Blaster and Laser Design Plasma Hack

[The_Ryujin]

I'm hoping to be running a campaign in the near future and wanted plasma weapons to be a option in it (realistic or not my potential players want em and hey, they're cool) but Ultra Tech doesn't have enough plasma weapon options for my liking and sadly the Blaster and Laser Design article from Pyramid 3/37 didn't offer any options to fix that...

Or... does it?


Well, I think the title I gave this thread kind sucked what little mystery there might of been out that question but yeah, by taking the examples given in the aftermentioned article I was able to figure out how to unravel how both flamers and plasma guns were stated... At lest for the most part.

Flamers
Outside of the funky way cost is figured and the fact that bulk seems a little off for them, flamers line up remarkably well with the blaster and laser design rules- to the point that I think they were omitted only do to page count limits and not do to rules compatibility.

Alright, below is all you need to stat up your own (near) RAW flamer:

Accuracy

Beamer: N/A
Pistol: 3
Rifle: 6
Cannon: 12

Range
A flamers ranges are figured as normal for a beam weapon but with a Rb of only 2.

Weight
Figured as normal, E is 3 for flamers but G is always 1.

ROF
Should actually be counted as Jet for flamers via word of Pulver and Kromm.

Shots
Shots for a TL9^ flamer using a TL9 power cell is 1800. Assumedly shots from higher TL power cells would cause the number of shots to go up by a factor of 4 per TL. Now as for where the hell the hydrogen for the shots come from, that's not addressed. Either just hand wave it, assume that it sucks in atmosphere (making it useless in space) or that like plasma guns each "power cell" is actually half non rechargeable power cell and half fuel (though it seems that with plasma guns "power cells" only go up by a factor of 2 to 2.5 per TL).

ST
Figured as normal.

Bulk
Can't tell if flamers used a different, maybe earlier, formula for figuring bulk or if just that David made odd rounding choices but if you use the formula as is and use a SB of 1.25 then you'll get results that gel close enough.

Rcl.
Is 1.

Cost
Don't know about you but flamers use a weird ass formula for figuring cost that's nothing like how other beam weapons are figured. Replace the formula from the article with:

$19 x D^3 x Cf

D^3 is dice of damage cubed.

Cf is based on the focal array: 0.25 for tiny, 0.5 for very small, 0.8 for small, 1 for medium, 1.25 for large, 1.6 for very large, or 2 for extremely large.

Why use a base of nineteen bucks? Why not base cost on weight directly like everything else? Hopefully one day we'll find out.

And that's it! Now that you got all this, no doubt you're gonna go off and stat up the flamers from Ultra Tech to see if everything adds up and very quickly you'll see that the numbers you come up with match up with what's been published for the assault, heavy and hand flamers but when you try to make the semi-portable flamer... Things get kinda crazy. But there's a reason for this! You'd think that since it lists its damage as 6dx3 that it's dice of damage should be 18 right? WRONG! It's actual damage is 16d- not 18! David just rounded up. Stat it as having 16 dice of damage with a very small focual array and everything is gonna be cool.

Plasma Guns
Despite being the only "beam" weapon to shoot matter, plasma guns still largely follow the normal design rules with only major difference being how range and ST is figured. Note that there seems to be no difference statwise between a TL11^ plasma gun and a TL11^ fusion gun aside from the name so I just use the term TL11^ plasma gun to mean both in the rules below.

Accuracy

Beamer: No love for beamers here either it seems.
Pistol: 4
Rifle: 8
Cannon: 12

Range
Plasma guns use a different formula for figuring 1/2d range then other beam weapons:

50 x D x Rf

D is dice of damage flat, not squared or cubed.
Rf is the same as in the article.

Max range is figured as normal.

Weight
TL10^ plasma guns have a E of 6, every thing else is as written. TL11^ plasma guns weigh half as much as.

Note that the plasma cannon and semi portable plasma gun (for both TL) published weights do not line up with weights of the other plasma guns. For example the TL10^ plasma cannon is over 3x lighter then it should but there is no sign of it having a smaller focal array while the semi portable plasma gun is 20lbs. too heavy. I have no idea if these are typos, somehow just special cases or Pulver just ran short on time and pulled the weights out of thin air.

ROF
No changes here.

Shots
Keep in mind that plasma guns don't use normal power cells but rather is half non rechargeable power cell and half tank of hydrogen buuut... are otherwise treated as normal power cells.

TL10^ plasma guns using a TL10 "power cell" have a shots of 7200.

TL11^ plasma guns using a TL11 "power cell" seem to only have 2 to 2.5 (not sure since I dont know what the unrounded numbers were orginally) times the numbers of shots compared the TL10 version which is odd but I don't think it would break anything if you use the normal 4x increase per TL the other beam weapons use.

Following this tend then a TL12 power cell would either give 4, 5 or 8 times the number of shots, pick your poison.

ST
Ok... I'm gonna have to dance around this one since plasma guns use the ST formula normal fire arms use so I can't quite post that here so I'll have to give a rule of thumb instead: find a normal gun of roughly the same weight with a Rcl of 2 and just use it's ST stat.

Bulk
In so far as I can tell no formal formula was used to determine the bulk penalties for plasma guns, they seem to have just been picked from a table based on type of weapon and weight. Either eyeball bulk based the listed examples or just use the normal bulk formula.

Rcl
Is 2.

Cost
For rifle type plasma guns (as well as the light plasma pistol) their cost is pretty constant at 2000 x weight for TL10^ and 1800 x weight for 11^. For plasma guns that use the gunner skill (and the heavy plasma pistol) the prices however are all over the place at 500 times weight for the Plasma Cannon (price is the same at both TL for all guns under this lsit),1280 for the plasma Gatling gun and 2000 for the semi portable plasma gun. Oh, and the heavy plasma pistol clocks in at a totally not random 2434.78. I guess just pick whatever price point that seems good to you for your campaign and run with it.

And there you have it, now you too can stat up your very own RAW compliant custom bringer of ionized death. Or at lest something that's reasonably close to RAW till the armoury book comes out.

And feed back and error finding is welcome as well as any attempts to divine the parts I couldn't.

[ericthered]

Wow, Your timing is superb! I was just about to try making the exact same thing-- at least for flamers. Now all I have to do is update my excel doc. Thanks!

The lack of beamers is really a pitty for flamers, particularly considering that they are often used for destroying nano and just about anything damage helps with that, so a beamer really makes sense. Here we are:

nano-torch (light): 1d burn range 4/12 ROF jet weight .1/B shots 180(3) ST 1 bulk 0 cost $25
nano-torch (heavy): 2d burn range 8/24 ROF jet weight .8/C shots 225(3) ST 3 bulk -1 cost $150

A small, inexpensive tool you can give all your troops, hazmat crews, or scientists who call hazmat far too often.
acc is undetermined, but it has either 1 or 2. take your pick-- I would personally go with 2, but that's me making up stuff.

[The_Ryujin]

Originally Posted by ericthered

Wow, Your timing is superb! I was just about to try making the exact same thing-- at least for flamers. Now all I have to do is update my excel doc. Thanks!

Glad my timing worked out so well heh.

Strangely I seem to be having rather (semi-) serendipitous events as late heh. Two days ago I watched Nausicaä at roughly the same time a thread asking about converting the setting to gurps popped up (which sadly doesn't seem to going anywhere at this point) and yesterday I was watching Aladdin when... I found out... Yeah I was almost a sobbing mess at the end when Genie was saying goodbye... Yeah.

The lack of beamers is really a pitty for flamers, particularly considering that they are often used for destroying nano and just about anything damage helps with that, so a beamer really makes sense. Here we are:

nano-torch (light): 1d burn range 4/12 ROF jet weight .1/B shots 180(3) ST 1 bulk 0 cost $25
nano-torch (heavy): 2d burn range 8/24 ROF jet weight .8/C shots 225(3) ST 3 bulk -1 cost $150

A small, inexpensive tool you can give all your troops, hazmat crews, or scientists who call hazmat far too often.

Looks good though if you need to give your scientists a plasma thrower because his experiments keep escaping... I think you might want to look over your containment protocols first... And then your scientist's competency second.

acc is undetermined, but it has either 1 or 2. take your pick-- I would personally go with 2, but that's me making up stuff.

If I where to make a guess at what the official Acc for a flamer beamer (wow, that sounds almost doublely derogatory if you say that fast enough heh) I'd give them a 1(with a 2 for a plasma gun beamer) BUT given that flamers use the beam Weapon (Projector) skill I think a "hand flamer" (which uses the pistol Acc) is sorta supposed to be the flamers version of a beamer already. But at the end of the day it's your campaign and if you want a civie flamer with an Acc of 2 then go for it, it does make sense that a flamer that's little more then a longer range plasma tourch wouldn't need to have that much accuracy anyways.

[apoc527]

This is super handy and amazingly well timed for me as well! Thanks!