Traveller and Guns

There was a game... in the 70s and early 80s... It was like Dungeons and Dragons, but in SPACE!

Traveller

Ok, it has evolved and is still around, but it came about in the late 70s.

In the game there are hundred and hundred of habitable planets that you can 'travel' to in a spaceship and whatnot.

Erin Pallette still plays it a lot.  Tam has been know to speak of it kindly and surely owned a rulebook or two at some point or still.

One feature of this gaming world was ships could travel faster than light (3-18 lightyears in about a week), but comms could not.  So star systems were a bit more isolated and self sufficient.  Messages travelled by courier.  Help was sent for, not called for.

Star systems would have various tech levels.  The equivalent of 19th century tech?  Sure.  Or a space station like in the Star Trek movies.  They'd also have various law levels.  Which ranged from Libertarian paradise to Police State. 

The first weapons that started to be banned as you went from no restrictions was:

" Body Pistols, Explosives, Poison Gas "

So, reverse order, no nerve gas canisters.  No hand grenades or claymore mines.  And no Ruger LCPs or Keltec .380s.  You could have a plasma gun powered from a backpack reactor to blast holes in stuff, but a smaller CCW style pistol was a no no. 

0 (Zero)	No Law	No Prohibitions (Nuclear Weapons)
1	Low Law	Body Pistols, Explosives, poison gas
2	Low Law	Portable Energy Weapons
3	Low Law	Machine Guns, Automatic Weapons
4	Moderate Law	Light Assault Weapons
5	Moderate Law	Personal Concealable Firearms
6	Moderate Law	All firearms except Shotguns
7	High Law	Shotguns
8	High Law	Blade Weapons Controlled
9	High Law	No weapons outside home

That is a sampling.

At level 5 that includes revolvers and semi autos.  Regular concealable, not super concealable.  The US, at the time the game came out, was between 4 and 5, the booklets implied.  Britain a 6.  If you could still carry a user sword in Britain.

Why the extra fear of the body pistol?  Ok I am mostly guessing here.  Remember this came up in the late 70s.   There was a big hate-on for small Saturday Night Specials.  Most folks thought those were pretty much banned in 1968.  Plus people saw the plastic pistols coming down the pike.  And assumptions were made that those would be able to foil the metal detectors.  So, early 1980s only-casual gunnie types with early 80s firearm attitudes, all before CCW entered the mass public consciousness. 

Little concealable pistols seemed scarier, perhaps, to them, than a machine gun.  It's just an interesting cultural snapshot reflecting the attitude of the times:  An unknown threat was worse than the obvious threat you can keep tabs on with an OC rifle or pistol.  Only cowards carry a concealed weapon, and must be up to no good with it. 

But that's not the way things worked out.

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Another funny gun thing about the game is how they though of a Snub Pistol.  In game it was a .38 or .40 cal J-Frame sized revolver that was good for fighting in Zero G.  For some reason.  They did specify it was low velocity, maybe the ammo was tuned even further down the speed scale (300-500 fps).  And it could fire specialty ammo, like tranquilizers or sleep gas or shaped charges to defeat body armor (so I guess it wasn't rifled, either, as that would defeat the shaped charge) and yet wouldn't puncture spaceship bulkheads and cause explosive decompression.  It felt weird to me even back in Junior High School.  It was a snubbie, but it could do odd things.