Quote:
Originally Posted by thulben
Black powder?
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The old-fashioned kind of gun powder. It was the only kind up to the 1880s, but was then rapidly replaced by "smokeless powder".
Smokeless powder is more powerful and burns completely, but making it requires industrial chemistry. Black powder is simpler to make, but less powerful, makes huge quantities of sulphurous smoke, and leaves deposits ("fouling") on the inside of the gun.
For most of the black powder era, guns were loaded with powder, bullets and priming separately. Late in the black powder age, cartridges came in, but fully modern cartridges appeared at the same time as smokeless powder.
Classical black powder guns are muzzle-loaders, which take tens of seconds to reload, using a ramrod. Machine guns and auto-loading weapons
can be built to work with black powder, but they don't tend to work very well.
Under GURPS, the effective way to use black powder weapons is to use them as one-shots at the start of a fight. Then drop them and use a melee weapon. If you start trying to reload them, the fight will be over before you've done it.