Brand name firearms, do you play around with them? Options

[DrJest]

[Austere Emancipa...]

Then the next important question is how realistic you want to be about it? Firing 3-round bursts accurately with akimbo pistols is pretty much an impossibility, even with something as weak as .380 ACP and all the porting you can put in a pistol barrel. It might not be too far out for something like the Beretta M93R to be controllable when fired in such a fashion in a fictional world.

I would suggest against naming it Beretta M93R, however. I don't think it very likely he would be using a 87-year-old pistol. I don't think this particular pistol will age that well. At the very least, you could name it Beretta M107R or something similar, and make it clear from the description that it's not an antique gun.

If you assume that the balance of penetration by firearms (and handguns in particular) and body armor technology stays the same for the next 60 years, the 9x19mm round fired by the Beretta M93R (and most other pistols of that size, at least for now) will still be capable of penetrating light to medium flexible body armor with armor piercing rounds. Anything non-AP will be stopped cold. In fact, because of how common body armor is and the existance of trolls and big orks, you might as well use armor piercing ammunition only.

Any decent rigid body armor will still stop even AP bullets fired from it easily, and you'll have to literally riddle trolls with it to kill them. But if you want akimbo BF pistols, that's as big as you could semi-realistically get.

For a semi-automatic solution, the 10x25mm (or something similar) would be decent. It will crush a larger hole deeper into the big metahumans, and with dedicated armor piercing ammunition it's bound to be capable of defeating most flexible body armor for a while still. With the full power rounds the recoil may be a bit stiff, but certainly more controllable for one shot than a 3-round burst of 9x19mm.

Cartridges more powerful than that are generally not available for pistols of the same size. Of course in a fictional world you can always wield .50 AE Desert Eagles akimbo, but expect to be laughed at by the people who like realism. Not only will the recoil screw your following shots, the weight and bulk of the guns makes wielding two of them pretty difficult. I suppose you could get away with more power in revolvers, but that really cuts down the lead-spraying.

[Crusher Bob]

If you made 10mm pistols that were gas rather than recoil operated, you might be able to fire them with one hand, a good gas operated weapon will help mitigate the recoil. The problem with this is that such 'pistols' would be rather large, so you'd have to deal with two ~1.5+ KG weights on the end of each arm.

If you only need to shoot at someone in the same room, you can probably use two small submachine guns, though hitting anything further away than that is probably right out.

Of course, if you are superhumanly strong (or just have cyberarms), the extra weight might not bother you. A cyberarm specifically designed to mitigate recoil (ie cyberarm gyromount) will probably make your job a lot simper.

[Austere Emancipa...]

Yup, I wouldn't hesitate to suggest the heftier DEs for someone with B10/Q6/S8 and two cyberarms with S10 and gyromounts. For an unaugmented human with S5, though, large & heavy weapons with a lot of recoil are probably a bad idea.

[DrJest]

Thanks for that, gents. Since I'm not wedded to the necessity for burst fire, I'll take AE's advice and go with 10mm rounds (for the record, is that approximate to the .40 S&W round?), probably in something like a descendant of the Glock Subcompact for the concealability.

Since we have experts on tap here, what about the .41AE round? (And no, that's not "a little under half an Austere Emancipator" :) ) I know very little about it apart from a passing reference in Millennium's End many years ago, net research tells me that it is comparable to a similar sized magnum round with less recoil but seems to be rather short on manufacturers.

[Austere Emancipa...]

[DrJest]

Thanks, AE, I'll stick with the 10mm then.