Would the peasant railgun be possible in GURPS?

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Anaraxes

You'd have to sort the peasants into initiative order for the sequence to work. And that could change every round if you reroll initiative. Really cuts into the RoF when the peasants have to run a mile or two in between shots.

Nah, in GURPS the scheme would be reliant on Cascading Waits. The peasant in the front of the line uses Wait (Throw the weapon once the guy behind me hands it to me), and each of the ones behind him use Wait (Hand the weapon to the guy in front of me once the guy behind me hands it to me), except for the last peasant, who instead just hands the weapon to the guy in front of him, no Wait needed (although he may need to Do Nothing for a second or two while everyone else gets their Waits set). Of course, in GURPS grabbing something and then handing it to somebody else typically takes two seconds - a Ready to grab and secure the item (making it ready for use - in this case, the use is "handing it to the next guy"), and another Maneuver - I assume Ready, as it's the only one that seems to fit - to hand it to the next guy. Now, certainly you should be able to Ready the item "instantly," but that would require a roll akin to fast-draw, and with 2,280 characters, even if they have skill 16+ (rather removed from the "peasant" concept) somebody is going to fail (on average, you're looking at ~32* Failures - each of which would add an extra second - and ~10.5 Critical Failures, each of which would prematurely terminate the chain when a peasant drops the near-sonic projectile, killing several in front of him). A realism argument can be made to claim something like just grabbing something handed to you and giving it to the next guy could be done with a single Ready, but you can't really expect a GM to deviate from RAW for the sake of realism in the process of enabling you to pull off something hilariously unrealistic.

*Initially closer to 31.5, but as each calls for another roll, you have to add around another 0.5 to account for the failures within the new set of rolls.