Dust Off

What round for zombies?

In GURPS, thanks to a glitch in the rules, the smallest shot you can find to get the most pellets.

Shotgun pellet damage bottoms out at 1d-5(0.5) pi-.

But any damage roll always gets 1 point regardless.  So 1d-5 is another way of saying 1.  Yes, I would make the player roll.

Any fractional armor divisor (0.5, 0.2 or 0.1) divides the DR encountered by the number given or gives a DR 1 to someone with DR 0, like a zombie.

Small piercing, pi-, means we divide any damage that penetrates the DR by 2.  This is going to end up not mattering.

Because the, effective, DR 1 completely nullifies the 1 point of damage, we consult the blunt trauma rules.  For every full 10 points of damage per attack which does not penetrate flexible armor will do one point of cr damage.  Bare skin is flexible armor.

Why does this all matter?

Every pellet does 1 point of pi-, so every 10 pellets do one point of cr.

A .410 shell firing #9 birdshot lobs 293 pellets.  Potentially 29 points of damage!

The range of that .410 is a mere 10/300.  293 pellets is +7 to hit.  Ten yards is -4 to hit.  So with a net +3 a person with a Guns/TL8 (Shotgun) of 12 is, on average, going to hit with a mere 6 pellets.  At 7-yards, 7 pellets.  At 5-yards, 8 pellets.  At 3-yards, 9 pellets.  At 2 yards, 10 pellets and a single point of still no crushing damage from blunt trauma.  EDIT: Each pellet is treated as a separate attack until the Extremely Close Range rules on p. B409 kick in.

Something interesting happens at 1 yard.  You multiply the damage of a single pellet by half the number of pellets fired.  So our single point of damage becomes 146, and thus will do 14 points of crushing to our zombie.  The standard zombie has unnatural, so bringing its 10 hit points down to 0 removes the un from undead.

The cr modifier matters because zombies are also unliving.  This would normally change small piercing from 1/2 damage to 1/5 damage.  This can drop a single point of penetration to a "no damage" effect.  Crushing is better on zombies.

The downside, of course is you have to let Mr Shamblor get so very close...

But wait, there's MORE!

They make shot rounds for non-shotguns.  A Kel-Tec PMR-30 gets 30 rounds at RoF 3 and each round of #12 Pest shot carries 277 wee little pellets that would normally be 1d-5(0.2) pi-, but do 13 points of crushing each at 1 yard.

That's right, the ideal zombie gun is a Kel-Tec.