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

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by swordtart

Actually I was never that concerned with the effectiveness of crossbows vs armour compared to smooth bores. I was commenting on ATE, where I don't think historical armour will figure to any great extent.

Between raiders wearing stop-sign armor (and/or wielding stop-sign shields), mutants with incredibly tough skin, and killer robots, armor is likely to be something to consider in an AtE campaign. For motorized raiders, you may need to shoot through doors to hit drivers, or engine blocks to disable vehicles, and in both cases penetration is very much going to matter. Even ignoring armor, that Medieval Crossbow I mentioned before doesn't even manage a Major Wound on an average hit (assuming a foe with HP 10+), while an average hit from the poorly-performing arquebus will drop anything with HP 12 or less into negative HP and scores a Major Wound on anything up to HP 26. Good shot placement can improve the Crossbow's wounding - average of 7.5 HP for a Vitals shot, average of 6 HP for a Skull shot, average of 10 HP for an Eye shot - but the arquebus sees even more of a boost (as it starts with a lower wounding modifier), for 27 HP for Vitals, 28 HP for Skull, and 36 HP for Eye.

Originally Posted by swordtart

I was more concerned with smoothbores being less precise than crossbows.

What do you think about the suggestion I made above? I'll probably split it off into its own thread for discussion, but I'm curious. I should note that the initial 1d-4 can probably be safely simplified to a -1, basically just meaning the Range penalty is simply doubled beyond a certain point.

EDIT: It's now in its own thread. In fact, further discussion of this aspect of muskets should probably go there rather than continue to derail this one.

Originally Posted by swordtart

Come the apocalypse I'll be the one with the crossbow.

Granted, a crossbow isn't a bad choice of weapon - it certainly has some advantages over a musket - but I think your assertion that nobody will bother with firearms without repeaters and/or rifling is a flawed one.