Leonard.Erickson:
>For a 5 ton projectile,
>V (g-hr) (m/sec) KE(ergs) (% of BC) kilotons diameter(meters)
> 1 3.528e3 3.112e19 .04 .7 kT 91
> 2 7.056e3 1.245e20 .18 3.0 kT 145
> 3 10.584e3 2.801e20 .39 6.7 kT 190
> 4 14.112e3 4.979e20 .70 12 kT 230
> 5 17.640e3 7.779e20 1.1 19 kT 267
> 6 21.168e3 1.120e21 1.6 27 kT 301
> 7 24.696e3 1.525e21 2.1 37 kT 334
> 8 28.224e3 1.991e21 2.8 48 kT 365
> 9 31.752e3 2.520e21 3.5 60 kT 394
> 10 35.280e3 3.112e21 4.4 75 kT 423
> 11 38.808e3 3.756e21 5.3 90 kT 451
> 12 42.336e3 4.481e21 3.3 110 kT 478
> 47.8 168.522e3 7.1e22 100 1.7 MT 1200 :-)
Fascinating. But you got the velocities wrong on this. One G-hour is
35280 m/s, NOT 3528 m/s. Interestingly enough, you got your KE's right,
in spite of the incorrect velocities...
>BTW, for a 5 *gram* projectile, we get 1 millionth the energy, or
>1/100th the diameter. So change the diameters above to cm. Which means
>that 5 gm projectile (a BB) at the veocity give by a mere 1 g for 1
5gm is NOT "a BB". It is bigger than a .223 round (which is only
3.5gm).
John H Bogan
> I finally figured out what the New Era reminds me of. Does any-
>one remember "The Morrow Project" ?
Yes. Good point. I'd forgotten the game, but upon checking, I find
(like you) that it is an almost exact parallel with TNE's background
campaign...
> Hole three is plugged with doubletalk (but not as bad doubletalk as
>cheap, common and generally magic 'force fields':). Like Steve has
>shown, the engines on missiles are much smaller (and much less
>effective) than the ship drives.
<snicker>. The missile's drives, in order to be capable of the kinds of
things they are listed as doing are ONLY equivalent to a 100 GIGAWATT
plasma gun, instead of the 100 TERAWATT fusion gun a Free Trader is
carrying around. But under Striker rules, that's still a penetration of
6000 meters of steel at "short range" of 140Km or less...
wildstar:
>I've been thinking about T:TNE errata. There isn't much of it, but
>there is some. I've saved Steve Higginbotham's corrected insystem
>travel tables, and (of course) my own Governments in the Wilds fix.
>If anybody has more errata (down to individual typos), if you will send
>it to me, I'll edit it into one master list and post it to TML (say) in
>about a week. I'll also take responsibility for making sure that
>someone at GDW sees and reads it, so we can get all of this stuff fixed
>for the next printing and/or the boxed edition :)
>How about it, everyone?
I'll get you a list of the things I have seen by the weekend (I hope)...
Bertil:
> I imagine that the mechanism that harm the ship works like this: The
>fusion rocket eject <whatever> (soft xrays perhaps:). If it is inside
>an atmosphere, it will form a classical fireball just aft of the ship.
Nonsense! It will do no such thing! It will look just like a classic
fusion gun blast in the 100 terawatt power range. Remember the Kzinti
Lesson.
> I can accept a continous plasma gun with range 10 and pen 10
>resulting from the maneuver jets. Imagine the difficulty in maneuvering
>the whole bloody ship to aim the thing! :)
pen-10? I HOPE you are talking about the attitude jets, and not the
main drive here, or you are full of it. The main drive should be a
continuous penetration measured in dozens to thousands of meters of
steel...
wildstar:
>Hmmm. That sounds like a reasonable way to limit the effectiveness of
>drives as weapons. I'd make that about 100 major hits to the aft of
>your ship for running the drive in an atmosphere.
So you've decided to live in dreamland too? I'm depressed...
>As far as attacking a ship, space station, or vacuum world with the
>drive exhaust, as a referee I'd probably come up pilot or astrogation
>task to aim the drive, and assign an amount of damage based on how well
>the roll was made (anywhere from 1 minor hit out at 10km or so, all the
>way up to a couple of hundred major hits for firing the drive while in
>a docking bay of a spaceport). For any damage over about 2 major hits,
>I'd make the firing ship talk about half damage. (Note that I don't
>have any physics to back this up; this is just what I'd do as a
>referee).
Play Star Wars! If you are going to ignore physics just to make it feel
good, then play AD&D! If you are going to throw out the physics, you
might as well start using magic in a big way, and settle for
Spelljammers...
---Steve Higginbotham