Re: [HOE] S&W Series 500 Sidearm

["Johnny Burlin" <Johnny.Burlin@home.se>]

> Well, I see, so the damage caused from a .45 round comes from its mass and
> the damage caused by a 9mm comes from its speed, finally it equals out. This
> sounds logical, but to me the problem came up again as I started to play a
> call of cthulhu campaign. This game is reknown for having a very well
> researched background on everything. In this game the damage for a .45 auto
> round is stated as 1d10+2 and the damage for 9mm or .38 is 1d10. The damage
> for a .44 magnum is 2d6+2. If you compare these values to each other and
> looking at the average results it seems very realistic to me. Iīd like to
> see these differences in HoE but I donīt know if its really realistic or not
> and I donīt know how I would incorporate it into the deadlands system.

Do you really want HoE to be realistic? If a reasonably normal human being 
would get shot in the head with a .45 or a 9 mm bullet he or she would almost 
invariably be either out of action or dead. In HoE you would take either
5 or 6 D6 damage, an average of 21 (serious) or 25.2 (critical), and that's
before you spent any chips. Realistic? Nah. Fun, action packed game?
Oh yeah!

As for the damage of handguns it depends on a lot of things (I'm not a ballistics expert 
either, but I do have a keen, unnatural interest in weapons... ;-), the most important of
these are:
The velocity of the bullet
The mass of the bullet
The diameter of the bullet
The density of the bullet

The velocity of the bullet and the mass determines its kinetic energy.
The energy of the bullet is what in the end does damage to the target but as
pointed out earlier in this thread it's the energy that gets absorbed by the
target that counts. How do we compute that that energy?

This is where the diameter of the bullet matters, a large bullet will spend more
of its energy penetrating a target and will thus do more damage. On the other
hand a large bullet will also have less energy per square mm and might therefor
do less damage to a target, it will also have a harder time penetrating armor. 
This is a trade off but large bullets usually do more damage because there is 
more gunpowder powering it (you can pack roughly 4 times more gunpowder 
behind a .44 round than .22 round, assuming the casings are of equal length).

The density of the bullet matters since a  high density bullet will lose it's velocity slower
than a low density one. There is no mechanism to handle this is HoE, a sniper rifle does
5D10 at 10 yards and it does 5D10 at 1000 yards. Does it matter? I don't think it
does.

Another important factor is how stable the bullet is once it has entered the body,
a stable bullet will go straight through and leave pretty clean, small exit wound
while an unstable one will rotate and cause much more damage (it spends
more of its energy this way).

So, the caliber of a handgun alone does not alone determine its damage potential.
If .38 and .45 deals the same amount of damage the .38 might be fired from a
more powerful cartrdige and will be unstable once it enters a body.

That being said, let's take a look at some typical muzzle energies:
Caliber                Muzzle energy

Pistols
.22                         200 J
.38                         400 J
9 mm      (0.354)    600 J
.357M                   1000 J 
.44M                     1400 J

Rifles
5.56mm  (0.22)     1800 J
7.62mm  (0.30)     3500 J
.338M                   5000 J
.460M                   10 000 J
12.7 mm (0.50)      18 000 J

So, a cal .50 machine gun has 90 times the energy a .22 pistol,
does this mean that it should do 90 times more damage?
Well, no, the damage should be proportional to the square root
of the energy per square mm (this takes penetrating ability and 
energy absorbtion into account) so the damage of the .50 should 
be 4.17 times greater than the .22. In HoE the .50 does 4.6 times 
more damage in average and that is pretty close to being realistic, 
assuming, of course, that the base damage values are realistic, which 
they aren't. How many real life people can take a hit from a M2HB, 
stand up, brush themselves off and say something cool? At an
average damage of 6.6 the .22 has about 60/40 to even scratch
a normal person, realistic? Nah. But yet again, realism (of this kind) 
is not needed, nor wanted, in a game like HoE.

I hope this has been at least a little helpful to people who have managed
to read this far.

/Johnny