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Originally Posted by Varyon
Well, with Rcl 5 and higher, you actually have to wait more than a full second between shots if you want to avoid the penalty.
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I'm not actually sure anything has Rcl 5+... I just checked, and it looks like it's limited to the artillery in High-Tech and Low-Tech. I'm fine with those guns waiting 1.2 seconds between shots, if they can even fire that fast. Now I'm thinking about how great it would be to dual-wield a pistol and a saber in order to take advantage of the pistol's IP-cheap attack once per second and the saber's efficient thrusts and parries... clearly, I need to go play an Age of Sail game now.
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There are a few things to keep in mind here. First off, skill 14 after modifiers is actually a pretty high skill with ranged weapons. More importantly, however, is that you're falling into the "roll average" trap here. With skill 14, it isn't "on average, I'll hit with every bullet." On the first shot, you have around a 74% chance of hitting twice, a 16.7% chance of hitting once, a 9% chance of missing outright - an overall average of around 1.65 hits. For the second shot, and all subsequent shots until you take a pause or run out of ammo, you have a 50% shot of hitting twice, a 24% shot of hitting once, and a 26% shot of missing outright - an overall average of around 1.24 hits. So, with a 1 second (5 Ticks) burst, you're looking at an average of 6.61 hits. Yes, this is more than the 5 hits predicted by RAW GURPS - but many people (myself included) are rather less than fond of how hard it is to hit the broadside of a barn with a full burst in RAW GURPS, so this is arguably an improvement.
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You're right, I did fall into that trap. Thank you for demonstrating it with numbers, that disparity is lower than I'd imagined. I, too, am less than fond of how hard it is to hit with the back half of a long burst, but it's also important to be aware of departures from RAW, even if this is widely regarded as positive.