Friday, October 31, 2014

GURPS: Fun with weird recoil

I'm considering that, as listed, buck and ball fits the Metro far better than traditional slugs. No loss in power, only a bit of range lost (in an almost entirely CQB setting), along with a good bit of extra damage.

Things get weird, however, when you start putting buck and ball shotshells in guns that get more than one per round.

With buckshot, shotguns are treated as recoilless. Every further degree of success gets you another hit. With buck and ball, the first hit is always the slug, and any further successes are buckshot. No information is given for multiple shots.

My leaning is this; in a repeating gun, you get another slug on target every time you reach the slug recoil. First success gets a slug, then you get buckshot with all further ones until you get to the required 5 (even if this has buckshot from the second shell using successes, as would be the case in a slug+3 buckshot shell).

However, if you go for a double barrel (or bolt two shotguns together), it's straight up recoilless. Fire both barrels at once, first two successes are slugs, and beyond that is buckshot.


It gets even weirder when you start bolting guns together into twin-linked configurations. GURPS sadly does not list stats for the Villar-Perosa has stats for the Villar-Perosa as an LMG with a bipod, Assuming it's fired prone, it keeps the same rcl 2 of most other 9mm guns, and merely has a doubled rate of fire. GURPS recoil stats take muzzle climb/etc into effect for making bullets fail to connect, and it seems like a gun that does not weigh double firing two rounds at once would have somewhat increased recoil. Alternatively, both barrels firing at once would tend to put the rounds side by side.


This seems like something of a can of worms, and I may well just declare "screw it" and call it close enough at basic unchanged recoil.

1 comment:

  1. First thing to note is the 10mm (.40 cal) minimum caliber and smoothbore specifically.

    The second difficulty is buck and ball went out of fashion when repeaters entered the scene. It's typical of Mr Christian-Vorsitch that he didn't consider a more modern action using the abandoned loads. Especially funny since there's modern .410 loaded in what's essentially b-n-b for guns like the Taurus Judge.

    Shotguns are a goofy case. Recoil isn't the "recoil" of the gun, it's the controllability/repeatability chance. The slug first rule is a simplification to keep from having to randomly determine which round hit. The rule as written makes the first hit a ball and all of the rest buck. That cuts its utility a lot and incorporates muzzle climb into the equation nicely.

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