Shadowrun
Shadowrun General => Gear => Topic started by: werebear83 on <06-09-12/2151:33>
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So I am running a street sammi in a game where our GM is using a lot of magic creatures. I rely on a modded pair of war hawks and keep encountering creatures with hardened armor and it is getting annoying having to roll over 10 successes just to make a dent in these things. So enough rambling, are there any decent options for a gillette to deal with these things? Special ammo, bigger guns, maybe a tac nuke? I am good with my BS rolls vs the GM so any ideas I can run with.
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My first thought would be to go with APDS or Stick-n-Shock ammo. AP mods come off the hardened armor before you see whether or not it makes a dent. So anything with AP -4 or AP -half is going to do good things for you.
After that, if you know you're going to be hunting a specific type of creature, do your research and find their weaknesses. If they are vampires, for instance, flechette rounds made from ash wood are a great choice. On a bug hunt? Capsule rounds full of KE IV are your bestest friend, except maybe the splash grenades full of the powerful insecticide.
Third option? Get your mage friend to sustain a spell on you. If you've got some melee skills, having the mage sustain a Fire Aura spell on you during the fight is going to make you nasty as hell.
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Mirkon's advice all works. In addition (and you can combine this with the other advice):
1) make Called Shots for +DV. -4 to hit for +4 DV is a great trade (unless you miss) and the +DV does indeed help you bypass hardened armor. You can also call to ignore armor but that can very quickly take you to 0 dice pools.
2) Use weapons with FA (or better yet, HV), and wide burst. Narrow burst DV does not help bypass hardened armor, wide burst = less defense = more nets hits = better chance of penetrating ITNW.
3) If you have Heavy Weapons, the Ares Thunderstruck Gauss Rifle is amazing against spirits; the errata changed it to AP half, then -4. With an already pretty good base damage, it cuts through ITNW pretty easily. It's also good as a ersatz sniper rifle (just as good range, no silencing, better stopping power) and as an anti-vehicular weapon, so the high price tag is well worth it, IMO.
What weapon skills do you have? I might be able to give better advice based on that.
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Thanks for the advice, we never know what we are gonna hit, we have gone on three runs and in the first we went to a waste land desert town near a magic rift, no comms, no tech, and lots of awakened animals. Next was a run where me and another sammi pretended to be minor corp security so our mage could bluff her way in, and all we brought were light pistols, we ended up facing a level 9 beast spirit, yeah, Colt Manhunter was really effective. Last run well, we were just supposed to get the info for the run, but I am just being a whiny PC. Thanks again.
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Umm... you said gilette. Gilettes used to be melee razorboys.
Your best bet is to shun the blades. Go with a taser instead. AP-half goes a long way towards cuting through hardened. (defiance EX is so good it really should be an exotic weapon... but roll with what you got).
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Umm... you said gilette. Gilettes used to be melee razorboys.
Your best bet is to shun the blades. Go with a taser instead. AP-half goes a long way towards cuting through hardened. (defiance EX is so good it really should be an exotic weapon... but roll with what you got).
If the things he has been going up against only have Hardened Armor, as opposed to ITNW, then capsule rounds with poisons
work, as do splash and gas grenades. Then again, does ITNW work on the insides? If not..gas grenades might be a good choice,
anyway.
For guns, you can also get Anti-Vehicle rounds...
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Well, I think what the OP needs is ....
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... is to have a good face-to-face with their GM, and ask them why they're throwing such powerful opposition against the PCs, in situatiosn where they're by default NOT going to have the right gear to effectively, not-panicking-for-their-lives deal with those threats. I mean, seriously, the two samurai have LIGHT PISTOLS, nothing more, and get thrown up against a F9 Beast Spirit ...?!?
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A Force 9 spirit would be some pretty heavy opposition for low-level runners, even if they did have their full firepower. A mundane would have to overcome an equivalent hardened armor of 18 to hurt it.
2) Use weapons with FA (or better yet, HV), and wide burst. Narrow burst DV does not help bypass hardened armor, wide burst = less defense = more nets hits = better chance of penetrating ITNW.
It should be noted that this strategy is only useful if you have sufficient recoil compensation to not have to sacrifice very many dice from the attack role. Otherwise it's a zero sum game: you'll lose just as many hits on average as the target does.
Called Shot for damage, on the other hand, is great idea, as it pays off at an average of about 3-to-1.
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That's not zero sum......
I have 18 dice.. you have 9 dice... no recoil comp.
-9 means I still have 9 dice, but you have no dice.
2:1 ratio is inferior to 9:0 ratio!
I agree with you that called shots generally work better... but a lot of GM's don't allow called shots with wide spread automatic fire. (scatter so it's harder to dodge... but I'm AIMING for a specific point of sorts!). If you have a HMG... you can't fire anything except a long or full burst anyhow (FA only), so called shot is not in the cards. So the rule of thumb is against vehicles and spirits... unless you can hit and breach hardened with a single shot... don't narrow but wide burst. If in doubt... wide burst unless you know exactly why you're narrow bursting.
This is the reason I hate the -dice mechanics for perception of penalizing the observer... normally the amount of perception available is small compared to the amount of stealth pool.. .so penalties to it tend to wipe it out, when if they were bonuses to the stealth pool instead they'd work practically as well without completely boning over the perception pools of all but the most extreme cases.
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A wide spread is +1d per bullet, isn't it? (I haven't looked that rule up recently.)
Every bullet after the first is -1 recoil.
So a 10-shot wide burst is +10 dice, and then (if you have no recoilcompensation) -9 dice.
All you've really done is throw away eight bullets, for nothing in return.
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No Pax, a wide burst is a penalty on the reaction to not get shot.
So if you have a steel lynx tossing 9 dice between +handling and response... and armor 12.
You shoot him with tripod mounted HMG firing cheap standard ball ammo. (FA only... so you can only fire 6rd (simple) or 10rd(complex) bursts).
You fire heavy weapons + agility + Misc - uncompensated recoil (0, 8 on tripod + whatever). He reactions with Reaction - 9 (-1 for each bullet after the first). He can't dodge.
Base damage on the HMG is 7P AP-3... so armor is 12 vehicle... you need to at least get 3 successes to increase damage to physical and hurt the drone.
You roll your dice and get 3 successes exactly... the drone gets no dice to roll to reduce this down under 3... so it gets hit for 10P, AP-3 and gets hurt severely.
If this were a NARROW burst... they do +1dam per bullet after the first (after the check for armor physical/stun). If one spitwad won't hurt the tank... 10 of them won't do much better....
In the same case... you fire and get 3 successes... barely enough to hurt the drone. If the drone fails to get any successes you'll do 19P AP-3 damage (pretty assuredly blowing it sky high).
However the drone still has 9 dice to roll to reduce your 3 hits... all it needs is 1 to take NO damage (armor 12 vs 9AP-3 damage) which is all the difference between a glancing hit sending tracers flying everywhere as they bounce off the armor, and a dead drone.
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It's also not particularly hard to get your recoil compensation, unless you're using an off-the-shelf gun.
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No Pax, a wide burst is a penalty on the reaction to not get shot.
Ah, yes that would make a difference. Thanks for the clarification.
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Third option? Get your mage friend to sustain a spell on you. If you've got some melee skills, having the mage sustain a Fire Aura spell on you during the fight is going to make you nasty as hell.
This is a brilliant idea. EVeryone can play with spirits now!
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Meh, this is why I like to play ghouls. Yeah, you don't invite them to the fancy dinner parties, but spirits get hosed by dual-natured beasties with claws. Well, anything really can get hosed by dual-natured beasties with claws. For hardened armor, yeah, I really like Stick-n-Shock. And as mentioned in other threads, S-n-S on Full Auto is pretty much broken as hell. Your DM keeps throwing huge nasties at you, whip out the S-n-S Ares Alpha. Remember, that stun track is generally shorter than the physical track.
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And if your players hose SnS, hit em with a great form air spirit
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And if your players hose SnS, hit em with a great form air spirit
Heh, with the wonky spirit rules, by RAW you can use stick-n-shock against an air spirit - or a flamethrower against a fire spirit. :D
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Indeed. Elementals are not immune to their element. Of course, against a spirit I would much rather have a weapon focus and/or a sustained [Energy] Aura spell, but that's just me.
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And if your players hose SnS, hit em with a great form air spirit
Heh, with the wonky spirit rules, by RAW you can use stick-n-shock against an air spirit - or a flamethrower against a fire spirit. :D
My DnD must be sneaking into my Shadowrun, I'd always given them immunity based on how they manifested. Birdie-air types immune to sonic, stormy types electricity. Accidental houseruling I guess
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This is one of those cases where unless it specifically has reasons it doesn't, house-ruling is the way to go. Just say you are pulling it from the fluff, and there isn't a hard and fast rule that an elemental DOESN'T have immunity from it's element, so the rule is that it does. It's from an elemental metaplane which is surrounded by the stuff. It shouldn't get hurt by it's home. That's be like humans getting hurt by... Well, bad example, as humans are rather susceptible to everything.
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You've kind of just explained exactly why I wouldn't be so sure that it was a mistake. Being made of something doesn't mean that it can't harm you. We're made of meat, but we probably wouldn't like getting hit by a side of beef. ;D
It's possible that having a quantity of foreign material, even of the same element, forced through the material of the spirit disrupts the cohesion of it to some degree. A water elemental hit with a high-pressure hose might find the water it brought through from the metaplanes to make up its body getting scattered about, for instance.
Then again, it also doesn't really say anywhere that mundane fire/electricity/etc. gets to ignore Immunity to Normal Weapons unless it satisfies an Allergy. ITNW specifically says that it applies against attacks that are non-magical, and makes no exceptions for elemental effects; otherwise, water spirits wouldn't need to list "Fire" as an Allergy. The only advantage they would have would be that some of the elemental effects reduce armor by half, and ITNW is treated like armor.
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Umm... you said gilette. Gilettes used to be melee razorboys.
Your best bet is to shun the blades. Go with a taser instead. AP-half goes a long way towards cuting through hardened. (defiance EX is so good it really should be an exotic weapon... but roll with what you got).
I thought Gilettes were female street sammies. (Jill by name, Gilette razor by trade)
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I thought Gilettes were female street sammies. (Jill by name, Gilette razor by trade)
It used to. It's been generalized since then.
Still not something you call a female street sammi without a Troll Tank to hide behind.
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I thought Gilettes were female street sammies. (Jill by name, Gilette razor by trade)
It used to. It's been generalized since then.
Still not something you call a female street sammi without a Troll Tank to hide behind.
No...it will NEVE be generalized: Gillettes are female, blade using, spurs/handblade implanted, close-combat street sams.
Males are "razorboys." Tanks are heavily armoured street sams, usually with a BIG GUN. And, of course, Street sam is
anything else.
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What Mara said.
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What Mara said.
Sidebar on Pg. 5 of the 20th Anniversary version of the 4E corebook. "Gillette - n. vulg. A female street samurai or razorgirl." Conversation about that is over. Every formal definition of that slang has always said female AFAIK. Moving on.
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On the topic, I'd use a LAW or a MAW to crack that armor. Cheap and at -6AP it's a nice to break that hardened armor. If your GM allows then do a called shot with flechette rounds into the wound.
Alternately, pack a MGL-6 pistol grenade launcher with HE (-2) or White Phosphorus (-1/2) or load those War Hawks with AV rounds (-6 on hardened armor).
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ITS Gonryu, with Monowire Grenades. :) "Hardened Armor? I hadn't noticed, Sir!"
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ITS Gonryu, with Monowire Grenades. :) "Hardened Armor? I hadn't noticed, Sir!"
Or, better yet, the ITS Gonryu with the White Phosphorous. Same DV, better AP, better Blast Radius value, and less illegal. Also does 4 DV again every turn for 10 Combat Turns.
DV 44 per full-burst due to the overlapping explosion rules, and DV 22 every turn for 10 turns... and that's just one Full Burst. With 4 IPs you could stack the per-turn damage up to DV 88 by the time it "ticks" at the end of the turn.
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<--- gets up, heads for the elevator, and presses the "B-100" button, to go retrieve his jaw from where it just fell. :o
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DV 44 per full-burst due to the overlapping explosion rules, and DV 22 every turn for 10 turns... and that's just one Full Burst. With 4 IPs you could stack the per-turn damage up to DV 88 by the time it "ticks" at the end of the turn.
Don't forget that you'd get to increase the initial 44 DV of damage with net hits on the attack roll, too, if you fire directly at the target with impact detonation. Not that it's likely to matter. :P
However, since it's the result of autofire, wouldn't only the base 8 DV + net hits count against the hardened armor (which would be halved by the WP)?
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DV 44 per full-burst due to the overlapping explosion rules, and DV 22 every turn for 10 turns... and that's just one Full Burst. With 4 IPs you could stack the per-turn damage up to DV 88 by the time it "ticks" at the end of the turn.
Don't forget that you'd get to increase the initial 44 DV of damage with net hits on the attack roll, too, if you fire directly at the target with impact detonation. Not that it's likely to matter. :P
However, since it's the result of autofire, wouldn't only the base 8 DV + net hits count against the hardened armor (which would be halved by the WP)?
Actually, at least according to my GM, the Overlapping Explosion rules supersede the Autofire rules, as far as Grenade Launchers go.
Essentially, he decided that grenade launchers are just delivery vectors for Microgrenades, and the BF and FA options just mean you're putting more grenades down-range with a single action. Since they're not bullets, what happens after that is covered 100% by the OE rules, as if you'd hand-thrown two grenades set to detonate at the end of the Action Phase.
EDIT: And, as a side note, DV 44 may seem excessive but you've got to remember each modern WP grenade contains 15oz of liberally aerated White Phosphorous, and you're detonating 10 of them near-simultaneously with each burst. That means that, assuming you have 3 IPs, you're going to be dumping 4.25kg of WP, a substance that burns at 2760 Celsius, into the air in about a second.
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*shrug* If the question came up in my campaign I would have said that any instance of combining damage from multiple sources (like overlapping explosions) would be treated the same as autofire for overcoming hardened armor: if a single one couldn't penetrate the armor, then pelting the armor with a shower of them wouldn't either.
It's really up to each particular GM's interpretation, since the rules in War don't say anything about how overlapping explosions effect hardened armor. If your GM is cool with it, then I have no complaints.
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<--- gets up, heads for the elevator, and presses the "B-100" button, to go retrieve his jaw from where it just fell. :o
You think that is bad? Head over to the other Shadowrun forum, where they will tell you that if you don't have 20+ dice
in your primary skill, you are not making a good character...
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<--- gets up, heads for the elevator, and presses the "B-100" button, to go retrieve his jaw from where it just fell. :o
You think that is bad? Head over to the other Shadowrun forum, where they will tell you that if you don't have 20+ dice
in your primary skill, you are not making a good character...
Oh yeah, you should have seen the WOTC forums back in the 3.5 days. Some of the same kind of crazy going on there, too. My favorite quote came from a build called the "War Hulking Hurler" which combined, surprisingly, the War Hulk and Hulking Hurler prestige classes. That quote was:
How much XP do you get for destroying Faerun?
All of it.
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That's not zero sum......
I have 18 dice.. you have 9 dice... no recoil comp.
-9 means I still have 9 dice, but you have no dice.
2:1 ratio is inferior to 9:0 ratio!
That depends.
9:0 is only less likely to fail, if all you need is one net hit.
On average both are generating 3 net hits.
If you need more than 3 net hits for example, 9:0 is inferior to 18:9, because the spread of the latter is higher.
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<--- gets up, heads for the elevator, and presses the "B-100" button, to go retrieve his jaw from where it just fell. :o
You think that is bad? Head over to the other Shadowrun forum, where they will tell you that if you don't have 20+ dice
in your primary skill, you are not making a good character...
No, we will tell you no such thing.
It so happens I post in both forums, under the same handle even. And while the possibility of 20+ die pools will certainly be discussed, the majority of posters there will not say "if you don't have one too, you're not a good shadowrunner". >=P
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One of those that that triggers the "There's no wrong way to play SHadowrun" twitch that I have. 20+ dice pools is significantly *different* than my game, but not *wrong*.
The Baseline game, however, doesn't expect dicepools over 12 for anything of note, and usually lower. 6 dice, after all, is "Professional competency", while 8 is "Veteran". That's a whole other discussion that makes people plant flags and tear their shirts, so, moving on. :)
I have to say that the gradual shift to "Cool professional" has snuffed the old Razorboi style. I undertsand why, but man I miss them in my old fart way.
(http://i108.photobucket.com/albums/n38/marcusg7428/mohawk_punk.jpg)
(http://blog.silive.com/marooned/2007/10/large_PunkMohawk.jpg)
*sniffle*
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And if your players hose SnS, hit em with a great form air spirit
Heh, with the wonky spirit rules, by RAW you can use stick-n-shock against an air spirit - or a flamethrower against a fire spirit. :D
What, you never heard of fighting fire with fire? :D
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One of those that that triggers the "There's no wrong way to play SHadowrun" twitch that I have. 20+ dice pools is significantly *different* than my game, but not *wrong*.
The Baseline game, however, doesn't expect dicepools over 12 for anything of note, and usually lower. 6 dice, after all, is "Professional competency", while 8 is "Veteran". That's a whole other discussion that makes people plant flags and tear their shirts, so, moving on. :)
I have to say that the gradual shift to "Cool professional" has snuffed the old Razorboi style. I undertsand why, but man I miss them in my old fart way.
(http://i108.photobucket.com/albums/n38/marcusg7428/mohawk_punk.jpg)
(http://blog.silive.com/marooned/2007/10/large_PunkMohawk.jpg)
*sniffle*
+1 lol
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Willie Peter is NOT your friend and you should not hug him!
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*shrug* If the question came up in my campaign I would have said that any instance of combining damage from multiple sources (like overlapping explosions) would be treated the same as autofire for overcoming hardened armor: if a single one couldn't penetrate the armor, then pelting the armor with a shower of them wouldn't either.
Um... TheNarrator... what you just said means that because 1kg of C4 can't successfully breech an armor plate that a tonne of C4 in 1,000 separate, simultaneously detonated charges can't breech the plate.
The fact is that, unlike bullets hitting one after the other, multiple sources of *BOOM* going off at the same time does increase the impulse directed at the target, which makes it more likely to suffer structural failure.
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Point taken.
But on the other hand, would scattering a half dozen fragmentation hand grenades in seperate locations in the vicinity of a tank really crack that tank like an egg, as these rules suggest? I'd like to find to find a middle ground for game balance purposes.
Now that I think of it, there are already rules for combining multiple explosives... which work entirely differently from the overlapping explosions rules. According to RAW, those 1,000 separate 1kg C4 charges would be fifteen times as powerful as a single 1 tonne C4 charge (1 + 999 / 2 = 500.5 as opposed to square root of 1000 = 31.62).
...times like this I really miss the explicitly-logarithmic damage of Star Wars Saga Edition, where double the *BOOM* always meant +1 die of damage.
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Point taken.
But on the other hand, would scattering a half dozen fragmentation hand grenades in seperate locations in the vicinity of a tank really crack that tank like an egg, as these rules suggest? I'd like to find to find a middle ground for game balance purposes.
Now that I think of it, there are already rules for combining multiple explosives... which work entirely differently from the overlapping explosions rules. According to RAW, those 1,000 separate 1kg C4 charges would be fifteen times as powerful as a single 1 tonne C4 charge (1 + 999 / 2 = 500.5 as opposed to square root of 1000 = 31.62).
...times like this I really miss the explicitly-logarithmic damage of Star Wars Saga Edition, where double the *BOOM* always meant +1 die of damage.
It's a case of one size not fitting all. The rules make sense for everything but frag grenades, really, since the "shredding" effect of the criss-crossing shockwaves really will do much more damage than one, bigger kaboom hitting at the same spot... although, really, the 501 vs 32 just demonstrates the how nerf the "charge scaling" rules are.
As a fix, since it makes no mention one way or the other of how you modify the AP when using the Overlapping Explosions rules, I'd take the route of assuming that the AP of the Overlapping Explosions rule also adds the same way. AP of the best single hit + half of the total of the rest.
In that case, those frag grenades are at AP +5 per grenade. That gives them a final AP of +18... which, of course, adds to the Vehicle Armor. That means, assuming the worst case scenario of them all landing with zero scatter, it would only need 24 points of armor to defeat the grenades' collective DV 42... easily doable for even a modded street vehicle that's been upgraded with Smart Armor.
Of all the vehicles in Chummer marked as a "Tank" of some sort, none of the ones marked as "Battle Tanks"... the equivalent of a modern M1 Abrams... fail to rise well above that mark, and the ones that would be vulnerable to such a strike are all fluffed as lightly armored, due either to a desire for speed or because they're "cheap"... and the weakest still rolls 55 dice to resist after the +18 is added in.
And, again, that's pretty much assuming zilch scatter on all the detonations. That means the grenades have landed on and under the tank, where they stand the best chance of damaging the treads or bouncing just right and managing to detonate in part of the engine's intake/exhaust system. Every meter of scatter off the primary detonation, or 2 collective meters of scatter off the supplementary explosions, drops the DV by 1 while the +18 AP stays the same, meaning an inaccurate barrage would quickly become worthless.
--- --- ---
Of course, talking about actual explosives doesn't really cover the effects of White Phosphorous Grenades, which fill the area with a load of ultra-hot incendiary particles that are more than capable of melting through steel and similar materials. Douse a tank with enough of the stuff and you'll end up with all sorts of nasty problems like tank shells cooking off, fuel-cells exploding, and the crew getting dry-roasted and/or burned alive.
Here (http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=8aa_1298522827) is a link from LiveLeak showing a real WP rocket hitting a real tank. The WP grenades may not be armor-piercing rockets, but I definitely think a full-scale barrage of them would make up for it with saturation.
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It's a case of one size not fitting all. The rules make sense for everything but frag grenades, really, since the "shredding" effect of the criss-crossing shockwaves really will do much more damage than one, bigger kaboom hitting at the same spot...
In this context, how simultaneous do the explosions have to be?
Of course, talking about actual explosives doesn't really cover the effects of White Phosphorous Grenades, which fill the area with a load of ultra-hot incendiary particles that are more than capable of melting through steel and similar materials.
True enough. Hence the AP -half, which is enough to even cut an MBT's impressive armor down to size.
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It's a case of one size not fitting all. The rules make sense for everything but frag grenades, really, since the "shredding" effect of the criss-crossing shockwaves really will do much more damage than one, bigger kaboom hitting at the same spot...
In this context, how simultaneous do the explosions have to be?
The whole idea is that before the material has finished "absorbing" one explosion's Impulse (Impulse = Force * Time), it gets another Impulse that increases the overall sheer-stress on the target and imparts a new vectors to the sheer that a single impulse would never be able to create by itself.
Practically speaking, I'd say somewhere within a generously-sized fraction of a second, usually. Easily within the realm of a det-cord setup or modern radio-detonation system, since it's a major tool in the arsenal of a modern commercial demolitionist.
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Yeah, I asked because I was wondering about whether it would work with an automatic grenade launcher, since the grenades wouldn't detonate simultaneously. The modern Mk 19 has a cyclic rate of 325-375 rpm, so if the Gonryu is similar than the grenades would hit and detonate less than one-fifth of a second apart. Probably close enough for these purposes.
I hadn't really thought about how the overlapping explosion rules would apply with a grenade launcher before. It makes the Gonryu a lot more brutal than I'd realized. Suppressing Fire with this thing would lay waste to whole areas, and narrow bursts put the Anti-Tank Mortar to shame.
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Yeah, I asked because I was wondering about whether it would work with an automatic grenade launcher, since the grenades wouldn't detonate simultaneously. The modern Mk 19 has a cyclic rate of 325-375 rpm, so if the Gonryu is similar than the grenades would hit and detonate less than one-fifth of a second apart. Probably close enough for these purposes.
I hadn't really thought about how the overlapping explosion rules would apply with a grenade launcher before. It makes the Gonryu a lot more brutal than I'd realized. Suppressing Fire with this thing would lay waste to whole areas, and narrow bursts put the Anti-Tank Mortar to shame.
All Shadowrun weapons capable of standard Full Auto firing (i.e. not HV or Minigun), are theoretically capable of putting out 2000+^ RPM.
Even assuming there's some unintended shenanigans involved in that number, due to the way cyclical rate interacts with IP boosts, the Gonryu would probably double or triple the Mk 19's rate of fire... which is still enough to do a fair imitation of modern air-to-ground cluster munitions.
^5 IPs per CT * 20 CTs per minute * 20 rounds per Suppressive Fire action = 2000 rounds per minute... which, even then, isn't just jamming the trigger and holding it down.
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Well, the MAC-10 can get to half of that cyclic rate with 1970s technology. And the MG42 did it in 1942 (The ROF was so fast that it sounded more like a buzzsaw than a machine gun, which had troops calling it "Hitler's Zipper"), and that design is still in use as the MG3.
With Smartgun technology, you can probably automatically adjust the cyclic rate by adjusting the gas-operation of the firearm to whatever you like. I mean, the damned thing does everything else except make you a sandwich for after the firefight.
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Well, the MAC-10 can get to half of that cyclic rate with 1970s technology. And the MG42 did it in 1942 (The ROF was so fast that it sounded more like a buzzsaw than a machine gun, which had troops calling it "Hitler's Zipper"), and that design is still in use as the MG3.
With Smartgun technology, you can probably automatically adjust the cyclic rate by adjusting the gas-operation of the firearm to whatever you like. I mean, the damned thing does everything else except make you a sandwich for after the firefight.
Oh, I'm not complaining... well, except a minor grumble that every FA gun seems to have exactly the same RoF... just noting that the Gonryu is theoretically capable of burning through the standard 50-round belt it comes with in about 1.5 seconds.
EDIT: Of course, that makes me wonder about how one would modify a suppression zone for grenades, since we've already established they're not treated like bullets.
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EDIT: Of course, that makes me wonder about how one would modify a suppression zone for grenades, since we've already established they're not treated like bullets.
If you're anywhere near the blast radius of the full-auto grenade launcher's impacts, you need to make a Composure test and find a new set of underwear.
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I mean, the damned thing does everything else except make you a sandwich for after the firefight.
You didn't buy that feature?
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EDIT: Of course, that makes me wonder about how one would modify a suppression zone for grenades, since we've already established they're not treated like bullets.
If you're anywhere near the blast radius of the full-auto grenade launcher's impacts, you need to make a Composure test and find a new set of underwear.
Well, I figured that part was obvious. ;)
I was more thinking about the damage to objects in the area being blasted into a crater. For ease of math, maybe just assume 1 at 0m scatter (for the primary damage source), 1 at 1m, and 2 each at 2m-10m? The falloff would be a bit more complicated, but I'd probably go with a -X/m/m... -X (the normal increment) per meter per meter.
So, for a HE volley it would go 10 + ((9 + 16 + 14 + 12 + 10 + 8 + 6 + 4 + 2 + 0) / 2) = DV 51 AP -18 (not -21, since 3 'nades don't reach them) for anything caught in the primary blast zone. At the edge of the blast zone, the DV takes a total penalty of of -1 at 1m, -3 at 2m, -6 at 3m, -10 at 4m, -15 at 5m, -21 at 6m, -28 at 7m, -36 at 8m, - 45 at 9m, and -55 (aka, no effect) at 10m.
EDIT: Whoops... got my High-Explosive and Fragmentation Blast increments mixed up, there. It's really 10 + ((8 + 12 + 8 + 4 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0) / 2) = 26 DV AP -9 (only 8 'nades apply to any given spot) , and -2 at 1m, -6 at 2m, -12 at 3m, -20 at 4m, -30 (no effect) at 5m from the edge.
Frags, with their higher DV and lower increment would be potentially much deadlier, but much more random, since they'd work out to DV 72 AP +52 and zeroing out at the 12m mark. WP works out to DV 49 AP -50%*, DV 25 for 10 turns, zeroing out at the 10m mark.
Using this model, suppressing with Frags will make people dive for cover and cause randomly devastating injuries among armored troops ranging from 'gravely injured' to 'fine red mist' over a 44m diameter area, but not do much against vehicles. Using HE will cause less damage at any one point, but will cause a seriously bad day for just about anything in a 28m diameter. WP grenades will, effectively, create a 38m diameter micro-apocalypse.
*When using OE rules for -50% AP mods, you essentially add -25% to the base for every AP -50% after the first. That means 3 or more WP grenades would totally nullify any armor except fireproofing, making such a strike an inevitable OHK against even heavy tanks. Hence why I'm sticking to AP -50%. The actual result should be -525%.