I have been following the discussion of silenced weapons with some interest.
Without wishing to rain on anyone's parade, I thought it might be worthwhile
to note that in the Traveller universe (and any game universe set more than
one hundred years in the future, if it's high tech), the question is moot.
Lasers are probably going to be VERY silent, compared to slug throwers, and
will not have to deal with the problems of reduced power. If I were an
assassin, 3,000 years in the future, and I wanted to make a quiet attack, and
had to use a firearm to do it, I would use a laser. I would suspect that
for any future game universe, a person needing to use a firearm in a stealthy
manner would rely on one of two methods:
1) A laser, since it is quiet, and does not lose power by being quiet
(I do not know if it is silent; I imagine there is a soft crackling noise
from the laser superheating the air as the beam passes through it, but this
cannot be any louder than the noise released by contemporary silencers).
2) A low calibre pistol at point blank range. (I understand this is how
many assassinations are done today.) It takes real balls to do this, but
what you do is to walk up behind someone, put a .22 or .25 to the back of
their neck or head, pull the trigger, AND THEN JUST WALK AWAY AS IF YOU
WERE JOE AVERAGE AND HAD NEVER DONE ANYTHING WRONG IN YOUR LIFE. The guy
you have just snuffed will fall. On a busy street, it will be several
seconds before anyone realizes that the guy has anything more wrong with
him than stumbling on a cracked sidewalk. By this time, you're gone.
For the second method, I recommend soft-nosed, explosive, hollow-point, or
glaser safety rounds. Against an unarmored target, they will do more damage.
If you're using a .22 or .25 (both 5-6 mm.) pistol rounds, you need all the
help you can get.
By the way, while we are on the subject of assassinations, I would like to
mention that no one seems to be talking about the possible applications of
microrobotics in Traveller, for assassinations or other enterprises. What
do you people think about wasp-sized robots, with VX nerve toxin in the
stingers, homing in on people based on their individual chemical signatures?
(Users would need a skill like Robotics or Remote Controls--I call it
Remotes in my game--to use the robots.) They fly about as fast as angry
hornets, hardly ever miss, and if the victim does not get medical attention
in about one minute, they are dead, dead, dead.
Any other interesting ideas?
Mark