Expanded Guns Tables

[Smoking Frog]

Well, for starters, look at the caulaty figures for combat. You will see that the majoirty of people who get shot, survive the battle. And that includes those hit in the chest with bullets from assault rifles.

This kinda touches upon what I mean about damage being too tied to bullet type/weapon. In the RPG an assault rifle does twice as much damage as a medium pistol, regardless of who is uning it or where he target is hit. If real life, rifle bullets often over penetrate the target. The whole thing isn't quite as linear as the game mechanics are. .

Okay. I'll bow out of this discussion. You're not responding to my point, and I don't see any point in just repeating myself.

[Nightshade]

Okay. I'll bow out of this discussion. You're not responding to my point, and I don't see any point in just repeating myself.

The problem is that the studies involved included a large number of exchanges of fire, including shotguns and some rifles. There was nothing to indicate that the longarm strikes were automatically lethal with upper torso hits. Neither, I might add, did some statistics I managed to acquire when I was working at the UCI Irvine Medical Center Library some years ago. Admittedly, more of those were what we think of as hunting rifle rounds than assault rifle rounds, but if you aren't automatically killed by catching a .30-06 round in the torso, I'd require some serious convincing that you will be by a 7.62 round, let alone a 5.56.

So at the moment, I have to assume your acquaintence has either had selection bias come up or has overgeneralized from too little data points.

[Smoking Frog]

The problem is that the studies involved included a large number of exchanges of fire, including shotguns and some rifles. There was nothing to indicate that the longarm strikes were automatically lethal with upper torso hits. Neither, I might add, did some statistics I managed to acquire when I was working at the UCI Irvine Medical Center Library some years ago. Admittedly, more of those were what we think of as hunting rifle rounds than assault rifle rounds, but if you aren't automatically killed by catching a .30-06 round in the torso, I'd require some serious convincing that you will be by a 7.62 round, let alone a 5.56.

So at the moment, I have to assume your acquaintence has either had selection bias come up or has overgeneralized from too little data points.

If you live in a world where the only two options from being shot in the chest with an assault rifle are (1) instant death and (2) staying up and functioning, then this discussion would be of some value. In the world in which I live, when you are shot in the chest with any type of weapon, three things can happen: (1) you instantly die, (2) you suffer some level of disability, including falling down, and (3) you can stay up and keep functioning.

Today many people survive battlefield injuries that in prior wars would have been fatal. That is partly a result of the excellent body armor troops have, but it is also to a great extent a function of the level of medical care and the availability of rapid evacuation to a hospital. None of that has anything to do with the ability of someone to shrug off any particular type of wound, that is, to stay up and keep functioning.

I previously referred to the numerous attempts to quantify the "one-shot stopping" power of various handgun rounds. Again, the idea is that whether someone ultimately survives or not is irrelevant: what matters is whether I can knock him out of the fight.

Unless you have studies that describe the likelihood of staying on your feet and continuing to function after being shot in the chest or abdomen with an assault rifle round, you really can't say how far from "reality" the BRP rules are merely because the vast majority of people will be knocked down when shot in the chest (if they have no armor). To say most people survive in the real world is not relevant, unless BRP has most people instantly killed when shot in the chest, which it does not.

[Toadmaster]

Damage has to mimic several functions, tissue damage and barrier penetration being two major functions. There is no doubt more powerful guns penetrate further, and when you look at BRP damage it is not a huge stretch of the imagnation to assume a rifle does more damage in tissue than a pistol, I mean we are actually talking about fairly small jumps no where close to the increase in muzzle energy (BRP .45 ACP 1d10+2, BRP 5.56mm 2d6+2, real .45 ACP 400ft/lbs vs 5.56mm 1500 ft/lbs, +15% potential max damage for a tripling of energy) so I really don't understand the argument.

While there is an enormous debate about "stopping power", big slow bullet vs light fast bullet etc, you will find pretty uniform agreement that more power = better in regards to wounding ability.

[Smoking Frog]

I will add that one factor that BRP does not seem to model well is blood loss. Any wound that is bleeding is going to cause you to go into shock sooner or later -- sooner obviously if you are losing a lot of blood. There is no respite from low blood pressure, even if you are very pumped up. In fact, the more excited you are, the more likely your heart is to pump that blood out of you faster. If you get timely first aid, you may even be reasonably functional. (Next month, the president is going to award the Medal of Honor to a Ranger who was shot in both legs and had his hand blown off by a grenade. Three tourniquets later he was not moving much, but he was able to direct his subordinates and use the radio. Without the tourniquets, it's pretty clear he would have died from blood loss very quickly. Of course, Rangers may be Epic level characters, so I don't recommend this for you kids at home.)

Edited June 24, 2011 by Smoking Frog

[Nightshade]

If you live in a world where the only two options from being shot in the chest with an assault rifle are (1) instant death and (2) staying up and functioning, then this discussion would be of some value. In the world in which I live, when you are shot in the chest with any type of weapon, three things can happen: (1) you instantly die, (2) you suffer some level of disability, including falling down, and (3) you can stay up and keep functioning.

But at least with the FBI study, even automatically being disabled didn't seem to be the case (there's no way to tell with the old medical data I had, since that applied to people brought to ERs, and by that time in many cases post combat sequelae have set it; all you could tell was who was and wasn't DOA, but how much the other injuries impaired someone immediately was impossible to tell). But the FBI study pretty much indicated that across the board, including the heavier rounds such as shotgun and rifle attacks, there wasn't a lot of interim impairment; the target either stopped fighting (from physical shock, psychological shock, or bleeding out) or showed no apparent impairment. There wasn't much of any middle ground between the two. That was what was so interesting about it. You'd expected some decrease in effectiveness in cases where people stayed up, but there wasn't (beyond the fact even apparently trained combatants in firefights spend an inordinate amount of time putting bullets into pretty much anything but their apparent targets, whether because of stress, adrenaline impact, or combinations of the two).

Unless you have studies that describe the likelihood of staying on your feet and continuing to function after being shot in the chest or abdomen with an assault rifle round, you really can't say how far from "reality" the BRP rules are merely because the vast majority of people will be knocked down when shot in the chest (if they have no armor). To say most people survive in the real world is not relevant, unless BRP has most people instantly killed when shot in the chest, which it does not.

But that's the point: these weren't about survival (in fact it wasn't even in the study); it was about people continuing fighting. I may have confused the issue with my reference to the data I found when at UCIMC, because you appeared to also be talking about survival, but the two sets of data were looking at exactly opposite ends of the stick.

The fact is, even the BRP handgun values show too consistent a takedown capability according to that study; several of their results wouldn't have even been possible in the game as written.

Part of that, is, of course, that every game ignores outlayer results (this tends to be most visible in falling rules which will almost never actually model the range or real results), but part of it simply is that an accumulative hit point model is a generally poor one for human damage, outside of possible emulating the effect blood loss has. You'd almost always be better off using something like a "match damage, factoring size in and do a Con roll" kind of thins with various output results.

But that's fussier than a lot of people would want to deal with.

[Nightshade]

I will add that one factor that BRP does not seem to model well is blood loss. Any wound that is bleeding is going to cause you to go into shock sooner or later -- sooner obviously if you are losing a lot of blood. There is no respite from low blood pressure, even if you are very pumped up. In fact, the more excited you are, the more likely your heart is to pump that blood out of you faster. If you get timely first aid, you may even be reasonably functional. (Next month, the president is going to award the Medal of Honor to a Ranger who was shot in both legs and had his hand blown off by a grenade. Three tourniquets later he was not moving much, but he was able to direct his subordinates and use the radio. Without the tourniquets, it's pretty clear he would have died from blood loss very quickly. Of course, Rangers may be Epic level characters, so I don't recommend this for you kids at home.)

Oh, yes. In fact the study I was refering to concluded that bleeding out was actually the commonest way next to shock that firefights came to an end. It also, if I'm remembering right (there was a much wider range of discussed results given the focus of the data, so all the bits have stuck less well in my mind) the single biggest cause of ER transported fatalities in the material I found at UCIMC, mostly because of inability to get bleeders stopped.

That material was instructive because it convinced me that many "dead" (in RPG terms) characters really should be saveable if you have a skilled medic on scene with even modest medical gear (and lets face it, with dedicated PC groups, the equivalent of this is often the case); things I've read over the years about the golden hour and the platinum minute seem to just reinforce this.

But the overall takeway I got from the whole thing is that one-shot-kills the way people think about them (you're hit, you die, and nothing can be done) are far rarer in reality than many people seem to think there are, because they're conflating those with cases where injuries were done that couldn't be treated in time to help them, one way or another. But that includes people who died minutes, hours, or even days later, and there can be some pretty important practical differences between that and "died instantly".

[rust]

... because the vast majority of people will be knocked down when shot in the chest (if they have no armor).

Actually, it is the other way: People who wear armour usually are knocked down,

because the projectile transfers all of its energy to the armour at the moment it

hits when it is unable to penetrate the armour, while in the case of people with-

out armour the projectile transfers its energy more slowly while it moves through

the body and often passes through the body and leaves it after transfering only

a small amount of its energy.

[Atgxtg]

Actually, it is the other way: People who wear armour usually are knocked down,

because the projectile transfers all of its energy to the armour at the moment it

hits when it is unable to penetrate the armour, while in the case of people with-

out armour the projectile transfers its energy more slowly while it moves through

the body and often passes through the body and leaves it after transfering only

a small amount of its energy.

Actually it is neither. A bullet ust doesn't have enough kinetic enegy to knock the target down. And that is a good thing, becuase if it did, the shooter would end up on his butt, too. Equal and opposite forces.

People might fall down after they get hit, but that is either a reaction to the pain, or to injury.

[Atgxtg]

But the overall takeway I got from the whole thing is that one-shot-kills the way people think about them (you're hit, you die, and nothing can be done) are far rarer in reality than many people seem to think there are, because they're conflating those with cases where injuries were done that couldn't be treated in time to help them, one way or another. But that includes people who died minutes, hours, or even days later, and there can be some pretty important practical differences between that and "died instantly".

Thanks. That's what I7ve been trying to get across for several pages.

Mosdern Police forces have actually changed the way the train thier offers to reflect this.

First off if you shoot someone who is holding a knife, they can probably still reach you after you shoot them.

Secondly, if you believe that the shot will kill you, you are far more likely to drop than if you don't.

[rust]

Actually it is neither. A bullet ust doesn't have enough kinetic enegy to knock the target down. And that is a good thing, becuase if it did, the shooter would end up on his butt, too. Equal and opposite forces.

Yes and no, since most longarms which fire high power ammunition have recoil

buffers, because otherwise it could well happen that the one firing it is indeed

knocked over.

Besides, if the one firing the weapon has a minimum of training and experience,

he will fire it from a stable body position, expect the recoil and prepare to absorb

it with his body. Just take a look at beginners firing a comparatively heavy wea-

pon for the first time without any training, it is not that rare to see one of them

in a sitting position after the first attempt.

Edit.: This one here is demonstrating how not to do it ...:

The target normally does not know that it will be hit and cannot prepare to soak

up the energy from the impact, and is therefore far more likely to be knocked

over.

What is nonsense is the Hollywood idea that a hit with a projectile from a normal

firearm could throw the target several meters through the air, this is simply im-

possible.

Edited June 26, 2011 by rust

[icebrand]

Yes and no, since most longarms which fire high power ammunition have recoil

buffers, because otherwise it could well happen that the one firing it is indeed

knocked over.

Besides, if the one firing the weapon has a minimum of training and experience,

he will fire it from a stable body position, expect the recoil and prepare to absorb

it with his body. Just take a look at beginners firing a comparatively heavy wea-

pon for the first time without any training, it is not that rare to see one of them

in a sitting position after the first attempt.

Edit.: This one here is demonstrating how not to do it ...:

The target normally does not know that it will be hit and cannot prepare to soak

up the energy from the impact, and is therefore far more likely to be knocked

over.

What is nonsense is the Hollywood idea that a hit with a projectile from a normal

firearm could throw the target several meters through the air, this is simply im-

possible.

That video borders trolling, they are firing a novelty ammo that is so overpowered that's actually useless on a real world situation. It doesn't come any heavier than this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qtzk8HNPzHY

Anything whith a recoil that can knock a man over is usually fired on a bipod!

This is a .460, for taking down ELEPHANTS.

[rust]

As far as I understood, the ammunition used in the video I linked is the .700

Nitro Express. The .700 Nitro Express is a rather common big game hunting

round, and rarely (if ever) fired with a bipod or tripod. It has been available

and in production for more than 20 years now, so it is also not exactly a no-

velty.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.700_Nitro_Express

However, if you think this example is too extreme, take the .460 Weatherby

Magnum, a standard big game round. It still has a recoil of 140 J, easily suf-

ficient to knock over someone who does not know how to handle the gun.

Edited June 26, 2011 by rust

[icebrand]

As far as I understood, the ammunition used in the video I linked is the .700

Nitro Express. The .700 Nitro Express is a rather common big game hunting

round, and rarely (if ever) fired with a bipod or tripod. It has been available

and in production for more than 20 years now, so it is also not exactly a no-

velty.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.700_Nitro_Express

Its a t-rex

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.577_Tyrannosaur

"This cartridge has the distinction of possessing the heaviest free recoil of all commercially available, shoulder-fired weapons, at 220 lbs into the shoulder with its heaviest solid of 750 grains."

[rust]

Its a t-rex

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.577_Tyrannosaur

"This cartridge has the distinction of possessing the heaviest free recoil of all commercially available, shoulder-fired weapons, at 220 lbs into the shoulder with its heaviest solid of 750 grains."

This is just 10 % more than a .700 Nitro Express, so I really doubt that the result

would look different.

[Nightshade]

Actually it is neither. A bullet ust doesn't have enough kinetic enegy to knock the target down. And that is a good thing, becuase if it did, the shooter would end up on his butt, too. Equal and opposite forces.

People might fall down after they get hit, but that is either a reaction to the pain, or to injury.

Yeah, the vast majority of knockdowns actually seen from smallarms, are "reaction", that is to say, someone jerking away after getting the feeling of being hit and falling over.

[Atgxtg]

Yeah, the vast majority of knockdowns actually seen from smallarms, are "reaction", that is to say, someone jerking away after getting the feeling of being hit and falling over.

Yup. Plus if you shatter someone's kneecap they probably can't stand up.

[Atgxtg]

Yes and no, since most longarms which fire high power ammunition have recoil

buffers, because otherwise it could well happen that the one firing it is indeed

knocked over.

I suppose that depends on what you consider "high power". Most bullets don't have enough force to knock someone over. But, if you are talking elephant guns....