[email removed] writes:
>
> > A better way is to consider the price of missiles. At Cr50000 each, a bay
> > shoots off MCr1.25 with each volley.
>
> This would affect the PC's capability of popping off missiles like pop-corn
> too so it has it's disadvantages.
Preventing PC's from having (and using) the firepower to wipe out a fleet
is a disadvantage? :-)
Besides, now you know why, whenever I played in a campaign with space combat,
I used lasers when possible and kept missiles for "special occasions".
He also writes:
> So the infantry could use recoilless rifles with nuclear rounds to take out
> almost any target no matter how hard it is.
If they don't mind ending up with a radioactive desert. If they're defending
their homeland, they might want to be careful; if they're attacking, they may
be under orders not to do too much damage, because they're supposed to be
capturing the place, not destroying it; and if they are supposed to be
destroying it, a few large nuclear missiles will do a better job anyway.
[email removed] (Steve Higginbotham) writes:
> > (This is BTW the reason why we don't see any supertankers
> >mounting 10 127mm naval guns today).
>
> Actually, we see few supertankers with 10 127mm naval guns because it is
> against the law in most countries to put weapons like that on privately
> owned ships. Note that in WW2,we DID see merchants mounting heavy guns.
The reason you don't see merchants mounting many heavy guns, even during
a war, is that they are merchant ships. Their job is to transport stuff.
Ammunition for big guns takes up space. Now, if the ship's main job is
fighting, then it gets big guns, and lots of them. In WW2, we did see
merchant ships mounting heavy guns - one per ship, usually. We also saw
ex-merchant ships with the armament of cruisers. They were called
auxiliary cruisers, and their job was either to do commerce raiding, or
to make life harder for the other side's commerce raiders. And German
supply ships tended to have a good few guns as well, although they were
tankers whose main job was to supply the real raiders - the auxiliary
cruisers and the "pocket battleships".
Now, in Traveller, lasers don't take any ammo. Their hardpoints do take
up space, but even so, if I were running a large freighter I'd want to
get a good load of lasers if there was a serious risk of piracy. For
a historical precedent, there is always the Dutch East India merchant
ships, which were as well armed as many warships.
[email removed] writes:
> Subject: (3616) High-tech infantry
>
> 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.
Well, FGMP's aren't quite that powerful. And anyway, with the higher TL
armour, the tank is probably better armoured than the Iowa. If the
infantry's FGMP can destroy a tank, the tank makers just build a bigger
one which the FGMP cannot destroy.
What might change the whole nature of warfare is small meson guns, as
someone else pointed out. Armour is not much use against them, and
a tank is therefore no better protected than an air/raft. So then
someone figures out how to make small meson screens, and then the
ground war becomes the same as space war, except smaller. (Didn't
Book 4, Mercenary, say something about high tech grav tanks being
almost indistinguishable from spacecraft?)
- --
"Keyboard? How quaint!" - M. Scott
Adrian Hurt | JANET: [email removed]
UUCP: ..!ukc!cs.hw.ac.uk!adrian | ARPA: [email removed]