[Ultra Tech] Increased Firearm Power with TL

[David L Pulver]

To address the original point: certainly one can make a case that ammunition chemistry will get better and material strengths also improve, and so making a rule that this is what happens every TL is quite justifiable!

In general, I wouldn't put something like that in a core "Ultra-Tech" book because it's a pain to recalculate all the ancillary numbers, any more than I'd raise damage of swords and modify breakage risks by a few percents or pluses every TL after TL8 to account for similar gradual improvements in steel alloys.

In blades, I'd be inclined to offer one "advanced alloy" option and then add a bunch of radically new technologies every couple of TLs (or via superscience) with monoedge, vibro, hyperdense or whatever.

Likewise, in guns, to avoid having to create new weapon tables every TL for every darn weapon, I'd be inclined to just focus on a couple of incremental upgrades (liquid or ETC) and maybe a single advanced propellant option that is factored into the TL9 numbers, before things go all gauss-like at high TLs.

Again, this partly due to seeing how conservative regular firearm changes were at TL6-8 in terms of raw damage and range (unless the bullet is changed), at least in GURPS terms. But it's mainly due to being sufficiently lazy that I don't want to deal with creating whole new firearm stat blocks f or TL10, TL11, and TL12 versions of TL9 guns....