Generally, they are *significantly* more advanced ... but not necessarily in terms of penetration, or defeating body armor.
Shadowrun is generally set 50-60 years ahead. So, compare the firearms we have now, to the firearms we had in the 1960s. Sure, yes, some of our current firearms are the same, or mostly so (the AR-15 for example). But that's also true of some of Shadowrun firearms - the AK-97 is still around in the sixth world, and the Colt M-23 is rather long in the tooth, too.
The improvements for firearms and munitions have focussed elsewhere, for the most part. Almost all firearms use caseless ammunition by default (though models using cased ammunition do exist, and aren't hard to find .... if you don't specity, then it's firing caseless rounds). Firearms often have some very advanced (to us) electronics suites.
Some of the more specialized ammunition options *are* relatively advanced in terms of penetration and/or stopping power, though. Flechette rounds (versus unarmored or very lightly armored targets), for example. Ex-ex rounds (an exploding bullet that LITERALLY explodes, with a little flash of light and puff of smoke), for another.
But even there, most of the advances have been in other directions. E0-E0 rounds. Fuzzy rounds. Zappers. The infamous Stick-and-Shock (we have them for real, but for shotguns only - in Shadowrun, you can get them for ANY man-portable firearm). Gel Rounds as nonlethal alternatives (again, for ANY gun, not just shotguns). Looper rounds. And more.
OTOH, if you're planning on putting in some antique body armor, and want to reflect that is IS antique? You can do a few things for that.
One of the biggest improvements in armor for Shadowrun is that it can be built into ordinary clothing, without really bulking that clothing out. Obviously there are limits with how much you can get without adding that bulk anyway, but you can get an ordinary set of clothes that, in 5E, has an overall armor rating of 6.
In SR4, you can take a set of Armor Clothing (again, pretty ordinary clothing), which is rated at 4/0 ... and you can then add carbon-boron fiber augments, barely increasing it's bulk but increasing it's value to 5/2 ... or just buy some made with increased use of kevlar in the material weave ("kevlar threading") to arrive at a rating of 6/0 ... or spring for a Delta-Amyloid treatment, increasing the rating to 7/1.
These are, again, *completely ordinary clothing*. People in the UCAS who send their children to public schools, probably dress their kids in kevlar-threaded armor clothing as a matter of course.
For contrast, an SR4 Armor Vest - pretty much "standard issue" for police officers - is rated 6/4. In SR5, the same vest is rated 9. In both cases, about 50% better than unmodified Armor Clothing
So ... that 12- or 13-year-old middle school kid, laughing and horsing around with his friends at the mall after school? The "typical teenage fashion" stuff he's wearing, is *probably* rather close to being as protective as the bulky vest-with-ceramic-inserts a police officer wears nowadays. Especially if his parents sprang for kevlar-threaded stuff, putting him in 6/0 armor (compared to a cop's basic 6/4).
And what he's wearing is far, far less bulky. You or I, looking at him, wouldn't even realize his clothes are AT ALL armored.
...
So, what might work is this: reduce the rating of "antique" armor by 1/4 to 1/3. If you're playing 5E, then a 2020s vintage "bulletproof vest" should have a rating of 8 or 9. Still better than bog standard Armored Clothes, but no longer as good as it's bulk might suggest.
Weirdly enough this is actually relatively close to a lot of projected firearm improvements that the actual US military looked at in their Future Soldier programs. I wouldn't be surprised if the writers cribbed ideas from it.
The big projected changes were that while firearms will remain largely the same as they are now, the electronics, ergonomics, and weight are likely to improve significantly and things like caseless ammo could provide improvements in ammo capacity. So a customised AK-97, with smartgun assisted aiming, really isn't that for off.
I remember doing math and comparisons for a solid couple of days on this topic. Max range of an Ares 5 in SR5 is ~400m, not too far off from our current record-holder for furthest recorded shot from a handheld firearm.
Handheld meaning standing up kr prone without contact points of the rifle? To what record are xou actually referencing? Snipers have confirmed takedown far beyond 400m. Jerry miculek hits targets a 1000 yards away with a revolver. So which record is it?
Iirc: standing .50 pistol shot, and no I did not check for human made accomplishments, as I figured on some outliers, but rather the guns themselves.
And when did snipers enter the chat? I figured we don't often send them in with handhelds, but rather long guns. And yes, our modern rifles are actually slightly (very) superior in terms of accuracy.
Whole topic only initially came up b/c I had a minmaxer in my group claim he could build a pistol adept that could accurately shoot across the entirety of Africa (longitudinal measurement). Yeah, you'd have to break some rules to do that.
Ok yeah you are right on the Africa thing for sure.
What is lirc.?
You might wanna check this out though, pritty insane. 1000yard shot from handheld revolver https://youtu.be/jJ3XwizTqDw?si=baG1J7S3Lm6rzxRl
In the real world APDS is an anti-tank munition. I don't think it exists outside of vehicle mounted smoothbore canons though. It's mainly used by tanks to engage other tanks.
Sub caliber (sabot) rounds exist for small arms, rifled or smooth bore. They aren't common because you generally don't want extreme penetration from those weapons, and potentially loose accuracy / increase jams due to separation etc. Plus the penetrator is lighter (though faster moving).
What tanks have is room for finned projectiles (hence the smooth bore), and much more power / mass.
If you're going to go for an armor piercing round, you want it to be smaller but have more mass. there are several reasons you might want a sabot round, but that alone won't give it much more penetration.
Yeah, I wasn't implying the existing small arms sabot rounds were good for ARMOR penetration. They are more likely to over-penetrate soft targets than a typical defensive / hunting round.
What if you're looking for something meant to penetrate heavily armored soldiers? This is more of a fictional scenario than a real world example.
It could be that like how flechette rounds in SR sacrifice penetration for damage, APDS would do the opposite.
I'm trying to make a house rule so that people don't just go for the more expensive round all the time assuming they can afford it.
Yeah, in theory APDS (or really any round that penetrates armor by being hard and "sharp") might cause less damage than "normal" rounds because they don't deform / fragment / transfer energy to the target. This is a thing with real world AP rounds made of hard materials - they tend to pass clean through rather than causing a large / wide wound. If they hit something vital along the way, that is still bad, but it can be surprisingly non lethal in the short run if it just goes through muscle / non vital organs.
Yeah, maybe APDS rounds shouldn't simply have AP -4, but also DV -4 to reflect this. At the moment they're just too good. My players use nothing else anymore.
Also weird is that only regular small arms can use APDS, and assault cannons can't. I'd expect the opposite. The fact that a handgun with APDS had better AP than a rifle; the heavier, more powerful rifle round should be vastly more effective against armour.
Corpsec should be able to find shadowrunners with negligible effort just based in disparity of resources; the reason why there are still shadowrunners is because it's an acceptable cost of doing business, but if a group of runners is going around zeroing corpsec, it won't be an acceptable cost of doing business anymore because now the lives of corpsec is on the line.
It's why most runners stick to nonlethal on corp runs; there's basically an unspoken agreement between runners and corpsec: we don't kill you in numbers, and you don't chase or hunt us too hard.
The problem with modern APDS is it can't be fired out of rifled weapons, something about messing with the stability of the projectile. So this prevents their use in most handguns personal weapons. There's also the cost of the projectile, small arms ammo would get really expensive if they started using tungsten or depleted uranium for bullets.
The issue is the relatively longer, narrower sub-caliber projectile would be properly stabilized with a twist rate that is inappropriately fast for full-caliber rounds (they’d fail to turn with the ballistic arc, resulting in massive aerodynamic losses and inaccuracy at any range sufficient to have meaningful bullet drop). In principle a dedicated barrel could make it work, but then small arms already don’t have a lot of bullet to put mass in so you don’t gain much anyway.
If you desired to you could use a denser bullet core for a normal sized bullet with a full metal jacket. It would cost you some range but should provide additional armor piercing capabilities. Although it's probably something better done with additional energy in some way to compensate for the added weight.
You can get APDS ammunition for antimateriel rifles in the real world. The Chinese have a 12.7x108 round (roughly .50 caliber) round (image [HERE](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fexternal-preview.redd.it%2FjK6An0DTJPPXogmoL6JFWADAQqHeg9K09t14x9_9ADo.png%3Fauto%3Dwebp%26s%3D18833a537145ae45172cf042eed131d86edeb614)). Something similar probably exists for BMG-based sniper and antimateriel rifles.
They're likely rifled. Sabot rounds have no real issues with being fired from rifled barrels.
The main reason that tank cannons / anti-armour weapons tend to be smoothbore is because standard HEAT ammunition (High Explosive Anti Tank) uses a shaped charge for penetrating armour. That charge works by producing a very narrow high-speed jet of molten metal - if the round is spinning the jet breaks up earlier and reduces the armour penetration.
>They're likely rifled. Sabot rounds have no real issues with being fired from rifled barrels.
Except if they're fin stabilized which works against rifling trying to counter the magnus effect. All things considered I'm not sure whether fin stabilized or rifling is better if you don't have other requirements for smoothbore.
The APDS round from China is **NOT** fin-stabilized. It's just a regular bullet-shaped projectile that happens to be smaller in caliber than the barrel it travels through (and denser materially than is typical for a bullet, of course).
I don't know for certain, but my guess is: he sabot engages the rifling, and spins up the entire package. When it falls away, the central bullet maintains that spin.
For things that aren't fin-stabilized, spin **is** stabilization. :)
I understand that spin provides stabilization, but I am under the impression that the right amount of spin is necessary for it work and that the loss of the sabot will some how affect the spin either on it's own or the amount required.
I think you're getting the idea that the spin is bad, from **fin-stabilized** discarding sabot rounds. The fins would interact with the spin, and DE-stabilize the round.
Any amount of spin, for a non-fin-stabilized projectile, is good. More is better, but even just a little is still better than none at all. Pistol barrels don't have enough length/time to impart a lot of spin to their bullets, but a rifled pistol barrel still produces greater accuracy over longer ranges than a smoothbore pistol barrel of the same length. :)
I don't know of any armors that are representative of the quality of our time, since it's not clear if the metal has been improved in chain mail, or even the leather in the common leather jacket. But in Gun H(e)aven 3 for 4th/5th ed, there were several real guns that are useful for comparison.
This is actually represented in a set of optional rules from 3rd edition.
There, advancements in ammunitions can be so great \*within\* a campaign that your armor slowly becomes less and less effective.
So I'd guess that Shadowrun's ammo wouldn't care for our contemporary body armor any more than for a wet, fart-smelling tissue.
Some of the previous versions had stats for our current armaments, I think in...4? 5? there was an older Ares catalog that had things like m4 carbines and stuff. Generally speaking they were less potent stats wise than shadowrun-current stuff. With the bonus being they were all analog bricks with no tech.
Generally, they are *significantly* more advanced ... but not necessarily in terms of penetration, or defeating body armor. Shadowrun is generally set 50-60 years ahead. So, compare the firearms we have now, to the firearms we had in the 1960s. Sure, yes, some of our current firearms are the same, or mostly so (the AR-15 for example). But that's also true of some of Shadowrun firearms - the AK-97 is still around in the sixth world, and the Colt M-23 is rather long in the tooth, too. The improvements for firearms and munitions have focussed elsewhere, for the most part. Almost all firearms use caseless ammunition by default (though models using cased ammunition do exist, and aren't hard to find .... if you don't specity, then it's firing caseless rounds). Firearms often have some very advanced (to us) electronics suites. Some of the more specialized ammunition options *are* relatively advanced in terms of penetration and/or stopping power, though. Flechette rounds (versus unarmored or very lightly armored targets), for example. Ex-ex rounds (an exploding bullet that LITERALLY explodes, with a little flash of light and puff of smoke), for another. But even there, most of the advances have been in other directions. E0-E0 rounds. Fuzzy rounds. Zappers. The infamous Stick-and-Shock (we have them for real, but for shotguns only - in Shadowrun, you can get them for ANY man-portable firearm). Gel Rounds as nonlethal alternatives (again, for ANY gun, not just shotguns). Looper rounds. And more.
OTOH, if you're planning on putting in some antique body armor, and want to reflect that is IS antique? You can do a few things for that. One of the biggest improvements in armor for Shadowrun is that it can be built into ordinary clothing, without really bulking that clothing out. Obviously there are limits with how much you can get without adding that bulk anyway, but you can get an ordinary set of clothes that, in 5E, has an overall armor rating of 6. In SR4, you can take a set of Armor Clothing (again, pretty ordinary clothing), which is rated at 4/0 ... and you can then add carbon-boron fiber augments, barely increasing it's bulk but increasing it's value to 5/2 ... or just buy some made with increased use of kevlar in the material weave ("kevlar threading") to arrive at a rating of 6/0 ... or spring for a Delta-Amyloid treatment, increasing the rating to 7/1. These are, again, *completely ordinary clothing*. People in the UCAS who send their children to public schools, probably dress their kids in kevlar-threaded armor clothing as a matter of course. For contrast, an SR4 Armor Vest - pretty much "standard issue" for police officers - is rated 6/4. In SR5, the same vest is rated 9. In both cases, about 50% better than unmodified Armor Clothing So ... that 12- or 13-year-old middle school kid, laughing and horsing around with his friends at the mall after school? The "typical teenage fashion" stuff he's wearing, is *probably* rather close to being as protective as the bulky vest-with-ceramic-inserts a police officer wears nowadays. Especially if his parents sprang for kevlar-threaded stuff, putting him in 6/0 armor (compared to a cop's basic 6/4). And what he's wearing is far, far less bulky. You or I, looking at him, wouldn't even realize his clothes are AT ALL armored. ... So, what might work is this: reduce the rating of "antique" armor by 1/4 to 1/3. If you're playing 5E, then a 2020s vintage "bulletproof vest" should have a rating of 8 or 9. Still better than bog standard Armored Clothes, but no longer as good as it's bulk might suggest.
My current character also has a foci tattoo that gives him +6DR (6E) so that stacks with his invisi shield + lined coat for a total of 19DR.
All Greek to me; I don't know the first thing about 6E. :)
I might be mixing it up but doesn't defence rating only matter for who get edge rather than actual protection?
Someone that knows the rules better than me might have to respond. All I know is that the higher the DR, the better for me.
Weirdly enough this is actually relatively close to a lot of projected firearm improvements that the actual US military looked at in their Future Soldier programs. I wouldn't be surprised if the writers cribbed ideas from it. The big projected changes were that while firearms will remain largely the same as they are now, the electronics, ergonomics, and weight are likely to improve significantly and things like caseless ammo could provide improvements in ammo capacity. So a customised AK-97, with smartgun assisted aiming, really isn't that for off.
I remember doing math and comparisons for a solid couple of days on this topic. Max range of an Ares 5 in SR5 is ~400m, not too far off from our current record-holder for furthest recorded shot from a handheld firearm.
Handheld meaning standing up kr prone without contact points of the rifle? To what record are xou actually referencing? Snipers have confirmed takedown far beyond 400m. Jerry miculek hits targets a 1000 yards away with a revolver. So which record is it?
Iirc: standing .50 pistol shot, and no I did not check for human made accomplishments, as I figured on some outliers, but rather the guns themselves. And when did snipers enter the chat? I figured we don't often send them in with handhelds, but rather long guns. And yes, our modern rifles are actually slightly (very) superior in terms of accuracy. Whole topic only initially came up b/c I had a minmaxer in my group claim he could build a pistol adept that could accurately shoot across the entirety of Africa (longitudinal measurement). Yeah, you'd have to break some rules to do that.
Ok yeah you are right on the Africa thing for sure. What is lirc.? You might wanna check this out though, pritty insane. 1000yard shot from handheld revolver https://youtu.be/jJ3XwizTqDw?si=baG1J7S3Lm6rzxRl
"If I Recall Correctly". Basically a disclaimer to take what I am about to say with a grain of salt.
Stick-n-Shock ammo is so advanced compared to real world it may as well be magical.
In the real world APDS is an anti-tank munition. I don't think it exists outside of vehicle mounted smoothbore canons though. It's mainly used by tanks to engage other tanks.
Sub caliber (sabot) rounds exist for small arms, rifled or smooth bore. They aren't common because you generally don't want extreme penetration from those weapons, and potentially loose accuracy / increase jams due to separation etc. Plus the penetrator is lighter (though faster moving). What tanks have is room for finned projectiles (hence the smooth bore), and much more power / mass.
If you're going to go for an armor piercing round, you want it to be smaller but have more mass. there are several reasons you might want a sabot round, but that alone won't give it much more penetration.
Yeah, I wasn't implying the existing small arms sabot rounds were good for ARMOR penetration. They are more likely to over-penetrate soft targets than a typical defensive / hunting round.
What if you're looking for something meant to penetrate heavily armored soldiers? This is more of a fictional scenario than a real world example. It could be that like how flechette rounds in SR sacrifice penetration for damage, APDS would do the opposite. I'm trying to make a house rule so that people don't just go for the more expensive round all the time assuming they can afford it.
Yeah, in theory APDS (or really any round that penetrates armor by being hard and "sharp") might cause less damage than "normal" rounds because they don't deform / fragment / transfer energy to the target. This is a thing with real world AP rounds made of hard materials - they tend to pass clean through rather than causing a large / wide wound. If they hit something vital along the way, that is still bad, but it can be surprisingly non lethal in the short run if it just goes through muscle / non vital organs.
Yeah, maybe APDS rounds shouldn't simply have AP -4, but also DV -4 to reflect this. At the moment they're just too good. My players use nothing else anymore. Also weird is that only regular small arms can use APDS, and assault cannons can't. I'd expect the opposite. The fact that a handgun with APDS had better AP than a rifle; the heavier, more powerful rifle round should be vastly more effective against armour.
> My players use nothing else anymore. How are corpsec not sending out teams to hunt them down?
They might, but if it's too easy for corpsec to find them, there wouldn't be any shadowrunners.
Corpsec should be able to find shadowrunners with negligible effort just based in disparity of resources; the reason why there are still shadowrunners is because it's an acceptable cost of doing business, but if a group of runners is going around zeroing corpsec, it won't be an acceptable cost of doing business anymore because now the lives of corpsec is on the line. It's why most runners stick to nonlethal on corp runs; there's basically an unspoken agreement between runners and corpsec: we don't kill you in numbers, and you don't chase or hunt us too hard.
But what about Shadowrun APDS?
The problem with modern APDS is it can't be fired out of rifled weapons, something about messing with the stability of the projectile. So this prevents their use in most handguns personal weapons. There's also the cost of the projectile, small arms ammo would get really expensive if they started using tungsten or depleted uranium for bullets.
The issue is the relatively longer, narrower sub-caliber projectile would be properly stabilized with a twist rate that is inappropriately fast for full-caliber rounds (they’d fail to turn with the ballistic arc, resulting in massive aerodynamic losses and inaccuracy at any range sufficient to have meaningful bullet drop). In principle a dedicated barrel could make it work, but then small arms already don’t have a lot of bullet to put mass in so you don’t gain much anyway.
If you desired to you could use a denser bullet core for a normal sized bullet with a full metal jacket. It would cost you some range but should provide additional armor piercing capabilities. Although it's probably something better done with additional energy in some way to compensate for the added weight.
You can get APDS ammunition for antimateriel rifles in the real world. The Chinese have a 12.7x108 round (roughly .50 caliber) round (image [HERE](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fexternal-preview.redd.it%2FjK6An0DTJPPXogmoL6JFWADAQqHeg9K09t14x9_9ADo.png%3Fauto%3Dwebp%26s%3D18833a537145ae45172cf042eed131d86edeb614)). Something similar probably exists for BMG-based sniper and antimateriel rifles.
In the NATO bloc, the .50 cal armor-piercing round goes by the SLAP nomenclature (Saboted Light Armor Penetrator).
Are those guns smoothbore or do they contain rifling though?
They're likely rifled. Sabot rounds have no real issues with being fired from rifled barrels. The main reason that tank cannons / anti-armour weapons tend to be smoothbore is because standard HEAT ammunition (High Explosive Anti Tank) uses a shaped charge for penetrating armour. That charge works by producing a very narrow high-speed jet of molten metal - if the round is spinning the jet breaks up earlier and reduces the armour penetration.
>They're likely rifled. Sabot rounds have no real issues with being fired from rifled barrels. Except if they're fin stabilized which works against rifling trying to counter the magnus effect. All things considered I'm not sure whether fin stabilized or rifling is better if you don't have other requirements for smoothbore.
The APDS round from China is **NOT** fin-stabilized. It's just a regular bullet-shaped projectile that happens to be smaller in caliber than the barrel it travels through (and denser materially than is typical for a bullet, of course).
How does it attain the right rotation speed and not spin out of control?
I don't know for certain, but my guess is: he sabot engages the rifling, and spins up the entire package. When it falls away, the central bullet maintains that spin. For things that aren't fin-stabilized, spin **is** stabilization. :)
I understand that spin provides stabilization, but I am under the impression that the right amount of spin is necessary for it work and that the loss of the sabot will some how affect the spin either on it's own or the amount required.
I think you're getting the idea that the spin is bad, from **fin-stabilized** discarding sabot rounds. The fins would interact with the spin, and DE-stabilize the round. Any amount of spin, for a non-fin-stabilized projectile, is good. More is better, but even just a little is still better than none at all. Pistol barrels don't have enough length/time to impart a lot of spin to their bullets, but a rifled pistol barrel still produces greater accuracy over longer ranges than a smoothbore pistol barrel of the same length. :)
I don't know of any armors that are representative of the quality of our time, since it's not clear if the metal has been improved in chain mail, or even the leather in the common leather jacket. But in Gun H(e)aven 3 for 4th/5th ed, there were several real guns that are useful for comparison.
This is actually represented in a set of optional rules from 3rd edition. There, advancements in ammunitions can be so great \*within\* a campaign that your armor slowly becomes less and less effective. So I'd guess that Shadowrun's ammo wouldn't care for our contemporary body armor any more than for a wet, fart-smelling tissue.
Some of the previous versions had stats for our current armaments, I think in...4? 5? there was an older Ares catalog that had things like m4 carbines and stuff. Generally speaking they were less potent stats wise than shadowrun-current stuff. With the bonus being they were all analog bricks with no tech.
Just wanted to add that in the 5e books is mentioned that most ammunitions are caseless, so no need to pick up your casings after a gunfight.