I speculate that GURPS (and maybe The Fantasy Trip; I wasn’t around for that one) started with a fairly generic view of damage that incorporated penetration, blunt trauma, injury, and a certain amount of gamist fun. GURPS High Tech introduced the dependence on the square root of kinetic energy as a “damage” scale by giving…
Over at the GURPS Forums, there’s a really interesting (well, interesting to me) thread asking the question if basic melee weapon damage is too high (what you look up on p. 16 of the GURPS Basic Set). I think the answer is “yes.” In fact, as part of my “Armor Revisited” article I had originally written…
FYI, this space will change without warning for a while, until I figure this stuff out. I’ll likely be stealing shamelessly from Dungeon Fantastic, ’cause it’s awesome.