My darling runners have come up with another idea to torment me: A bullet that dissolves within the body after firing. They claim that the bullet actually exists already and was used to knock off JFK from the grassy knoll. If this nasty little sucker does exist, what modifiers would apply, if any? They're currently thinking of an ice bullet.

You're kidding right?

Someone will soon come and post real life ballistics stats, but seriously, c'mon. Slap your player with the nearest heavy object and call it a day.

The "ice bullet" has also been dicussed and dismissed, IIRC.

What are they so concerned about? Waste the guy and go for sloppies™.

Close, but no cigar. THe bullet I had heard of was the frozen meat bullet - freeze the meat, shoot the meat, and when it dissolves it's just more meat in the meat body. I think ice bullets aren't practical as such...the explosive would vaporize it...it's gotta have more substance than that.

You're kidding, right?

At the very least the "meat bullet" is not conected to any of the "meat" in the body. It would still stick out like a sore thumb. Esspecially if its at the end of a big ass wound canal.

Suggestion: have them hear a rumor of such a bullet being available. Let them go searching for it. Then either let them use them or make the search go on forever. I don't see how such a bullet would break the game world.

Certain plastic-like materials could be made to disintegrate when touched by human blood...

Give me a chemistry degree, a team of scientists, billions of dollars, and a few years to work it out.

Just thinking we could engineer something to disintegrate when it comes in contact with, say, potassium.

One of the runners seems to think it's fun teasing Lone Star. The last stunt was dumping FAE into the sewers then setting it off. I think I'll have to start going with the heavy object thing.

Hey, I just said I'd heard of frozen meat bullets before...I've also heard of killing with icicles before, but ice bullets are just silly.

In this day and age of CSI, frozen meat bullets could be useful - I would think there would definately be no way of telling how the meat got in there (yes, it looks like a bullet wound, but why would meat be in the hole and along the sides of the wound?) and more useful - couldn't tell what kind of gun fired the bullet - no striations I would think.

Eh...yes, it's a silly idea in SR. *nyah*

Edit: FAE in the sewers? gah! I had my runners accidentally set of a FAE in a warehouse (white phosphorus and diesel tanks just don't mix), but it always has consequences (the entire neighborhood is now addicted to a new drug that was in the warehouse - it vaporized and became a gas)

Heh. They haven't found the ramifications for that yet. I'm thinking devil rat shamans.

Mostly I just let them get away with this stuff because they're amusing. They rp well, but they like to think up crazy new stuff.

Make that bullet out of human meat, possibly from generic muscle augmentation/toner bioware. Petrify it and shoot.

IIRC, the point of the magic bullet was partly that they wouldn't find it and partly the lack of an exit wound.

so, you use a chunk of frozen flesh for a bullet. it takes the CSI guys a while, but they finally figure out what happened, based on the presence of expended gunpowder in the wound and the tissue damage around the end of the wound channel that looks oddly like the flesh there has been, y'know, frozen. they immediately lable you "The Flesh Bullet Killer" and begin a manhunt.

meanwhile, all the other hitmen are using APDS or shotguns. they're just as hard to track, forensically, and they don't get a cool nickname.

guess who i'm gonna hire.

I'd hire both: The Flesh Bullet Killer to take out a target, and the other to take out the Flesh Bullet Killer. No witnesses, and I get a reward for turning him in.

I call it getting a return on my investment.

I don't understand what they're trying to accomplish. Even if the bullet itself is missing, it's still going to be obvious that the guy died by being shot. What benefits do you gain from a bullet like that, that make it better than simply using a different gun for your various assassinations? There's also the problem that it'd take a large amount of BS to not only make this bullet in the first place, but also to have it break apart into anything other than a soup of highly conspicuous chemical residue. And again, it's obvious that this person was shot, so what point does a 'stealth' bullet serve?

The idea is to eliminate a ballistics trace, so they can't match bullet to gun. That, and the cool factor.

yeah, but you can't get a ballistics trace on a shotgun round, either. it's like the old myth about mafiosi rubbing their bullets in garlic so that they're poisonous, or whatever. even if it works, shooting your guy twice works better.

The TV show CSI bugs the crap outta me. It's just not like that.

*curses and shakes fist*

right. next, you're going to tell me that CSI techs don't investigate cases. or that nobody in real life can actually use the lines that David Caruso uses without getting laughed at.

CSI is a fun show to laugh at. I think the reason they get it so wrong in many areas is so that the idiots who watch the show to learn from the mistakes there won't realize the information is wrong and will get caught by the cops.

i just can't imagine anyone who rubs their bullets in garic being taken seriously. though, since people believe it, i guess i've set my standards too high.

If nothing else, the scent could potentially cause a misdiagnosis upon First Aid. Maybe.

Though as long as they get their jobs done, who am I to begrudge them their little rituals?

~J

I think I remember seeing a Mythbusters about alternate bullet types... can't remember exactly what the myth was, but I think this was covered.

I think the main concept is the "dissolving" or "invisible" bullet. The meat or ice bullet option would definitely be the low-tech version of this... in Shadowrun, with smart materials and nanotechnology, along with caseless ammunition, you can probably cook up bullets that have a sort of timer when the "seal is broken". I can even imagine bullets that break down when exposed to organic enzymes (maybe a organic matrix that is polymerized into a shaped projectile), thus facilitating a bullet that dissolves in the body. It wouldn't be cheap, but the corps seem to waste money all the time anyway. It's the same techonology that is shown for the stealth rope, freeze foam, and carcerands, so why not?

The trick is, of course, not the fact that you have bullets that are untraceable. The trick is to plant the gun on someone you want to incriminate, so the evidence traces back to that person. A notable movie version of this is in "Payback", with the revolver incident.

Sabot made out of a disintegrating plastic, or indeed the already mentioned shotgun. The downside with the latter is that you're stuck with shotguns, the former that they're going to be more expensive and perhaps less useful for whatever purpose you need them for than standard ammunition. As people have been saying, it's still obvious that the guy has been shot -- at the ranges where an ice/meat bullet has any chance of killing someone, there will be plenty of propellant powder residue.

The real problem with bullets like these is weight. There's a reason bullets are usually made out of metals like lead, and now more exotic ones like tungsten ("heavy stone"), as opposed to, say, steel.

The density of lead is 11.34 g/cm^3 while that of ice (as well as frozen meat of most types) will below 1 g/cm^3. You end up with a 9x19mm bullet weighing in at a whopping 10 grains, 2/3rds of a gram. Your effective range will drop to less than 10 meters, probably around 5 meters.

Heavy clothing will stop the bullet. Made out of ice, it will probably shatter immediately upon hitting anything more solid than air, causing a tiny little wound cavity that just isn't going to kill anyone. A meat bullet will perform better by a small margin, providing a theoretical kill chance if you hit someone in the eye socket. Plastics aren't much better. The bullet might not immediately shatter, but it'll still be just as light, making plastics a completely useless material for the bullet body/core.

A dissolving plastic coating on any old bullet is a better option, if you assume the technology is around. Storing such ammunition for any period of time will be a pain in the ass, though, and the cost will be accordingly high. This goes for the kind of saboted ammunition I mentioned first as well.

Here's one for you, when the tech level gets high enough:

A bullet consisting of a nanite shell surrounding a large clump of cutters. When it hits, the outer shell lets go (if it isn't already torn off). Wound profile suddenly doesn't matter as much.

Be the first on your block to spend more on a single bullet than your entire team's running budget for the previous year.

~J

When you start to try and rationalize the whole 'disappearing bullet' thing, it's probably a good idea to switch gears and try to be a little more creative in how you intend to go about killing people. A bullet hole is going to be pretty obvious no matter what made it. If you're worried about ballistic forensics, a sabot load or sintered frangible bullet would probably do the trick there.

A squirt gun loaded with DMSO/hydrogen cyanide will leave no physical mark and leave no projectile residue whatsoever. Any vaguely compotent coroner will diagnose cyanide poisoning, but even an incompetent coroner could diagnose gunshot wounds even with a 'dissolving' bullet.

For the ultimate in invisible weapons, how about an electrolaser tuned to the involuntary muscle frequency? Spontaneous cardiac arrest, no apparent cause. He just drops dead.

How about a gelatin bullet? Not your everyday jiggly store-bought-fun-for-kids Jello gelatin, but some water-soluble gelatin that freezes nice and hard while providing plastic-like structural integrity to the bullet, enough to survive launch.

Sure, maybe a good coroner will find the gelatin and gunpowder residues in the wound, but the ballistics trace is gone...except for the gunpowder grains.

I wonder if commercial gunpowders in 2060 add micro-plastic tags for easy identification.

This is all an interesting exercise, but why are your players limiting themselves to a disolving bullet. There are so many other interesting ways to get the job done in 2064. Nanites, DMSO/poison cocktail, Spirits, Spells, tailored viruses and bacteria. The list is endless...

Wouldn't Explosive ammo have no real way to be traced? The bullet explodes into a million fragments and I don't think even the most obsessive puzzle-assembler is going to put together several grams of dust, over a period of years, to rebuild the bullet. If that's even remotely possible. I'm no forensics expert but I don't think would allow ballistics traces from any kind of Frangible round like Glazer or Mercury, explosive, or gel. The bullet's just too deformed by what it goes through. APDS, only if they didn't pick up the sabots.

well thay coudl do a chemical analysis on the residue and trace it back to what batch adn company made it, posabbly a lot of lage work to trake down were that batch went and who localy bout from that batch. It is posable presently to add a signature that is chimicaly specific to each bullet even. But would a runer be bying that type of ammo. Would thay even knwo that thay were?

With current technology, bullets with a very soft and/or significantly fragmenting jacket are pretty much impossible to do a ballistic trace on. In the 2060s, though, who knows? They could take that deformed piece of plastic that used to be the multi-projectile bullet ("Glazer") jacket and scan it, run it through a program, and find out which wrinkles came from the interaction with tissue, which from it deforming and which from the barrel. That goes for all the bullet types mentioned.

And, uhh, yeah, Gel Rounds. Right. Can't help wondering how those are supposed to work, based on what's been discussed on this thread so far. And mercury rounds? Better hope the target is naked.