03-02-2021, 01:27 PM | #11 |
Join Date: Oct 2007
Location: Kentucky, USA
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Re: Very Rapid Fire
My experience is that eggshells with hammers is intensely un-fun. So anything that gets away from that is good, no matter how unrealistic.
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03-02-2021, 01:39 PM | #12 | ||
Join Date: Jun 2013
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Re: Very Rapid Fire
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VRF under the normal rules doesn't help a lot here - it means you'll often be dealing with a lot of hits, so if your DR isn't enough to outright stop the attack, you're probably in pretty bad shape after a burst.
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03-02-2021, 02:00 PM | #13 |
Join Date: Jan 2006
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Re: Very Rapid Fire
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03-02-2021, 02:24 PM | #14 | ||
Join Date: Jul 2008
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Re: Very Rapid Fire
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One is that your basic premise is flawed - you can't presume you can trade 10 pulses per second for one 10x as energetic pulse per second. It's not like the laser has a fixed amount of power output in the second but can split it up however it wants. The other direction might work, but there's no reason for the rapid-pulsing laser to be capable of a 10 times stronger than normal pulse at all. Meanwhile, all rapid fire necessarily adds is the ability to quickly recharge the lasing system between shots (that's supposing the actual firing cycle happens in less that 1/10 seconds, but that seems much more likely than not.) The other is that 10 shots at half damage can mean doing 5 times as much damage. Quote:
I was referring to Anthony's expanded wound size modifiers or David L. Pulver's version in Pyramid 3/34, which mitigate the usefulness of small-caliber weapons against large targets such as vehicles. (They don't mitigate the effectiveness of exploiting high accuracy for destroying people's unarmored personal gear.)
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03-02-2021, 02:25 PM | #15 |
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Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: Montréal, Québec
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Re: Very Rapid Fire
I selected GPMGs for good reason: Those are where full-auto weapons for use vs. infantry came into their own. Well, Gatling guns before that, but you get my point. Originally, GPMGs and MMGs fired rifle rounds because there were lots of rifle rounds around and the weapons kind of had to be useful at ranges where they could engage people shooting back, also with rifle rounds.
Then SMGs emerged, usually firing pistol rounds. Then people starting fielding LMGs and automatic rifles which had more manageable recoil achieved mostly through lighter rounds, which also let soldiers carry useful amounts of ammo. These could still compete at rifle distances because propellants advanced to make light, fast rounds a viable option. Which led to various armor-piercing rounds – whether by design or consequence – that could achieve useful penetration despite light weight. At which point we're at various carbines, PDWs, and even offensive combat pistols that are worth taking to war. These are where extremely high cyclic rates started showing up: Yes, the rounds shoot far and penetrate really well, but they make tiny holes and don't inflict much trauma . . . so you need to hit with lots, and a gun that puts two, three, or four rounds on target is a good idea. Not entirely orthogonal to this was the desire to have the higher hit probability of automatic fire without the waste of ammo associated with the stressed infantryman's tendency to spray and pray. That, too, drove the development of high-cyclic weapons. Something that spews a few rounds per pull has higher odds of a hit without chewing through a ton of ammo. So that's the "niche" of these weapons. Whether beam weapons need this at all depends on their behavior: Do they pierce armor well but do little harm to flesh? Do they consume costly resources if left to blast away? Well, that's all a question of what sci-fi you're trying to emulate. I don't think Star Trek phasers would want or need VRF . . . one hit seems to disintegrate most targets, and apparently power packs do run out. Star Wars blasters don't ever seem to get reloaded, but they mostly just poke little smoking holes, so maybe VRF is good there.
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03-02-2021, 02:37 PM | #16 | |
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Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: Montréal, Québec
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Re: Very Rapid Fire
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When I was running my modern secret-agents game, the players wanted their highly trained operators to be able to fight hordes of mooks with just one magazine per scene, each shot a kill shot. They didn't care about their own eggshells getting smashed, because they had all those great cinematic traits for dodging, shrugging off flesh wounds, etc. So one-shot-kill weapons were the order of the day, and spraying lots of light rounds all over was seen as tedium involving too many dice rolls. There were a lot of anti-materiel rifles and hand cannons. A long time ago, when I ran a nominally fantasy campaign which crossed TLs and worlds a lot, yeah . . . Some PCs were angels, giants, wraiths, etc. and wanted to be able to "tank" guns the same way they could soak up hits from maces and tiger claws. So there, I had to carefully tweak the weapons to support that. It ended up that super-high-RoF, armor-piercing, ultra-low-damage flechette guns and lasers were the most fun. The PCs could get shot 20 times and mostly not die, but they could count on getting hit some and not on their armor stopping the hits.
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03-02-2021, 02:59 PM | #17 | ||
Join Date: Jul 2008
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Re: Very Rapid Fire
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It's possible that significantly fewer dislike 'big sack of hit point' PCs though.
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03-02-2021, 03:23 PM | #18 |
GURPS Line Editor
Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: Montréal, Québec
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Re: Very Rapid Fire
My very long (42 years) experience with RPGs in general, and long experience (35 years) with GURPS in particular, is that this is one of those areas where symmetry – while realistic in most cases – isn't popular with anybody but rabid realism nuts the likes of whom I've never gamed with. My players prefer their PCs to be able to "soak" lots of attacks, whether that's via avoidance (in GURPS, high defenses, Luck, or spending character points to influence rolls), absorption (in GURPS, through HP, ablative DR, or a "Stun Points" mechanic), or rapid recuperation (in GURPS, Instant Regeneration or the Flesh Wounds mechanic). On the other hand, they expect their PCs to be able to drop one foe per turn, ideally. I guess this can be realized through gear . . . but honestly, I prefer special abilities and meta-game mechanics. YMMV.
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03-02-2021, 10:03 PM | #19 | ||
Join Date: Jun 2013
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Re: Very Rapid Fire
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I should note I was comparing different weapons, not saying that any given beam weapon should be able to freely adjust output and RoF. I can see where the confusion could come from, however, as I suggested a weapon in a previous post that could indeed switch between two RoF's (with different outputs for each) - that was meant to be a specific, purpose-built weapon. It wouldn't have as good of performance as a weapon of equal weight that is only RoF 10 (and 1/10 output) or only RoF 1, and may not be available in certain settings, but could be an interesting weapon in a setting with fully ablative force shields. Quote:
It's clearly designed with characters in mind, but I see no reason it couldn't be extended to hardware (indeed, it has specific rules for Unliving/Homogenous) - which should help the old "Warship vs Muskets" problem.
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03-02-2021, 11:11 PM | #20 | |
Join Date: Jul 2008
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Re: Very Rapid Fire
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Side note: recharge and cooling are actually significantly separable concerns. They wouldn't be for a weapon intended for indefinite continuous firing. But few if any weapons are so intended. If you assume that lasers need cooling to support that level of use, you should be subjecting firearms to the same demands. At which point they'll be quite different, much more cumbersome, and pay a crippling price for autofire! It could, obviously. But just throwing out 'half the damage' is highly misleading - it's got half the penetration, but is far more destructive in many cases.
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