GURPS High-Tech is the title for GURPS supplements detailing recent-past and contemporary technology in greater detail than the game's Basic Set. Actually, there have been several books with this title; that for GURPS third edition went through three editions of its own, and the material was then updated and expanded for GURPS fourth edition. In addition, there are three PDF-only extensions of the latter version — GURPS High-Tech: Adventure Guns and two volumes of GURPS High-Tech: Pulp Guns.
In all its incarnations, High-Tech has a reputation as "the GURPS gun book", with a lot of justice; it has notes and game stats for a lot of historical firearms. But, to be fair, it also covers other technology in respectable detail; it has been noted that the fourth edition version has about as many pages on non-weapons tech as the third edition versions had on everything.
Tropes appearing in High-Tech:
- Abnormal Ammo: High-Tech has a two-page table of ordinary ammunition. You modify the bullets on that table to make bizarro ammunition. Incendiary shotgun slugs with silver cores? No problem!
- Aerosol Flamethrower: These show up, but they're unreliable, lack range, and get five seconds of firing time at best. They're still better than most improvised weapons; scarier, too.
- Awesome, but Impractical: Nitroglycerin is one of the most powerful demolition explosives (making it very useful if you're operating on a weight limit), and is one of the first to appear. Unfortunately, it's the Hair-Trigger Explosive, with a significant chance of blowing up even from a small fall, and given the sorts of antics that a Player Character may get into, you're better off using anything else.
- Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick: High-Tech recommends several things that can be laid over barbed wire to provide a safe way to get past it: a log, a sheet of metal or thick plastic, or a body.
- Depleted Phlebotinum Shells: High-Tech includes a sidebar on exotic ammunition.
- After his first encounter with the supernatural, an ordinary FBI Agent decided to upgrade his arsenal with modified silver hollow point that can be filled with a dose of poison (which in this case is actually garlic). The bullets in question are expensive but without any special quality, unless they happen to hit a monster's weakness.
- High-Tech has information on making iron bullets. They don't get better ballistics, and in fact reduce reliability in firearms... but if a Fair Folk has a weakness to iron, they cover it.
- Wood has poor ballistics and armor penetration and thus is only good for triggering a weakness.
- Deployable Cover: High-Tech details "explosives blankets" which SWAT officers can use to protect themselves from attack or contain a bomb that can't be relocated. There's also a variant that gives protection against radiation, which is meant to contain dirty bombs.
- Developer's Foresight: Just in case somebody is ignorant or crazy enough to try, the book has rules on trying to fire a gun when it's loaded with the wrong caliber. Most of the time, this will cause the gun to suffer a misfire or jam, but it may also surprise the shooter by breaking or exploding... or actually firing.
- Drop Pod: The rules on parachutes mention the EXINT pod
and give stats for it. It's much more expensive than a parachute, and is less efficient on space than simply using a parachute, however, making it rather niche. - Explosive Stupidity: The rules given for skimming nitroglycerin from dynamite (by boiling the dynamite) give a significant chance for the average demolitionist to accidentally blow up the dynamite instead, possibly dying in the process. The same set of rules also has the rule for carrying a ball of nitro on one's person, with the carrier having to roll each time they're hit in order to cushion the explosive safely.
- Fast-Roping: Basic Set already has rules for rappelling, but High-Tech adds rules for running down the wall you're climbing down, allowing you to shoot at the same time (albeit with a large to-hit penalty).
- Gatling Good: High-Tech has details for historical and real-world Gatling guns, including the Minigun. Carrying most of them is almost impossible for most characters because they are too heavy. However, in a nod to cinema, there is a technically man-portable version, with proper grips, batteries, and an ammo backpack. It still requires very high strength and runs out of ammo very quickly.
- Goggles Do Something Unusual: For example, realistic anti-laser goggles to protect against weapons intended to blind the wearer.
- Gun Porn: There's no denying that High-Tech has details for a huge number of guns. GURPS Tactical Shooting, the two volumes of Pulp Guns, Adventure Guns, and SEALs in Vietnam add even more.
- Gun Stripping: The perk "Armorer's Gift" lets the character assemble or disassemble a gun in record time without even thinking. The extreme familiarity with guns helps if a weapon jams.
- Hair-Trigger Explosive: The infamous nitroglycerine is given stats. Any time it's mishandled, it has a 37.5% or so chance to explode, making it extremely dangerous to carry.
- Hand Cannon: The Desert Eagle (if chambered in .50 AE) and the Ruger Super Redhawk (chambered in .454 Casull) are the most powerful handguns. The latter even does the same damage as an assault rifle.
- Hollywood Encryption: Averted, as basic encryption demands a powerful computer by the standards of the Tech Level, and can take a year or ten to crack without a Complexity 3 computer. It's only by The New '10s that you can crack basic encryption in a day with the average gaming computer. Secure encryption, meanwhile, is completely impossible to crack if the user or creator didn't do something stupid, so the only route is to either persuade the user to tell you the key, or torture them until they give up the key.
- I Just Shot Marvin in the Face: The section on gun handling cautions against Reckless Gun Usage, and mentions the possibility of GMs hitting players with accidental discharges if they engage in athletics with a loaded gun that doesn't have the safety on, if the gun is known to be particularly unsafe, or if the character has the Unluckiness or Cursed disadvantages.
- Impeded Communication: Jammers can be used to hinder the use of radios and radio-operated devices. A skilled operator can get past the jamming, however.
- Improvised Armor: A Dirty Tech box covers this topic, with rules given for a paper vest (which can be made even without training) and a cuirass made out of a large plastic bucket or barrel.
- Invisible Writing: Rules are given for using invisible ink, but it's very easy to screw it up (either making the writing impossible to make visible, or just barely visible to the naked eye), unless you have good manual dexterity or training in such writing. Modern spies, however, can use it with typewriters or printers, avoiding such an issue.
- It's Raining Men: The book gives stats for parachutes and hang-gliders, along with an EXINT-like infiltration pod. There are even rules for firing a gun while using a parachute.
- Joke Item:
- Some weapons are more backwards than typical for time period. Such as surplus rifles - repeaters reloading bullets individually, or one-shot rifles - during World Wars.
- The Chauchat machinegun in Pulp Guns 2 is just as awful as it was in real life. Both the (8mm Lebel) and (.30-06) variants are horribly unreliable (Malf 15), have small fire rate (Ro F 4), small clip size (20 and 16 bullets, respectively), and mediocre damage (6d). The only good quality about them, is their cheapness - but Browning M1918 BAR is just as cheap while being better in every way, and becomes available in 1917, while Chauchat (.30-06) becomes available in 1918.
- Pulp Guns 1 has the Kolibri, which is the epitome of the Little Useless Gun. It does 1d-3 pi- damage (meaning that the bullet can bounce off thick leather clothing, will struggle to penetrate a man's skull, and will usually only do a single point of injury if you don't target the vitals or brain), has Acc 0 (making it mostly useless to aim), does half damage if you shoot farther than 25 yards, only holds 5+1 rounds (which, due to the low damage, isn't enough to incapacitate humans, even if you hit them with all the rounds), and also gives you -1 to the attack roll if you have average-sized hands. Unless you're of below-average strength, the gun itself is a more useful weapon than the bullets it fires.
- The Daisy Number 111 Red Ryder does very little damage, suffers from poor range, can only fire a single shot per attack, and uses Guns Sport with the Musket specialty (so most modern gunfighters will be forced to use the DX-4 default, since you can't double-default to Musket and then to Guns Sport, and musketeers will be rolling at -3 from their normal Guns). The main redeeming qualities it has is low cost and weight, high Legality Factor, and the fact that it's actually meant as a toy, so complaints about its uselessness are missing the point.
- Lie Detector: Subverted and downplayed. Even if the polygraph works as advertised (by default, it doesn't), the machine still doesn't detect lies — the interrogator is the one doing that. It also only gives the interrogator a bonus to their roll (or possibly a penalty if the operator failed their roll), rather than allowing one to automatically detect lies, compulsive liars will automatically defeat the polygraph, and it's less effective on strong-willed people. Voice stress analyzers are even less effective, though they also don't require attaching anything to the subject (thus making them usable in secret), and can be used on high-quality recordings.
- The Little Detecto: A decent amount of detectors is detailed, with them probably being too numerous to list. If it exists in real life, you can likely find it in the book.
- Metal Detector Checkpoint: The walkthrough metal detector gives a variable bonus to the operator's Search skill. The description notes that security teams don't usually have the sensitivity turned all the way up because it can end up catching even tiny bits of metal and lead to long lines.
- Myopic Architecture:
- The rules on locks make it so that the toughness and quality of the lock are independent of each other, making it possible to have a hard-to-pick lock that can be easily destroyed with a few kicks, or a tough lock that can be picked even by an untrained person (or a trained person with an Improvised Lockpick). Safes do at least come with super-tough locks and demand an hour to open, but it's still possible to have one that can be easily picked with a stethoscope.
- Basic versions of fingerprint scanners can be easily bypassed just by... breathing on them. So long as the last scanned print was valid, the scanner will grant access.
- Nail 'Em: The use of nail guns as weapons is discussed, but it requires two hands and a strength attribute higher than average, while also being very difficult to hit with.
- Night-Vision Goggles: Stats are given for all sorts of night-vision devices. In a nod to realism, they don't work in total darkness, and thus demand an infrared illuminator in these conditions. They also render the wearer colorblind with No Peripheral Vision and no depth perception, making it difficult to shoot. Thus, unless stealth is paramount, a tactical flashlight is a much better option.
- Overheating: High-Tech naturally has detailed optional rules for overheating of automatic weapons, including barrel swaps, heating management by burst firing, and the possibility of spectacular malfunctions.
- Power Fist: The Pistol Glove, which shoots a bullet when you land a punch.
- Reliably Unreliable Guns: In addition to the usual rules for malfunctions, as given in Basic Set, it's mentioned that some guns aren't drop-safe. As such, recklessly dropping them around will result in an accidental discharge, which can potentially result in somebody's death.
- Safecracking: Unlike normal locks, safes demand an entire hour (instead of a minute) to crack, and demand a stethoscope to do so. If one wants to destroy them, explosives are almost always a necessity.
- Secret Compartment: Smuggler's luggage consists of normal containers that have a hidden compartment or a false bottom built into them, thus giving a bonus to one's attempts at smuggling.
- Silver Bullet: Silver bullets are hard to male but have no negative effect on range or damage; against werewolves, they do multiplied damage. High-Tech points out one potential problem: because they are relatively soft silver bullets can mess up rifled firearms. Notably, this is wrong. Silver is harder than lead, but also less dense. It has also been discovered that a silver bullet will shrink while cooling, and thus a silver bullet cast in a regular bullet mold comes out smaller than the intended size. Also, silver does not "mushroom" in the barrel as much as lead does. Thus, the bullet does not form a proper seal against the grooves of the barrel, allowing much of the gas to escape around the bullet, and the bullet does not get as much spin imparted to it. As a result, a silver bullet has a shorter range and less stopping power (except against werewolves, of course) when compared to a lead bullet.
- Spy Satellites: While you can't actually buy one in the game, the flaws of the "Eye in the Sky" are discussed. Along with limits of the technology itself, an untrained character can't even determine what the readouts mean.
- Static Stun Gun: High-Tech has tasers/batons as well as taser guns — which are nearly useless against people wearing anything but normal clothing, unless you use the version meant for large animals.
- Stomach of Holding: Rules are given for mule pills, which allow semi-safely transporting anything that weighs half an ounce or less by swallowing it, but at great discomfort (with observant guards being able to notice this) and with the possibility that the contents will rupture, exposing the mule to the contents. The book notes that while they're typically used for drugs in real life (due to the great weight/cost ratio), explosives could also be valid.
