Quote:
Originally Posted by Icelander
On the other hand, historical muzzleloaders could often take a much heavier powder charge than the listed stats assume without bursting. The limiting factor was often the recoil that the shooter was prepared to face, not the strength of the barrel. When pushing a smaller ball faster than typical black powder weapons, this limiting factor is not as severe.
Kentucky rifles didn't need massively heavy barrels to tolerate firing a .45 caliber ball at higher velocities than most military muskets operated at with their heavier balls. Even with their very long barrels, a typical example is listed in High-Tech as weighing 7 lbs., which is significantly lighter than I intend for the calivers and muskets used in my game. And the rifles were hand-crafted, with no tools that I'm aware of that are unavailable to TL4 craftsmen in the Forgotten Realms.
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It seems to me that I recall that one problem with hunting rifles as war weapons was that they were prone to overheating in actual combat situations. Ideally you should just fire once and charge with the bayonet, so the heat of loading and firing dozens of times in quick succession would not be a problem, but hunting rifles were not fitted with lugs, and it turned out that hangers and hatchets against a line of men with bayonets did not work well either.
So it was great to have a few troops with rifles to pick off individuals at beyond effective musket range, but arming a large body of troops with rifles, and especially with civilian rifles, had problems.
I would never try to use game stats to ask why a weapon was not more widely adopted. As S.A. Fisher says, game stats are at best a selective simplification of reality, and any research behind them is out of charity or self-respect, not because game companies can pay for it. Most GURPS authors do their best, but they can only spend so much time and money on a project.
I suspect that your best bet would be to just research pre-Napoleonic firearms yourself, present the results in real-world terms with footnotes, then if nobody has big problems work out the game stats yourself. The questions that you asked a few weeks ago would require three or more people with serious education to spend several days or weeks finding an answer (say a historian of firearms, a ballistician, and an industrial engineer- who would have to ask you a lot of questions about how things are made in your setting, and would not be satisfied by any answer containing the phrase "tech level").