Just browsing the rules. Don't have the rigger book, but have a question. I'm so well loved by a few folks, but this is just a simple question or two concerning an area of the rules I have never thought much about.

You are rigging an armored van with a body of 5 armor 10. You pass within 1 meter of a narrow alley and a suicidal troll armed with a dikoted polearm "intercepts" you. According to interception, he gets a free attack on you. I assume you get by him if your vehicle can still move after he takes his shot.

The troll has a 13 strength, the polearm blade is dikoted, so against vehiles he does what? Polearm normally 16S, goes to 17D for dikoting, goes down to 17S vs vehicles? If the troll is an adept with improved skill 6 levels, a 6 skill, and at least 6 combat pool, he could roll 18 dice to attack your vehicle, right?

What am I missing? Can the troll even try to intercept a moving vehicle? I have never thought of it before, but I am curious if it is possible for a melee weapon to destroy a vehicle? And if your vehicle can't physically turn the corner to run the troll over what can you do as the driver?

I'm not really sure that Interception rules apply to vehicles, but if they do then the driver may engage in Full Defense and try to dodge the attack. It's a semantics questions, really, since the Interception rules specifically call out characters within the movement rules for characters. Even under the Vehicle rules it seems to imply it doesn't work (note that niether ramming nor vehicle-pedestrian collsions mentions melee attacks). And even more odd, no mention is made of melee attacks against vehicles at all in the entire vehicle section. Perhaps there are to be treated as barriers.

I thought about that. But then the dikoting slices thru barriers pretty well, or at least they are not doubled.

The interception is questionable, but what if the troll was waiting in ambush to just ram that polearm up your grill as you drive by?

Mum, I think it should be possible to attack a vehicle with melee, but slicing through barriers doesn't actually damage things in a normal way.

[GM opinion] My thought is to simply treat it as a normal melee test. In the case of interception, the driver rolls their vehicle skill plus any control pool or karma pool and the attacker makes their roll per normal - though I'm tempted to increase the attacker's TN by +2 or +4 using the Ramming modifiers (it's a similar action). In the case of an ambush, a surpirse test is in order, but the implications of Actions during vehicle combat is that characters have it harder against vehicles, so I'd use the base TN of 4 and not 6, unless I felt the character planned the ambush well.

Actually in this cast it's irrelevant. For the purposes of armor Dikote does not grant any anti-armor abilities. The 17d drops to an 8s which is less than the value of the armor, so no roll is necessary, the vehicle is immune to it. Boink.

BitBasher's got it. You need this guy or something similar.

Oh you can still do that, unless there's a rigger driving or the car is very heavily armored. Ranger-X bow @ STR 7 + Dikoted arrows = 6M damage to vehicles.

Thanks, that makes it easy.

Is it possible for the troll to call a shot and bypass the armor of the vehicle?

There's a link to wallhacker in there somewhere...

If the link above doesn't get you right into the WallHacker-message, try this.

By the same token, "only" 6 Vehicle Armor will stop dead HMGs firing EX-Ex on FA, and a good rigger can dodge several vehicular lasers fired in unison. The issue there is that Dobermans and Steel Lynxes have very heavy armor, and that dodging in Shadowrun is very powerful, not that bows are powerless against vehicles.

As I also pointed out there, the bison/bulldog sec would be resisting 2M with 4 body dice, which has pretty good odds to reduce entirely, but might take a light, which still isn't that great.

The F-C Bison can also shrug off limitless AR fire, while the GMC Bulldog Security can shrug off HMG fire. Again, that doesn't mean bows are not powerful against vehicles, it just shows that vehicle armor is very powerful. Also, with only 4 dice to resist damage, even 2M is plenty deadly if the archer has decent skills. If on the other hand there's a rigger in charge of the vehicle, you usually won't need any armor.

Um, just a point of contention, how exactly does a van "dodge" in an alley with a meter of wiggle space? That's a No dodge allowed moment.

Speed up, slow down, that'd be about it. By the book, trains can dodge, and they're on tracks. It even explicitly allows them to.

well, that's just stupid. unless it's a road train and even that shouldn't happen too often or easily.

It also could represent the rigger altering speed so the blow then hits the vehicle in a way it cannot harm it, or any other method for making the blow ineffectual.

Heh, pop the hood and deflect the bullets, yeah, thats it....

Ok, thanks for the response guys. I have one other related question though. Under "determine damage" on page 123 SR3 rules it says the damage code can be staged to deadly and any success over that increases the power of the attack. Is this representing a really hard swing? Can the troll adept hit so hard if he places his swing right that he can chop thru the armor? Or is this rule to be read similar to burst fire?

No, its off the base weapon damage. So, if your base weapon damage is < 2x the armor value, you can never damage the vehicle with that weapon. Period.

Ok, I'm not saying I don't accept this, but are you sure? Because a polearm doesn't have a base weapon damage. It does differing damages depending on who is holding the weapon. Under melee it says that the power of the weapon is improved. There is nothing similar in ranged weapon fire where extra success increase weapon power. A troll with 18 dice might make 12 successes to stage it to deadly and end up with a weapon doing 22D, which would then effect the vehicle.

And can you even dodge a melee attack? Under melee you go straight from the success test to resisting damage. I thought this was the main difference from being shot at and being swung at? It doesn't sound like a rigger can use his skill in this melee situation or am I reading it wrong?

What makes me wonder the most is that the weapon is capable of having a base power high enough to damage a vehicle, but those full auto fire weapons are not. The extra damage from full auto is not similar to the extra damage from a well placed swing of the polearm. After reviewing it, I am leaning towards allowing the extra power to effect the target. If anyone is able to damage an armored target it should be someone that is an expert at using the weapon, ie. lots of dice.

Well, in the part of the rules where it says you can increase the power of a melee attack for each 2 sucesses beyond deadly does it say you're increasing the Base Power of the attack? If not you're more than welcome to do it that way, btu it's a house rule.

I'm still not sure how to handle attempts to run pedestrians over.

pedestrian ramming is easy, just figure out the base damage level as determined by speed (1-20mpt = L, 21-60mpt =M, 61-200mpt =S, 201mpt+ = D). Then you stage it up one level for the pedestrian, and down one level for the vehicle (a S level attack will do D to the pedestrian and M to the vehicle). The power is the speed divided by 10, rounded down.

A house run that I like is if your vehicle is going 201mpt+ and you hit a pedestrian, the pedestrian doesn't get a dodge test (hey, you're going 150 miles per hour. they're not even going to see you coming), and the damage stages up to Road Paste (body is gone, equipment is destroyed).

I'm going to go with the AD&D "set to recieve a charge" rule: When you're braced for impact and you've got something moving twoards you at high speed and with a lot of mass, you're liable to puncture something. Of course, cars are usually much less squishy than horses, but with a dikoted weapon you're looking at being able to damage something as it drives by. Of course, any amount of force that large is likely to knock you about, and stun damage/knockdown are both possible side-effects.
Think of it this way: You need one heck of a lot of armor to shrug off driving into a large steel spike at 150 kph.

Hmm.

I had a mental image of a PC standing flat-footed and holding an Uber-Heavy Pistol of some sort in a two-handed grip, a la "Dirty Harry" Callahan, but somehow I don't think that that would work too well in the world of the 2060s.

Unless you substitute a Troll PC for Dirty Harry and a Panther Assault Cannon for the Smith & Wesson Model 29 .44 Magnum, that is....



--Foreigner

"This is the Panther, the most powerful handgun in the world."
"That's not a handgun."
"Shut up. So I bet you're asking yourself, did I fire six shots, or only five?"
"Um, I can see the belt sticking out."
"Shut up."

~J

Wounded Ronin:

At which point, the PC with the hand-cannon draws an IDENTICAL weapon from under his jacket and says:

"Oh, that's okay. I was a member of The Boy Scouts of America. We're 'ALWAYS prepared'."



(And yes, I am aware that the motto of the BSA is "Be Prepared", and not "Always Prepared".)

--Foreigner

What about the adept power of rooting? Providing your spear does'nt break, an adept with 10 levels of rooting can just stand in place and watch the vehicle impale itself.
Also...what ever happened to shooting out the tires or the ever-popular "sticky bomb"

(For those of you who have yet to meet a GURPS player buddy of mine, a "sticky bomb" is a grenade covered in neodiyum magnets, with a set of bags under a porous outer layer that break under impact. If your opponent is ferrous (and most cars are) the grenade will stick to the undercarriage (Boom!), and if not, the bags will break, releasing and allowing to mix a potent mixture of cyanoacrylate and accellerator, making the bomb adhere almost instantly. And, if the car's cruising at 150mph, chances are you'll be out of the blast radius to boot.)

And besides, what ever happened to anti-materiel rounds? Lousy against people, marvellous against large metal targets (Read: almost any vehicle)

No, an adept with rooting can be flattened in place by the vehicle squishing him terribly. Just as with ramming, if the pedestrian takes D, the vehicle rolls on over them. Also, all 10 levels of rooting does is give the adept 10 extra dice on their knockdown test. Since taking a D wound has no knockdown test, its automatic, it actually grants them no bonus whatsoever, other than a +2 tn to keep the polearm pointed at the vehicle.

Actually, as far as magnetic bombs go. M&M pg 30 says "Note that in 2061, most metals are nonferrous, semi-metallic polymer compounds, including those used in weapons and cyberware. Ferrous metals are still used in heavy vehicles (big cars and trucks), building support structures (railings, beams, cables) and so on."
I'd take Big cars and trucks to be body 4+ vehicles, as cars are defautly body 3, and trucks are standardly body 4. Well, if the bags break on impact, I'm pretty sure unless you chuck it into the front of the car, that it would stick to the pavement. Also, the rigger would get a dodge test vs your throwing skill, which would have a large target number modifier due to the speed the vehicle is travelling at.

How can something that is great against large metallic objects NOT be a good round vs people? If it can rip through steel, it will rip through someones head, including any helmets just fine, so how is it non-effective vs people? They don't exist is what happened to them.