[Redman]

IMO hacker should still mean something in combat, not just through shenanigans that are very specific, impossible sometimes and often have very little effect on say street-sams with thermovision. I think the best way I have seem a gun bricked was a gun the chambered three rounds and electronics was fried. I believe it is a fiction story from the shadowrun.com website.

As a GM I am letting my deckers and TM's brick guns. Sometimes it is all the fun they have (thus not all the time, but sometimes).

[Xenon]

firearms have device rating 2, but can be slaved to a more secure device.
it's security settings can also be tweeked by owners that have good logic and intuition attributes

a firearm without a smartgun will have one device icon.
a firearm with an internal smartgun have one device icon.
a firearm with an external smartgun also only have one device icon.

firearms can go wireless on and just like any device that goes wireless on it can be bricked.
bricking will disable the device, it will not destroy or blow up the device.
...but it will stop working. you can use your firearm as a club, but you can't fire it as long as it is bricked.
to repair a bricked firearm enough to make it work you only need to repair a single box of damage.
to repair matrix damage you just need a toolkit and take a Hardware + Logic [Mental] test where each hit can be used to cut the base time of 1 hour down to half.
3 hits and it just take 15 minutes to fix it enough to make it work 100% again.

[RHat]

The force involved isn't the only factor - the position is important too.  And we might not be talking about an explosion, either - if something warps the firing pin, or causes it to become sufficiently misaligned, that would have the same sort of effect.

And, if you've been following the conversation, weapon designers have already learned from that mistake. Did weapon designer in 2075 all magically forget about every design flaw in the past 200 years? That doesn't seem logical either.

You can't put your parts behind the firing pin or their getting shattered during operation. If it's on the side of the firing pin, their has to be a metal shield that is powerful enough to handle the pressure from the chamber. Your electronics would have to heat up hotter than the explosion in the chamber does. Not really logical unless it's designed to do that.

You keep coming up with excuses, but everyone involves the weapon being specifically designed to be flawed with issues that we have already learned are bad today.

I'm not really seeing the safety as reasonable either. Every single gun would have to be designed to be flawed in the same way for that to be viable. Again, that's really bad reasoning. It's again a case of, it is because it is, which is running rampant in SR 5 and bad game design.

I'm pointing out that we don't actually know what the smartlink requires, and thus it's entirely possible that it could require things that, should they catastrophically fail, disable the weapon.  This is especially true when you bring in ideas like the ammo skip system, but here's a simple case: what happens if the catastrophic failure (rather than normal, expected failures) of whatever allows the smartlink to move the hammer on a pistol immobilizes the hammer?

[Namikaze]

There's no point in arguing about whether or not this makes sense.  It's part of the game's design, and it's easily houseruled out if so desired.  There really doesn't need to be more made about this issue.

[Mithlas]

It's very believable that up to date the guns in shadowrun no longer have a mechanical connection between the firing pin and the trigger, but instead use some sort or piston to move the firing pin.

When you say that something is very believable, then point out a gaping flaw in that design that you can drive a semi through, it's no longer believable. Maybe for civilian models it could be believable, but for security and military grade weapons, not a chance. Most tools that involve life and death (guns fall in here) have a manual backup.

We already have guns that are designed like this – they’re all civilian pistols designed to children can’t get into their parents’ gunsafe and shoot themselves or their friends, but the point is that the basis already exists.

Now would military weapons lack redundant circuitry? Doubtful. Would they have a hardline or manual system that could be set even if cyberlungs require server authentication to access internal functions? Maybe. We'll probably have to wait for SR5's equivalent of "War!" before we see most of that. As of SR5, the design is that Hackers can do something everywhere “so everybody can share in the spotlight”. Let’s not mention Faces, B&E experts, drivers, and others that have to diversify to be involved in combat… More on-topic: you and I might think there was too much effort on making hackers Useful Everywhere, but that's not something to loose your cool over.

I can see bricking the ammo count, DNI interface, firing modes, etc. I can't see bricking the physical "I pull the trigger, you go boom" part of the equation though.

...unless the gun was specifically designed to be destroyed in that manner.

1) I agree that the matrix damage should influence the interface but not the solid combat parts of equipment, but 2) you need to be able to consider equipment that doesn't work like it does in the modern day. Corps are sufficiently everywhere that they feel it's an asset and not a liability to be able to wirelessly unlock and brick a weapon they built and sold. In any case, I don't think there's any way around saying guns are designed to fail in this manner, in order to make this whole thing work.

[RHat]

One thing to remember when you think about manual backups or designed failures, by the way:  The things represented by Attack or Sleaze actions aren't ever supposed to happen.  Hackers discover a previously unknown vulnerability, updates are issued to remove it, new vulnerabilities are found...  The whole back and forth is abstracted into these ratings.

[Twilight]

My last comment on this is that I will be avoiding playing Missions under SR5 due to 2 hacking rules that make absolutely no sense:
1) this one - a gun is not brickable by disabling electronics
2) the rule that a device defends with the owner's mental stats even if they are not online (that's what the device rating is there for!)

If either of these came up in play and affected me, I would very likely storm away from the table because they are so stupid and absurd (so I'm just going to avoid that possibility).  It's clear they are intentional rules but they are some of the worst rules I've seen.  As others have said, part of designing a game should be doing research to make the game believable.

[ImaginalDisc]

So.

What's the device rating on this forum topic grenade? Weapons and hacking is clearly shaping into one.

http://www.flamewarriorsguide.com/warriorshtm/grenade.htm

[All4BigGuns]

1) this one - a gun is not brickable by disabling electronics

So you want hackers to be given even more power to shut down the Street Sam even though, taking into consideration hot sim bonuses, they can in a single turn completely disable every frakking cyber implant they have (which most are likely to be with the ludicrous price hike on bio implants)?!

[ProfessorCirno]

So you want hackers to be given even more power to shut down the Street Sam even though, taking into consideration hot sim bonuses, they can in a single turn completely disable every frakking cyber implant they have (which most are likely to be with the ludicrous price hike on bio implants)?!

If a decker is in hot sim and thus unconscious, I don't see how this doesn't favor the street sam in every way.

THe decker targets your hardware.

You target their wetware.

Also, disable every cyber implant?  They can attack two per turn.  And they're unlikely to brick it on one attack, and attacking is a complex.  Come on.

[All4BigGuns]

If a decker is in hot sim and thus unconscious, I don't see how this doesn't favor the street sam in every way.

Funny how the stalwart defenders of the hacker love of the new edition that comes at the expense of every other tech-oriented character type ignore that that hacker can 'do his thing' without being some place they can't be seen.

Also, disable every cyber implant?  They can attack two per turn.  And they're unlikely to brick it on one attack, and attacking is a complex.  Come on.

1st Pass: Enter Sam's comm-link. Not going to be hard for a dedicated hacker.
2nd Pass: Send command to shut down every implant from said comm.
3rd Pass: Brick comm to prevent reactivation.

[RHat]

1st Pass: Enter Sam's comm-link. Not going to be hard for a dedicated hacker.
2nd Pass: Send command to shut down every implant from said comm.
3rd Pass: Brick comm to prevent reactivation.

Doesn't work that way.  Closest you can get is spoof command, which would require a mark on, and a seperate action for, each piece of 'ware.  As such, you're looking at, minimum, 2 passes to shut down one piece of 'ware like that.

[ProfessorCirno]

Funny how the stalwart defenders of the hacker love of the new edition that comes at the expense of every other tech-oriented character type ignore that that hacker can 'do his thing' without being some place they can't be seen.

And where is the hacker getting all these points to pour into stealth in order to beat the Sam's perception? 

1st Pass: Enter Sam's comm-link. Not going to be hard for a dedicated hacker.
2nd Pass: Send command to shut down every implant from said comm.
3rd Pass: Brick comm to prevent reactivation.

Uh, have you read the hacking rules?  Because it doesn't actually work that way.

I mean, yeah, I'll totally agree that Decking is super overpowered in the clowniverse that your games apparently take place in, but there's a reason those of us who play Earth Prime Shadowrun 5 rules are scratching our heads.

[Insaniac99]

If a decker is in hot sim and thus unconscious, I don't see how this doesn't favor the street sam in every way.

Funny how the stalwart defenders of the hacker love of the new edition that comes at the expense of every other tech-oriented character type ignore that that hacker can 'do his thing' without being some place they can't be seen.

Given the dice required, The decker is going to be within 100 and going to need to avoid all the penalties they can.  That could mean they are visible.  The average decker is going to have 12-14 dice but the average defending device will be on the public grid (-2 to deckers) have a good commlink (6)  and a decent Logic (4-5) so the Decker will be facing 10-11 dice using 10-12 dice without any other negative penalties like noise or something else.

Also, disable every cyber implant?  They can attack two per turn.  And they're unlikely to brick it on one attack, and attacking is a complex.  Come on.

1st Pass: Enter Sam's comm-link. Not going to be hard for a dedicated hacker.
2nd Pass: Send command to shut down every implant from said comm.
3rd Pass: Brick comm to prevent reactivation.

I see a few issue with this. 

• I don't see Spoof command being able to send one command to multiple devices.
• a street same with DNI can turn everyone back on as a free action (so it takes a complex action for a decker to turn everything of, but only a free action for the same to turn it on again)
• a formatted device still functions basically, it just loses the wireless bonus (so the sam can turn it back on right away)
• The Decker isn't likely to brick the commlink in a single action with one attack roll and if you want to format, you require 3 marks and another action to reboot.
• The Decker has to make three rolls with slim odds to "win" which, since the 'ware and guns aren't destroyed with full matrix damage they can still be used normally (at worst minus wireless bonuses as per format device)

[Namikaze]

All4BigGuns, you have a lot of hatred for this new system, but you also don't seem to understand how it works.

There's a lot more steps involved than just saying, "I'm going to shut down that guy's gun, commlink, whatever."  Especially if the enemy has a decker that is guarding his gear.  Additionally, you keep mentioning that the decker can be "some place they can't be seen."  That's just wrong.  The device is almost certainly running silently, and the decker is going to want to be within 100m to account for noise.  Other people have already gone on about the steps necessary for the decker to shut things down, and there are a lot of methods that GMs can use to further protect their NPCs.  Also, this works both ways, so the team's decker needs to be on his toes to account for any shenanigans that the NPCs might try to pull.