For a rigger idea I'm tossing around, I've got a guy with an offensively armed step van (a pop up remote turret, remote controller and some other goodies). However, his problem is that is usually going to be the only one in the van, so when he's got a go gang nipping at his wheels, and he wants to pop into the turret to pick them off, how does he keep his van from ramming into a divider?

If it's got a pilot rating, then it can comprehend orders given to it, so when it comes to driving, does it get to roll anything for a driving test? Or does it have to be paired with an autonav system (which at level 3 or 4 would do a good job of driving defensively while his attention is in the turret). In that case, would it just be better to have a high level auto nav and skip the drone pilot?

The van can be outfitted with an autopilot and simply controlled like a Drone. Also, there're those softwares for Autopilots that can be installed into an onboard memory bank and double as "skills" that aifd the pilot in tests. Can be installed in the turret as well, but takes up quite some space and thus, should not. Use that space for ammo or an additional grenade launcher or HV-LMG or whatever weapons you have at hand.

Of course, a turret on top a van is useless once the enemy gets close. However, if you outfit the van with runflats and possibly rams of sorts, and start just running them over. A sufficiently armoured van should be in no danger of being hurt by a go-gang, and a decent rigger surely can use the vehicle itself as a weapon against any bike-driving chiphead punk wielding an Uzi-III and considering himself king of the road.

Hermit, a couple things. Firstly, armor has no effect in regards to ramming.

Next, if it has a pilot rating, I'd suggest making a preprogrammed order that is something like avoid colliding with things, and drive quickly. It interpretts the order when you first program it, by rolling pilot, then, thats how it interprets the order. So you can redo it until it gets a good amount of successes. When the go-gang is on your heels, you send it the preprogrammed order, and jump into the turret to shoot.

As far as driving tests go, it rolls its pilot rating for them. Autonav actually adds TN to driving tests (as driving tests are for unsafe maneuvers, and autonav drives safely). So you don't want to be putting that in.

Lastly, hermit, turrets have fixed amount of firmpoints/hardpoints, software doesn't affect that. CF is basically only good for ammo in a turret, or storeing random things if it isn't a remote turret.

Something else you could do sandoval, is get some autosofts for the van. So say you give it pilot 3 (fairly cheap, only 25,000¥) and get it an autosoft interpretor 3. Slot in a sharpshooter autosoft, rating 3, and the van can shoot with 6 dice for you, while you drive. Which may be a better option, depending on your VCR rating and such.

Autonav works against you for combat driving, so for doing things like ramming, making sharp turns at unsafe speeds, or whatever else the GM deems is contrary to the autonav's interpretation of keeping the vehicle safe, it will add to your TN. However, if you're driving defensively, then you get to add dice eqaul to it's rating to your driving test.

So in this instance, where he wants to van to do its best not to crash while he's away from the wheel, it'd be pretty well suited. Also, the price of a level 3 drone pilot, plus autosofts is going to be a much steeper bill than a level 4 autonav. That's why I'm trying to see if there's anything I'm missing in regards to what the drone pilot does(for example, if the pilot and autonav rating stack for the purpose of driving or crash tests while the van is on autopilot).

So is it legal to set a vehicle to act as a drone, then jump into one part of the vehicle?

I'm thinking about, for example, having a drone with two guns on it. Order the drone into a combat area and tell it to shoot at the enemy with one of the guns (drones aren't allowed to fire more than one at a time) then jump into the other gun turret and fire away. Does that work?

JaronK

Sure, or you could link the turrets when you set them up, so that they both fire at the same target when one or the other is fired.

The problem with jumping into parts of a vehicle is that you trust your 1-5 drone pilot to do the driving, according to how well it interpretted your instructions.

Alright, how about setting up each turret as an individual drone? Say, make a firing platform that's one drone that controlls the steering, with four or five drones that are just onboard turrets?

JaronK

what is the problem, use remote turrets and the rigger can control them while he is driveing the van. i have never read that you have to drop control of the vehicle to enter control of the turret if your hooked up with a vcr. just use sensory asisted gunnery, lock on to the target and have the turret blaze away.

I might have just completly misread/misinterpreted some of the rigger rules, but I thought that in a vehicle with a remote turret, you could observe both from the captain's chair, but in order to actually control either, you would have to jump into one of them. You could shoot, but you wouldn't be driving, or you could drive, but then not shoot.

Of course by that logic, you would face the same dilemma when using a Doberman, or a Stratos, or any other drone. You could move, or shoot. I think I ended up just taking the fluff about some military vehicles having a seperate gunner and driving rigger at way more than face value.

The problem with it, is a rigger takes an action to shoot the guns, or perform a driving maneuver. You can't do both in one pass. Its easier for me to think of it as jumping between driving and gunning. You still can dodge however, which is important to make note of.

Right, I was thinking along the lines that when the PC's attention was on the turret, the vehicle would just being going in a straight line, no help with dodging or crash tests. I suppose that's a load off my mind, but I'm still trying to track down the answer to a different question: what does the drone rely on for crash or driving tests? Pilot rating?

Firing a gun is an action. If you have 4 turrets on a vehicle firing all 4 guns is 4 actions.

Driving takes some actions in a round but not all of them. More actions if you pull more stunts that need driving tests.

Thus if a rigger (or pilot program) is driving it cant shoot as often, but it can still shoot.

In the situation described I would probably give the autopilot an order “drive steady” and concentrate on the guns myself.

One of my characters has a van with 4 remote turrets, (one on each corner) the idea is he or the pilot will drive and control one gun while the other controls another gun, there are also arcade like controls within the van that allow passengers to control guns (with the riggers permission). Usually all 4 guns are not useful as firing arks mean no more than 3 guns and usually only 2 can be braut to bear on any ground target.

The option of treating each turret as a separate drone is not possible within the rules, some GMs allow it however. You need to perches extra drone pilot modules and sometimes extra sensor systems (or just an upgraded sensor system to cope with the extra demand). Also each active turret would count as a drone on your RCD. You need to ask, is it better to have 4 turrets on one vehicle or 4 vehicles.

Edward

Crash & Driving tests are done with drone Pilot rating if the drone is driving.

Edward, yes, firing a gun is an action, I said you can't fire & do anything other than drive normally in one pass, because you get 1 free & 2 simple or 1 complex actions, thats it. I'm fairly certain ALL gunnery is a complex action, but that might only be sensor-enhanced gunnery. I can't check until late tonight, so someone else will have to.

As far as number of guns go, you can link turrets and guns together, allowing you to fire 2, 3, or all 4 at once. They all fire at once, together, at the same target however, so it can be kind of bad also. Personally, if its got 4 turrets, in each corner, I'd likely link the front two and rear two, provided they were mounting similar weapon systems. I tend to have more defensive stop chasing vehicle systems in back, and more offensive blow up vehicles/people on the front of mine, but thats me.

As far as each turret as a seperate drone... you can make a small wheeled or even track-mounted drone with a gun, put in pintle mounts, and have it go around shooting guns through them. The only downside is that pintle mounts can't be pop-out, but I don't think they're illegal, again, if someone could check, that'd be great.

Actually al the corners where the same, Ares alpha combat gun. It was a toss up between that and a shotgun with SA, the integral grenade launcher won out. Each weapon has stranded ammunition, jell rounds, EX EX rounds and tracers (rigged to be mixed in on the fly) as well as 5 types of grenades (offensive and defensive, HE and AP as well as concussion grenades) there are also ammunition bins marked APDS and AV but I don’t have anything to put in those yet.

That van was built to respond to any combat situation from street riots to engaging a well equipped teem of shadow runners. Unfortunately I don’t think I can have it as of rigger 3 revised.

Edward

you can have whatever the GM lets you have... he/she might need to come up with some additiona costs or something, but if it flys by them

Aku, when talking about allowances and such on dumpshock, we stick to the cannon rules, as it gives us a basis to have discussions with. If we didn't stick to cannon rules, we have no basis whatsoever for doing anything and the boards would be chaos.

i understand that, however, i said that in regards that i was assuming perhaps that his van is coming from a previous edition pehaps, when he stated alas i dont think this van can be built from rigger three revised, oerhaos i should have actually quoted him on that.

with that said, i dont personally see a need for 4 guns mounted on the corners of a fan. I can't see why adding two tracked guns running in a U shape wouldnt work, provide you full cover of your surroundings ( even better so than the 4 guns on the corners would as you would be able to get angles down alongside the van better.)

Maybe because you can't have a gun on a track?

O this van could be built under rigger 3 revised, it’s just that a 250,000 nuyen (prototype) van with armour around 9 and 4 assault rifles took a significant hit in the availability department.

And besides the non canon nature of tracked guns on vehicles making them retractable would be a hell of a job. Ill stick with my 4 pop up turrets thankyou. The sheer volume of lead tha thing could put into the are was exceeded only by some of my modified drones. Twin linked fully automatic shotguns anybody.

Edward

Just a tip edward. Its often better to design a "cargo van" as having lots of load and CF, then use after-market modifications to put in things like the pop-up turrets and armor (i hope its concealed). That'll help cut down on the availability and costs of the initial van, as well as make it more plausible to have existed.

Van/SUV chassis has a body of 4? cool. I thought it was lower than that.

You can have track-mounted weapons, but it wouldn't be feasible in conjunction with pop-up turrets.

As edward mentioned earlier, controlling the vehicle only takes one pass out of every turn unless you are performing multiple driving actions. Drive straight and you can shoot every other pass in your turn.

I don't believe that there is any way to link turrets to fire together unless you made them drones and used BattleTac or something.

Technically I guess track drones could be mounted on a vehicle using a drone rack system, and would be concealable as well if the vehicle stowed them internally - but you're looking in the heavy transport range of vehicles for enough CF to do so if I remember. One could use the "Special machinery" option working with your GM to come up with an agreeable space/weight/CF factor that strengthening the vehicle's chassis to mount tracks on I guess.

Like I said, much more feasable on the larger chassis like the Heavy transport, some of the heavy trailers or the locomotive chassis.

Edit: As an aside one wants to watch out for having too many weapons firing at once on a vehicle unless they are all to the front or rear arcs - weapons firing to the side add their uncompensated recoil to a vehicle's manuvering rolls TN...

Well they where fully compensated.

Starting with a 10 round burst.
Halve for vehicle mounted weapon
Integral 2 points of compensation
Gas vent 3

Frankly there is no excuse for taking recoil penalties on vehicle mounted small arms.

Edward

No, fortune, you can't. At best you could have a track drone of which its track is running along the top of you van. Nothing at all like a pop-up turret, and you couldn't fire it while driving the van, as it would be a seperate drone. So no, you can't have tracked weapon mounts on a vehicle.

Yes, as edward and I mentioned, driving takes 1 pass to accomplish, as does firing weapons. So the rigger needs to make a choice.

As far as linking multiple weapon systems together, I could swear I read it somewhere, and I'll be digging through books looking for it. Maybe its time to invest in a few PDFs.

Actually I'm not sure if you got my point. You only have to spend one pass per turn to control the vehicle. If you go 4 times in one turn, only one needs be spent on not crashing.

No, any time you want to do something that requires a driving test, you spend a complex action doing so, unable to fire your guns.

You want to turn while getting away, driving test, you want to not crash into all the cars on the highway while hightailing it, driving test, you want to do anything other than drive perfectly straight for that pass, its a driving test. Not for the entire combat phase, but every pass you have to actively drive in worse than normal conditions, and aren't perfoming a vehicle combat action, you must make you driving test. Nowhere does it say only once per combat turn, it says anytime you are attempting a difficult maneuver.

Just a comment, as far as it serves my interests, this thread has served it's purpose. When rigging, the character can drive and gun to a certain extent, rather than it being either/or, if I turned full driving control over to a Drone pilot, it'd use it's pilot rating for driving checks.

Other than the fact it takes a simple action to go back to captains chair, and another simple to jump in a new drone. Making them take an extra turn to get to, while definately requireing the vans dogbrain to do your driving for you. Also, as far as track-"mounted" goes. Thats the issue. Mounted means put on a vehicle, with a weapon mount. There is no "tracked-weapon mount" or such. Thus, you can't mount a tracked weapon on a vehicle.

Ok, semantics. I meant that you could have a weapon on the vehicle that uses a track. By your own argument though, it is at least feasible ...

No, it isn't, because putting a NEW drone on a track on top of your van is not a mounted weapon. The drone then mounts the weapon, what you're doing is putting a track on the van, with a drone on the track, and mounting the weapon on the drone. Not on the track, not a tracked weapon. Its semantics, but important.

Edit: Yeah, its feasible, but, the important distinction is that because it isn't a weapon mounted on the van, you can't control it at the same time as you can drive the van. You would have a seperate drone to jump into, costing you 2 simple actions.

Read my edit.

Those are called "vehicle combat actions" while performing them, you DONT need to make a driving check roll. I think its page 164 or 165 SR3, under driving test. Examples given are making a hairpin turn while going high speeds, or negotiating 4 lanes of highway traffic while travelling high speeds.

I'm sorry, if you're trying to go 20-30mph+ over the speedlimit on the highway, you're going to be making driving checks constantly, to not hit any cars. Period.

Every 3 seconds not constant enough for you?

Edward

Compared to real life where you really can't go faster than the speed of traffic on a moderate-heavy traffic day, no, it isn't.

This is where its advantageous to have advanced drone pilots and autonav systems - If a person is really concerned with the loss of time switching from driving to shooting simply always remain in command chair mode when operating the vehicle / drones / track drones. This means for everything you're relying on your drone pilots to make rolls rather than your driving/gunnery skills - but you can do multiple things at once - especially with a turreted vehicle. A command to the van might be like so: Navigate to point alpha and engage targets - so technically the drone can be driving and firing at once. Since it is a more complex request to make of the drone - it consists of two parts -Your Gm will be checking to see if the drone can comply or will understand. The better the dog-brain the better it will perform. Now here's where your rigger becomes very scary - If you have a group of drones you can give them all the same command to engage a target.... Once again if we had a bunch of track drones all mounted on a tractor trailer...

Autonav is a penalty to driving checks and vehicle combat action checks.

Other than that, this is why the autosoft that adds to gunnery is very nice. Make some nasty gunning drones, especially if they're all mini-drones (flying toasters) with small arms on them.

There is also a crash test, which is your last ditch option to attempt to avoid a crash, that would be caused if say, I'm driving down the freeway doing 200mph+ (other cars going 60-70mph) and fail my driving check. Say another car didn't see me coming, and pulled into the lane I'm in, as I was checking my side mirror to see if I could move over. Crash test time, if I succeed, I managed to avoid the crash (swerving around the car, honking while cursing incessantly) if you fail, you have a crash, slamming into the back of the car, and start the damage rolls. Crash tests are a test that come up when a crash is going to happen, which is almost always after a failed driving check.

seems to me like your trying to insert to much reality into the vehicle rules, similar to what many seems to do with the combat rules...

i would see this as going into tight terrain, and that will restrict the manuver score of the driver as he have to do a bit more defensive driveing.

a non-combat driving test would only show up if the player specificaly figured they wanted to pull someting crasy based on my descriptions. trowing it at them for every small part of the driveing is insane and redundant as its allready coverd by the terrain score.

and im starting to think that the one action spent to keep the vehicle from crashing dont exist. where i have picked it up i cant even start to guess...