Favorite non-lethals?

Tasers are awesome. It's all about the Yamaha Pulstar.
Besides that, I like Bola Rounds, CS/TearGas and ...freezefoam I think it was?

"A variant fires darts that contain high-capacitance batteries." SR3, page 277.

The only way it has a 15 meter limit is if you use the version that has the 15 meter wire. Presumably, that version continues shocking the victim for every combat turn after the first until it is removed.

(edited for not being able to type and read simultaneously)

So go hide in Afghanistan...

Go to Yucatan. Work for the local terrorists. Hey, you have quite some experience in terrorism already. Put it to good use, and make your current problems an opportunity.

SR3, page 113, Weapon Range Table: Taser, Extreme, 13-15 meters. No mention of it applying only to wired versions.

~J

I thought this was fixed in Errata? SR3 Errata:

In any case, the range of a taser dart definitely is not dependent on the trailing wire (if that was the case, all you need to do is make a longer wire).

Hadn't thought of that...

eeewww... Wow. I'd never thought of a musket as accurate, but compared to a taser I bet it's a damn sniper rifle.

Considering that today's taser have an effective range of 10 *feet* from what I've been seeing, I think that the SR ruling of 15 *meters* is probably overly generous.

The more I think about it the more I think that the grenade launcher style taser would probably be the most likely possibility.

Anyone out there shot an M203 or something similar? What would the effective range be for an actual hit (not something a 203 normally cares about).

Come to think of it, maybe you could design a sticky shocker to be shotgun shell sized...

The Other DSE

The number of people dying in America yearly because of such accidents because some yahoo thinks bullets fired in the sky disappear is astonshingly close to the number of people dying in Afghanistan because firing salvos into the air at any major celebration is considered a great tradition. What goes up will come down, and will do so more or less at the same speed it was fired up. It's not possible to precisely hit stuff like than, but something WILL be hit.

It could well have up to five shots, it'd just be a quite bulky magazine and an odd loading mechanism, but I doupt it's technically impossible. I have a hard time imagining a high-capacity battery of that size, but hey, it's 60 years in the future after all.

Okay, that IS a valid point for serious range restriction.

The taser German police is testing right now has, IIRC, a 10 meters range. I'll check on that, though.

EDIT: five meters, according to the German company that sells them

Where did I say that? I said:

Are you serious? I'm not meaning to flame here, but from everything I've heard muskets were only good for massed volleys because they couldn't hit the broadside of a barn...

Now a rifle from that period on the other hand might be far more accurate, but I'd still have a hard time thinking that it was close to modern rifles. I mean, from my understanding just the simple development of cartridges (and thus accurately measured and even powder charges) drastically effected the accuracy of firearms.

I guess I should ask what you mean by slightly less accurate as well as what you mean by the range of the rifle. Just doing a quick google search I found something that suggests that rifles in the 1860's were hitting targets at ranges of 2000 yards. That sounds pretty good until you find that the target was 24 feet wide and 12 feet high!

Anyways, this is probably fairly off-topic (not that this entire discussion of tasers isn't anyways)

Ditto on that one. I came up with the pen sized projectile for that reason, but even then I still have major trouble with that idea.

I thought the same thing, but didn't think that the entire weapon would still be "pistol-sized". At the very best it'd be the same concealability as a heavy pistol, and I'm a little skeptical that it'd even be that small if it had any reliable magazine.

I more envisioned something I think I've seen nowadays where the entire charge (battery, wires, and darts) are combined in one block which you just replace after you shoot it. Of course, tasers really aren't intended for the kind of high-intensity situations that make magazines necessary.

The Other DSE

Huh? Care to quote a source on this? Rifles did not come into widespread use until mid-1800s, and the majority of weapons on both sides of the American Revolutionary War was the unrifled Brown Bess musket.

From the article, 600m is the maximum effective range of the 5.56mm, not long-range shooting in general.

(edited by Foreigner)

Nikoli:

A couple of small corrections:

Quigley's rifle, the Sharps Model 1874, was introduced in 1871.
(For some strange reason, the weapon didn't pick up a name until 3 years after it was introduced.)

Also, 1000 meters is quite conservative for a Sharps, range-wise.

In the Battle of Adobe Walls, Texas, in June of 1874, 29 people (28 men and one woman), mostly professional buffalo hunters and skinners, were beseiged by approximately 700 Cheyenne and Kiowa warriors led by, among others, Chief Quanah Parker.

Two of the men present were William Barclay "Bat" Masterson (his parents christened him "Bartholomew"--that's where the "Bat" comes from) and William "Billy" Dixon. Three people died, and several others were wounded. In addition, most of their livestock (read, "horses and pack mules") were either run off or killed, along with the few dogs they had with them. (One account says that one unlucky pooch was hit 37 times before expiring. The animal's owner, a man named Shadler, sleeping in the wagon under which the dog had been hiding, fared no better. His brother, sleeping in the same wagon, also died.)

During the course of the battle Dixon, using a .50-90 Sharps rifle, downed an Indian chief on horseback with a bullet to the chest at approximately 1538 yards, or 1406 meters (87% of a mile).

A .50-90 Sharps fired a .50-caliber bullet, using a maximum load of 90 grains of black powder. The standard bullet used with this and similar cartridges weighed approximately 1 ounce (there are 7000 grains to a pound; 437.5 grains/28.35 grams in one ounce--the bullet used by Dixon has been estimated to have weighed between 500 (1.14 ounces/32.4 grams) and 700 grains (1.6 ounces/45.36 grams).

(Incidentally, when you read of the Sharps "Big Fifty" buffalo rifle, the .50-90 is the one the writer means, whether or not he/she knows it. The more powerful .45-120 and .50-140 cartridges didn't come out until 1880 or so--long after the buffalo were finished as a commercial proposition.)

Using an approximate starting velocity of between 1100 and 1350 feet per second (335.28 to 411.48 meters per second), Dixon's shot would have taken 5.3 seconds to reach its target.

(Keep in mind that Dixon was not using a telescopic sight.)

In September of that year Dixon, while working as a scout/guide/interpreter for the Army, became one of the few civilians to win the Congressional Medal of Honor, for his actions in the battle of Buffalo Wallow, Texas, which was a part of the so-called "Red River War". In this case, Dixon and another scout, Amos Chapman, along with four troopers from General George Crook's Sixth Cavalry, were attacked by a numerically superior force numbering approximately 125 Cheyenne and Kiowa warriors. In the course of the fight, one trooper was killed, and all of the remaining members, except Dixon, were wounded. All six men received the Congressional Medal of Honor (one posthumously). Dixon's and Chapman's medals were later revoked because neither man was a member of the U.S. Army, but a review board restored the medals in 1989. (Dixon died of pneumonia in 1913, aged either 62 or 63.)

Incidentally, during the January, 1815 Battle of New Orleans, one particularly unlucky Scots Highlander in the service of His Royal Highness King George III was hit simultaneously in the head by two bullets at a range of approximately 240 yards. According to one account (on The History Channel, IIRC), the victim was hit in the forehead, the entry wounds being above each eye socket. The marksmen who fired the two shots were more than 100 yards apart in the American lines.

Also, during the Civil War ("American Civil War", to any DS'ers in Canada or elsewhere outside the U.S.A.) battle of Chickamauga, Georgia (September, 1863), U.S. Army Brigadier General William H. Lyttle came under fire from several Confederate sharpshooters simultaneously. Out of the twelve shots fired, three hit the general, and seven hit his horse.

On May 9th of the following year, during the Battle of Spotsylvania Courthouse, Virginia, Major General John Sedgwick, commanding officer of the Union Army's Sixth Corps, was killed at a distance of roughly 800 yards by a Confederate sharpshooter. Ironically, his last words were, "Why boys, they couldn't hit an ELEPHANT at this distance...", which he uttered barely a second before receiving a hit just below his left eye.

Also, an unnamed Union general was killed outside of Petersburg, Virginia, by a Confederate lieutenant--at an estimated distance of 2250 yards (2058 meters). Two members of the deceased officer's staff were also killed.

In all three cases, the weapon of choice was a British-made Whitworth sniper's rifle. The weapon was .45-caliber, and fired a heavy-for-the-caliber 580-grain bullet--essentially, the designer, Sir Joseph Whitworth, retained the bullet weight of the standard British Pattern 1853 Enfield rifle-musket, which like its Union-issue counterpart, was .58-caliber, but reduced the bore size to .45. What made the Whitworth so deadly was that it used polygonal rifling--the bore was basically a six-sided (hexagonal) prism, and the bullet was mechanically fitted to it. In addition, the barrels were compressed externally while the steel was still cooling, resulting in greater strength and rigidity. The weapons were incredibly expensive--$96 for the rifle alone, $120 with case and other accessories--compared to the $43 for the Sharps Model 1859 which was standard issue to their Union counterparts. (However, because they had to be smuggled in by so-called "blockade-runner" ships, the price for individual weapons often skyrocketed to as high as $500.)

However, the Confederacy didn't have a monopoly on marksmanship.

In a still-disputed account, a certain Captain John H. Metcalf was credited with killing an unnamed Confederate General at the incredible distance of "one mile and 187 feet" (1822 yards/1666 meters).

Contrary to popular belief, long-range marksmanship is not a Twentieth Century phenomenon.


A.E./The Other DSE:

In the hands of a competent marksman, a Model 1911A1 .45 automatic is a viable proposition out to 300 yards. Granted, there aren't many who can utilize it to that potential, but I, for one, would not be willing to stand next to the target, however remote my chances of being hit might be.

(I personally watched my father knock sand and sawdust all over saltine crackers at a range of 300 yards at our local pistol range several years ago. The furthest out that targets can be placed on the range itself is 250 yards--the crackers were on the backstop, a large mound of earth and sawdust.)

--Foreigner

A hell of a lot farther. For example, the effective range of the RK-62 is about 300 meters, but the bullet can easily travel 4.5km when fired at a high angle.

I haven't fired one, or any grenade launcher for that matter, but the official effective range of the M203 against point targets is 150 meters. In reality, I expect not many people can reliably hit a human much beyond 50 meters. However, this is hardly an optimal platform for less-lethal munitions, unless you already have lots of them and have people trained in using them -- as is the case with militaries, but hardly with shadowrunners.

You probably mean AR-15? The Armalite AR-17 is a semi-automatic shotgun.

For a reasonable comparison, the US Army standard M16A2/A3/A4 firing the M855 Ball round can expect to fire within a 35cm diameter circle at 600 meters -- enough to hit a human torso, ignoring inaccuracy caused by the shooter or conditions not related to the weapon. A weapon with an effective range of 100 meters does not compare favorably.

Depending on the shooter and the conditions, and less importantly on the weapon and ammunition, modern militar/law enforcement sniper rifles have effective ranges against humans anywhere from around 700 to 1800 meters and beyond. The US Army M24 SWS has an official effective range of 1000 meters, the increasingly common .338 Lapua Magnum sniper rifles are effective to 1200 meters and beyond.

Accuracy of indirect fire with small arms: for another thread I dug up an article stating that in a particular test, bursts fired directly upwards with a .30-06 caliber machine gun dropped down in groups measuring about 25 yards in diameter -- hardly useful for engaging point targets.

Bullets fired very high won't come down very fast either: a US Army standard 7.62x51mm M80 Ball round (for the M60 and M240 machine guns) has a terminal velocity of ~70m/s (230fps). The reason why such falling rounds so often cause critical injuries is that they come at you (almost) directly from above, so they hit you in the head a lot.

A shot like that is exceptional for any man-portable long arm, even today, and is extremely exceptional for a .50-90 Sharps in 1874, firing the blunt, "aerodynamically-challenged" patched lead bullets of the time. This kind of thing was by no stretch of the imagination a commonplace event for a Sharps rifle or the shooter of that time period, which is one reason why that particular story has persisted for so many years.

Repeatedly and reliably hitting man-sized targets at 1,000 meters with an iron-sighted Sharps rifle would be outstanding performance from any shooter (though it was accomplished regularly at the Creedmoor target range during the time period).

Which means that either A) said Indian chief had been sitting stock still on his horse long enough for Dixon to set up and execute his shot, B) Dixon lucked out big time, or C) the story is farcical. Dixon himself never claimed that it was anything more than a lucky shot.

Which tends to add more questions to the whole thing. Have you ever look at something human-sized from 9/10ths of a mile away? A very tiny speck, if you can identify anything at all. Given the indian was supposed to be sitting on a horse, but even then, just a speck.

You're certainly right about that. But the ranges at which targets can reliably be engaged have increased dramatically since then. Equipment and training that allow ground-based forces to repeatedly engage vehicle-sized targets beyond 1,500 meters with man-portable rifles are far more common these days. Most modern militaries accommodate it.

On December 30th, 2003 Stephen Thorne of the Canadian Press reported that a Canadian sniper, operating with US forces in Afghanistan, confirmed a kill at 2,430 meters (1.5 miles) with a .50 BMG McMillan bolt-action rifle, using US ammunition, correcting fire once. According to a sniper interviewed for the article, "Shots out that far are 60 percent skill and 40 percent luck, or vice versa."