I shall now ride Mad Crab and use him like a tank so the party can have vehicle mounted weapons on a more mobile platform

Novacrabs are pods, not synths. It would be AWESOME to have a crab covered in missile pods, but that would have to be Seeker Armbands, not implants. I guess they hold guns with their little mandibles?

I honestly have always thought the restriction of weapon mounts to synthmorphs a rather nonsensical design choice. If you consider some of the larger, vehicle-equivalent pods and biomorphs, such as the Surya, Neo-Cetacean, and Novacrab, having weapon mounts makes more sense than trying to jury-rig arms that can hold weaponry commensurate with their size. Instead, smaller manipulators for fine activities and smart material mounts for weapons make security biomorphs more viable- you do not need to deal with your Novacrab wearing security guard getting chewed up by a case with a rifle at 200 yards because all the Novacrab can return fire with is the light pistol it can barely hold properly. A cyberware weapon mount is now headcanon for me- maybe making concealed weapon mounts for biomorphs more expensive due to masking the weapons properly, but it was always strange to me that biomorphs would not have weapon mounts at all.

the problem is you can not add any large caliber kinetic weaponry. This is because the recoil would literally cause it to be ripped away form the flesh. and mounting to a skeletal system would only succeed in massively dislocating the bones or breaking them. something with a carapace could probably hold a larger caliber kinetic weapon than a fleshy counterpart but after a certain size would have the same problem. Laser weapons i can see being used as they have no recoil. only question is how do they store the batteries. Armor with the nova crab is essentially a design limitation. No one has been able to come up with an armor system that adequality covers the morphs vulnerabilities with maximum coverage.

ORCACommander wrote:

the problem is you can not add any large caliber kinetic weaponry. This is because the recoil would literally cause it to be ripped away form the flesh. and mounting to a skeletal system would only succeed in massively dislocating the bones or breaking them. something with a carapace could probably hold a larger caliber kinetic weapon than a fleshy counterpart but after a certain size would have the same problem. Laser weapons i can see being used as they have no recoil. only question is how do they store the batteries. Armor with the nova crab is essentially a design limitation. No one has been able to come up with an armor system that adequality covers the morphs vulnerabilities with maximum coverage.

Lasers do actually have recoil, though it would be negligible on the scale of personnel weapons.

So, after much reviewing of rules it seems that layering over hard armors ( carapace, robotic enhanced armor) is the issue at hand. With soft armors a large part of their stopping power is derived from the deformation of the subject beneath the armor to dissipate the kinetic energy. A hard shell under soft armor is pretty much still getting the full brunt of impact. A hard layer over hard armor should be doable , but the penalty you take in doing so (core,pg. 194) may cancel the benefits. Shields and helmets are accessories and not subject to the layering rules! For adding weapon mounts... maybe just buy some cyberlimb plusses and hold the weapons ? In the old Cyberpunk RPG weapon mounts on a cyberlimb were an option and I don't see why not here, just no vehicle mounted stuff! The novacrab in the core book (pg. 276) has something that looks like a hand on the first set of limbs after the big claws...I... I have no idea what the crab in Transhuman uses to grab stuff!