Okay, time for more info than you ever asked for...
A shotgun is a firearm, normally designed to be fired from the shoulder, thus it is a "longarm," as oppossed to weapons meant to be fired from one hand (hence "handgun"). They take their name from their most common ammunition, a paper or plastic shell that contains a number of small spherical pellets called
shot. Shotguns can also fire a solid projectiles called a
slug, it isn't proper terminology but a slug can basically be thought of as a really big bullet. Shotguns are also extremely verisitle and dozens of special rounds exist for them.
The caliber of shotguns is measured in terms of
gauge*. The gauge number is determined by the weight, in fractions of a pound, of a solid sphere of lead with a diameter equal to the inside diameter of the barrel. So, a 10 gauge shotgun nominally should have an inside diameter equal to that of a sphere made from one-tenth of a pound of lead. By far the most common gauge in realworld use and fiction is the 12 gauge (with a 0.729"/18.5 mm diameter)
[spoiler="*"]The UK and its (other) former colonies measure shotgun caliber in
bore, which is calculated by different means. I don't know how they do it in any non-English language). But that's neither here nor there.[/spoiler]
The main thing to understand about shotguns in
Shadowrun is that, like all firearms, they've attempted to recreate cinematic gunplay and shave some rather boring complexity about ballistics and such in oder to a make an already complex game that much simplier. So
Shadowrun just sort of handwaves guage, shell-length, muzzle velocity, and all that boring crap that only gun guys and gun gals (like yours truly) care about. Ranges are reduced to "Hollywood Distances," everyone can share ammo, etc. The only really complex part of
Shadowrun's scatterguns are its ammo types and choke.
ShotAs I said before, shotguns are used to fire multiple small spherical pellets called shot at once. The
Shadowrun rules treat this as flechette ammunition, because for game mechanics this works best, although in real world the effect is rather different. A shotgun is loaded with
shells, plastic or paper cartridges that to grossly simpilfy things, contain the gunpowder that makes everything go "bang!" and a variable number of pellets. They are broken down into two basic types: birdshot and buckshot. Birdshot will be a dozen to several dozen very small BB's and is mostly used for hunting, well, birds. Buckshot is much larger, used for hunting large game (like, say, bucks) and is generally what police, private citizens, and, rarely, soldiers, will shoot at bad guys with. Buckshot comes in various pellet numbers too. The
Shadowrun rules basically model buckshot and ignore other shot types.
I want to to mentally picture that classic image of an American (or Canadian) deer-hunter with his trusty 12-guage shotgun. You can see it right? Inside his weapon will be several shells of 00 Buckshot (read as "double-aught") 00 Buckshot pellets are about 8.4 mm (.33") in diameter and a shell will general have between 6-9 pellets.
Shadowrun treats all shot ammo as flechettes, so if you load up the double-aught, follow those rules.
ChokeBecause shot pellets are small, round, and delivered without spin, is very inefficient ballistically. A 9mm bullet from a typical handgun is also small, but it is aerodynamicly shapped and spinning, making it a very efficient "flyer" (so to speak). But a the shot leaves the barrel of a shotgun it begins to disperse in the air, resulting cloud of pellets is known as the
pattern or
spread. The ideal pattern would be a circle with an even distribution of shot, with a density sufficient to ensure enough pellets will hit the target to achieve the desired result, such as breaking a clay target or killing Bambi's mom. To get that ideal pattern - or reasonably close to it - the shooter needs to be able to control the dispersal of the shot, we do this by a constricting the openning at the end of the barrel with a interchangeable tube known as a
choke. This post is getting long enough already, so I'll skip over the details, but with differing degrees of constriction the shooter gets different patterns. With my 12ga. Wingmaster, and a pocket of choke tubes, I can use the same gun and ammo to get a 30" diameter spread at 20 yards range, for busting clay targets up close; swap chokes for the same diamter speard at 40 yards, for hitting clay pigeons at a distance; swap tubes again for some turkey hunting, which requires long range shots with very small spreads in order to the small head and neck of the bird.
Shadowrun, as I said before, follows "Hollywood Physics" for guns... and in Hollywood a shotgun uses its choke to let Bruce Willis shoot a multiple stuntmen at the same time!
Shadowrun also lets users change the size of their choke "on the fly" thanks to scifi gun construction and smartlinks. The
Shadowrun choke rules are based on the Hollywood image and only work when the gun is firing flechette ammo.
SlugsA shotgun slug is a heavy lead projectile, it puts big holes in things. The default damage values fof most
Shadowrun shotguns are listed to assume slug ammo. 8P baby!
A cut-away look at a 12 gauge slug shell
A transparent plastic 12 gauge birdshot shell. Buckshot would appear similar, but with far fewer, and much larger, pellets.
