[The Wyrm Ouroboros]

For what its worth, I personally wish scopes were a more reasonable option for aesthetic reasons: they just look cooler.  But the designers of SR4 went with the simple "vision magnification makes all ranges Short," instead of messing about with degress of magnification. Maybe house rule it so that Scopes give a few bonus dice if you Take Aim?

I had house rules for SR3 that enabled rifles to exceed their presumptive maximum range.  If a Barrett .50 M82A1 can deliver lethal hits at 2300m, and others at 2500m and beyond, then SR's 1500m extreme range is clearly in need of ... not revising, but extending the table if you have the proper gear to do so.

It took a complex action for each additional range bracket, and you could only extend it to the rating of your scope (i.e. up to a max of Extreme-3); target numbers were still equivalent to Range Bracket - Rating, which meant if you were shooting at something at EX-2 and you had a level 3 scope, you had the TN equivalent of Long Range.

I also expanded the 'grades' of rifles; sporting rifles don't shoot as far as the ones snipers on SWAT teams do; those don't shoot out as accurately as the sniper rifles the military uses.  And of course, everyone knows that the CIA has guns that can kill you from, like, five kilometers away, right?  Therefore Sport, SWAT, Sniper, and Sanction grades were 'born'.  (And no, you did NOT want to become the target of a CIA hitter using a Barrett M135A5 ...)

[Crash_00]

I have a couple scope and reflex sights in a small supplement I wrote up a while back. It's not official, but you can find it on the forums here: A Personal Touch

[Mäx]

I for one don't allow optical vision magnification to be placed in contacts or glasses. If you want it, you're going to have to get goggles at minimum.

Only purity conscious mages use optical magnification.

[hobgoblin]

I for one don't allow optical vision magnification to be placed in contacts or glasses. If you want it, you're going to have to get goggles at minimum.

Bending light using lenses still requires some space. Miniaturization of tech doesn't change the rules of physics.

Mirrors can do a whole lot to help pack things in tight spaces.

Hell, they can paint images on walls now using lasers and a microchip-size array of movable mirrors.

And those scientists keeps coming up with all kinds of materials with crazy refraction indexes.

[CitizenJoe]

I had house rules for SR3 that enabled rifles to exceed their presumptive maximum range.  If a Barrett .50 M82A1 can deliver lethal hits at 2300m, and others at 2500m and beyond, then SR's 1500m extreme range is clearly in need of ... not revising, but extending the table if you have the proper gear to do so.

That's because a .50 caliber weapon is an anti-materiel weapon, not a sniper rifle.  It should use the Assault Cannon ranges which go out to 2400m.

[The Wyrm Ouroboros]

And yet the in-game Barrett 121 -- see, Ronnie Barrett only works with one caliber -- still uses Sniper ranges.

What's more, the lighter bullets are the ones getting the furthest kills these days, so ... riddle me that.

[Ajax]

And yet the in-game Barrett 121 -- see, Ronnie Barrett only works with one caliber -- still uses Sniper ranges.

What's more, the lighter bullets are the ones getting the furthest kills these days, so ... riddle me that.

Actually, his company currently offers firearms in .50 BMG, 6.8 Remington SPC, and .416 Barrett.  Yes, the company has invented its own caliber and named it after themselves... Browning did it with the .50 BMG, why shouldn't Tennessee's current favorite son?

The .416 Barrett factory specs state a 0.8 MOA at 1500 yards; The .50 BMG is specs have a 1.2 MOA at 1500 yards; the much smaller 6.8 SPC has factory specs that don't go past 1000 yards (its meant for what Shadowrun would class as sporting rifles or assault rifles [it is essentially an improved 5.56 NATO]).  The  .416 Barrett has a greater velocity than the .50 BMG - that means less drop over the same ranges.  The larger .50 BMG delivers more energy to the target, although at the full 1500 yards the difference isn't as dramatic as it is at shorter distances.

With a damn good man behind the trigger, either of these rounds should be able to reach upwards of 2000+ yards... but you're talking about Longarms 7, a weapon specialization, AGI 6, several Take Aim actions, and some Edge Dice.

[The Wyrm Ouroboros]

Ah, didn't know that about the various calibers.

Still, by game rules, your max range just isn't there.  Ergo, rules so that weapons do go out to actual ranges, and how to hit them way out there...

[Ajax]

Ah, didn't know that about the various calibers.

Still, by game rules, your max range just isn't there.  Ergo, rules so that weapons do go out to actual ranges, and how to hit them way out there...

My Sniper will not kill all the bad guys before the rest of the party is in range.

Well, the key thing is that Shadowrun is a game, and many aspects of its mechanical design are built to reinforce its aesthetic design.  Shadowrun combat is, at its heart, meant to recreate a sort of hybrid cyberpunk/heroic bloodshed/action movie aesthetic -- its just cooler to have firefights involving heavy pistols, submachine guns, katanas, kung fu, and parakour than it is to have the heroes taking cover and trading rifle rounds at 500 yards.

This is just one of those little "breaks from reality" that need to be shrugged off for game play.  It is cool and badass for the team to have one player that invests quite a few of their resources into being an elite long-ranged sniper; it really gets dreadfully boring if everyone can do it.

[The Wyrm Ouroboros]

Well, yes, to all of the above.  However.

Making a kill-shot at 3000m is just as much a part of that hybrid cyberpunk/heroic bloodshed/action movie aesthetic; the 'one shot, one kill' thing, plus the 'impossible shot' thing.  I am not saying that everyone should be able to do it; clearly everyone should not be able to punk an impossible-to-get-to target at two and a half klicks, having taken a -12 penalty (or something equally ghastly) to their dice pool.  However, I am saying that it should be doable -- just as using your katana in close combat to cut apart six guys at once is doable, in that hybrid aesthetic way.

As the rules stand, however, 'doable' it is not.