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There are a lot of "no ammo dice for heavy weapons rule" exceptions spelled out, namely all machine guns as a category and all of the grenade machine guns individually. The categorical exception for machine guns needs to either 1) get expanded to also include vehicle cannons > ROF 1 or 2) vehicle cannons > ROF 1 need to be reclassified as (ridiculously large) machine guns. (Looks like a table mistake is now reclassified an informal houserule. )

@Fenhorn Just touching base. Any new information on the ROF topic?

@Fenhorn Just touching base. Any new information on the ROF topic?

I told Tomas about it, so he knows about it and hopefully there can be a clarification about it when he moves on to UO.

Super cool. Thank you very much!

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For what it's worth, there also continues to be a lot of questions about grenade damage, specifically direct damage vs. blast damage, largely as a result of the way the rules are laid out at present in the Player Manual. My understanding is that, as you said previously, targeting a hex with a grenade attack will result in any npcs in that hex *only* receiving blast damage. And that they'd only take the direct damage if the player making the attack targets a person directly and takes the -2 penalty on their to-hit. This is stipulated on the fact that direct damage and blast damage are two separate, discrete rolls.

This sentence under targeting for heavy weapons is causing some heartburn though:
"Also, when targeting a hex, any extra [successes] on the attack roll have no effect."

That sentence, when paired with the section on blast damage, seems to imply that when you target a hex with an explosive attack, any NPCs in that hex would take the base damage of the direct damage (they just wouldn't add any additional successes from the to-hit roll) as well as doing the blast damage roll.

Can you clarify if you've talked with Tomas or the devs about this particular rule regarding explosive attacks? Since this exact same question seems to come up every month or two despite your earlier earlier clarification, it would be really helpful to get an official ruling. Or should we take your own post as an official ruling? I believe it's a little unclear to the community whether, when you provide answers to these kinds of questions, if those answers are to be taken as the source of truth, or if it's just your opinion as a forum moderator. A little more clarity there would be helpful as well.

Thanks again.

For vehicle cannons I am assuming ROF 1 means no ammo dice and ROF > 1 means uses ammo dice. The ROF 1 cannons are the larger ones you would generally see only in MBTs, which have to be reloaded every time they fire.

Example of 40mm cannon on CV90...

40mm Bofors Cannon Firing

That does indeed work like a very big machinegun and so should use the machinegun rules imo. [EDIT] for ammo dice. For effect I'd treat it like Mk19 GLR.

For effect I'd treat it like Mk19 GLR.

It’s a wee bit more powerful than that, though…


Roughly — very roughly — speaking, I’d say the effect of a 40mm grenade from the Mk.19 is more or less comparable to that of a 20mm autocannon grenade.

A grenade from the 40mmL70 is orders of magnitude more powerful.

A grenade from the 40mmL70 is orders of magnitude more powerful.

This is a very good point. Under Vehicle Cannons (PM, p113) it lists 40mm cannon as blast D. This is way too low, surely! Same goes for the 30mm cannon on things like BMPs.

Hello!

For vehicle cannons 20-40mm, the idea is that they are fired like machine guns (with ammo dice), with the added effect that they also trigger an explosion in the hex where a target is hit. The vehicle cannons are different from the automatic or semi-automatic grenade launchers and mortars in that they are typically aimed at a specific target, not a hex.

And yes, when targeting a hex (not a specific target) with an explosive attack, targets in the blast radius suffer only explosive damage, no direct damage. In the reprint, the direct damage from fragmentation hand grenades has been removed. We will include this change in the updated PDF and errata.