[Ultra Tech] Increased Firearm Power with TL

[Varyon]

This is something that occurred to me when David Pulver asked about things people would have liked in UT (over in the digital camera thread).

The idea is that, as materials improve, so can the chamber pressure of firearms. HT has the +P option that is initially a bit risky (reduced Malf), but at higher TL's doesn't have any issues (IIRC, at TL 7 the +P option only reduces Malf for finicky fully-automatic weapons, while at TL 8 it doesn't reduce Malf for anything). With that in mind, might it be appropriate for higher TL's to have access to even-more-powerful variants of +P?

The RAW version is +10% damage and +10% to MinST (due to increased felt recoil), and can be considered (assuming I got the above relationships right, going off memory here) to be mature at TL 8. Would it be a stretch to have +20% damage and +20% to MinST, without a drop in Malf, at TL 9, +30% at TL 10, +40% at TL 11, and +50% at TL 12? Could you potentially eke out another +10% with a variant that reduces the Malf of fully-automatic weapons... or maybe even +20% with a variant that reduces Malf for all weapons?

Of course, if the above is the case, your firearms are arguably over-engineered - so you could have lighter ones that can't handle those increased pressures. How much weight reduction would make sense, here? In Classic Vehicles, both damage and weight scale linearly with power. A weapon that is designed to handle 110% damage without issue (so, ~TL 8) would thus be 110% of the weight that would be needed for only being able to handle 100% damage. If we assume nobody is going to design weapons that cannot handle TL 8 +P, this means we could have a weight multiplier of 0.92 at TL 9, 0.85 at TL 10, 0.79 at TL 11, and 0.73 at TL 12; my inclination would be to just round these to 0.9, 0.85, 0.8, and 0.75, respectively.

The fly in the ointment above is felt recoil, which influences MinST (hence the boost to MinST when using +P) and increases as weapon weight decreases. How much would MinST increase for the above weight multipliers? I'm thinking +10%, +20%, +30%, and +40% (mimicking the effect of using +P of one TL lower), does that make sense? That is, at TL 12, a firearm that can only manage (at least without worsening Malf) +10% to damage from increasing the propellant would have 75% of the weight but 1.4x the MinST? That feels a little excessive, but I've never really been clear on how that should work...