Gun Construction Kit or similar resources?

[Polydamas]

Originally Posted by ClayDowling

What I do as a GM is just use the very shortened lists in the basic set, or Action. Two of my players are gear heads, and they picked very specific guns out of High Tech. Everybody else is using the shortened list, since detailed gun traits don't really affect the story. Also, if those other players are shooting, things have gone very sideways.

I didn't know that Action had a condensed list of guns! That would be better than S. John's since his is for 3e.

[zorg]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

The two options I keep seeing are the Ballistic Spreadsheet and the Guns Guns Guns supplement (which provides instructions for getting GURPS stats).

I've been using the excellent Stuff! supplement, which let's you do weapons, gadgets, creatures and civilizations. Pretty neat.

[ClayDowling]

Originally Posted by Polydamas

I didn't know that Action had a condensed list of guns! That would be better than S. John's since his is for 3e.

It's on page 32 of Heroes.

It has nice shortened rules for custom ammo as well. Again, I let my gear head players have their head with High Tech, but they're in charge of all of the calculations and providing me the numbers I need during combat.

In general I love the Action series because it removes a lot of the fussy detail and lets me focus on the story I'm telling. I only just barely know the rules, and rely on my more detail oriented players (again, my gearheads) for specifics. I just want to kick bad-guy butt.

[Dwarf99]

So I just thought about how lasers are rated by kJ of energy output. I wonder if it might be possible to base damage on that?

EDIT: Off the top of my head, the table in spaceships 1 lists 10cm as dealing 4d Ddamage, but that's without any air resistance (I think... it's in space) so you could ballpark the air resistance as halving damage... Though upon further reflection, this works on the lower end but not so much the higher end.

[PTTG]

And now we're full circle back to 3ed vehicles.

Actually, I've been writing this stuff out and what I'm finding is that for my purposes, I'm going to have PCs build their weapons as innate attacks.

That said, I still see a place for a simplified weapon factory that has "basic" models of pretty much all common weapons and then a bunch of quirks and perks for weapons. So, your PC can just grab a TL 8 Compound Bow and throw on a Laser Sight and Enhanced Materials for a (+1 aim, +0.5 lbs, +$100) and (*0.9 lbs, Cost *3) modifications.

Of course, High Tech does a lot of this, but most of that book is taken up with hundreds of (painstakingly researched) real guns. A much smaller list of steriotyped guns and some quick modifications would suit my PCs level of interest- "I want a gun that's, like, a sawn-off shotgun except it has a revolver thing for ammo"- instead of "I want a [Insert long string of accurate acronyms] with [14 lbs of various sights, scopes, addons, and additional mounting rails] and APDSHVHE Ammo."

[Dwarf99]

Originally Posted by PTTG

And now we're full circle back to 3ed vehicles.

Perhaps I should have clarified that there's tables in 4th edition Spaceships that do energy output in kJ and don't require any math. Just look at the table column that has cm corresponding to your gun's mm. A side note: Alternate GURPS 2 presents a different table based on the square rather than the cube.

Actually, I've been writing this stuff out and what I'm finding is that for my purposes, I'm going to have PCs build their weapons as innate attacks.

I am doing that for my game, but it's TL 3+5 so the only firearms are Metatronic Generators.