In message 1543, Stephen Tihor says:
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I am not sure I would like to have a meson gun firing through another meson
gun or the ships fusor for two. Most of the ship should be transparent to
meson fire although one might expect some "minor" sideffects along the axis of
fire, particularly are the first few tech levels for meson weaponry.
For a large enough weapon these "side effects", trivial fractions of the
main weapons power, might belarger than one would like effecting your own ship,
although they may well be acceptable in a planetary defense mode.
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I'd like to know what some of these "side-effects" are. It seems the
concept of the meson cannon is the same as TL-8 radiation therapy:
you cut loose a sub-atomic particle of known energy and it gives up
most of its (stored) energy within a well-defined region. (I don't know
why it happens like this, but it does.) By knowing what our mesons
are passing through, we simply adjust the energy we put into them so that
they are `targeted' where we want them.
Of course, you'll NEVER find me walking the passageways during combat :-)
I'll hazard that firing mesons through gravitics, shields, or fusion
reactors would have all kinds of interesting and only marginally predictable
results.
It's too bad the rules make these such large weapons. I'd have thought that
your jump drive would produce more than enough of these to do the dirty work.
Richard Johnson
...and for people like me, who only hunt in desparation there is the
Remington Arms "Sporter" meson shotgun
TL-very, very high ++
Brings down small game and waterfowl _already cooked_!