>Now, the overall battlefield situation is not brought to the level of
>the 14th century, where armored men had a hard time injuring each other on the
>battlefield because power generation technology and energy weapon technology
>keeps up with armor technology, and it is impossible to design a tank so well
>armored that some sort of weapon can't punch through it. The trouble is, from
>the point of view of the infantry, that that weapon is likely to weigh 3/4 of
>a ton and require another 5-6 tons of power plant to support it. That makes
>it non-portable, even for battledress equipped infantry, except of course by
>their carriers, which are effectively tanks.
This is not what I find when designing weapons systems for future wars. To
be sure, there are fundamental limits on how powerful man-portable weapons
dependent on chemical explosives can be. But then, there are also fundamental
limits on how tough armor made of theoretically possible materials can be.
So you have the same situation as has prevailed since WWI: a continual arms
race between tank armor and infantry anti-tank weapons, with neither able
to gain a permanent edge.
However, while armor not made of atomic matter is theoretically impossible,
weapons not dependent on chemical explosives are not. Once you get to the
stage where a fusion gun can be made man-portable (the Traveller "FGMP-16"
is based on this idea, though the effect is greatly understated), then as
far as I can see, armored vehicles become redundant because a fusion gun
is basically a straight-line hydrogen bomb; you could blow away an Iowa-
class battleship with one like a china plate in a shooting gallery, never
mind a tank.
Of course, before you get man-portable fusion guns, you will have them
carried on tanks, though tanks would probably still retain armor for
protection against artillery and infantry weapons.
The only way I can see out of this (unless and until you allow force-fields
to be developed, but these are *seriously* high technology if possible at all)
is to assume that there is a rule (written or unwritten) against using nuclear
weapons, including fusion guns, on an inhabited planet.
Now you said something about "superdense armor" in the Striker rules, which
I assume is some sort of theoretically *impossible* armor, which can
withstand any man-portable conventional weapon; but if this is what is
causing your problem, why not simply remove it and improve the realism while
you're at it?
"To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem"
Russell Wallace, Trinity College, Dublin
[email removed]