Guns! Guns! Guns! and GURPS

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by DataPacRat

Okay, good; we've got a physical mechanism for capping damage. Now - how do we figure out what number to cap said damage at?
.

With a wire-bound Taser the way to make it lethal would be to increase the amperage from 4 milliamps to 8 miliamps. in normal use milliamperage is carefully limited to 4 (non-lethal we hope). Some of the Tasers that have produced fatal results may have been over specifictions for milliamperage or maybe zapping people with electiricty is inherently unsafe for at least a small number.

......and yes, energy measured in milliamperage is not much. Taser and electric contact stunners get dozen or even hundreds of activation off a 9 volt battery.

Luke Campbell (a working high energy physicist and occaisional poster here) did once tell me that lethal electrolaser charges would require keepign the channel open 10x as long to let the charge penetrate into the heart instead of only reaching the skeletal muscles. I don't know if this would take 10x as much energy but virtually all the energy used goes into creating the ionized channel.

So neither the 3G3 or the old Gurps ve2 rules for creation of electrolasers are scientifically rigorous.

[DataPacRat]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

So neither the 3G3 or the old Gurps ve2 rules for creation of electrolasers are scientifically rigorous.

I'm open to any suggestions for increased rigorification that you could share. :)

[Anthony]

Basic problem is that we can't build electrolasers at all, so it's difficult to say what things you can and cannot tweak. In general a plasma current destabilizes over time (and is also accelerated by high beam current), possibly very small amounts of time (one of the issues with charged particle beams), so holding it open 10x as long as a lot harder, but it's hard to give exact numbers.

[Daigoro]

Have a look at Luke Campbell's blog about GURPS electroshock lasers. It might have some of the crunch you're needing.

http://panoptesv.com/RPGs/Equipment/...php?TL=10&HR=1

I do recall seeing a page that had a bit more theorising and I don't think it was this one, but Google isn't helping at the moment. It might have been about effects on the body? Does anyone recall this coming up on the forum in the past 6-12 months?


ETA:
Ah, it might be this post.

Originally Posted by lwcamp

I looked into the science of these things a while back. As others mentioned, the "electro-" part is basically just a taser's electrical waveform. For the "-laser" part, what seems to work best are fairly wide (several cm) beams of pulsed ultraviolet light*. Choose a UV wavelength with enough energy that the absorption of two photons will ionize nitrogen, but a single photon has insufficient energy to do so. With a very short, intense flash, you can get two photon ionization for a distance of several tens of meters - even to 100+ meters - with enough charge carrier density to conduct your electric pulse but that has insufficient time-averaged intensity to cause thermal burns or start fires (from the laser beam - the electric arc from the EMD waveform might ignite easily flammable items). The UV light can't get past the cornea of the eye, making it fairly eye-safe, and you would need to be exposed to the beam for an extended duration in one spot in order to develop a sunburn.

A detailed investigation is given here
http://panoptesv.com/RPGs/Equipment/...ES_physics.php
Alternate rules that more realistically follow the physics are here
http://panoptesv.com/RPGs/Equipment/...php?TL=10&HR=0
and a conceptual picture of what one might look like is here
http://panoptesv.com/RPGs/Settings/V...ar/Stunner.png

Luke

* Narrow beams lead to higher ionization density in the air, which leads to much faster recombination times, which in turn leads to an increased power needed to keep the current-carrying channels capable of conducting the beam, which leads to a higher risk of thermal burns.

[GURPS Fox]

Yeah, the only real problem that currently makes me bang my head against the wall is that, so far, there hasn't been a conventional gun equation ala the back-engineered 4e EM gun equation that I've been using.

Hence why I've been using 3G3 right now to make it more plausible.

[Rupert]

Conventional bullet damage hasn't changed since 3e, for what it's worth.

Energy weapons now scale by the cube root of output energy, with a multiplier depending on weapon type (see Pyramid 3/37).

[GURPS Fox]

Originally Posted by Rupert

Conventional bullet damage hasn't changed since 3e, for what it's worth.

Energy weapons now scale by the cube root of output energy, with a multiplier depending on weapon type (see Pyramid 3/37).

From what I understand, EM guns scale in weight similarly to DEWs...

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by GURPS Fox

From what I understand, EM guns scale in weight similarly to DEWs...

UT says "probably not".

The 3D6 Laser Pistol weighs only 1 lb sans power cell. The 6D6 Laser Rifle is 8lbs (it's D cell is in a power pack). That's 8x weight for 2x damage.

The 3D6 Gauss Machine Pistol weighs 2.4 lbs without ammo or power cells (2 Bs). The 6D+2 Gauss Rifle weighs 6.6 lbs in the same condition. Not a cubed relationship.

You might get different results from Spaceships but Spaceships is very gamist in its' scaling.

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

UT says "probably not".

The 3D6 Laser Pistol weighs only 1 lb sans power cell. The 6D6 Laser Rifle is 8lbs (it's D cell is in a power pack). That's 8x weight for 2x damage.

The 3D6 Gauss Machine Pistol weighs 2.4 lbs without ammo or power cells (2 Bs). The 6D+2 Gauss Rifle weighs 6.6 lbs in the same condition. Not a cubed relationship.

You might get different results from Spaceships but Spaceships is very gamist in its' scaling.

Spaceship's energy weapon scaling is x10 mass = x2 damage for most damage/size steps, which roughly matches a cube relationship of energy/mass and damage (and also roughly matches the 1-1.5-2-3-5-7-10 range/speed table progression of armour).

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Rupert

Spaceship's energy weapon scaling is x10 mass = x2 damage for most damage/size steps, which roughly matches a cube relationship of energy/mass and damage (and also roughly matches the 1-1.5-2-3-5-7-10 range/speed table progression of armour).

Spaceships' Projectile base damage is linear with caliber and doubles every 4 SM or 100x mass. I don't think that's the relationship GURPS Fox was aniticipating and isn't the same one the Energy Weapons use.

I generally don't use Spacships as a primary source for tech facts. That's not what it was designed for.