Firearms Scatter worksheet from 3e

In a wild and likely unlawful combination of Throwback Thursday and GURPS-Day, I present something that I thought had been lost years ago.

This was a head-poundingly complex shot at taking the old 3e rules (you can tell because of the Acc 10 assumption for the rifle) and asking the question “where does each bullet go?”

This result shown is almost regrettably good from an illustration perspective. There’s a circle, which shows the actual point of aim of the weapon. There’s a line with three purple asterisks in it, which accounts for trigger jerk and the march of the barrel in a relatively random direction as recoil pushes it around. The assumption is clearly linear. And the red dots are actual bullet strikes, which vary around the notional aimpoint due to uniform scatter.

I had thought this lost, and didn’t have that much interest in recreating it, certainly not with the assumptions present in this older 3e ruleset.

Were I to try this again, I’d make much more extensive use of the Size and Speed/Range table, and fold in the kind of modeling that +Mark Langsdorf did in his calculations on how many shots hit with Rapid Fire. Even my own averaged numbers when I looked at shotguns take a shot (ahem) at this, lacking only the step of tracking each bullet.

Parting Shot

Why would you do this? Good question. Does it add significantly to the game? Only when you’re in conversations about where misses go, or combined with overlays (or underlays?) of character models to allow picking out hit locations. It’s fun, but ultimately usefully abstracted.

Still, here’s the raw sheet, if you want to hack at it – just post the results.