Weapon add-ons

A note or two about the recent suggestions for weapon add-ons....

First off, I would argue that for gaming purposes as well as practicality
reasons, there should be stacking limits as to how many cumulative pluses
you can add to a gun, and furthermore that these pluses are capped by the
user's innate skill. Putting a laser sight AND HUD AND smartgun link AND
telescopic sight AND everything else on a gun eventually gets ridiculous.

Furthermore, Refs must be careful as to how much TL advancement they want
to allow in the development of these systems, before game balance goes
straight out the window. In a recent game I ran, one character had an
integral smartgun link wired to a cybernetic enhancement of his own brain;
this allowed him (among other things) to sweep an auto-gauss-gun across
a crowd of people on full auto, scanning ahead of the barrel's trajectory
and momentarily interrupting the flow of hot lead as he passed over
friendlies. Because the target acquisition, identification, calculation
of trajectory and fire interrupts were carried out in terms of machine
cycles (milliseconds at most), the overall effect was a two-second burst
from the gun, after which twenty perps dropped dead in the arms of six
VERY confused PCs.

If one installs a robot brain in the gun itself (not an unreasonable
extension of the idea) then things get even tougher to manage. I
wasn't sure whether to be amused or upset when a visitor to our game
talked at great length about wanting to introduce such a system,
whereupon he described "Smith" and "Wesson" from BUCK GODOT, ZAP GUN
FOR HIRE (not what I'd call Traveller-grade hard SF).

On the defensive side, a person in or out of armor about to be shot at
with a gun is not the same as a fighter plane about to be shot at with
a missile. Defensive alerts are idiotic--they add sensory distraction
without the hope of added defense. The point of armor is to stop
damage from getting through to the user, not to let him dodge bullets
and lasers (shades of STAR WARS!). Even if you could design an armor
suit that could sense and dodge for you, it'd probably hamstring the
user in the process unless he plans to just lie there limply and let
the suit do the moving for him....

The advantages of these high-tech doodads are limited overall by the
person carrying the gun, and should be handled accordingly. I have no
trouble with a small aiming laser on ANY weapon above TL8; for $100
you can buy a real HeNe laser pointer the size of a pencil at any
Sharper Image store.  Mounting a telescopic sight or IR sight, or at
higher TLs a camera and HUD uplink, is also OK, but not in all cases:
a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, and the best HUD system
is not going to let you snap-shoot any faster or hit a target beyond
the reasonable rated range of your gun. I subscribe to the KISS
principle: Keep It Simple Stupid. Laser pointers let you instantly
determine aim, and improve snapfire and aimed fire. HUD links help
aimed fire designate targets, but I dare someone to try to snap fire
AND use such a targeting system without becoming nauseous. (Think
about it: you're fast-drawing your gun and trying to get a sensible
picture from the camera mounted on the barrel, which is moving at an
enormous angular velocity? By the time you could focus you'd be dead.)
This is especially important when people try to mount all of this
stuff on pistols. Common sense should rule all such things, and
weenies who insist on the latest cybertoys should be politely directed
to the Cyberpunk game going on in the next county.

- --

Mike Metlay
[email removed]
[address removed]