Equipment Locker: Beam SMGs and Beam Staffs

I've already made some pretty big expansions to David Pulver's system for designing energy weapons but I'm always looking for new stuff to add. The biggest gap I saw that needed filling was the lack of any intermediate weapon form factors between pistols and rifles. In real life, the personal defence weapon (PDW) is a vital part of most modern military and police forces, as it gives a happy medium of firepower, controllability, and manoeuvrability in small spaces. For added fun, I also came up with a way to make energy weapons into long staffs, like the Goa'uld staff weapon from the Stargate series. Any plasma SMGs, blaster PDWs, or laser staffs you want can be made with the tricks here!

Review: Ultra-Tech Print-On-Demand

My preference for RPG books is always PDFs – I use a laptop when GMing anyway, since I like keeping notes, files and information on a computer because the structuring feels more logical to me. I find PDFs easier to navigate through than books, thanks to instant page-jumping and text search, so all of my GURPS collection is digital.

Until now! In preparation for my upcoming game, I bought hard copies of GURPS Basic Set Characters, GURPS Basic Set Campaigns and GURPS Ultra-Tech, the main books I'll need at the table. I bought them from Amazon UK and the copy of Ultra-Tech seems to have been print-on-demand, so I'll do a quick review of it!

Equipment Locker: Mystery Crate I

I often come up with bits and pieces of equipment that don't really fit into any larger theme. I like combing through GURPS Ultra-Tech and the Pyramid magazines devoted to sci-fi to come up with combination gadgets or gear inspired by existing equipment. And rather than let these sit on my computer with no-one seeing them, I thought I'd throw a few of them together at once and put them in a post, as a random grab bag of technology.

So let's open the first crate and see what's inside.

Equipment Locker: Lightning Guns, Galvanised

I made a post a while ago about back-converting electrolasers to lethal electricity weapons and mentioned at the end of the post that I'd use my then-upcoming expansions to the beam design system to give them a more traditional progression and spread of weapons. And now I've finally got around to it! Check after the jump for the details.

Equipment Locker: New Beams for Blaster and Laser Design

I think I've talked about and teased my expansion to David Pulver's Blaster and Laser Design system for too long. So rather than keep you waiting even as far as the "Read More" button, here are the important numbers!

These were made from reverse-engineering energy weapons in GURPS Ultra-Tech. Pulver's system doesn't gel perfectly with them; some have non-exact focusing arrays or have slightly varying costs or shots. A lot of this can be put down to rounding errors; when you build a weapon that costs $4,956 you round up to $5,000, and when your power cell gives you 45.8 shots you drop the fraction and get 45. That makes working backwards a little trickier but not impossible. The bigger issue was holdout weapons, which almost uniformly had too many shots, too long range, and too little weight for their damage. This is the main caveat emptor for my expansions to the system: weapons smaller than a pistol won't work the same as the ones in Ultra-Tech.

There are some more specific things you'll need to know in addition to the numbers above. Those are continued after the jump.

Equipment Locker: Sonic Disruptors

I've been a fan of The Generic Universal Roleplaying Blog ever since I first encountered it. A recent post on it that was part of this week's GURPSday haul was Ultra-Tech Quickie: More Options for the Blaster and Laser Design System. TheRyujinLP nicely encapsulated the chemical power packs for TL9 lasers, which I intended to do at one point, though they did so much more elegantly and simply than I probably would have. Another large part of the post was weight modifiers based on TL – prototype weapons that are heavy, mature weapons that are light. I've been considering including sonic screamers in my space opera setting but wasn't really happy about the lag in TL, since the setting is TL10^. But with Ryujin's little expansion, I can now extrapolate sonic screamers to TL10!

In the process, you get a sneak peak at my own expansion to the Blaster and Laser Design System: sonic screamers and stunners, plasma flamers and guns, electrolasers, and neural disruptors.

Equipment Locker: Lightning Guns

When going through GURPS Ultra-Tech for the five-billionth time, something occurred to me. Blasters can have an omniblaster setting, which gives them a nonlethal stun mode. It turns dice of damage into a penalty on a HT roll and drops the armour divisor one step. I turned back a few pages, to the electrolasers. They have penalties to HT rolls and an armour divisor... Can you do the same backwards?

I mean, obviously you can because a) I'm writing this post and b) this is GURPS. So here are write-ups for two different varieties or flavours of lethal "electric guns".

Equipment Locker: Boser Weapons

I've been reading Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space recently and highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys science fiction (and not just because Reynolds is a fellow Welshman). Reynolds' setting is best described as relativistic space opera; spacecraft called lighthuggers travel between star systems at a hair's breadth below the speed of light, their Ultranaut crews genetically and cybernetically modified to endure years-long voyages and repeated hibernation. Inhabited planets and star systems have an array of different technological levels, with the splinter group of humanity called the Conjoiners responsible for ridiculously advanced technology that exhibits Clarke's Third Law. The thing that piqued my attention enough to write a blog post was a type of weapon several characters use in the book, called a boser.

"Boser" obviously has a hint of "laser" about it, following in the tradition of masers, grasers and spasers by making a portmanteau of laser and something else. But what they actually were baffled me for a while. A hint comes during an altercation about halfway through the book on the planet Resurgam, where the beam of a boser is described as "coherent matter". This made me curious enough to look it up and as soon as I saw the words "Bose-Einstein condensate", I immediately understood. For those without the background in particle physics I have, I'll explain below, and give some highly speculative statistics.

Equipment Locker: Pressor Weapons

While Halo's gravity hammer is probably currently the best-known example of this kind of weapon, 'gravity hammers', 'impact hammers', 'pressor weapons', or whatever you like to call them have been seen in science fiction for a while. GURPS Ultra-Tech comes close to giving us them with the rocket striker (p. 163) but stops just short of giving us anything more sci-fi than rocket-assisted melee weapons, at least for those of us who prefer blunt instruments to fancy knives. Thankfully, the tools we need to build these weapons are all in the book and only need a creative application of the Combination Gadgets rules (p. 16), to tease them out.

Eidetic Memory: Ultra-Tech Armour Design... Review

I had recently begun a post here where I updated David Pulver's articles Eidetic Memory: Low-Tech Armour Design and Eidetic Memory: Cutting Edge Armour Design from Pyramid #3/52 and #3/85 to work for TL10 and up, having reverse-engineered armouring materials from the items in GURPS Ultra-Tech.

If you've seen the latest Pyramid (#3/96 - Tech and Toys IV) you'll know that unfortunately for me, Pulver has beaten me to the punch! I was working on something a little more extensive than his materials, trying to generalise his more-detailed approach to TL9 armours up to TL12. That post isn't quite ready yet, since I still have some fiddling and noodling to do with some values of them, so instead I thought I'd do a quick test/review of Ultra-Tech Armour Design by building a few armours with it.

Equipment Locker: Gyroladar Launch Pistol

A friend and I regularly pick each others' brains for GURPS concepts, ideas and advice and one of our recent discussions was a kind of "enchanted weapon" for a boss to wield in a semi-hard TL10 space opera game where humanity fell then rose again (somewhat like Traveller). The idea of "boss loot" is tricky to do in science fiction, since the vast majority of objects are mass-produced (or 3D printed) but fall-and-rise-again space opera gives you a certain amount of wiggling room if the previous civilisation was more advanced than the current one. The other constraint was that it can't rely on special ammo, since the specialness of the weapon degrades a bit if you can just stuff it's ancient 10mm rounds into your modern gun.

The idea I came up with was a gyroc pistol with an active targeting sensor on it, that uses it to auto-adjust itself. I didn't get time to build it in detail at the time (since anyone who regularly reads this blog should know I'm fond of using the combination gadgets rule to make new items) but I took some time to do it properly, so here's the entire process, as well as the result.

Equipment Locker: Battlesuit Point Defence

One of the most annoying holes in GURPS Ultra-Tech is the comparison between armour-piercing or shaped charge warheads with both heavy battlesuits and tanks. The DR values given for either of these are woefully inadequate at stopping even the lightest shaped charge or HEMP round. I was reading through the entries for tanks, trying to find some justification for why the main battle tank doesn't have enough DR to stop being ripped to shreds by a shoulder-mounted HEMP round. Then I found it: the tank has a strike laser on the turret for point defence. This makes sense! If you can stop missiles and anti-tank weapons from even hitting you in the first place, you don't need to lug around armour heavy enough to stop the damage. Well, that's all well and good for tanks, but how does that help battlesuits?

As per usual, GURPS Ultra-Tech provides us with the tools to make what we want, it just doesn't put them together for us.

Equipment Locker: Laser Sword

I was a little dissatisfied with the selection of melee weapons in GURPS Ultra-Tech. Vibroblades are cool but I wanted something a little lower-tech than a force sword that still had an 'energy sword' feel. There's also issues with the immense power of force swords, so you can't really just dial down the TL on them. This is where the laser sword comes in.

Playbook: High-Cyclic Controlled Bursts for Ultra-Tech Guns

GURPS High-Tech has a great little rule where some guns can fire "high-cyclic controlled bursts". For those who haven't read the book, this is when a gun fires several rounds so quickly after each other that they all leave the barrel before the has moved due to recoil, giving the entire burst Recoil 1. GURPS Ultra-Tech was written before this rule was devised, so lacks rules for them, even though it explicitly mentions that ultra-tech firearms can stack cartridges within the barrel for ultra-fast firing speeds! So I wrote some quick rules to fix this.

Reliquary: Karpov Arms LBV-M47

The Karpov Arms LBV-M47 (Lazernaya Bitva Vintovka Modela 47, or "Laser Combat Rifle, Model 47") is a military-grade light laser carbine manufactured by the now-defunct Karpov Arms corporation. Karpov Arms went out of business at least forty years ago, yet newly-made LBV-M47s still show up in the hands of guerilla armies, criminals and mercenaries across the galaxy, all either with the serial numbers filed off or with the stamp of some armoury nobody's heard of.