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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Lie Detector: Subverted. 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.
- Overheating: High-Tech naturally has detailed 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.
- 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.
