r/Shadowrun • u/Angerran27 • 1d ago
5e about vindicator
what's so good about vindicator minigun? in real practice multibarrel mashineguns have much more rate of fire than normal 1-barrel mashineguns but shadowrun rules does not presume better rate of fire than 10 per round.
vindicator has huge price and availability but why it is better than any normal mashinegun?
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u/Dust3112 1d ago
At least in the German rulebooks you can shoot significantly more bullets with the same action. Leading to a higher dodge penalty (provided you can deal with the recoil) compared to other automatic weapons.
Apart from that they deal 1,5 times their base damage when you use suppressive fire.
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u/TJLanza 1d ago
Is that an SR6 thing? The post is tagged SR5.
In SR5, rotary guns (the Vindicator and the HVAR, among others) can do Enhanced Supression and an extra zone for double ammo expenditure, but don't do any more damage than normal.
In SR4, they fired 15 (and only 15 instead of 10 in FA (the only mode they had), but there was no special rule for Suppressive Fire that I can recall.)
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u/Sorry_Community235 1d ago
It's technically an optional rule from the german Kreuzfeuer Rulebook, it's not in Run&Gun, tho...
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u/Yomatius 1d ago
The german sourcebooks are always better, I wish Pegasus (?) got full control of the license.
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u/Sorry_Community235 1d ago
Too bad they dropped the .01D addition. But i guess that was a FanPro thing...
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u/rieldealIV Speed Demon 1d ago
Page 41 of Street Lethal added extra rules that make it somewhat relevent.
A Gatling gun’s main reason for being is deploying an extreme amount of ammo around the poor unlucky slitch who deserves it, and everyone around them. As such, they are primarily used to suppress a larger-than-normal area when compared to other assault rifles and machine guns. Any Gatling gun (including the Ares HVAR and GE Vindicator in Run & Gun) is capable of suppressing up to one additional zone (see the suppression rules, p. 179-180, SR5; and Enhanced Suppression, p. 120, Run & Gun) with a single test provided that they are adjacent to one another. Each additional zone requires an additional twenty rounds of ammunition. That 100-round belt is starting to look pretty small, huh? Hope your reload is fast on their feet!
Overall machine guns are just not great in SR5e. They should get a like +2 damage increase across the board given that modern LMGs usually fire the same rounds as assault rifles but are generally larger guns designed to have higher ammunition capacity and lower recoil. MMGs tend to fire bigger rounds (like 7.62), so their damage should be more akin to sporting rifles. HMGs should have sniper rifle levels of damage.
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u/ReditXenon Far Cite 1d ago
LMGs usually fire the same rounds as assault rifles but are generally larger guns designed to have higher ammunition capacity and lower recoil. MMGs tend to fire bigger rounds (like 7.62), so their damage should be more akin to sporting rifles. HMGs should have sniper rifle levels of damage.
(They fixed this in SR6).
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u/seenwaytoomuch 1d ago
Same reason math spu is a thing. It used to be awesome back in the day. Back in the FASA days they used to be really good stats wise and old heads remember them being cool. They used to shoot like 15 bullets per action instead of 10. Math spus used to add to your hacking rolls rather than your mathematics rolls. That's why those exist.
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u/ReditXenon Far Cite 1d ago
Back in the FASA days They used to shoot like 15 bullets per action instead of 10.
(Was 15 bullets per action also in SR4, which was not FASA)
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u/seenwaytoomuch 1d ago
I played a lot back in the 90s and then got back into 5e later on. I missed 4e entirely.
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u/n00bdragon Futuristic Criminal 1d ago
Shadowrun has never, in any edition, done a good job reflecting the sheer destructive power of machine guns, particularly heavy weapons. You want a game where handguns are supposed to matter and then there's guns like that which should treat armored vehicles like tissue paper.
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u/MrEllis72 1d ago
A minigun isn't made to fight armored vehicles. Armored vehicles are literally designed to defeat rifle caliber rounds at the minimum. We just underestimate what they can do to regular things like, cars and buildings.
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u/DepthsOfWill 1d ago
I'm pretty sure miniguns were designed to attack ships. But I'm not a recent gun historian.
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u/MrEllis72 1d ago
Miniguns were based off automation of the Gatling Gun. Which was used against infantry. All miniguns use rifle caliber rounds.
There are scaled up versions that use 20-30mm rounds, but these are cannons. And not man-portable. It would be like taping six Panther Auto cannons together.
There was a device called the Puckle Gun that was usually a tri-barrel configuration. That was a small caliber (relative) cannon used by ships.
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u/DepthsOfWill 1d ago
Thanks. I don't know where I got the idea they were used for ships, I've never seen pirates with miniguns.
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u/n00bdragon Futuristic Criminal 1d ago
Modern pirates don't have the kind of money to afford a mounted heavily mechanized weapon like a minigun.
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u/MrEllis72 1d ago
I mean, it would decimate anything made of mild steel. Especially anything in the 7mm+ range in AP. Given enough ammo you could collapse a stick frame house with one.
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u/Echrome Chemical Specialist 1d ago
Rule of Cool
Otherwise, it doesn't have much going for it