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Originally Posted by Johnny Angel
So the damage for bows and other low tech missile weapons is determined using the same formula that weapon damages from other TLs and genres use, or no?
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No. The damage is based on an adder to the thrust damage, which is based on strength. This scales up - in the human range - based on each additional point of ST being equal to one point of swing damage or half a point of thrust. This means that for ST values above 14, it's quite possible for GURPS to tell you you're hitting harder than a modern TL8 handgun. With a bow.
The issue is somewhat one of two separate systems, the firearms system and the hand-weapons system, coexisting but not rationalized consistently with each other (in fact, having tried to do so, it's damn hard, so forgiveness reigns here). The firearms system is based on very, very fixed understanding of what "damage" means. For firearms, "Damage" = "penetration of homogeneous steel armor at a ratio of 20d = DR70 = penetrates one inch of RHA steel 50% of the time. This puts all projectile weapons that penetrate armor by virtue of kinetic energy dump on a common scale.
Momentum based weapons, such as swords, maces, fists, and feet, are based on the ST scale established arbitrarily way back when, probably roughly dating from The Fantasy Trip or Man-to-Man or GURPS 1e...which certainly from Gurps 3e and on was that - in normal human range from ST6 to about ST twenty-something - one extra point of ST was meaningful to the character in that it gave you an extra point of swing damage on the average. Thrusting was more or less half this in terms of extra damage per point of ST.
Bows and other muscle or semi-mechanical powered ranged weapons (crossbows, slings, thrown spears) are sort of bastard children here, with characteristics similar to firearms, but measured and quantified in terms of ST.
These two don't coexist well. It's quite possible for a strong character to do enough damage with a FIST that, by strict interpretation of the rules (and a good roll), he can punch through a DR6 steel breastplate.
These two scales have not been reconciled with each other; I'm not sure you can even DO so without really, really mucking things up. So we just accept that hand weapons (and hands, for that matter) are advantaged compared to armor and stuff for good storytelling reasons, and we do a lot of hand-waving to explain why a strong guy can kick for as much damage and penetration, on the average, as being shot with a .38 snubnose revolver.