[Ultra-Tech] Optional rule for EM guns, feedback wanted

[McAllister]

Originally Posted by Anthony

Actually, GURPS presumes that if you buy a genre book about X, you want a game about X. One of the problems with Ultra-Tech is that it's not fully embracing its genre book nature.

One of the important qualities of Ultra-Tech is that it recognizes that the future is a setting, not a genre. I suspect we simply disagree about this.

[scc]

Originally Posted by Anthony

Actually, GURPS presumes that if you buy a genre book about X, you want a game about X. One of the problems with Ultra-Tech is that it's not fully embracing its genre book nature.

Except that Ultra-Tech, like the other Tech books, isn't a genre book, it's a gear catalog.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by McAllister

One of the important qualities of Ultra-Tech is that it recognizes that the future is a setting, not a genre. I suspect we simply disagree about this.

The future is not 'a' setting. The future is many settings, depending on the future history you design.

Originally Posted by scc

Except that Ultra-Tech, like the other Tech books, isn't a genre book, it's a gear catalog.

And what gear exists, for anything but a hard modern or historical game, is a genre issue.

[Joseph Paul]

Since David Pulver is in a mood to be changing things how about making the TL assignments for EM weapons line up with the verbiage? The introductory paragraph states that they appear as heavy weapons at TL9 and personal weapons at TL10. Given that, I would have expected to see the 40mm Railgun and the EM 64mm mortar join the Sniper Railgun as TL9 devices on the principle that we tend to make things large and then shrink them as we understand the tech better and improving the tech for more mobile operations and man-portable operations. The autoEM mortar as TL10 - could go either way.

The verbiage for the 7mm HMG (is it TL10 or TL9?) and the 4mm minigun is a Printer's Devil of an hermaphroditic orgy of confusion and disagreement with the stat lines. 7mm HMG at TL9 as the predecessor or successor to the 7mm Sniper Railgun and 4mm Minigun at TL10 as a development of the 4mm Gauss rifle is what I would expect.

If we are getting more damage per shot are we getting less shots per magazine/hopper/cassette?

[Mailanka]

Originally Posted by Joseph Paul

If we are getting more damage per shot are we getting less shots per magazine/hopper/cassette?

The bullet mass might remain the same, but have higher power requirements, in which case it would be less shots per cell

[ericthered]

Originally Posted by Anthony

The future is not 'a' setting. The future is many settings, depending on the future history you design.

And what gear exists, for anything but a hard modern or historical game, is a genre issue.

I have to agree with this. Sorry McCalister. There are too many possible futures for it to be a single setting. The future is a collection of genres.

At the same time, I can see the use of having a gear book spanning multiple genres: low tech did it. And it did it well by sticking to a single genre: historical low tech. That genre is used as the basis for a lot of other genres, but low tech didn't try to address how to build a magic sword, and its a stronger book for that.

[The_Ryujin]

Originally Posted by Mailanka

The bullet mass might remain the same, but have higher power requirements, in which case it would be less shots per cell

I don't think power per shot is going up, the 6d+2 for the gauss rifle doesn't make a lot of sense and I chalk it up to early installment weirdness. The 4mm gauss round weighs ~2.7g and is fired by the rifle at 1,500m/s^2 which gives us a muzzle energy of 3.07kJ. A 4mm diameter gives us a sectional area of 1.27×10^-5 m^2.

Plugging this data into Doug's damage formula gives us sqrt(3,070^1.04/1.27×10^-5^0.314)/13.3926 or 28.5. Dividing this by 3.5 gives us 8.15 which becomes 8d+1. If we were to properly boost 6d+2 by 25% you'd get 23×1.25 which is 28.75 which becomes 8.21 which is also 8d+1 (I assume the method explained by PK is meant to make the conversion simple rather then fully accurate).

Now from what David has said TL10 EM weapons are 50% efficient, that means it takes 6.14kW to power each shot which in turn mean it takes 184.2kW to power a full 60 rounds. A TL10 C cell holds 160kW which is a little to low to power 60rounds but if David round the rounds KE down to just 3kJ then 60 rounds comes out to exactly 160kW.

So this is a much needed correction rather then just boosting damage.

[McAllister]

Originally Posted by Mailanka

The bullet mass might remain the same, but have higher power requirements, in which case it would be less shots per cell

The issue with that being, of course, that a cell can fire however many shots are in a magazine.

[GodBeastX]

I agree Gauss guns need a bit of a boost, but I think the problem is also ETC is overpowered.

As Doug once said to me "There's only so much you can do with a pistol's barrel to increase damage" and once you start stacking ETC and other ammunitions, you can pretty much double the dice of damage on a pistol.

And while changing pi- to pi will increase wounding, at these higher tech levels, you end up splattering the pavement with people no matter the wounding, it's armor penetration that tends to suffer. When people have the option of turning a TL9 weapon into 1.5 damage with 1.3 damage added for ammunition (I know APDS adds damage and so do some High Tech options), but and armor divisor to boot, it ends up penetrating better than Gauss.

I wonder if ETC ammunition wouldn't add something simple like +1 damage per dice instead of close to +2 damage per dice?

It's also unclear how the ammunition stacks with the ETC weapon. What I mean is, is the math:

Base x 1.5 x 1.3

or

Base + (Base x .5) + (Base x .3)?

That does matter!

A heavy pistol is 3d base. With ETC it becomes 4d+2 and with APDS it becomes 5d+2 (2) pi. That's pretty insane with a TL9 weapon!

[The_Ryujin]

Originally Posted by GodBeastX

I agree Gauss guns need a bit of a boost, but I think the problem is also ETC is overpowered.

As Doug once said to me "There's only so much you can do with a pistol's barrel to increase damage" and once you start stacking ETC and other ammunitions, you can pretty much double the dice of damage on a pistol.

And while changing pi- to pi will increase wounding, at these higher tech levels, you end up splattering the pavement with people no matter the wounding, it's armor penetration that tends to suffer. When people have the option of turning a TL9 weapon into 1.5 damage with 1.3 damage added for ammunition (I know APDS adds damage and so do some High Tech options), but and armor divisor to boot, it ends up penetrating better than Gauss.

I wonder if ETC ammunition wouldn't add something simple like +1 damage per dice instead of close to +2 damage per dice?

+1 damage/die is probably a much more realistic option, based on my research ETC should probably be a 1.3× boost.

Originally Posted by GodBeastX

It's also unclear how the ammunition stacks with the ETC weapon. What I mean is, is the math:

Base x 1.5 x 1.3

or

Base + (Base x .5) + (Base x .3)?

That does matter!

A heavy pistol is 3d base. With ETC it becomes 4d+2 and with APDS it becomes 5d+2 (2) pi. That's pretty insane with a TL9 weapon!

Yes, it would be base × 1.5 × 1.3 or 10.5×1.5×1.3 28.5 which becomes 6d-1(2) pi-. This is pretty intense but this increase comes from two different things. The ETC is boosting the bullets velocity and therefore KE whole making it a APDS round is dumping that energy on a smaller area with a denser projectile.

However, as stated above 1.5× is too high for ETC so a more realistic version would be "only" be 5d(2).