striker, meson guns, etc...

A thread of 2 messages, 19 February 1992 to 19 February 1992, in the order they were sent.

#3749 striker, meson guns, etc...

Steve Higginbotham · 19 February 1992

Adrian Hurt:

>But because of the nature of a meson gun, direct fire-control is not
>possible, therefore not available.  So I think that vehicle-mounted
>meson guns would be TL15 self-propelled artillery, not tanks.  Thus
>they would be lightly armoured, as self-propelled artillery often is,
>and as someone else said they would be in another message.  But there
>would still be TL15 tanks, heavily armoured and equipped with energy
>weapons (fusion guns and/or lasers), point defense and perhaps meson
>screens.

It's not??? In Striker, any weapon that fires in a straight line has a
direct
fire control.  Just buy the one for the TL in question, and mount your
meson
gun in a turret of at least 20Kl.

>> My problem with a tank-sized meson screen is that a meson screen
>> generator has minimum size of 215Kl at TL15- (or 108Kl at TL16), which
>> is rather large for a tank.
>
>Then again, perhaps not.

Mighty big tank, eh?  16 tons for the meson screen, 1+ for the gun, 2+ for
the power plant, more for crew, armour, drives, sensors.  Probably 25+
tons.  The
M1 Abrams is rather less than 6 tons displacement.

As to the question of a smaller meson screen generator, the MT rules set
the
smallest one at about 2.5 tons (at TL21).  Since MT provides us a look at
the
technolgical improvement in meson screen technology for the next 6000
years, it
is probably safe to say a smaller one can't be built at TL15.

Later...

- -- Via DLG Pro v0.985b

[email removed]

I have learned to use the word "impossible" with the greatest caution.
                                    --W. von Braun

#3754 Re: meson guns

Adrian Hurt · 19 February 1992 · reply to #3749

[email removed] (Steve Higginbotham) writes:
> Adrian Hurt:
>
> >But because of the nature of a meson gun, direct fire-control is not
> >possible, therefore not available.
> > ...
> >							    But there
> >would still be TL15 tanks, heavily armoured and equipped with energy
> >weapons (fusion guns and/or lasers), point defense and perhaps meson
> >screens.
>
> It's not??? In Striker, any weapon that fires in a straight line has a
> direct fire control.

But most weapons that fire in a straight line are effective for the whole
length of that straight line.  True, with slug throwers (CPR and gauss
weapons) range does have some effect, but not as much as it does on a
meson gun.  You have to know the exact range to the target so that you can
control the mesons' velocity, so that they will go off inside the target.
Perhaps the meson gun's fire control would not be exactly the same as a
standard indirect fire control, but it would resemble an indirect fire
control more than it would resemble a direct fire control.

> >> My problem with a tank-sized meson screen is that a meson screen
> >> generator has minimum size of 215Kl at TL15- (or 108Kl at TL16), which
> >> is rather large for a tank.
> >
> >Then again, perhaps not.
>
> Mighty big tank, eh?

Yes.  That "perhaps not" was contrasting with the "... and perhaps meson
screens" in my list of what a TL 15 tank would carry.  In view of that
minimum size, I was accepting that the TL 15 tank would probably not
carry them.  Incidentally, what radius does the screen have?  Does it
just protect the hull of the vehicle which owns the screen, or can one
vehicle mounting a big screen cover an area, in which several other
vehicles would sit protected?

In any case, I would expect that the vehicle with the meson gun would sit
well back, out of harm's way.  Smaller, cheaper vehicles, perhaps drones,
would go into the forward battle area, trying to find enemy assets (vehicles,
troops, interesting buildings, etc.) and provide targetting information for
the meson gun.  Because of the requirement for precise ranging, I would
expect a meson gun to be less accurate than a laser, so if a tank with a
meson gun met a tank with a laser, the laser tank would have a better chance
of scoring the first hit.  So why risk the meson gun unnecessarily?

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 Adrian Hurt			     |	JANET:  [email removed]
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