The real question regarding mecha at this point is mostly scale.
GURPS is designed such that it should be theoretically possible to drop mecha into
any game world and have it work out systematically. This means that whoever sat down and compiled the weapons list did so with full knowledge of things like "how many hit points does the average small house have?" At this point, I would like to preserve that sense of scale, which is why the numbers in question are so huge.
A person has 10 hit points; a handgun does 2d+1 damage. A vehicle should be a little sturdier, comparatively speaking, than a human being with soft fleshy bits, so if a mecha has 1,000 hit points and a couple hundred points of DR, then mecha are pretty much immune to small-arms fire. While we could hypothetically divide all the numbers by 100 or something, it'd kill the universality of the system. As such, in the event that I decided to do weight the way I'm talking about, armor, too, would be reduced by means of compensation. In short, I'm looking for the lowest numbers possible that still achieve the appropriate sense of scale. As it stands, my estimates regarding DR pricing are based around the damages of the higher-end weapons. If a mecha's damage output per round can be in the neighborhood of 6,000 before DR (and maybe 4,000 after DR), which is theoretically a really easy thing to do, then there needs to be some system for player mecha to
survive more than a round or two of combat. Lowering damages across the board increases overall survivability of individual player characters (and important NPCs, without GM tricks).
At this point, I'm using standard rules and saying that mecha aren't encumbered, but that their maximum load is equal to STR x 20. This is really more than enough capacity for weapons, because most weapons that don't have a four-digit weight weigh between 300 and 600 pounds. If I ignore armor weight, this means that the average mech can have five or six built-in weapons; stronger mechs would be able to carry more, and each STR increment would allow 200 pounds more weaponry. Six to eight built-in or wielded weapons seems like a really reasonable number to me, so I'm okay with that.
This makes the most likely standard weapons as follows, based on weight:
Light Rainbow Laser
Plasma Gatling
Gatling Blaster
Light Particle Cannon
30mm Gatling
45mm Autocannon
20mm Gauss Cannon
100mm Medium Missile Launcher
Any contact weapons
The average damage of the lt. rainbow laser is just over 400 (assuming half the shots in a burst hit), whereas the damage of the lt. particle cannon is just over 1,000. If average armor is something like 300, and average HP is something like 1,200, this works out reasonably well. The particle cannon is all or nothing, one shot, hit or miss, whereas the laser is quite likely to hit with at least
some of its spray, whether it actually works out to be enough to deal damage or not, so the two weapons being equal point-wise is reasonable as well.
In short, I'm trying to find precisely the "right" numbers that will achieve cinematic mecha combat without crucial battles being decided by one or two hits with a huge cluster of linked-fire weapons.
DR vs. automatics applies to each shot of the burst. According to GURPS standard rules, a laser is effectively recoilless, which means that the damage from an automatic laser burst is
summed before DR is applied
once against the entire burst's worth of damage. This makes lasers especially useful against heavily armored targets, even if the damage output of ballistic weapons with a higher rate of fire is technically higher on a shot-by-shot basis. As such, machine guns and the like would achieve maximal effectiveness against less heavily-armored targets, and their rate of fire would make them effective against faster moving targets. Mages come to mind.
What I really need to do at this point is probably a little bit of mechanical playtesting; people need to throw together some mechs and we need to battle them to see how the system actually plays...
Edit: At this point I'm officially going to say that I like 10 DR per 1 point as opposed to forcing the 50 for 5. I'm also going to note that I'm probably going to apply a sidebar rule from GURPS Mecha that is referred to as "super ECM," which basically means that even though mechs will have good sensors, there won't be battles going on at five miles apart even if some weapons theoretically have that range. <p>
<div style="text-align:center">
RPGWW Wiki!</div></p>
Edited by: Archmage144 at: 7/10/06 1:14