What kinds of firearms would people start making [After the End]?

[phayman53]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

A lot of your questions boil down to "If people are limited to TL4 why don't they just do TL5 stuff instead?" and the answers amount to "If they could they'd be TL5."..

Well, my first, and main, questions were really about breech loaders and rifles versus muskets, which all are TL4. I asked the other questions more as a conceptual afterthought on what would be possible with TL4 tool manufacturing capabilities but with higher tech concept already know to be possible and preferable. For instance, black powder does not really require other TL3 methods and technology to make, but nobody really discovered it until then historically, so we call it TL3 in GURPS (same goes for 3 field farming and later methods of crop rotation, germ theory, basic vaccination, etc). Conversly, computer circuit boards require a bunch of other TL7 tech to make possible, so they cannot be made without a large technological base. So I was wondering, really, how large a technological base certain kinds of firearms require versus the accident of when the idea was historically thought of.