Re: Hypothetical Arsenal
 

ACOG? Nobody wants to be using a 4x scope during an indoor firefight.

The Trijicon Reflex sights are different critters.

http://www.trijicon.com/na_en/produc....php?id=Reflex

Re: Monster Hunting Guns Made in or Associated with the UK
 

Here's a silly option: most wear and tear isn't from operations anyway, it's from practice. Therefore, set up a practice facility somewhere where it's legal, and send your people there every three months or whatever. You'll need a UK arsenal, but it's small.

Re: Hypothetical Arsenal
 

ACOG don't have to be 4x.

See for example this one.

That being said, they really don't need any magnification. I was misled by Tactical Shooting, which featured a very light and handy Trijicon ACOG Reflex sight with no magnification. Using actual brand names, I think Trijicon Reflex RX30 would be fine.

Re: Monster Hunting Guns Made in or Associated with the UK
 

I thought about it, but the ability to deploy operators quickly from their training facility ultimately won out. The full-time Rangers will tend to stay in the castle, with one team (rotating) being stationed in London, in order to react quickly to any threat to the Queen or other high-value targets.

That being said, there are several part-time Rangers who have day jobs as PSC people and they go to Oman and similar places regularly to train tactical teams. They will arrange to do any truly spectacular training there, taking some fellow Rangers with them.

Shotguns
 

Does anyone know if subsonic shotgun loads would have a noticable effect on Dmg and Range in GURPS?

And what would be the stats of no. 4 buck load in .410? I know it would be hard to find commercially, but if one were to handload such a thing?

What would be the best shot load for a 20G, for short range engagements against humans and not-so-human things? Obviously slugs could have applications, but when you used shot? And what would be the stats?

Re: Monster Hunting Guns Made in or Associated with the UK
 

My impression from reading the thread is that using only UK-made guns limits your choices, and complicates your procurement. You seem rather attached to the idea of getting guns in one particular way rather than using your capabilties to get whatever guns you need in another way. That's fine, but I don't really understand why.

They don't have to smuggle them into the UK. The rangers do that part of it.

Then what are we talking about on this thread?

Well, you've turned around in a circle twice in just a few sentences. Do these guys need guns for use (i.e. including spare parts and lots of ammo) or not?


Yes, it does, or at least to steer your own activities away from where the inspections are.

I don't understand why you're involving outsiders at all. (Other than the foreign party who is pretending to purchase the weapons, your cabalists can carry out the rest.)

Do participants in the conspiracy have some kind of moral issue with the objective? What risks do you conceive there?

You don't have a real world conspiracy. You have a cinematic conspiracy. You seem to be over-estimating the difficulty of the conspiracy as described to (a) contrive secretive acquisition of firearms and (b) modifiy and maintain firearms. You are of course at liberty to define your rather interesting campaign as you see fit, but these items seem slightly incongruous (at least to me) with the rest of the description.

Re: Hypothetical Arsenal
 

The Browning is a larger pistol that I thought you were interested in, almost half a pound heavier than other options.


Unnecessary proliferation of types, IMO.

Regarding the various SMGs and carbines -- do you foresee your monster hunters having the same need for bulk ammo transport, bulk weapon transport, and sustained individual portability, as well as the same squishy human targets as those experienced by modern state armies?

Personally, I think your needs are different and that the low-damage long-weapons would become irrelevant.

Re: Hypothetical Arsenal
 

The weight is irrelevant, it's the bulk and concealability that matters. A lighter plastic gun that's equally bulk won't really add anything to their capabilities, as it will be rare that encumbrance will matter to them.

And as noted before, the Browning Hi-Power is by far the best choice among those weapons they have a reasonable chance of acquiring in numbers.

In each case, how many they were able to get their hands on through the clandestine ways described.

You seem to be assuming that obtaining fully-automatic military weapons is a problem so trivial as to be worth hand-waving away. It doesn't work like that in the real world and it shouldn't work that way in my setting. Aside from the 'one impossible thing' of the paranormal, I'm not interested in cinematic conventions and unrealistically competent conspiracies.

For example, an important consideration about the conspiracy around the Queen is that keeping it a secret forever will prove impossible and even the limited activity they've done so far might be enough for some investigator to blow them open in the near future.

More generally, even organisations with the legal right to obtain military-grade firearms usually don't have the freedom to simply buy whatever they like. The acquisition proccess will be influenced by political concerns, their resources and simply by what is available to anyone willing to sell to them. Militaries and tactical teams in some countries are forced to buy certain types of weaponry simply because only one country is prepared to grant licences that allow them to buy.

For example, there are a lot of tactical teams in the Gulf still using a Browning Hi-Power pistol and longarms designed and made more than a generation ago. Germany refuses to issue the necessary end-user certificates for them to buy H&K or SIG weaponry. They do obtain some weapons in similar grey market ways I was describing, but never in unlimited quantity and without any hassle.

Check on how the PIRA or early Israeli armed forces obtained their weapons. And both had profiles and resources that dwarf this comparatively small conspiracy. Just having some social connections and a few million dollars doesn't automatically translate into having carte blanche to pick any illegal weapon, in any quantity, and abstract away the process they got there.

They have a need for hgh quantities of ammunition, for training. While the cost of the guns is a fairly small part of their total expenses, ammunition is a significant and ongoing cost.

One of the most important factors in choosing weapons is the bulk, both large 'B' and small 'b'. How easy the weapon is to conceal while transporting it to a scene or carrying it while disguised is vital. Two weapons of the same GURPS Bulk might realistically not be equally easy to conceal.

That being said, a moderate caliber weapon which allows effective follow-up shots often possesses greater firepower than a huge caliber one which a human operator will find difficult to control. The ability to put rounds more-or-less randomly downrange is not especially valuable.

For example, the automatic pistol-type weapons are practically speaking of a limited value, unless for the very specific case* of pressing the barrel nearly against a monstrous foe and emptying the weapon into it.

Another consideration is noise. Using a suppressor and subsonic ammunition, the total noise reduction possible is greater with 9mm than with heavier handgun chamberings. This is largely because better suppressor designs exist for the 9mm than for newer and rarer cartridges like the .40 S&W. It's true that very good designs exist for the .45 ACP, but a subsonic .45 ACP starts out louder than a subsonic 9mm.

They'll also own exotic suppressed weapons chambering .22 LR and .410 shotguns with moderators, specifically for covert murders. It doesn't necessarily take massive damage to take down a dangerous magician, for example. And if you do it before he can summon a powerful spirit entity clothed in corporeal flesh, you can avoid having to have a massive firefight.

*Admittedly the exact situation for which they were acquired.

Re: Hypothetical Arsenal
 

In that case, you're probably doomed from the start, because it will require an unrealistically competent conspiracy to actually do anything remotely relevant; a conspiracy at the size and level of resources posited simply cannot find its targets. You are, at a minimum, going to be need to wired in to a whole bunch of law enforcement databases, at which point you might as well just use the SAS to deal with your paranormal threats.

Re: Monster Hunting Guns Made in or Associated with the UK
 

It's important to be that the acquisition process have the least risk possible. Hence, I'm interested in suggestions for extremely effective methods that really were/are used by criminal organisations and terrorist groups and which worked perfectly, perhaps only coming out in rumours decades later.

Anything that involves having your people travel abroad and buy from companies where you don't know anyone and thus can't manipulate the system through an insider is introducing an element of risk. When you have your people actively smuggling illegal weapons over the UK borders, it adds even more risk.

It doesn't ultimately matter that you think that the risks are low enough so that they could succeed. It's just that raising the chance of discovery from 1% to 2% would be unacceptable.

The weapons they have access to when they are confronted by a situation that gives them no good choices. In a way, that's what the Rangers are about. They came across because some among the conspiracy felt that not acting was worse than anything that could result from acting. On the other hand, from a purely logical point of view, it is not necessarily true that they are right.

Given that supernatural incidents are steadily becoming more numerous and more severe, there is certainly not shortage of jobs for the Rangers. The cautious people among the conspiracy try to limit the risks, arguing in every case whether the risk of discovery is justified, but for now, the hawks have it their way. The view of those who advocate the use of the Rangers is that when they have advance knowledge of a potential massacre*, they have to risk discovery, because if they didn't, what would that make them?

Eventually, a threat that will be almost impossible to deal with covertly will emerge. And at that point, it will matter quite a bit what they have available to deal with it. If they manage it without getting caught, they buy more time, which in turn might allow people in the Shadow Court to quietly influence the direction Britain takes once the secret it out.

*Through prophecy, the warnings of spirits, divination or conventional intelligence work.

While theoretically possible, it's insanely risky to try to manipulate the police and customs to ignore something that to outsiders has all the appearance of a drug smuggling or terrorist operation. In general, it's much more useful to utilise personal relationships without giving them the impression that you are a dangerous criminal. Hence, every time you ask a favour, it should be something obviously fairly harmless.

Ensuring privacy at the estate of a pillar of the community, with no criminal record or connections to anything questionable, might be okay. Introduce anything that looks like you're smuggling weapons or drugs into the UK and a friendly and indulgent Chief Inspector might find himself regarding you quite differently.

How do they get the weapons from the foreign armament company? If they are buying from a company where they have a contact, they do this with the help of an insider. Who would the insider be if they bought somewhere else?

Not to mention that various rulers of Gulf states for whom the UK government will issue end-user certificates would have trouble getting such certificates in Europe and sometimes in the US. Germany is very restrictive about where they'll sell weapons and historically, HK weapons have been shipped to the UK and assembled there, precisely in order to make it possible to do what I'm describing and sell them to a country which couldn't get an end-user certificate in Germany.

Assuming that they somehow manage to get end-user certificates, though, they still have to get the weapons to the UK when they are supposed to be shipped to the Gulf. Without an inside man in the company, this is now much harder. They could try to steal the weapons in Germany, Austria, Belgium or the US, but that's a stupid risk. Barring that, the weapons would be shipped to whatever Gulf state they used for the transaction. Then they'd have to smuggle them from there and into the UK. And no matter what you think about the laxness of border controls in the world, the fact is simply that nation-states are much more likely to be curious about weapons (or unmarked crates) arriving from the Middle East than they are about stuff that's supposed to be leaving their own factories.

Is it still possible? Sure. Would the chances of success be better than even. Probably. But would the chances of discovery be as low as they could possibly be? No, not even close. This is a much greater risk than the method I've already described.

I'll consider any other method, but it has to have a lower chance of discovery than what I've explored so far. Any additional risk is unacceptable.

In order for the armaments to disappear from the notice of any tracking systems designed to monitor the proliferation of smallarms, someone inside the company must knowingly help you manipulate those systems. Most likely he will do so without knowing about the Shadow Court, but believing that he is participating in a conspiracy originating with the Foreign Service, MI6 or some other government agency.

If you strip away that illusion, by having the weapons be smuggled from somewhere else and into the UK, you multiply the risk. Now everyone involved in all stages of the operation must be one of your own people, thus multiplying how many people you are risking, or he'd have to be someone with no moral qualms about doing something that looked like he was helping with a terrorist attack on Britain. In which case dealing with him presented additional risks all by itself.

There's also the matter of cover stories. If the worst happens and your people are caught smuggling weapons from one place in the UK to another, they can pretend that they are involved in nothing more than a scam designed to circumvent legal restrictions on selling the weapons to certain foreign governments. While that might sound super-serious, there are people in the UK right now who have been accused of that, some more than once, and the majority of them haven't even seen the inside of a courtroom.

Yes, sure, your Rangers who were doing the driving would probably be convicted of various violations, but there is a chance that a huge task force of law enforcement agencies would not be assembled to get to the bottom of this.

If they were discovered smuggling weapons from abroad into the UK, though, that suggests international terrorism. Instant parlimentary inquiry, huge investigation, etc.

Apart from the existence of magic, my 'one impossible thing', that's not what I want.

Out of curiosity, can you point me to any organisation which has operated in secret in a high CR modern nation and managed to easily obtain an unlimited supply of military weapons without having to restrict their choices according to what contacts they had?

As far as I can see, none of the terrorist groups operating in Northern Ireland ever had an unlimited supply of whatever guns they chose. Their networks of contacts and supporters defined what weapons they could obtain and there was essentially never any chance of standarising their stockpile. They were glad to get anything, really, even if that left them with a mix of longarms in .22 LR, 9mm, 5.45x39mm, 5.56x45mm, .30 carbine, .30-30, 7.62x39mm, 7.62x51mm, 7.62x54mm and others.

Beyond a much better armoury capability; I don't see much difference here. The Shadow Court will take what weapons they can get and modify them as needed. They can construct their own weapons, but beyond prototypes and modifications, that capability only started to be practical in 2006. Not to mention that they need the plans for the weapons to build them. That's available from their contacts inside British industry, but not necessarily from a foreign firm in which they know no one.