The Guns of Psi-Wars

I'm pretty sure I've banged on about this before, but I've made an effort to include more alien races in Psi-Wars (there will be a post on that soon) and I've been exploring the alternate tech of alien groups like the Ranathim Tyranny and the Mug Atheocracy, which has emphasized the need to explore guns, and my own research has begun to finally bear some fruit.  As a result I've found myself confronted with the core issues with the Guns of Psi-Wars. I'm sure I've discussed this before, but there's new material before, so I apologize if this comes across as repetitive.

So, let's start with does Psi-Wars need guns? I think it does, and it needs them in the same way that settings it draws inspiration from all have guns too, despite having access to other, better weapon.  Star Wars has projectile rifles despite having blasters; 40k has slug throwers despite having micromissile "bolt" guns; Dune has Maula pistols despite having lasguns. These weapons tend to be either niche weapons meant to get around a particular problem, or they're primitive weapons used by factions that lack access to better weapons.  I particularly want to explore the latter, because the world of clean blasters and elegant, carbide armor is the Valorian Empire and the Galactic Alliance, not the world of post-apocalyptic techno-savages or primitive aliens.  Guns also allow us to deliver warheads down range.  Psi-Wars definitely has guns in a strictly literal sense in the form of grenade launchers, and weapons that fire poison darts certainly fits some factions well.

So, if we have a need for guns, how do we design them, and how do we make them fit? These two questions have plagued me, but I think I finally have some answers.

Ultra-Tech Guns: Gun Weight

Alright, so I've looked pretty closely at damage.  Today, I wanted to look at weights, as I'm pretty sure those are pretty easily determined also with Vehicles.  Let's see, shall we?  Once again, we'll take a look at several Ultra-Tech guns and see if the Vehicles gun design system gets them close to correct.  Once again, I'll note the formula, which is

B^2 * L * P * S * T * R

Where B is boresize, L is a value based on the length of the barrel, P is power (1, in our case), S has to do with bore size as well, T has to do with technology (we'll use 0.6 for this value) and R has to do with  reload time (1 for us).

If we use these values for pistols we get:

• The Heavy Pistol: We expect a weight of 1.8, and if we assume an "extremely short" barrel, which is what we got for damage, we get 1.5. Not too far off.
• The Holdout Pistol: we expect a weight of 0.8, and we get... almost exactly 0.8 (assuming an extremely short barrel)
• The Magnum Pistol: we expect a weight of 2 lbs, and we get ~3.4
• The Medium Pistol: we expect a weight of 1.5 and we get 1.7

These aren't too bad if we do some rounding off with ammunition, except for the Magnum pistol, which is much heavier than it should be.  Worse, there's no real indication as to what's wrong.  The Heavy Pistol is "too light," and the Medium Pistol is "too heavy," so there's no obvious trend, such as all the pistols being too light or too heavy.

If we jump straight to rifles, we get:

• The Anti-Materiel Rifle: We expect about 28 lbs.  With a Very Long rifle, we get the right damage, but it's too heavy at ~34 lbs.  If we assume Long, then the weight is correct, but the damage is low.
• The Assault Carbine: We expect 5.5 lbs, and we get 5.5 if we assume a Long barrel (odd for a Carbine); damage lines up too (it's a bit high, though).  If we assume the Assault Carbine is a "heavy automatic" then the barrel should be medium (that also gives us 5.5) and the damage drops to 5d+1, which is too low.
• The Gatling Carbine: We expect it to be 8 lbs, and if we assume a medium barrel and a triple barreled gatling motor (what it's described as having), we get a weight of 5.8 (too light) and a damage of 4d+1, which is close.  If we go for Long barrels, we get a weight of 8.8 and a damage of 5d.
• The Hunting Rifle has effectively the same stats as a Long Barrel 7mm, both for damage and weight.
• The Payload Rifle: this has ~28 lbs, and if we assume low-powered ammo and a medium barrel, we get ~23 and ~9 damage.  It feels like it's been fudged/iterpolated up.
• Storm Carbine: we expect this to be 6 lbs.  If we assume a medium barrel and "light" automatic, we get 7.5 lbs (too heavy) and 7d+1 damage or so, which is close.
• Storm Rifle: We expect this to be 8.8 lbs and if we assume a long barrel, we get 11 lbs, but exactly correct damage.

So, I see a consistent pattern here: the damage and weight values seem pretty closely correlated: if a particular configuration is off, it's generally off for both. If the weight is high, the damage is high, and if the weight is low, the damage is low.  So this is another value that more or less looks right, as though it was developed using the same system with, perhaps, some fudge values.

So weight looks about right, and damage looks about right, if you assume designs were fudged.

Ultra-Tech Gun Damage Revisited

Yes, I'm still working on other things.  This won't become the Ultra-Tech Gun Blog (I leave that to better men). But yesterday's post created quite a stir, and I wanted to record some thoughts and some links.

First, this. Evidently not all of Pulver's errata made it into Ultra-Tech Revised, or at least the version I have, which is a shame.  But I find it more interesting what he says at the end:

Since the Weapon Design Rules, while functional, remain vaporware, some weapons in UT were not modified if deviated too much from Basic Set. --David Pulver

This doesn't tell you anything you don't know in your heart of hearts, I suspect, but it does confirm something important: there is no gun design system and there never was. He's using some baseline (likely from GURPS Vehicles) and then either fudging the rest, or just using stats from Basic, which are likely themselves converted from 3e (which probably used GURPS Vehicles).  So, in short, the design system is probably GURPS Vehicles with a large fudge factor. If you just make it up as you go, as long as things "feel" right, you're probably fine.

EDIT: Someone wanted to note that I'm misinterpreted this statement.  There does seem to be a design system, it's just not "publishable in its current form," and we're unlikely to see it.  My point about "you can probably fudge it because they do" still stands, however, given the final part of the statement.  I also doubt we'll ever see a behind-the-scenes look at the design system, as I get the sense SJGames is very much move moving away from revealing complexities that lurk behind GURPS design choices.

The second is this, which is probably the final word in most arguments about gun design in GURPS.

I've seen this article before and bounced off it a couple of times as incomprehensible. Seems I had to get to the point where I could invent it myself in order to understand it. --Skullman

Man, I know the feeling.  Well, we let's just dive in and see how it works out.

Musings on Ultra-Tech Gun Damage

Most people who regularly participate in my discord are either $3+ patrons, or non-patrons who just really like Psi-Wars, but I have a few that are only $1 patrons and thus have only a passing interest in Psi-Wars, but mostly strip-mine my material for their own campaigns, which is fine!  That's part of the intent of what I'm doing. But a lot of my material lately has been more "Psi-Wars" specific, and not especially generic at all.

One such poster mentioned "Gauss Guns" as an off-the-cuff example of something more useful to him than what I had been posting (though I hasten to add that it wasn't meant to diminish what I was posting), and that single line got me thinking about something I honestly dread: Psi-Wars needs guns.  There are several reasons for this, but most of them revolve around illustrating a more primitive era, from the 40k-esque Mug to the hunting weapons of Nekotara, to the ancient weapons of the Tyranny, one way you can show that a particular race is ancient is to give them firearms rather than blasters (especially given that firearms are pretty much better than all beam weapons until Blasters show up, which means they can "keep up" nicely).  But this poses another problem, because the point of the Mug is to have extreme ST and to showcase what you can do with it, and part of the idea there is to give them arms and armor that take advantage of their superior ST.  So it's not enough to use the existing weapons, which are built for ST 10, SM +0 humans, because I need guns built for ST 20, SM +1 dragon-people.

So I need to be able to design guns.  And I don't have a system for it.  But my conversion of GURPS Vehicles gave me hope: it looks like most 4e vehicles are just 3e vehicles with some minor tweaks to a couple of formulas that we're largely privvy to, and a few arbitrary values chosen by the designer based on his assumptions for the vehicle.  Could the same be true of guns?

There are a lot of stats for guns.  The following, I think, can be arbitrarily assigned:

• Malf
• Acc
• Bulk
• Rcl
• LC

I suspect there's a formula behind Acc, Bulk and Rcl, but I think it's safe enough to make some basic, arbitrary assumptions: Pistols are Acc 2-ish, rifles are Acc 4-ish, and cannons are Acc 6-ish; rcl is generally 2, but it might hit 3 or maybe even 4 for extremely unwieldy weapons.  Guessing at bulk is more involved, and we need to get a sense of the weight and length of the weapon, but we'll come back to that.  But if we know these parameters, we can compare the weapon to existing weapons and make a reasonable guess.

The following are likely derived from formulas:

• Dmg
• Range
• Weight
• RoF (or at least, from design choices)
• ST
• Cost

For guessing at how these formulas work, I'm going to use Ultra-Tech exclusively.  I suspect LT and HT weapons aren't derived from formulas, but from real world stats converted into GURPS.  Thus, the only place where I think we can see a design system in action is Ultra-Tech, and that makes sense, as there are no "real-world" weapons from which the stats can be converted.  And this makes sense: if we want a gun design system it's for arbitrary weapons, like "What does a pistol for an SM +1 dragon-man look like, anyway?"  And I'm going to start with damage, as that's the most important, though we'll quickly see that the variables that matter to damage here will impact the values of other stats elsewhere.

Whenever I post something like this, someone inevitably responds with "But don't you know about X?" Someone somewhere has made a conversion, or worked out some formula and posted it somewhere on the internet.  To that, I say: Bring it.  I can use any help I can get.  I've done quite some research on this topic, and it's something I've been chewing on for a long time, so I may well know about it, but shoot it my direction anyway, or leave it as a comment, so other people can see it.  Every little bit helps, and it's safer to assume I don't know and annoy me with things that I've already seen than it is to assume I do know and then I miss the valuable, secret answer.

So, without further ado, let's look at gun damage.