Back to the main page

Mailing List Logs for ShadowRN

Message no. 1
From: shadowrn@*********.com (Aethelwulf)
Subject: Shadowrun Weapon Calibres
Date: Thu May 17 12:15:01 2001
Hi

I was wondering if anyone had a accurate or semiaccurate list of the
calibers of shadowrun firearms.... a freind told me that he had seen one and
i have been looking for it ever since. or perhaps a list of ammunition
calibers and their equivalent SR3 damage codes.... I do not believe that a
9mm round and a 50 Action express round would do the same damage (9M) so can
anyone help me with this?

Aethelwulf
_________________________________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.
Message no. 2
From: shadowrn@*********.com (Gurth)
Subject: Shadowrun Weapon Calibres
Date: Thu May 17 13:35:00 2001
According to Aethelwulf, on Thu, 17 May 2001 the word on the street was...

> I was wondering if anyone had a accurate or semiaccurate list of the
> calibers of shadowrun firearms.... a freind told me that he had seen one and
> i have been looking for it ever since. or perhaps a list of ammunition
> calibers and their equivalent SR3 damage codes.... I do not believe that a
> 9mm round and a 50 Action express round would do the same damage (9M) so can
> anyone help me with this?

Almost anything you'll find to this effect is complete speculation on the
part of the author. About the only things we "know" are that a Ranger Arms
SM-3 fires .655 caliber bullets and that the Ingram Mk. 22 (no game stats
given, but the SR1 main rules say it's equivalent to an Uzi III without
the laser sight) is 9 mm, but both these come from fiction -- the one in
the adventure Elven Fire, the other in the opening story from the SR1 main
rulebook. There may be one or two more references to actual calibers around
in FASA-published game books, but that's it. Novels aren't canon, but you
might as well consider them to be for this type of thing, and even then you
won't find many more clues AFAIK...

At any rate, the best way to handle it that I've found is to simply do
things the FASA way: talk about "heavy pistol rounds" and "shotgun
shells"
rather than "9.5 mm AAP (Automatic Ares Pistol) rounds" or "15 gauge/70 mm
shells." It will solve all caliber problems in one go :)

--
Gurth@******.nl - http://www.xs4all.nl/~gurth/index.html
Who needs that now?
-> NAGEE Editor * ShadowRN GridSec * Triangle Virtuoso <-
-> The Plastic Warriors Page: http://plastic.dumpshock.com <-

GC3.12: GAT/! d-(dpu) s:- !a>? C+@ UL P L++ E W-(++) N o? K w+(--) O V?
PS+ PE(-)(+) Y PGP- t@ 5++ X(+) R+++(-)>$ tv+ b++@ DI- D+ G+ e h! !r y?
Incubated into the First Church of the Sqooshy Ball, 21-05-1998
Message no. 3
From: shadowrn@*********.com (Paul J. Adam)
Subject: Shadowrun Weapon Calibres
Date: Sat May 19 06:00:01 2001
In article <F242hgS86aRZlz8OO750000ab38@*******.com>, Aethelwulf
<aethelwulf_@*******.com> writes
>Hi
>I was wondering if anyone had a accurate or semiaccurate list of the
>calibers of shadowrun firearms.... a freind told me that he had seen one and
>i have been looking for it ever since. or perhaps a list of ammunition
>calibers and their equivalent SR3 damage codes.... I do not believe that a
>9mm round and a 50 Action express round would do the same damage (9M) so can
>anyone help me with this?

As Gurth pointed out, very few weapons have calibres assigned: the
Ranger SM-3 was described as a .655" rifle (a _big_ bullet, but
presumably subsonic for stealth) in "Elven Fire" but not much else is
stated.

As for the example you cite, it's much worse than that: how come a
5.56mm assault rifle does less damage than a pistol? People tend to
focus on pistol calibres with muzzle energies in the hundreds of joules,
and neglect that rifles have three or four times the energy to hurt the
target with...

The SR damage system doesn't map particularly realistically to real-
world weapons, it's deliberately skewed so that characters with pistols
and SMGs have a chance to win against opponents with machine-guns and
assault rifles :)


--
Paul J. Adam

Further Reading

If you enjoyed reading about Shadowrun Weapon Calibres, you may also be interested in:

Disclaimer

These messages were posted a long time ago on a mailing list far, far away. The copyright to their contents probably lies with the original authors of the individual messages, but since they were published in an electronic forum that anyone could subscribe to, and the logs were available to subscribers and most likely non-subscribers as well, it's felt that re-publishing them here is a kind of public service.

Thwap!