contemporary swedish hunting rifle

[Jerron]

Might I suggest she use a shotgun? The usual choice for small game would be a shotgun, not a rifle. By small, I'm talking birds, rabbits, that sort of thing. Squirrel could be either, because they sit still long enough to take aim.

Something GURPS doesn't model well, IMO, is the canceling of movement penalties with the spread of shotgun pellets. Or maybe size penalties. Anyhow, with a 7.62 bolt action, and a 12 gage shotgun, your character would be pretty much set for anything. The downside would of course be two types of ammunition and two guns to tote around, but really does anyone go for both big and small game at the same time. There are specialty guns that combine the two, and have two barrels, but with the mention of price, I'm sure you won't be wanting them. They're horribly expensive because they're mostly only found handmade.

Personally, in the US, I find the shotgun much more useful. In populated areas, we're not even allowed to use the rifle to hunt, you need to use a shotgun slug. (That's like a big bullet fired from a shotgun, instead of lots of little pellets. It has considerably less range because shotguns aren't rifled.) If I were to recommend to a person who only wanted on gun, I would recommend (IRL) a shotgun. You won't get the mountain top - to - mountain top shots because the range isn't there, but I don't live near any mountains. You will be able to hunt moose in the woods or swamp where the shots are taken at shorter ranges, anyhow, and you will be able to hunt anything from rabbits on up. The only real restriction is knowing you can't hit anything far away.

Of course, I extremely dislike GURPS modeling of shotguns, but that's another point entirely. One thing that's odd is, if you are at extreme close range (and the target has no armor whatsoever, so useful for zombie games only, pretty much) the pellets do more damage than the slugs, and it goes up if you get really small pellets. IRL, really small pellets bounce off, I've shot my sister by accident before and had nothing worse than getting yelled at over it. (I was using very small target shooting pellets, something you probably wouldn't even hunt birds with.)