Building Firearms

In the Inconsistent Firearm Stats thread Kromm ranked the various parts of firearms from most to least objective:
*Cost, Shots (capacity), and Weight are the most objective. You can go look them up. They'll vary by model and magazine size – and in the case of Cost, by seller and market conditions – but it's possible to present real-world stats for a specific model as it was offered when it first entered the market.
*TL is objective if you take year of release as deterministic. However, you get judgment calls coming in for weapons near the starts of new TLs, as well as for those that are notably "advanced" or "retarded" relative to their era's technology. Thus, it's mostly objective but there are special cases where it's subjective.
*RoF is rounded to the nearest whole number. It's also subject to the game's assumptions about how guns work; e.g., anything over RoF 2 for something that has to be pumped or levered, or 3 for a semi-auto, requires techniques that drop your odds of hitting a target, so the useful RoF is listed, not the theoretical maximum in the hands of a robot. Within those limits, it corresponds to real-life rate of fire, and is purely objective for full-automatic weapons.
*Damage and Max can vary a lot due to things like barrel cross-section, twist, quality of the seals, how much energy is needed to cycle the weapon, and so forth. Two guns of identical barrel length firing identical ammo might differ due to one transferring less of the energy to the projectile (and more to operating the action or to escaping gases), or due to one launching the projectile with more stable aerodynamics (meaning two projectiles with the same muzzle energy but one losing energy more rapidly to air resistance). This is functionally on the objective/subjective frontier.
*1/2D has the same variability as Max . . . and also takes into account "effective range," which can get fairly squishy and subjective because it has an ergonomic component.
*ST and Rcl are linked to real-world weapon weight and recoil to an extent, but have a substantial ergonomic component that's rather subjective, even more so than 1/2D.
*Acc and Bulk are seriously subjective. They represent how well the weapon behaves. Yes, things like how long the barrel is matter some, but these stats are mostly "gamist" quantities that give skill modifiers in particular situations, and as such are more about "ease of use" than mechanical properties.
*Shots (reload time) is subject to the game's assumptions about how guns work, like Rcl, but a lot more like a guess . . . so much so that I'd call it "gamist" and not very objective.
*LC is just some made-up game stat that changes with your setting. As the concept is a pure game construct, whose only links to the real world are to "soft," social concepts that vary even from city to city, it's essentially the most subjective of all.
==Related Material==
*Range Time-Two Rounds Through One Hole (Gaming Ballistic) - recommenced by Kromm for MoA and Acc determination.
*Barnes, Frank ; Stan Skinner Cartridges of the World: A Complete and Illustrated Reference for Over 1,500 Cartridges
==Quick and dirty damage formula==
Points of Damage = sqrt (KE in Joules/ (Caliber in mm)^0.4) * 0.6
Category:Firearms
Category:World Building