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Even though I'm not an accredited expert in the eyes of Steve Jackson Games, I was once dismissed as a hobbyist, I do know a thing or two about guns.
What exactly is a hobbyist?
They're the experts in a topic who don't make a career out of it and educate themselves on their own dimes.
I've been calculating various rounds with GURPS: Gun Stats and this book has been found wanting.
Sad trombone.
The first, gigantic, problem is that .30 Caliber M1903 ball out performs .30 Caliber M2 ball. It's like it was stupid for everyone to change over to spitzer rounds.
But spitzer rounds carry more energy farther than round-nose bullets. The 1/2D numbers generated are backwards of reality.
This fails the reality check.
Then I calculated a few pistol rounds.
9mm came out almost the same as published materials. .40 S&W was a bit worse than published and a bit better than my house rule... But .45 ACP was as good as the legends!
Way more range and +2 to the damage.
The old numbers were 2d+2 pi for 9mm and 2d pi+ for .45 ACP. This gives them almost identical damage to tissue (avg. 9 points vs 10) and reflects that 9mm is slightly better at punching things like car doors.
New numbers has .45 at 2d+2 pi+, so it will now punch car doors the same and do more damage in tissue (avg. 9 points vs 13).
This fails the reality check.
I missed something.
First, I had the wrong bullet diameter, copy paste error.
The ranges are calculated differently if the muzzle velocity is under 1,000 feet per second.
Now the damage is 2d+1 pi+ and that changes the average damages to 9 for 9mm and 11 for .45. .45 is slightly worse at car doors again!
While it seems to do fine with pistols, this book does NOT GURPS!
That's surprising and disappointing. I would've figured that they had a formula for damage from the start (I think Doug Cole reverse engineered one) and this book just publishes it. Instead, it seems they made up a formula after the fact and didn't bother to check already published stats against the formula. For a detail-oriented game such as GURPS, that's kind of unfortunate.
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So far, damage has been pretty close to what Doug and I, independently, reverse engineered. His method is more elegant.
DeleteThe ranges are getting sketchy for rifles when you compare pre-spitzer to post-spitzer.
It's broken, but I think I might be able to make it work.
I was quite amused to read a comment by Colleen McCullough, the Australian novelist. She said that when she was writing her massive series of doorstopper historical novels, Masters of Rome, she often was able to get important information about things like, e.g., the equipment of the Roman legions from material published for hobbyists and gamers. She said it was more clearly written and more cogent than the stuff published for scholars.
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