Length does allow the size of a gun to be roughly gauged; for example, based on the height of the actor holding it (if you're willing to BS it a little from Da Vinci's notes on Vitruvius* you can use any part of him if you know his height, even; for example, the length of an actor's arm is roughly his height multiplied by 0.375), or if it's in a rack with other weapons you can gauge the length of one by the lengths of the others. It's also useful if there are versions of varying length.
As I said, fire modes are only useful in certain situations. A manually-operated weapon would never really need that column, but it's always there anyway. In much the same way, length is potentially useful in IDs. It should also be noted that the rules caution against descriptions being too brief. I think year / type / length / weight / calibre / capacity / fire modes is a reasonable compromise between too much and too little. According to the rules we should also have a field for country of origin in there somewhere. Things like barrel length, effective range, rate of fire (except auto RoF as part of fire modes), action, muzzle velocity, sights and so on I'd agree with dropping on pages where they're present. Though clicking around, a lot of pages have no statistics at all.
Also, a lot of pages don't have any standards for fire modes; for example, some list safe as a mode while others do not. Are we just covering fire selector positions, or do we include "safe" on anything which has a safety?
Edit: Probably the best solution would be a template with fields to fill out; that way people wouldn't be tempted to add extra specs because there'd be nowhere to put them.
*Figure drawing, in case you're wondering why the hell I know that
Last edited by Evil Tim; 11-07-2011 at 11:45 AM.
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