Jamming plastique in my bullets; damage for TL8- explosive rounds

[Kalzazz]

Bullets overall are very cheap

However, high enough skill to reliably put bullets into the brain or vitals is generally your best bet

[panton41]

I thought the official HT ruling on explosive small arm bullets was that they were little more than expanding bullets and to just use those rules.

[Ubiquitous]

Originally Posted by ciaran_skye

I thought the official HT ruling on explosive small arm bullets was that they were little more than expanding bullets and to just use those rules.

Yeah, but then you apply the explosive damage to the vitals. Which is nice.

EDIT: IF it penetrates inside them.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Ubiquitous

Yeah, but then you apply the explosive damage to the vitals. Which is nice.

Zero damage x5 is still zero. I'm not aware of any explosive small arms bullets carrying enough explosive to produce a measurable blast in GURPS terms.

[Refplace]

The trouble with HE rounds is that after you put in the detonator and considering the tiny size of the bullet you dont have much room for filler.
We had them in the USAF but it was a real rare round to see and HEI were much more useful because you could start fires.

If HE rounds or even HEI rounds were considered practical you would see them in much more common use on the battlefield.
Instead we have Tracers, hollow point, snakeshot or AP rounds as the nonstandard round your going to run into.
So for any small arm I wouldnt give much boost, if any to damage output. Someone would have to show me a good demonstration or other proof.

[Ubiquitous]

Originally Posted by Anthony

Zero damage x5 is still zero. I'm not aware of any explosive small arms bullets carrying enough explosive to produce a measurable blast in GURPS terms.

Except that, as I said, the standard HE/Frag damage for bullets in HT are 1d-2 each. Which'd give you a minimum of 3 damage whenever it went off inside someone. However, these HE bullets are for guns a larger caliber than assault-rifle cartridge size, so that's why I started wondering what difference filler made.

Originally Posted by Refplace

The trouble with HE rounds is that after you put in the detonator and considering the tiny size of the bullet you dont have much room for filler.
We had them in the USAF but it was a real rare round to see and HEI were much more useful because you could start fires.

If HE rounds or even HEI rounds were considered practical you would see them in much more common use on the battlefield.
Instead we have Tracers, hollow point, snakeshot or AP rounds as the nonstandard round your going to run into.
So for any small arm I wouldnt give much boost, if any to damage output. Someone would have to show me a good demonstration or other proof.

Snakeshot, what's what? Sounds nasty.

[Crakkerjakk]

Originally Posted by Ubiquitous

Snakeshot, what's what? Sounds nasty.

Like birdshot shotgun shells, but in a pistol round. Frequently loaded in a cheap revolver and taken on hikes/camping.

[SuedodeuS]

To calculate damage, look up the weight of the round on the internet (Wikipedia tends to work). Next, use the guidelines from HT to decide how much explosive the bullet will have in it. Then, decide what explosive to put in. Finally, use the equation from B415 to determine the actual damage. Optionally, adjust this to take fragmentation into account - I think explosive small arms bullets generally trade 2d cr ex for [1d]. Maximum fragmentation is probably where cr ex and fragmentation damage are equal.

As an example, consider an HE 7.62x39mm (for an AK-47). This is a 123 grain bullet. HT gives a lower bound of 15%, but no upper bound - we'll assume you can get ~50% weight. This gives us 60 grains of explosive to work with. We'll shove this thing full of CL20 to get about the biggest bang we can manage at TL8. With an REF of 2.3, we get 1d+2 cr ex. This will give us a little bit of fragmentation (trade the +2 for 1 damage, which is around 1d-4), so the end damage is going to be somewhere around 1d cr ex [1d-4]. Keep in mind that this round has a (0.5) armor divisor!

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by SuedodeuS

As an example, consider an HE 7.62x39mm (for an AK-47). This is a 123 grain bullet. HT gives a lower bound of 15%, but no upper bound - we'll assume you can get ~50% weight.

15% should probably be the upper bound. A bullet that's 15% explosives by mass is around 60% explosives by volume, and furthermore, won't weigh as much as a regular bullet -- that bullet would be something like 51 grains of metal, 9 grains of explosive.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Anthony

15% should probably be the upper bound.

I believe that it is the upper bound. 10% filler by weight is the norm for run of the mill artillery rounds. 50% would be for bombs and missile warheads. Things that don't accelerate at thousands of Gs.

So you're looking more at 12 grains of explosive than 60 and you need to account for the detonator too and that doesn't shrink past a certain point.

HT's number of 1d-2 is probably generous.