How does SM affect Ballistics/Beams?

[GodBeastX]

I have not seen any information on how SM affects ballistics and beam weapons? Imagine you got a larger species of aliens, for example, how can one scale up weapons like a Heavy Pistol, or a blaster pistol, etc.

[McAllister]

http://scigamer.blogspot.kr/2013/08/...modifiers.html

Well, this helps.

I hear there's some sort of Douglas Cole approved ballistic spreadsheet around that you could find, should help you figure out damage based on actual bullet dimensions. I'd figure the caliber of a comfortable gun scales linearly with the height of the user, and maybe you could put it all together to make rules for guns work?

Don't talk to me about beam weapons, though, I don't have a clue.

[The_Ryujin]

Originally Posted by GodBeastX

I have not seen any information on how SM affects ballistics and beam weapons? Imagine you got a larger species of aliens, for example, how can one scale up weapons like a Heavy Pistol, or a blaster pistol, etc.

Damage and range wise? For beam weapons, this based on how tight of a focus the beam can maintain relative to its output. Assuming all things being equal (and at lest in GURPS, things are a bit more complicated in real life), the damage and range of the beam weapon will go up with the cube root of the size increase while power consumption will go up with the weight increase cubed.

For bullets... Things get complicated. With in a small increase regime you can get away with increasing the damage and range liner with the increase in weapon size so long as velocity remains constant.

[mlangsdorf]

Originally Posted by GodBeastX

I have not seen any information on how SM affects ballistics and beam weapons? Imagine you got a larger species of aliens, for example, how can one scale up weapons like a Heavy Pistol, or a blaster pistol, etc.

Most human-scale rifles have a ST of 10 and weigh around 10 lbs for a 7d attack. An ST 20 alien could plausibly carry a rifle weighing 35 lbs and firing .50 BMG for a 12d attack. An even larger alien might carry a 20mm autocannon at 120+ lbs doing 18d per bullet.

Scaling up for ballistic weapons seems to rapidly hit diminishing returns: doubling damage increases weight by a factor of 8, tripling by a factor of 24, which suggests a cubic relation.

[weby]

As said by others, it gets complicated fast, so using heavy crew served weapons as personal weapons at slightly higher strengths and then eventually tank guns when you get big enough...

You could of course use the rules for beam weapon design in pyramid #37 to design heavier weapons.

But in the basic approach you would go with going up the chart one step each time the ST and size raises enough to use the weapon in question in the lower role so for blasters:
Holdout Blaster->Blaster Pistol->Heavy Blaster Pistol->Blaster Carbine->Blaster Rifle->Heavy Blaster->Semi-Portable Blaster->Blaster Cannon

And the same way for other weapon types.

[GodBeastX]

Alright, taking in all this, I guess my option is to just be "Close Enough" in the math proposed. Thanks for the input everybody.