New weapons for Traveller

Forget all your smart handguns, forget eye-piece gunsights! I've got the
ultimate weapon. :-)

It depends on fibre-optic cable capable of carrying a laser pulse of
laser-rifle power.

In your backpack, you have the power unit and the laser itself. The laser
should be switchable between either of two power settings.  The low power
setting produces a continuous low power beam, about the same power as a small
targetting laser. The high power setting produces a pulse similar to the one
from a laser rifle (or for a lighter backpack, a laser carbine).

In your hand, you have a small pistol. It has a two-stage trigger. It is
connected to the backpack by a cable containing a fibre-optic line and an
electronic control line. When you pull the trigger to its first stage, the
laser is triggered on its low power, continuous mode, and you have a
targetting laser which you can wave around and point at things. When it's
pointing at something interesting, like the bad guy's head, you pull the
trigger the rest of the way. This switches the laser to its full power pulse
mode, and a laser rifle bolt goes right where your targetting beam was just
a moment ago.

If you can't have a dual power laser, have two lasers linked to the same
fibre-optic cable; one low power, the other straight from an ordinary rifle.
This method is probably better in that the targetting laser can be IR, so
you aren't lighting yourself up at the same time. You, of course, are wearing
goggles which allow you to see where the target beam is hitting.

Assuming it works, how do you implement this in a game? What die roll do you
need to hit, assuming you can take an aimed shot? The way I see it, it seems
to be impossible to miss.

 "Keyboard? How quaint!" - M. Scott

 Adrian Hurt			     |	JANET:  [email removed]
 UUCP: ..!ukc!cs.hw.ac.uk!adrian     |  ARPA:   [email removed]