguns.

Some of the most powerful factory loads for 10mm Auto get ~650 ft-lbs out of a 5" pistol barrel -- up to 1300fps with a 175gr bullet. A 158gr .357 Magnum can get 1350fps out of a 6" revolver barrel for 635 ft-lbs. A .41 Magnum can easily push a 210gr bullet at 1300fps for 788 ft-lbs. A .44 Magnum can propel a 210gr bullet out of a 6" revolver barrel at 1500fps for 1050 ft-lbs.

You can find more powerful loadings for any of these, but that's about as high as they get in common use. Those Hornady XTPs of yours are not even near the 650 ft-lbs mark, with 556 and 490 ft-lbs at the muzzle for 180gr and 200gr loads.

I got all those on my first Googling. Those are certainly not "mid range" in the 10mm Auto power scale, those are near the absolute top. Even most of the "full power" 10mm Autos are well below 700 ft-lbs. This site, for example, calls 600-650 ft-lbs "full power" and 700-750 ft-lbs "nuclear".

Similarly I could point to some of the original .44 Remington Magnum loadings which produced 1200 ft-lbs+. Or even to some of the .41 Magnums which fire a 240gr bullet at 1700fps for 1500 ft-lbs (at pressures in excess of 50,000 psi). This doesn't change the fact that 1050 ft-lbs is around the upper end of what people commonly fire out of .44 Magnums, 800 ft-lbs for .41 Magnums and 650 ft-lbs for 10mm Auto.

Weeeell, the .50 BMG was designed to be used in AAMGs, so I guess it works out that it was made to punch through engine blocks of moving vehicles, just not ground-bound ones. The same goes for the Russian 12.7x108mm. Most .50/12.7mm rifle calibers were indeed designed for AAMGs or, in some cases, antitank rifles.

Isn't the Ruger Warhawk a very obvious stand-in for the Ruger Redhawk, which is just a .44 magnum?