The other day, I was searching the library catalog for Gene Wolfe books. One thing that popped up was a Hammer's Slammers compilation, to which he wrote an intro. I grabbed it, both to read the intro and to read any Slammer's stories I'd missed. There were a couple, surprisingly, and a novel that I missed as well. Lucky for me I didn't miss Rolling Hot, which is just excellent.
That got me thinking, did anyone ever think out what Powerguns would be like in GURPS? They're ammo fed, not battery, but they're energy weapons. No recoil, fire in straight lines, and otherwise act like energy weapons. They tear people up rather than torch them . . . so, lasers? Blasters? Plasma weaponry? I'm fuzzy on what they should be in GURPS terms.
There is a Hammer's Slammers RPG using Traveller, though, on DriveThruRPG. I didn't notice it until now, though.
I'm certainly not going to run a campaign with a Dutch mercenary tank unit using powerguns, but if someone has noodled around on the details of how they'd do the equipment in GURPS I'd like to see a link to it!
Hammers Slammers is something I haven’t thought about in years! Now I want to run that in Gurps
ReplyDeleteBut I want to read about the Dutch Mercenary Tank Unit Campaign!
ReplyDeleteThere was an option for chemically pumped lasers in the third-edition Ultra-Tech or UT2 books, IIRC. This way, you can do "power cartridges" and little to no external power input, but have a laser or laser-like output.
ReplyDeleteI'll have to see if I have UT2 somewhere in my collection. All of my 3e stuff is physical only and it's not stored on-premises any more.
Delete"how they'd do the equipment in GURPS"
ReplyDeleteMy quicky napkin level notes on it would be: Use slugthrowers, change the fluff text, increase ACC but otherwise keep the crunch.
The issue with that is the crunch is wrong. The ammo might be right, I could increase ACC and set Recoil to 1 (they're recoilless), but the range, damage effects, incidental effects (setting fires, etc.), penetration, and interaction with armor would be different. If I'm changing all of that it's easier to just start from scratch, since also the ammo, likely the weight, etc. will be off as well. That's why I'm wondering if someone else did this first.
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