The Ares Slivergun has always been one of the more interesting Firearms in Shadowrun. Everyone visualizes it differently and interprets it in another way. I have always thought of it as a Needle Pistol. The ammunition as a block of ceramic/composite plastics that are shaved off and hurled with great velocity. Doing Flechette Damage to all Targets.

My players took this one step further and engineered and developed a few creative variations.

Chemical Rounds - Using a Frozen Ammunition with DMSO Cocktails or Frozen Holy Water or Garlic Water.

Splinter Rounds - Wooden Flechettes for those pesky HVHMM carriers.

Tracking Rounds - A Tracking Flechette Electronic/Chemical/etc...

What do you think I should do?

QM

have them role their apporpriate skill to create them, such as chemical engineering.

having a contact to do that should be very difficult. they'll need to foot the r&d costs, etc.

good theory, encourage it, just make it tkae a while for it to implement in gameplay.

Just. Make it. Fucking. Stop.

if you are using frozen rounds, how are you going to keep the frozen? mega compressed nitrogen catridges? batteries?

you will need chem tests, engineering b/r, firearms b/r

if you are firing these off, remember that air friction will warm the frozen matterial, wood is much lighter, and brittle than lead

flechette trace rounds? if you wish, but your chars will have to clean the weapon religiously. you are going to need a phosphorus and firearms b/r for this as well

btw holywater and garlic do not affect vampires.

Just. Make it. Fucking. Stop.

Just. Make it. Fucking. Stop.

The Myth Busters proved that the "ice bullet" doesn't work.

The Mythbusters also only spent a day on it and recieved a response from the US Goverment that all information, research, and technology relating to an "ice bullet" and other such disappearing ammo was classified and not subject to the freedom of information act because it was deemed either vital to national security or was seeing actual use.

That said, there are probably better ways to achieve a similiar result. A bullet that simply shatters while inside the body pretty much destroys the chance for forensics work, right?

Depends on how small the fragments. They'd have to be pretty damn small to be missed by a serious forensics team. Or are you talking about IDing the gun it came from? Easier ways to avoid that that with a disappearing bullet.

Maybe you want a dissapearing bullet to completely freak over any possible remote chance that ritual sorcerery can be used to track it back to the person who discharged it?

I'll bet Mythbusters never though of that!

Actually, hobgoblin, it is quite possible to make a weapon with compressed air powerful enough to slay. They were doing this around the time of the Lewis and Clark expedition. I'm sure by 2060, the technology has been revived in some form or another.

sure its possible. hell, a bb gun can kill if your within range and aim for the right place

question is, will it be practical compared to a normal handgun.

and most likely you will still have to be closer to the target then you need to be with a normal rifle+scope.

no way in hell if you can make a compressed gas powered weapon be effective at those ranges.

and if you need to get close to a target, there are better ways of killing then a firearm anyways.

Actually, modern bb guns are powerful enough to slay. The problem is that the bbs are very small and they don;t deform. They'll penetrate flesh but the wound cavities they produce are so small they are unlikely to be fatal. There are, of course, cases of lucky shots that sever arteries.

Modern bb guns won't penetrate much. I'd consider two inches of soft tissue penetration exceedingly generous.

Just. Make it. Fucking. Stop.

Hobgoblin, you are incorrect.

http://www.beemans.net/Lewis%20&%20Clark%20Airgun.htm

That air gun had enough power for 40 or so shots, though probably only 10 or so at full power. It was quite powerful - the report I heard was that the woman was killed, not injured. (Lewis loaned his rifle to a skeptical man who fired negligently in the vicinity of a crowd.)

Combine this with a dissapearing bullet, and you've got rather a nice little sniper's weapons. They are supposed to be quite silent, and obviously have no muzzle flash.

What Arethusa said. A charge powerful enough to anchor deer-sized game with a .54" lead ball at, say 50 yards, is going to be pretty noticeable at that range. Perhaps not as loud as a normal black power charge for the day, but likely much louder than a pneumatic nail gun, for example. Relatively quiet. Not "quite quiet".

In a noisy city, you'll almost never hear that report, as opposed to, say, a typical sniper's minicannon.

There's no way you can make a statement that absolute. Sorry. City noise will make a difference and in some cases mask loud sounds completely, but you can't just say "noisy" and "city" and "almost never hear it".

I think that in an urban environment, you'd be much more likely to hear it just fine so long as you were within a couple hundred yards of it and there wasn't much but air between your ear and the muzzle blast (and by that I mean not many coming from inside of a building while you were on the outside, or a lot of other particularly large things to reflect sound waves away from you). You'd just mistake it for something much more mundane. Much the same way you're likely to perceive a single suppressed gunshot from a conventional (subsonic) firearm.

I own an airgun that fires liquid filled projectiles. Also, it's so damn quiet that the target doesn't hear anything but the "smack" of the liquid filled projectile striking them, and all the firer hears is a light "click" when the bolt slides back open and a quiet intermittant whirring sound of the loading system when firing rapidly.

Can you give us the make and model of that airgun?

If you made it pointy you could do something.

Granted it'd be a weak something, but you should never underestimate the power of pointy things.

~J

Electric airsoft guns are an order of magnitude less powerful than BB guns. At the high end we're talking about something like a 4.5 grain projectile launched at 450fps, 2.02ft-lbs at the muzzle, while 3.1gr @ 300fps = 0.62ft-lbs is more common. Many mid-price airguns can easily manage an 8gr projectile at 850fps, 12.84ft-lbs, while more powerful ones can fire 14gr pellets at 1300fps, 52.55ft-lbs. As far as I can figure, paintball guns can generally be expected to launch a 45gr ball at 280fps, 7.84ft-lbs.

To get back to the topic at hand, I can't imagine the splinter rounds working too well (I believe they've been mentioned elsewhere). There are an assortment of problems with shooting with something like that. You're better off with a crossbow. Can't say much on the ice rounds.

However, the tracker rounds would make sense, assuming the bullet is big enough and the electronics pricey. It wouldn't have much range, though, and odds are against it working once it hit something (bullets tend to deform and break). But if you're lucky... I suppose one could decrease the muzzle velocity by cutting down onn the amount of cordite in the bullet, which would in turn give you more space for the equipment and cause less damage to the bullet, but penetration would be bad and it would be ungood at longer ranges (presumably its lighter and has less force behind it, so its more at the whims of other factors).

But I haven't had enough experience to say that's more than just a semi-informed opinion.

Cordite hasn't been used for over 50 years.

I believe that's why he referred to it as 'a kind of narcojet.'

So what is the term used now? Gunpowder? I thought gunpowder referred to black powder, which we were way past.

(And I have to say yay that I'm not COMPLETELY wrong, just wrong in most cases)

I believe we're still on Smokeless Powder (so named because of the distinct lack of a choking black cloud when you fire)

*shrugs* Why not just propellant?

"Gunpowder" pretty much covers everything we use in small arms these days, both black powder, and more commonly, smokeless (nitrocellulose-based) powders. Cordite is a nitrocellulose-based propellant, but it is not made in powder (granular) form, rather it is extruded in long rods or cords cut to specific lengths, hence "Cordite".

This picture shows a sectioned round with cordite propellant inside (13.9x99B = .55 Boys). Compare to the others.

All it says on that page is that it fires flechette ammunition, which you can get for an Ares Predator.

Does that mean that if my Ares Predator is using EX-EX and my opponent's Manhunter is using APDS, one of our ammo must magically change into the other?

No. What it does mean, however, is you can take the flechette ammo that you loaded into your AVS and put it into an Ares Predator.