Does the CSC make Gauss Rifles over powered?

[justacaveman]

TNE Superdense is apparently tougher than tungsten and makes good hulls, but I don't think it's as dense as Depleted Uranium (I could be wrong).

 

[Egil Skallagrimsson]

I have created some variant gauss and laser weapons (about a dozen) of various tech levels, including some semi-auto civilian models for my game. I have a complete write-up that includes stats that I created for the missing 8mm Gauss Sniper Rifle info in CSC. I have it available in several formats and can email it to anyone who wants it.

I also have a House Rule that makes Laser and Plasma weapons Semi-Armour Piercing, and Fusion weapons as Full AP. I considered making Plasma weapons Full AP, and Fusion weapons as Super AP, but that seemed to be a bit of overkill ( Not that overkill is bad mind you, but I wanted G-garriers to be more than big targets.).

Yeah, I am still playing around with similar ideas, if I decided to use the AP for gauss rifles perhaps making a TL13 laser rifle SAP, and a TL15 one AP, or allowing +3 vs armour and +6 vs armour respectively, which amounts to much the same.

But all this weakens the advantage of armour, especially the top of range combat armours and battle dress, whereas I quite like the idea that armour that expensive provides very convincing protection against small arms (forcing those dealing with battle dress equipped opponents to trade up to using Anti-material rifles, AT missiles and PGMP to deal with them).

Egil

 

[justacaveman]

I also have a house rule that drops the armour-piercing ratings of weapons by 1 step for every 3 TL's difference (Never goes negative.). This means that lower tech weapons are less effective against high tech armour.

For Example: A TL12 Gauss Rifle firing at TL15 armour can only ignore 4 points of armour with DSAP ammo, and 2 points with regular ammo.

A TL6 Heavy Machinegun firing at TL15 armour couldn't ignore any armor no matter what ammo it uses because of the 3 step drop in armour penetration.

This rule makes Combat Armour and Battle Dress much more effective against lower tech weapons.

And even a TL10 Diplo Vest is more effective against your typical Assault Rifle, SMG, and Autopistol etc..

I also use a house rule that has Armour convert 1/2 of the penetrating damage (up to the armour rating) into what I call Temporary Stun Damage points that are recovered at a rate of 1 per hour. You record all the regular damage points first, then assign the TSD points like they were separate hits. Subsequent regular damage can overwrite TSD points turning them to regular damage, and subsequent TSD points that overwrite TSD points convert them to regular damage. I've found that this rule seems to fix the weak armor problem in MGT.

Example: TL6 Autopistol fired at TL7 Cloth armour does 7 points. The armour absorbs 3 points of damage and 4 points penetrate. 2 points are regular damage taken from Endurance (8 in this case), and 2 points of TSD are also taken from endurance. Next shot is better and does 11 points, 3 are absorbed and 8 penetrate (5 regular, 3 TSD). 5 regular points are taken from endurance (overwriting the 2 TSD points) leaving 1 Endurance point, 1 of the TSD points is assigned to Endurance reducing it to 0, and the target player assigns the remaining 2 TSD points to Dexterity. You would assign any more damage regular to Endurance first, then assign the rest of the points in the same manner.

It sounds complicated, but it works quite quickly in practice. I simply mark regular damage points as X's and TSD points as /'s, this makes it easy to see how much is in any stat and makes the conversions simple.

It sure encourages the wearing of body armour to gunfights, and adds some fear when the PC's encounter a fully armoured SWAT team etc..