Ultra-Tech: UAC Plasma Rifle

Ultra-Tech: UAC Plasma Rifle

Remember Pyramid #3-37? The one with the Blaster and Laser Design System article? I do. If you do, I suggest you to check out GURB and Hard Maths, as they have a ton of additional options for that article. Let's play around with the beam weapon design system and try to recreate the plasma rifle from Doom.

First, let's determine some parameters. This is going to be a TL9^ plasma weapon (plasma weapons typically appear only on TL10^, but TheRyujinLP provides a set of rules to represent weapons that are introduced one or two TLs earlier - link).

How do we determine damage? Let's pick the damage value based on how many shots the weapon can fire. As you probably remember, a single cell in Doom provides 40 shots for the plasma rifle. Let's assume that this is a TL9 C-cell. This gives us 4.07d of damage that gets rounded down to 4d.

Let's use the medium focal array, as it should be for plasma weapons. Also, let's use the Acc optional rule from the plasma weapon post I linked above. That gives up range of 200/600. Not very good for long-range engagements, but that sounds okay. Do you remember trying to shoot down a cacodemon that got blasted away by a super shotgun blast? Plasma rifle doesn't work well for that.

Plasma rifle fires 700 shots per minute, and that's roughly RoF 11. Let's use alternative RoF rules.

Also, lets make this weapon Rugged (p. UT15). It just looks rugged to me.

The final result is as follows:

UAC Plasma Rifle (TL9^)

This is an experimental weapon designed by the UAC. It has a HUD Link (p. UT149) with a wireless connection via a micro radio communicator (p. UT44). Its recognition grip (p. UT150) requires a palm print. The rifle lacks iron sights, but has an integral multispectral laser sight (p. UT149). The weapons has no accessory rails. Its diagnostic computer (p. UT151) and other internal electronics are powered by a B cell. The weapon is rugged - it has HP: 4; HT: 12; DR: 8; Malf. 17.

Beam Weapons (Rifle) (DX-4, or most other Guns at -2)

TL

Weapon

Damage

Acc

Range

Weight

RoF

Shots

ST

Bulk

Rcl

Cost

LC

9^

UAC Plasma Rifle hot cartridge

4d(2) burn ex sur 5d+1(2) burn ex sur

10

200/600

2.5/C (plasma)

11

40(3)

8†

-3

2

$10,780

3