[Ultra Tech] Increased Firearm Power with TL

[DemiBenson]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

That would be the percentage of deer hunters using shotgun slugs.

This would be an example of how weapon and ammunition choices suffer artificial constraints.

Ok, sure.
For battlefield use, I’ll bet it’s much, much less than the “100%” value that was true centuries ago.

[Varyon]

I feel we're getting rather far afield of the thread topic. Does the idea of +20% at TL 9, +30% at TL 10, +40% at TL 11, and +50% at TL 12 make sense (assuming the users can handle the increase in felt recoil - either by being strong enough or with appropriate recoil compensating technology)? Conversely, what about weapons that can only safely manage the +10% of standard +P - do my suggested weight reductions make sense, and what impact would this have on MinST?

Or maybe +20% is actually TL 8? I came across some mentions of +P+ 9mm when looking up the popularity of .45 ACP, but from a brief bit of searching there's no proper specification for it - rather, it just means "higher chamber pressure than +P." One test I came across showed 9mm +P+ having around 25% more muzzle energy than standard 9mm, but considering GURPS firearm damage generally scales with the square root of energy (Douglas Cole's spreadsheet divides by a factor related to projectile cross-sectional area here, but as that's constant when comparing 9mm to 9mm +P+, we can ignore that), that's only around a +12% boost to damage. Then again, some of what I came across for +P had only around a +10% boost to muzzle energy, which would be around +5% to damage. Is the +10% in HT more appropriate for something like +P+, but the authors opted to let that work for +P on account of +5% damage generally being beneath GURPS resolution (you need around 6d-1 before you get a full +1 to damage)? With that in mind, might it be more appropriate for TL 9 to be +15%, TL 10 to be +20%, TL 11 to be +25%, and TL 12 to be +30%?

[apoc527]

A few thoughts:

First, this is very much what the NGSW program was all about: the chamber pressure for what will become the M5 rifle (I think that's the name?) is rather high and the new ammo uses a steel-brass hybrid case in part for this purpose. I suppose you could call that the highest end of TL8 or early TL9 if you wanted.

Second, isn't this really what ETC is for? Or are you looking for something that's an interim value between TL9 standard rounds and ETC? Alternately, if ETC isn't realistic (I don't actually know the physics of it), then this idea could be a good alternative.

I think, however, that by TL10, you may be maxing out the usefulness of higher chamber pressures and should probably look at energy weapons or magnetic propulsion, no?

[David L Pulver]

To address the original point: certainly one can make a case that ammunition chemistry will get better and material strengths also improve, and so making a rule that this is what happens every TL is quite justifiable!

In general, I wouldn't put something like that in a core "Ultra-Tech" book because it's a pain to recalculate all the ancillary numbers, any more than I'd raise damage of swords and modify breakage risks by a few percents or pluses every TL after TL8 to account for similar gradual improvements in steel alloys.

In blades, I'd be inclined to offer one "advanced alloy" option and then add a bunch of radically new technologies every couple of TLs (or via superscience) with monoedge, vibro, hyperdense or whatever.

Likewise, in guns, to avoid having to create new weapon tables every TL for every darn weapon, I'd be inclined to just focus on a couple of incremental upgrades (liquid or ETC) and maybe a single advanced propellant option that is factored into the TL9 numbers, before things go all gauss-like at high TLs.

Again, this partly due to seeing how conservative regular firearm changes were at TL6-8 in terms of raw damage and range (unless the bullet is changed), at least in GURPS terms. But it's mainly due to being sufficiently lazy that I don't want to deal with creating whole new firearm stat blocks f or TL10, TL11, and TL12 versions of TL9 guns....

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by David L Pulver

Again, this partly due to seeing how conservative regular firearm changes were at TL6-8 in terms of raw damage and range (unless the bullet is changed), at least in GURPS terms. But it's mainly due to being sufficiently lazy that I don't want to deal with creating whole new firearm stat blocks f or TL10, TL11, and TL12 versions of TL9 guns....

Blocks of guns, all alike aside from TL, and some minor stat changes with each TL are also unlikely to excite players and potential purchasers of a product including such lists either. Most players want their upgrades to have meat, or at least cool fluff. Going from a laser pistol to a blaster feels more of an upgrade than a 'laser with +1/die damage', even if that's essentially what the blaster is.