FF&S and Personal Firearm Design

[atpollard]

While flipping through FF&S looking at the pretty pictures, I was struck by the depth of detail for the weapon design system. While topics abound on Starship Weapons, I found no discussions on creating personal weapons in FF&S.

So has anyone here actually used the FF&S Weapon Creation System to design a personal firearm or gauss weapon?
How was it?
Good Points?
Problems?

 

[robject]

Involved. Hard to use for someone who doesn't need more depth than the game provides, and results of marginal value -- maybe it's good if you're designing something special.

Ah, I used FFS2, but I think the comment applies.

 

[Andrew Boulton]

I've built a few exotic things - meson rifle, plasma pistol, etc.

 

[far-trader]

FF&S1: I built several personal weapons back in the day, and found the system far more complicated than the results were worth. It can't reliably build believable equivalents to actual weapons without fudging and gets really screwy if you stray beyond a narrow median margin. And that was with all the available errata. And the high tech weapons were not much better except that one was able to excuse excess with a "well we don't really know how Handwavium would work so... "

In the end I went back to simple interpolation and extrapolation for "new" weapons. It takes far far less time and work and produces much much better game-balanced results. In my opinion and experience. I use the FF&S details as colour, and found the book worth it even just for that

Ditto for all the other design system builds with FF&S. Ships, vehicles, heavy weapons. Too much work for the value and too often screwy results, but lots of gems in the way of descriptive colour.

@ robject: yep I think FF&S2 applies as well, the only real difference was the presentation (and symbols screw-up) iirc

 

[atpollard]

Thanks.
I was wondering if it had some well known problems - like the Classic/Mega Traveller debates on Fusion PP efficiency or reaction drive exhaust velocity. Not creating real weapons sounds like the traditional ‘use with caution’ that I remember only too well from my experience with MT: COACC.

Re: Excessive complexity.
I agree. From just a casual glance, I've read text books on Internal Ballistics that didn't have that much detail on designing a cartridge.

 

[atpollard]

And that was with all the available errata.

I have both FF&S1 and FF&S2 for TNE (PDFs), so comments on either are fine.

What errata?

 

[far-trader]

What errata?

You know, for FF&S1 which I was remarking on, off-hand I can't recall exactly. I seem to remember about a page worth (not counting the misprinted page in the ship design section), and that some of it was weapons design related. I'll have a look for my FF&S1 later and see if it's in there. I vaguely recall ferreting out some additional errata by comparing/backwards engineering some examples as well.

FF&S2 of course is the formula fixes mostly (or entirely).