Transhuman Space Firearms more in line with High-Tech

[Icelander]

After High-Tech came out, has anyone converted the Transhuman Space firearms or made up some new models that represent slight improvements of modern TL8 weapons in line with the proposed technological advances of THS?

Apart from using caseless ammo, having electronic ignition and some inbuilt electronics, most military and civilian weapons would probably be pretty similar to the firearms that already exist.

There are a lot more options for ammunition, of course, and smart scopes interfacing with HUDs and running all sorts of tactical programs mean a lot of nice futuristic functionality, but for the most part, everyone is still using conventional firearms we'd recognise.

I do want to try to avoid having every nation in 2100 having adopted military rifles that are a step backward from TL8 assault rifles, so I'd like to update the stats in GURPS Transhuman Space: Changing Times so that the slugthrower part of the Battle Rifle isn't inferior to 1990s designs. Updated versions of FN SCARs, HK416s, QBZ95s and G11-equivalents with smartgun electronics and high-density magazines for caseless ammunition are what one would expect to see.

Military requisitions are sometimes bureaucratic and stupid, but it beggars belief that no major nation would choose to retain service rifles capable of practical accuracy at longer ranges than machine pistols (Acc 3) or PDWs (Acc 4). If the 'Battle Rifle' is a carbine, it should have at least Acc 4, if it's a bullpup, it should have Acc 5. And the Damage really has no reason to be reduced from the quite reasonable 6d it had in the stats from 3e.

On the other hand, the BCR (Basic Combat Rifle) from Transhuman Space: Broken Dreams can easily be converted from 3e without improving it any, as the main selling point of that design is economical robustness. It's the AK of the 21st century and it's no more effective than a modern M4 in combat, just cheaper to make.

I plan to convert the Battle Rifle, BCR, Enkidu and Xuan Feng in future posts. I'll also write up firearms as they become relevant to our campaign.

Edit:
Behold!

BCR (The 'Basic Combat Rifle' and its variants).
Chahandras (Indian 'Battle Rifle').
Chinese Battle Rifles (the 2020s and 2030s vintange Xuan Feng and a more modern Chinese 'Battle Rifle').
More Chinese Rifles + Grenade Launchers (co-existed with early mini-missile launchers, need to add the upgraded liquid propellant version of the ZH-35 grenade launcher).
The American 6.5mm PTCA round (needs stats and names for the guns it mentions).
Street guns for our PCs in Dar es Salaam (Easily minifacced models including the Mbogo entry shotgun and the FAC-9 machine pistol; also a higher quality, if impractical, 15mmCLP magnum pistol, the Pretoria Defence Ubhejane Mk II).

Facts that have already been established for our campaign is that the most common model name for the BCR in the Tanzanian civil war was Ngiri ('Warthog') and it was minifac-made by all major factions in that war. Also, the most common chambering for illegal weapons in the underworld of Dar es Salaam is 9mm, the same ammo as the Enkidu machine pistol from the Caliphate. More or less faithful copies of the Enkidu made from pirated designs are popular among rich gangsters and corporate security, with the better copies retaining the exceptional balance and ergonomics of the original design.

One unusual firearm that one of our PCs will be starting with is the 'Siri' Bastola, a black-market minifac-made advanced plastics holdout pistol in 9mm, with a sealed scent-masked magazine and low-profile fin-stabilised non-metallic subsonic bullets.

I'll need a reality-check on how heavy non-metallic bullets could be in Transhuman Space. Obviously, they'd be inferior to plain full-metal jacket bullets, but these are meant for concealed carry past basic security scanners, at the cost of performance.

[RogerBW]

Originally Posted by Icelander

One unusual firearm that one of our PCs will be starting with is the 'Siri' Bastola, a black-market minifac-made advanced plastics holdout pistol in 9mm, with a sealed scent-masked magazine and low-profile fin-stabilised non-metallic subsonic bullets.

"This just doesn't have any legal purpose, does it? Even owning one is grounds for suspicion." — Insp. David Akram, ESCA Police

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by RogerBW

"This just doesn't have any legal purpose, does it? Even owning one is grounds for suspicion." — Insp. David Akram, ESCA Police

"I though this was 'Merica!" "Second amendment!" You laugh, but I think we know quite a few that would pony up any legal fees such a gun owner would accrue when caught.
Some may just despise the idea of "grounds for suspicion" when no crime was known to have been committed... assuming such weapons weren't themselves illegal.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by RogerBW

"This just doesn't have any legal purpose, does it? Even owning one is grounds for suspicion." — Insp. David Akram, ESCA Police

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

"I though this was 'Merica!" "Second amendment!" You laugh, but I think we know quite a few that would pony up any legal fees such a gun owner would accrue when caught.
Some may just despise the idea of "grounds for suspicion" when no crime was known to have been committed... assuming such weapons weren't themselves illegal.

You missed which police force that was: ESCA is the European Space Control Agency, which regulates EU-registered spacecraft and stations. Not even slightly American. Under such a jurisdiction, "grounds for suspicion" isn't grounds for arrest or prosecution, just a flag to look into anything connected with you that looks even slightly interesting.

[Icelander]

Before statting various national Battle Rifles, I need to understand the underbarrel missile launchers better.

I'm guessing that the 3e writeup of Range 500/500 does not follow 4e conventions, where the first number is minimum range. Rather, the same Range statistic would be written -/500 in 4e, with minimum range being a function of software safety protocols designed to protect the user, probably present in explosive missiles at least.

I seem to recall an early 3e mention that 1/2D range for missiles should be read as Move per second. THS micro- and mini-missiles would thus be supersonic and have a velocity of 1500 fps. If I'm wrong and the published stats do not include any information on missile velocity, I'd like to get ideas from forumites, authors and fans alike, on typical velocities for military 'smallarm' missiles.

Finally, is the maximum range of 500 yards a hard limit? It makes a lot of sense that legal and social issues limit police and security forces to a fairly close range missile, as longer ranges increase the risk of harming civilians downrange with missed shots and there is rarely any tactical need for law-enforcement to engage at long range. It seems it ought to be possible to design military missiles with a semi-ballistic cruise setting though.

Granted, the velocities are a lot lower, but TL8 grenade launcher designs that exist right now have maximum Range up to 2,200. Not having any way to reach out to that range with an explosive warhead seems like a weakness for a TL10 infantryman. And the advanced guidance systems seem like sort of a waste if the missiles are much shorter ranged than ordinary dumb munitions.

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by johndallman

You missed which police force that was: ESCA is the European Space Control Agency, which regulates EU-registered spacecraft and stations. Not even slightly American. Under such a jurisdiction, "grounds for suspicion" isn't grounds for arrest or prosecution, just a flag to look into anything connected with you that looks even slightly interesting.

I was joking. But if you look hard enough, you will find what you're looking for even if it doesn't exist. Grounds for suspicion will lead to corruption and persecution if not overt prosecution.

[Phil Masters]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

Grounds for suspicion will lead to corruption and persecution if not overt prosecution.

In the hands of a bad or lazy cop, sure. But all police look for grounds for suspicion; all it means at the core is "reason to suspect A over B", which may be a good reason, like, say, "Running away from a jeweller's store where the window is broken and the alarm is going off, with a bunch of expensive watches in your pocket".

"Carrying a gun" is not necessarily proof of criminal intent - the person may be a soldier, or a hunter, or a licensed gun-owner in a polity where this is considered a valud option for self-defence. Carrying a gun whose sole advantage over other guns is low detectability and non-traceability, much like carrying, say, a set of lockpicks and a pocket crowbar, will cause any sensible non-hopeless cop to wonder why. Good cops will accept good explanations why, perhaps after checking; bad cops will treat this as an excuse for persecution.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Owen Smith

Phil Masters notes on using 4E Ultra Tech and Bio Tech in THS:

https://tekeli.li/transhumanspace/ultratech_ths.html

https://tekeli.li/transhumanspace/biotech_ths.html

Thanks. I read through these.

Note, however, that Ultra-Tech came out before High-Tech and while all sorts of exotic TL10+ weapon technologies in Ultra-Tech have very optimistic stats, the TL9 conventional firearms are often inferior to the stats for real TL8 weapons, apart for some optimistic assumptions for light and compact high-density magazines for some of the smaller guns, which I personally think might be rather bulky in practice.*

Apart from that, I don't understand some of the assumptions underlying the magazine weights. Why does the Storm Carbine have a weightless magazine, the Storm Rifle have a magazine weighing 0.48 lbs. and the Assault Carbine have one that weighs 0.15 lbs.? If it had anything to do with the power of the round, the pistol caliber rounds wouldn't need such high magazine weights. The Urban Assault Weapon has a magazine for pistol rounds that weighs 0.44 lbs. and the Machine Pistol has a magazine for the same caliber that weighs an astonishing 0.58 lbs. empty (more than a modern metal magazine).

If caseless rounds can be carried as a disposable bloc where the individual rounds stick together without an external structure, meaning a loading scheme that works more like TL6 clips than TL6-8 magazines, as the weightless Storm Carbine magazine implies, why isn't that noted in the descriptions? What makes the Assault Carbine or the pistol chamberings unable to take advantage of that technology?

Ultra-Tech is also riddled with plain-old errors in the weapon lists. Even with years of errata, not all are fixed. As an example, the 5.7mm PDW has a full magazine of 100 rounds weigh 0.3 less than a 100 individual rounds of that caliber...

That simply can't be right.**

*It's certainly technically possible at TL9+ (even at TL8+) to fit 18 .30 caliber caseless rounds into a pistol magazine, but I just have a hard time imagining how the pistol would remain slim and concealable enough to rate Bulk -1 (Walther PPK, AMT Backup, etc.) with either a single-stack magazine that is an absolute minimum of (135mm + wall thickness) long or a double-stack magazine that seems like it would always be thicker than a modern single-stack magazine of up to 9mm. On the other hand, modern double-stack 9mm subcompact do rate Bulk -1, even if they might be less unobstrosive than slimmer single-stack designs, so maybe it's just a granularity issue.
**I suspect that the WPS for the 5.7mm Caseless rounds is meant to be less than the listed 0.013, as that modern cased 5.7x28mm FN already weigh that and Ultra-Tech caseless rounds are usually 40-60% lighter than modern cased rounds.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by RogerBW

"This just doesn't have any legal purpose, does it? Even owning one is grounds for suspicion." — Insp. David Akram, ESCA Police

Our characters live in a cuberpunk-ish free city of Dar es Salaam where any kind of gun licence is unavailble to 'our kind', i.e. people who aren't police, army, corporate security or Status 1+.

Although neither of us has a criminal record, we have been suspected of crimes, we don't have Wealth or a Patron behind us and we live at Status -1 (Johann Copley, dala dala driver) and Status -2 (Mansur Batenga, smiling young man appearing much like all the Tanganyikan refugees illegally in the city, who sometimes does odd jobs for him).

If discovered with even a stun gun, electric stun wand or zap glove, we would go to prison if we failed to bribe the policeperson/corpsec/border guard who found them.

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by Icelander

Our characters live in a cuberpunk-ish free city of Dar es Salaam where any kind of gun licence is unavailble to 'our kind', i.e. people who aren't police, army, corporate security or Status 1+.

What's the CR? Because what you describe doesn't sound like what I would call a 'free city' (which would be CR1).

Originally Posted by Icelander

Although neither of us has a criminal record, we have been suspected of crimes, we don't have Wealth or a Patron behind us and we live at Status -1 (Johann Copley, dala dala driver) and Status -2 (Mansur Batenga, smiling young man appearing much like all the Tanganyikan refugees illegally in the city, who sometimes does odd jobs for him).

If discovered with even a stun gun, electric stun wand or zap glove, we would go to prison if we failed to bribe the policeperson/corpsec/border guard who found them.

If you can make a good story to justify it, perhaps you can ask the GM for the License perk for the single benefit that is normally unavailable outside that Status?

For instance, you could have once bribed an official to issue a reward government-issued pistol for some fictional act of heroism, which normally comes with the permission to use and carry pistols. That's how such things are done in real life, anyway.