[Ultra-Tech] ergonomic paradigms for sidearms, smallarms, and body armour

[Agemegos]

A long time ago in a land far away there was an artist working on a comic set in my perennial SF setting, FLAT BLACK. I liked Max, and enjoyed working with him, but his background was in manga, and his habit was to draw futuristic pistols the size and shape of a hair-drier. They looked powerful to him. I pointed out to him that we can already make huge pistols such as the Desert Eagle, and that nobody uses them because they are too big, too heavy, and recoil too much. Futuristic technology isn't going to give us the ability to build bigger pistols. We can already do that. It's going to let us build deadlier weapons that are more reliable and safer and have larger ammo capacities but that we can still carry all day on our belt, draw and use while we are in a cockpit, wear under our jackets without freaking the civilians, hide in a coat pocket, or carry in a purse. The power and range of sidearms and smallarms are constrained by the ergonomics of wearing or carrying them, drawing them, presenting and aiming them, and firing them controllably. Future-tech pistols will be no larger and may be smaller than the service pistols, police pistols, pocket pistols, and holdout pistols of today. {Note also that an M4 carbine is smaller than a Garand, which is smaller than an '03 Springfield, which is smaller than a Kentucky rifle.}

GURPS is dedicated to reality checking, and one reflection of that is that its native way of acknowledging the range of sidearms is to include stats and descriptions for a great range of real guns &c. A system for representing guns more abstractly is not GURPS' preferred way of doing things. So, when I was running a ~TL10^ SF campaign Icelander, a GURPS stalwart, naturally felt that the way to treat the range of available smallarms was to make up a raft of different models, with manufacturer's brands, quirky model names and numbers, production and procurement histories, unique quirks and foibles &c. — in short, to write a whole fictitious TL10 "Adventuring Guns" for one particular TL10^ setting. I admire — I am awed by — his energy, but that isn't actually my preferred way of doing things. For a start, in that setting there is virtually no interstellar trade in weapons, so few manufacturers or models model is known on more than one of the thousand inhabited worlds. And to follow up I recognise in that setting ten different development levels each producing weapons with different methods and distinct levels of technical sophistication.

FLAT BLACK's native RPG was the long out-of-print ForeSight, which took a different approach. At each tech level (or, sometimes, half-integer tech level) there was a small collection of paradigmatic weapons of quite different types. For example, at TL 6 (its near-future TL) it offered the needle pistol, cone pistol, cone rifle, auto cone rifle, and self-designating heavy cone rifle, while at TL 7 (its STL space-travel TL) it offered the stun pistol, stun rifle, stun cannon, laspistol, lasrifle. And then there was a system of weapons modifications that you could apply (in combinations, if you desired) to produce "cheap", "quality", "heavy", "light", "target", "reliable", "old/rusty", or "cut-down" variants of the base weapon. The TL 5 "SL pistol" was a 1970-vintage 9mm service pistol. A "heavy SL pistol" was a .45, a "heavy, heavy SL pistol" was a Desert Eagle or such monster. A "light SL pistol" was a .380 or 7.65 police pistol, a "cut-down SL pistol" was a short-barreled nine with reduced ammo capacity, a "cut-down light SL pistol" was a pocket pistol (kriminal) in 7.65 or so. The same modifications could be applied at different TLs to different base weapons from the master table, producing service pistol, general officers' model/police, pocket pistol etc. versions of the "cone pistol", "laspistol", "DEXAX needle pistol", "TD laspistol", "stun pistol", and "projac laspistol". I was keen on the "heavy quality DEXAX needle pistol"; a friend swore by the "target, target, target-designating laser rifle".

{Like the excellent James Bond 007 RPG on which it was partly based, ForeSight had rules for concealment of various weapons in and draw of them from different carries, which I valued as giving player characters an interesting incentive to carry something other than the largest and most brutally effective weapons. The weapon modifications affected the weapons' Draw and Concealment stats in way I found satisfying.}

Now, supposing that we were do devise such a system for fictitious ultra-tech weapons in GURPS. What ergonomic paradigms should we aim at producing for future-tech small-arms and sidearms? Is a military service pistol and an infantry weapon the best base model to put in the master table?

And moving on to body armour, what are the ergonomic paradigms that ought to be represented at each technology. Concealable, flexible, heavy?