Tag: Guns for Xenograg

…[The first Texas Rangers only] had three shots: they had a Kentucky long rifle…and two single-shot pistols.

Lo and behold, this inventor named Samuel Colt had come up with a prototype…it was a five-shot pistol. They had five shots here, one interchangable cylinder: now ten. Ten shots in each pistol….

— How the Texas Rangers Changed the Course of Modern Warfare – YouTube

The speaker describes an interchangeable revolving cylinder. With that first revolver, changing cylinders requires partially disassembling the pistol. So the reloading time is a couple of minutes.

The Remington Company manufactured revolvers with truly removable cylinders in the 1850s. The 1985 film Pale Rider shows this reloading process done leisurely for dramatic effect in the final scene. (Warning: spoiler video.)

In the prior blogpost, I looked at increasing reload time to slow down rate-of-fire. Now to look at reducing the number of shots per load. Returning to the flintlock as starting point, the lowest number of shots before needing to reload is one. What if we retain the modern, fast reload time?

This is actually very applicable to ray-guns. Energy weapons require power cells which are more analogous to magazines than individual cartridges. Modern ergonomics has the bullet magazine in the pistol grip. A convenient button press plus gravity removes the empty magazine, and your off-hand has the new one ready to insert. My change here is to have a magazine-shaped power cell which is empty after a single shot. Reloading only take a couple of seconds, but has to be done frequently. No dual-wielding here, either.

The third “dial” suddenly becomes the limiting factor: sustained fire depends upon the number of power cells readily available—that you can carry. The return of bandoliers!

Still a problematic rate of fire, but the total amount of shots someone has available is lower than speed-loaded revolvers. Also unlike revolvers, this design cannot fire in a rapid burst at need.

This latter design fits Xenograg’s sonic disrupter weapons. It also answers why the Drachen Walde revolver is still his everyday sidearm: much lower ammunition encumbrance.

While the flintlock and revolver pistols mentioned in the prior blogpost have been fully articulated for roleplay by me, the disrupters never have been. Specifically, the number of shots possible before needing to reload the weapon. This is important for the following reason:

The massive impact that guns bring to roleplaying games (and real life, but nevermind that now) comes from the high rates of fire possible in modern firearms.

Thanks to modern bullets, magazines, and speed-loaders, even a semi-automatic or revolver gun generates a sustained rate of fire far in excess of any other missile weapon. This results in high lethality in gun combat. Unless your game milieu is explicitly about that, it is disruptive to roleplaying. To reduce that lethality, rates of fire need to be drastically reduced.

Sustained rate of fire (SROF) comes from the combination of three factors:

1. Number of shots before needing to reload
2. Time required to reload
3. Number of reloads readily available

Adjusting any one of these “dials” will change SROF. For simplicity, I will confine the remaining discussion to pistols. For my first adjustment, I will draw upon the historical evolution of gun development for inspiration. The focus is on reload time.

For 200 years, the best gun technology was the flintlock. At best, it could maybe fire four times a minute. This was due to it being laborious to load and that for only a single shot. I cannot imagine a high-tech weapon being that difficult/slow to reload, though.

The invention of the revolving cylinder in 1836, C.E., predates the invention of the pre-assembled bullet cartridge. A revolver gave its owner 5 (later 6) shots before needing to reload, but the reload process was nearly identical and just as laborious as with the flintlock—now multiplied by that same 5 or 6 count of bullets. The new combatant type called pistoleers carried two or more revolvers because reloading an empty one would take several minutes; better to holster the empty gun and draw another loaded one. Pistoleers frequently held a revolver in each hand. Revolvers with replacable cylinders were developed to speed up reload time (some), but at the cost of dual-wielding.

Even at this point in history, such a rate of fire is going to be problematic to roleplaying. Less sustainable, at least; knowing you have a fixed amount of loaded ammunition does make one more deliberate in their use. That is only a soft constraint.

The next blogpost will look at focusing upon the first dial.

As prologue for a future post, a summary of existing lore:

Xenograg comes from an Iron Age civilization, but has been in Rhydin for over thirty years. He has had plenty of time to become accustomed to higher technologies—including guns. His marriage to Amaltea first introduced them to him as her homeland of Barsi has a tech level equivalent to our Napoleonic Era. Xenograg’s first gun was a flintlock pistol.

Later exposure to Stars End Spaceport and its “spacer” denizens eventually led to an upgrade. Lady Azjah’s family business, Drachen Walde Industries, includes an armaments division. She repaid a service rendered by Xenograg with the gift of a “modern-yet-retro” pistol: a six-shot 12mm revolver (slug-thrower). It has been Xenograg’s sidearm for over twenty years.

Seeing that the quest to avenge Llewys Greymantle’s death would constitute a small war, Xenograg ordered a cache of guns from Drachen Walde Industries: six crates, each containing a sonic disrupter carbine and pistol. Alas, they did not arrive in time for those battles. Only one pair has ever been taken from their crate, and solely for handling practice. Xenograg has never carried either.

The next blogpost will look at the problem of adding guns to a roleplay milieu.