Quote:
Originally Posted by Fred Brackin
Going back to 3e (specifically Ve2) Caseless ammo guns are 2x the cost of conventional guns but their ammo is half weight and volume (wps and vps). Liquid propellant guns are then treated like caseless guns but cost is 3s conventional.
So it looks to me that the stats of real world caseless guns are not special or specially related to liquid propellant. They're just both part of a simple modification scheme that could indeed be called "pulled out of thin air".
As the two caseless weapons HT has stats for are either a simple modification of a basic hunting rifle (the Saco) or a unique prototype (the G-11) that has no cased equivalent and no one has to my knowledge ever built a functional liquid propellant smallarm there just isn't much to base stats on.
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Based on that observation, I'm largely going to ignore the liquid binary propellant concept for the cyberpunk campaign I'm running. What bothers me most about the ULTRATECh book is that there aren't rules for gun evolution going into TL 9 (if any).
I guess one kludge might be that just as guns built for black power can't use smokeless powder or risk bursting, the guns manufactured in TL 9 may be of better quality due to material science increases, and ammunition can take advantage of that fact by being strong, or perhaps the gunpowder manufactured with modern industrial processes have more surface area per granule and thus combusts more thoroughly than gunpowder of the 1990's for example. A simple "does same damage as High Tech guns, but adds +1 damage and increases range by 1.3 might fit the bill.
I hate "tinkering" with something if I don't know the underlying principles involved in the first pace, or have no clue at all what I'm doing. Doug's spreadsheet demonstrates the relationship between bullet weight, diameter, and velocity in such a way that I can play with the velocity numbers just to see how much velocity change is required to get a +1 damage bonus. At least with HIGH TECH guns, I've a chance to add new guns for a Near Future campaign set 30 years from now - something that GURPS ULTRATECH doesn't really allow me at present. :(