> From: [email removed] (Steve Higginbotham)
> Subject: (3653) still more striker (1)...
>
> > Like densitometers? Graviton lasers? Where is the muzzle on a
> >meason-gun tank by the way?
>
> Good point. Of course there is no tank sized meson gun, but that is
> another question entirely.
Isn't the battle-field meson gun in Striker or Mercenary on around 50 tons?
> I do not consider ground combat at all likely while both sides still
> have an operational fleet in near space. "Our" fleet may save us, if we
> are the attackers, but if we are defending, then "our" fleet is probably
> radioactive debris before the first grav tank is offloaded from their
> transports.
I checked the Fire Control difficulties table in MegaT, and it revealed
an interesting thing: Even at hight TLs it isn't easy to hit a target at
5 to 50km range and close to impossible at 50-500km. If we accept
this, and factor in the movement DMs, it will be very hard for the navy to
hit a Gravtank at all. One could make a case for the tank being treated as a
fighter, but it would have to be above the ground clutter for that, so
the threat of an orbital navy against NOE tanks is not that high.
> > From below we can get various boobytraps and infantry weapons. But
> >they will also at most have a penetration of around 65. If they appear
> >close by the point defences might not hit them, and it *is* possible to
> >hide them well enough so that the sensors will miss them. Energy
> >weapons will be close to impossible to hide due to their powerplants.
> >Meson guns are not possible to armour against so we discount them, and
> >the PA's won't work in air.
>
> Of course, if we operate at 10,000 meters, this all goes out the window.
Not really. 10000 meters will make it possible to mount PD on the
bottom of the tank, thus removing the threat from missiles and nukes. PAs
will still don't work. But remember the difficulty in hitting: Non-missile
weapons would have a hard time hitting *if we accept these difficulties*.
If we on the other hand think that it is too difficult to hit, and that
we should factor in the computer and similar things, it will lend more
credibility to the pancake theory since the ranges are much longer than
5000m, (The tank is operating in the middle of the 10000m thick pancake)
(I'm basing this on Striker with its saner model of penetration attenuation):
Fusionguns have ranges of 11 to 30km and lasers of 50 to 250km. If we up the
power to penetrate the armour, we will get even longer ranges.
> I do not necessarily agree with the pancake, though notice my earlier
> opinion about weaponry on the TL14+ battlefield: leave the grav
> vehicles home, since they are more detectable than a hovercraft, and
> thus more vulnerable.
Imagine the savings in weight and cost if one could reduce the belly
armour of hovercrafts... :)
> > Why hasn't any modern tank a rear hull armored as good as its glacis?
> >If gravtanks can appear from behind, so can T76s, so the US Army must
> >put its trust in its tactics and routines to avoid that some T76s get
> >behind their M1s, because nobody argues that the M1 is "worthless as a
> >weapon system."
>
> Have you noticed that modern anti-tank missiles, and anti-tank
> helicopters are causing tank designers to increase the deck armour on
> new tanks (as opposed to the generally quite thin deck armour on older
> tanks)?
But even if you put, say 300mm of armour plate on all faces of an M1,
assuming that the weight don't make it unable to move, it will have a thicker
effective armour thickness on some faces due to the slant of those faces.
If the glacis slants at 45 degrees it will have an effective armour
thickness of around 400mm if my calculator isn't decieving me.
The same reasoning holds true for gravtanks unless they look like spheres:
Equal thickness all around give unequal armour protection depending on face
hit and angle of hit.
> > Yes, but real world ships don't have to pull 6G. There were some talk
> >about the inertial compensators removing the inertia that would tear
> >the ship up during 6G manuevers, but that sounds like a TL11 version of
> >lifting oneself in ones hair.
>
> So, you disbelieve in inertial compensators when you find them
> inconvenient, but use them when they support your opinions?
If I believed in them in the second way (cancel all inertia of the whole
ship even structural components) any ship in the Imperium would go like
greased lightning if they put normal (chemical or fusion) rockets on them:
The power to weight relationship would approach infinity as weight
(seen as inertia) approached zero.
> > Only when used on starships and vehicles: Mount it on a normal ship
> >and watch it swell to its normal proportions (Wet Navy rules).
>
> SO let's fix it for MT, too.
No opposition to this: In fact I would like it that way (but it was done
badly in Wet Navy).
> > They are kludges and shouldn't be taken as valid designs.
>
> Why not?
For once, some of them has more HUDs than crew, and the listed missile
consumptions are far far to low (so the magazines isn't big enough) and they've
violated their own armour rules among other things.
> No. Not when I was in the Navy. Navy ships carried all those extra
> guys to keep things operating even with normal failure incidence. When
> something broke, we fixed it. Right then.
Well, that is *one* reason why MTBFs must be longer for aircrafts and
real-life space equipment (where you can't make repairs on the fly) than for
ships, but isn't the other reason that any failure can have immediately
disastrous effects for aerospace vehicles?
An aircraft having an engine failure is more likely to be lost than a
ship having an engine failure, all other factors being equal.
> [email removed]
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