[email removed] (Mark Urbin) writes:
> On page 96, in the small arms design section, the Configuration
> Modifier table. Why is bolt action treated differently? According to
> this table, a bold action rifle has less range than a lever action,
> pump, semi-auto or breach loading rifle (cm of 1.1 vs cm of 1.3). A
> bolt action pistol becomes the target shooters dream (cm of 1.1 vs a
> cm of 0.4).
> What's the story here?
I doubt that you're the only one who is confused about this part of the FF&S
weapons design rules, so let me help straighten things out here. First,
let's take a look in FF&S, and see what the rules say:
FF&S pp.96, first column, reads: "Cm: Configuration Modifier, as shown below.
If two configuration descriptions apply to the same weapon, multiply them
together to determine the total configuration modifier."
OK, that helps. Since the design sequence is for small arms, either the
"one-handed" or the "two-handed" modifier will *always* apply. The other
modifiers, for "bullpup", "bolt action", and "smoothbore" may or may not
apply. This results in 8 canonical configurations for weapons:
configurationtotal cmcomment
rifle1.3
rifle, bullpup1.17
rifle, bolt-action1.43
shotgun0.65all 2-handed, smoothbore small arms
pistol0.4
pistol, bullpup0.36not a very likeley combination
pistol, bolt-action0.44the Remington XP-100 is an example
shot-pistol0.2a 1-handed "sawed-off" shotgun?
The following combinations are not "offically" allowed (because the rules
say "two configuration descriptions", making any weapon with more than two
applicable configuration descriptions un-official). The bullpup shotgun
in particular sounds reasonable to me for a semi-auto or full-auto
military design (sufficiently so that I'd be suprised if it's never been
tried in Real Life).
configurationtotal cmcomment
shotgun, bullpup0.585reasonable for a military shotgun
shotgun, bolt-action0.715
In addition, various other unlikeley combinations are probably "possible",
but I doubt that they'd be used. Combining bullpup and bolt-action doesn't
make much sense, because this would move the handle of the bolt back to a
location that would make it very incomvenient to operate the action.
Bullpup pistols also don't make much sense to me, nor do bolt-action
shotpistols, so I won't list the cm values for these combnations.
A good, well-explained example would have helped; unfortunately, the one
that's in FF&S not only has very little explanatory text, but it also has
an error in this calculation. The designer of the example has performed
the "cm" calculation correctly, but then rounded the value before using it
in the formula for short range. This is incorrect; the "cm" value should
not be rounded before use, but the final short range should be rounded to
the nearest meter.
Corrections to FF&S: pp.155, top of the first column, the "SR" line should
read: SR = Sqrt(E)CmBlm = 69.303679 * 1.17 * 1 = 81.0853 = 81m. This
correction changes the short range from 83m to 81m, and will affect the
other short ranges comuted in subsequent lines.
In general, this also points out a question that many non-engineers will
have trouble with. How many significant figures should you keep in your
calculations. As a rough rule of thumb (and the the engineers out there
will probably cringe), keep one more digit than the number of significant
digits in your answer. This will keep any rounding or truncation errors out
where they won't change the results of your calculation.
For small arms ranges, our answer will be in the tens, or sometimes hundreds
of meters. This is two or three significant figures in the answer; so we
should use three or four significant figures in our calculations.
For example, in the SR calculation above, the figures could have been kept
to three significant digits: 69.3 * 1.17 * 1.00 = 81.1, which rounds to 81.
Two significant digits (which is what the designer of the example used when
using a value of 1.2 for cm) won't work: 69 * 1.2 * 1.0 = 82.8, which rounds
to 83. More significant figures that the "rule of thumb" suggests will only
increase the amount of work you have to do, and won't improve the accuracy
of your answer. Fewer and you will get bad results as in the example above.
Other computations will have answers with different numbers of significant
figures. However, for Traveller, we should never need more than about 4
significant figures in our answers; accuracy greater than this is probably
irrellevant to the game. So keep the first 4 or 5 digits that your
calculator displays, and ignore the rest. Going back to the above example
from FF&S, we can get by with SR = 69.304 * 1.17 * 1 = 81.086, which rounds
to 81m. Note that this is slightly more punching on your calculator to
achieve the same results as when we kept only 3 digits, illustrating the
point I made earlier: more significant figures only adds work, and doesn't
increase the accuracy of your answer.
> Page 52, "Visable and Infraed Light Sensors" box. Check out the TL
> 8 PIR goggles. They cost MCr0.00050 or Cr0.5. A nice cost drop from
> the TL 6 Infrared goggles listed on page 343 of the main TNE book.
> Those pups cost Cr500 a pop.
Check your math again. MCr is an abbreviation for MegaCredits - millions of
credits. MCr1 == Cr1,000,000; therefore MCr0.00050 == Cr500. Expressed in
millions of credits, Cr0.5 is MCr0.0000005.
[email removed]
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Science-Fiction Adventure
In the Far Future