Bertil:
> Isn't the battle-field meson gun in Striker or Mercenary on around 50
>tons?
Perhaps in Mercenary. Striker deleted that little fiction.
> I checked the Fire Control difficulties table in MegaT, and it
>revealed an interesting thing: Even at hight TLs it isn't easy to hit a
>target at 5 to 50km range and close to impossible at 50-500km. If we
>accept this, and factor in the movement DMs, it will be very hard for
>the navy to hit a Gravtank at all. One could make a case for the tank
>being treated as a fighter, but it would have to be above the ground
>clutter for that, so the threat of an orbital navy against NOE tanks is
>not that high.
Hmmm... So starships cannot hit a 10 ton tank at 500Km, but can hit a
ten ton fighter at 500,000Km. Odd.
As to the question of ground clutter, look up the description of the
densitometer. Artificial grav fields at range less than 50,000Km stand
out quite clearly. Ground clutter is meaningless against grav tanks.
> Not really. 10000 meters will make it possible to mount PD on the
>bottom of the tank, thus removing the threat from missiles and nukes.
>PAs will still don't work. But remember the difficulty in hitting:
>Non-missile weapons would have a hard time hitting *if we accept these
>difficulties*.
An odd picture, but perfectly true, all the same. I concede the point.
However you inadvertently made MY point: that it is safer to be at
altitude than at NOE.
{more discussion of the "pancake}
BTW, the pncake has one serious flaw: curvature of the planet limits
the effective side of the pancake to no more than 5 or so Km, unless the
tanks are operating at altitude. So the "pancake" doesn't actually
exist except in theoreticians' minds>
> Imagine the savings in weight and cost if one could reduce the belly
>armour of hovercrafts... :)
Yeah. Really... :-)
> But even if you put, say 300mm of armour plate on all faces of an M1,
>assuming that the weight don't make it unable to move, it will have a
>thicker effective armour thickness on some faces due to the slant of
>those faces.
You are showing your track-layer prejudices again. If you can fly, you
can choose an altitude where your shot falls at the most advantageous
(to you) angle. Then armour sloping becomes much more problematic, and
design theory would probably consist of determining optimum slope to
convince your enemy to move to a position (relative to you) that makes
HIm more vulnerable. Sounds like fun...
> If I believed in them in the second way (cancel all inertia of the
>whole ship even structural components) any ship in the Imperium would
>go like greased lightning if they put normal (chemical or fusion)
>rockets on them:
> The power to weight relationship would approach infinity as weight
>(seen as inertia) approached zero.
Power to weight ratio (though MT loves teh concept) is meaningless. The
correct concept is "power to MASS ratio". Even if weight is zero, mass
is still there.
> No opposition to this: In fact I would like it that way (but it was
>done badly in Wet Navy).
So we do agree on something. Great!
> For once, some of them has more HUDs than crew, and the listed
>missile consumptions are far far to low (so the magazines isn't big
>enough) and they've violated their own armour rules among other things.
Good points. Though their missile usage may be based on Referee's Guide
before the Errata. I noticed the HUD problem myself last night on the
Vargr ships in Rebellion Sourcebook. I suspect this has something to do
with the fact that the various controls DON'T DO ANYTHING other than
contribute to CP totals. Something needs to be done (at least
informally) to regulate the use of controls of various types. No more
than one HUD per workstation, or whatever. For that matter, why can't a
ship have large numbers of computers, so ships don't need to be limited
by Computer CP limits?
> Well, that is *one* reason why MTBFs must be longer for aircrafts and
>real-life space equipment (where you can't make repairs on the fly)
>than for ships, but isn't the other reason that any failure can have
>immediately disastrous effects for aerospace vehicles?
> An aircraft having an engine failure is more likely to be lost than a
>ship having an engine failure, all other factors being equal.
Too true. But a starship in space is in less danger from engine failure
than a surface ship. Very little out there to hit, and you aren't
likely to need the engine for quite some time.
Later...
- -- Via DLG Pro v0.985b
[email removed]
I have learned to use the word "impossible" with the greatest caution.
--W. von Braun