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Old 11-20-2008, 12:00 PM   #5
DouglasCole
Doctor of GURPS Ballistics
 
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Default Re: Low-Tech Missile Weapon Range and Accuracy

Quote:
Originally Posted by Icelander
But, as I said, I'm not here to curse the darkness. Instead, I only want to know what reasonable stats for the thrown weapons, bows, crossbows and slings in GURPS would be. If they weren't 'heroic average' weapons, what would be their stats?

Just so an individual GM can correct them in his game, if he so chooses.
And then be prepared to restat punching/kicking (base sw/thr) damage, or else you can do that more effectively than you can strike enweaponed.

I'm not disagreeing with your overall observation, and re-statting ranged projectile weapons based on velocity and cross section would be quite doable.

For example this resource: http://slinging.org/index.php?page=t...hom-richardson puts sling velocity at 30-40m/sec. They're 15 to 18mm in diameter. Using my formulae for bullets, a 60g stone with 15mm cross section (diameter) and velocity of 40m/s should do about 2.2 points of penetration damage, with a wound modifier of 3.0.

In short, a sling thrown with those properties is about 1d-1 pi++

Arrows are faster and heavy as well, about 60g and 60m/s, with a smaller cross section for the shaft (call it 10mm). That represents a shot from a 150lb bow according to http://www.stortford-archers.org.uk/medieval.htm and would do about 3.8pts of damage (1d) and the shaft itself would have a wound modifier of about 1.9.

So about 1d impaling is about right for the 150lb warbow. A crossbow fires roughly the same velocity, but is much easier to aim and train and hit with, at the cost of long reload times.
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