[UT] Gun Generator v0.3

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by RogerBW

Just in case, I should probably say again that this playtest isn't for any kind of "GURPS Gun Design". You don't start from scratch and design a pistol as you can with the system in this thread. You start with real-world numbers and get out GURPS stats that should be reasonably consistent with the stats already in High-Tech etc..

Yeah, that's part of why I'm thinking it would be best for me to sit it out. Real world gun specifications can be interesting, but my primary interest is in designing novel weapons rather than converting existing ones. I'll certainly be getting the book when it comes out - probably on release day - and then seeing if I can break and twist it into some flavor of design system (although even if I can't, it would still a worthy purchase, even if only to demonstrate interest in gearhead-adjacent products - and I'm sure I'd find other uses for it).

...

To actually add something to the discussion, I wanted to look at three of the things I've struggled with for my own design attempts - ST, Bulk, and Rcl.

For ST, it looks like you basically have it scaling roughly with the square root of ST for pistols, the fifth root of ST for rifles, and the third root of ST for cannon. I'm curious as to why you opted for this. For my own, I just went with ST = 5*(Weight)^0.5, and had rifles (which are two-handed) use 2/3 normal weight, as is typical for two-handed weapons.

For Bulk, your length-based numbers almost match the Size and Speed/Range Table, but are a bit off. Why did you opt for these cutoffs instead of SSR? Does it simply match better with existing weapons? For my own, I put a 200 mm overall length at -1, 300 at -2, 500 at -3, etc, with in-between values rounding up, as is standard for SSR.

Finally, for Rcl, I'm simply curious where you came up with your equation from. For my own... I pretty much had no idea where to start, so I just set the most powerful weapons - those with a muzzle velocity of 320 m/s (the speed limit for my gear rifles) - to have Rcl 5 and had Rcl scale linearly with muzzle velocity (which worked out to Rcl=V/64). I think I like your suggestion better.