Ultra-Tech Quickie: Do You Have The Strength?

As I said in my last post, the formula for figuring a beam weapons ST stat that is listed in the Blaster and Laser Design System in Pyramid 3/37 is a little wonky. While it works reasonably well for most small arms, as you get bigger and bigger you start to see the ST requirement skyrocket at a much higher pace then an equivalent sized projectile weapon.

To give you an example, let's take a 250lbs auto cannon with Rcl 2 and a 250lbs. beam cannon with Rcl 1.

The auto cannon would have ST 28M.

The beam cannon, according to the Blaster and Laser Deisgn System, would have the square root of (250) × 2.4 or ST 38M!

In GURPS terms that means you need to be almost twice as strong to handle the recoiless beam gun as you would need to be to handle the very much has recoil auto cannon!

Now the thing is it's against my policy to publish the actual rules for figuring out what a guns or beam weapons ST is since it can't be found on the forum or really divined by reverse engineering it  but at the same time I can't keep dancing around this subject and just adding more pre-made charts makes things harder to use on your end.

So I decided on a compromise.

I'm going to give you guys a simplified formula to figure out what a beam weapons  actual ST score should be and need to stress this will only work for weapons with Rcl 1.

For pistols the formula is ST = 10 × (Bw/10)^1/4

For rifles the formula is ST = 7 × (Bw/10)^1/4. Don't forget to add a dagger (†) mark after it.

Bw is the weapons loaded weight. 

For cannons, ST can be ignored. Since mounted weapons, are well mounted, and not being held out as like a lever; so long was whatever its mounted to is strong enough to hold it, the whatever is also strong to use it. Basically adding a ST score to a mounted beam weapons makes a much sense as adding one to an equal sized radar mast. A mounted beam weapons ST should be noted as N/A.

However if you still want to give your beam cannons a  ST score then just use the same formula as for pistols but use the cannons empty weight, not loaded weight, and add a M after it.

Do note that I did round off the numbers used above to make the math easier and neater so do keep in mind that there will be a few break points the ST scores generated by this formula will not 100% match with the official one.

Alright guys, Here's hoping I can keep this ball rolling heh.