I'm at work, so my book isn't in front of me. But as I remember, the Viper Slivergun is 9S(f), 30© SA/BF and availablity between 5/6.

My question is? Can you just swap out the Flechettes for Regular Rounds (or EX-EX or APDS, etc) and have a decently concealable pistol at the appropriate damage rating but with a 30 round clip? Or, is the Sliver gun, unlike every other firearm in SR3 not receptive to different types of ammo?

Sorry .... the slivergun is flechette only. it has its own ammo as well, not just any hp flechette will do.

There are several firearms that can only take its own custom rounds, including the Raecor Sting, the Viper Slivergun, and the Barret Sniper Rifle.

Can I di-kote my Sliver gun ammo?

LOL. As a gm, there is no way in Hell I would allow anybody to dikote the ammo for the Slivergun. I was just saying that it should be physically possible.

OK, so can I dikote my Ally spirit, and have one of it's manifestation forms be a Slivergun? Or would it's form be a "dikoted Slivergun"?

This thread, and the other one floating around, both bring up different visions of what 'slivergun' means in visual terms.

I've rolled this around in my own head a couple of times. Often I've imagined that 'sliver' was an exaggerated description of a particularily light, slim bullet, looking like a teeny rifle bullet, which would account for the high ammo capacity. Other visuals I've heard include a shotgun type of round that uses needles instead of pellets, (now how would that be silenced?) and a "salt shaker" looking muzzle with internal workings like a teensy rotary barrel gattling gun contraption, but somehow powered off a compressed gas mechanism (weird indeed).

Who's seen "bird shot?" We used to load them in .22's when I was a kid. Just like a miniature shotgun shell. Not exactly 9S devastating, though... unless you were a sparrow.

Anybody else got a visual on this? Can anyone refer us to a picture or more specific description of the mechanism that's published or posted?

http://www.antipersonnel.net/sdllc/images/S014.jpg

That's my understanding, that a Flechette is actually a tiny sabot round. It does not make sense with the rules relating rounds to armor. According to a program I watched on TV, the round is SUPPOSED to penetrate armor, not as described.

But there are plenty of Gun nuts incarnate on the site, who can explain it fully I'm sure.

<casts Summon Gun Bunny>

<rolls for resisting drain>

Make fun of the gun bunnies and it's not drain you gotta worry about... (ducking!)

You coulden't dikote a bullet. It's the same reason bullets aren't made out of steel.

In the barrel, the bullet has to deform very slightly, to dig into the rifling, which lets it spin. Any material harder than lead, such as, ooooh, let's say steel, or titanium, or a diamond coated whatever, would be too hard, not dig in, and would fuck your barrel up, to boot.


So, if someone insists on having Dikoted bullets, probably a collector's item or something, and insists on adding powder charge and primer and firing it, well.... Not only is the bullet going to be a haaaair too big...

Call it, say, roll 2d6; below 4 = misfire. I doubt it would result in Carnage, oweing to the modern design of firearms in the 2060s, which probably have some sort of If pressure > X, where X is some number consistant with a misfire, then some sort of emergency valve facing forward on the gun pops, and you get a mother of a kick, but your gun basically survives. And requires a firearms BR test of 2 and about a miunte to fix.


However, none of this precludes dikoted flechette rounds. I woulden't let it do very MUCH more, but if you're willing to go to the extra cost, I'd maybe let it use it's full rating against armor.

my take on the fletchette ammo for most handguns in SR sounds like a kind of shotgun light. most likely a series for small metal slivers that forms the shape of a "standard" bullet when loaded into the gun. but when fired the slivers break away and make for many small wounds. but if grouped just right on a unarmored target they should do more tissue damage then a normal bullet.

ie, its an extreme kind of hollow point, but with worse penetration

but then im no firearms hobbyist (or gun nut as i think its more normaly called ). hmm, that reminded me about some guy talking about the m-16 on a discovery channel program. the way he talked and held that gun made me wonder if he wanted to have sex with it...

I don't remember where I read it or how reliable the source was, but I do recall reading about 12ga flechette shells being used to clear trees of snipers in Vietnam.

Flechettes were also pitched to the US military in the form of Steyr's ill conceived and equally fated ACR.

And, yeah, brick ammo is just utterly silly rubbish.

Toturi, that was entirely uncalled for. I never said it was impossible if you decided to use an FMJ around it. It's simply very, very impractical.

Think about it. The only possible reason you'd want to dikote something is to make it retain it's shape. This results in impossibly hard and sharp bladed weapons that do not lose their shape, and can retain an impossibly sharp shape long after any similar shape of titanium steel would have become dulled.


However, this is NOT what you want from a bullet. You want the bullet to deform inside the target if at all possible. If you dikote the bullet, it's not going to deform, and you're going to get overall less damage. And if you're dikoting a standard round-nosed bullet, it's going to do less damage still, because it's going to penetrate even less. It might be SLIGHTLY more effective against ballistic armor, but you'd lose a whole damage code to ignore 2 pts of Ballistic armor.

On the other hand, if you dikote a round that's already AP, you've created... An extremely expensive AP round. It dosen't have the velocity to be antivehicular in any sense, even if it does retain it's shape.

So all you're doing is taking an expensive AP round, and making it extremely expensive.

I do not understand why my pointing out a gross mistake uncalled for. A bullet is generally made of steel over a lead core. The steel may be further coated with some other material, but it is not the default. Or at least I think the default bullet used in any army is the FMJ and is the one that is generally available and what people think of when someone mentions the word "bullet".

No, Toturi, even the fancy bullets are lead (or material with similar properties) over a steel (or tungsten, or DP, or etcetera) core. If you have naked steel going down the barrel, you are going to fuck your barrel up, at best.

What about smoothbores? Many tank guns are smoothbores and fire (among other things) FIN-stabilized projectiles, as opposed to the SPIN-stabilized projectile of most small arms. And some Discarding Sabot rounds that can be fired from a rifled barrel allow the sabot to spin around the fin-stabilized penetrator making the rifled barrel undesirable at best.
Anyone who fires flechette rounds from a rifled barrel is a moron. They would disperse multiple flechettes to a virtually unusable spread, and for a single penetrator, the small diameter would not allow enough rotational momentum for spin-stabilization to work for long. Flechettes are for smoothbores and if you shoot at any sort of range, will be fin-stabilized.... at added cost.
Given a proper sabot, I see no reason to disallow Dikoted flechettes. If the players want to spend mucho nuyen on armor-piercing ammo that causes much less wounding than normal ammo. Let them spend 1500 nuyen per round on ammo that only inflicts 1 box of damage!

Maybe I don't know anythng about firearms... but my GPMG use copper coated steel jacketed lead core bullets. And I fired enough rounds to know (250 belt, 6-7 belts per exercise, more exercises than I care to count...)

Steel can be harder or softer depending upon how it's tempered. Very well hardened steel would be extremely bad for a gunbarrel. Hence the teflon coating in some armor piercing ammunition. Milder steel . . . it won't be as soft as lead but it'll probably be softer than the barrel and I'd figure that's what counts.

Yes, some bullet jackets are made of soft steel rather than guilding alloy (copper/zinc).

Actually, when you say "Bullet", I think of round-nosed Ball ammo. It's simply the cheapest you can find, and when you're on a budger, especially at the range, that's what's most important.

For carry loads, of course I'm going to go for something with more stopping power, like FMJ Hollow Point. But it'll be lead, not steel. Steel dosen't deform as much as you want, anyway.

Yeah, I think it was pretty harsh calling ShadowDragon out like that. A simple correction would have sufficed in place of a threat of ass-reaming or what have you, but that's in the past now (which begs the question of why anyone would bring it up again...SELF-OWNED!). And anyway, doesn't one ream an existing asshole? I was under the impression that a new asshole (or arsehole for those of the traditional persuasion) was torn into being. I guess you could ream an asshole until it was a good as new, but it just wouldn't be the same, would it?

In any case, I too was under the impression that steel is generally bad for barrel rifling, which, I guess is why AP bullets are steel cored, rather than pure steel. But in the case of flechette ammunition, even in brick form, it might be in a sabot. Of course, it would probably be bad idea to put a (synthetic-?)diamond coating on something that is supposed to fragment, and it would be difficult to put back into brick form once you have pulled it apart to dikote it, if you were going to do it that way.

Okay, dude. You can go on thinking copper plating on a steel jacketed bullet makes some massive amount of difference as far as friction is concerned. I really don't have any way to prove to you that it doesn't other than to possibly show you that there just isn't much copper left on the contact surfaces between the jacket and the bore after the bullet leaves the muzzle. It simply cannot do much good, especially at that other critical point of the barrel; the muzzle.

I was pretty much wrong about steel-on-steel contact anyway. Rifles that use steel jacketed ammunition usually have chrome-plated bores.

I'm curious about something.

I had a random thought flit through my head just now (I sometimes think that my train of thought is either an express or a runaway ):

Would it be possible to silver-plate Slivergun projectiles to make them more effective against shapeshifters and other Awakened paracritters with that vulnerability?

(And yes, I *do* realize that, if flechette ammunition is your choice, silver-plating conventional flechette ammo--especially for a shotgun--would probably be a more cost-effective option, as would loading an Ares Supersquirt with a mixture of water, silver nitrate and/or colloidal silver, and dimethyl sufoxide.)

Please, NO flames.

--Foreigner

What about dikoting the barrel? After all, don't you dikote things to prevent them from deforming?

Toturi,

I was a gunner once. We never used anything called steel jacketed. We were issued 7.62 x 51mm Nato Full Metal Jacket Disintegrating Link - Belted for the jimpy. I was a bit of a gun bunny, mostly in the use, not the tweaking. You know, hopping rounds into dead zones, making funny shaped lanes, putting up range markers with rude pictures, etc... The round was designed with a copper jacket or in some cases a crazy zinc (I believe), which can lead people to believe it is steel. I guarantee you it is not a steel jacket, if it were, you would burn out the rifling and possibly warp the barrel in a matter of a hundred rounds. I know of which I speak. Me and some guys spent a half a day scrounging out all the tracer ammo once to play "STAR WARS" with the L7s on a night firing ex once. We almost burnt out five barrels and that was simply with tracer rounds*!
I have also glowed barrels with the BFA and blank rounds (Granted, we pushed 1200 "rounds" through two barrels in three minutes...)

And as an aside, if you are dikoting rounds, which are put under a great deal of force (acceleration out of the barrel has to be akin to smashing it with a hammer) wouldn't the coating simply shatter or deform at certain points, causing spurs which would decrease their performance?

*No charges were laid during this fiasco, but boy did we get rickies!