>From: pierre-louis constantin [email removed]
>Subject: Ship ram damage
>Starship combat question:
>
>How would you handle the damage caused by a ship hitting
>another ship using maneuver drives and speeds? It seems to me that
>a 10-ton fighter moving at 42 km/s would cause a HELL of a lot of
>damage to even 10,000-tons cruisers. I haven't seen references to
>this anywhere.
>
>The on-the-spot rule call I made during the battle was to
>divide the mass of the ship by the mass of a missile and make that
>many damage rolls, but that is obviously not very good. :)
Well, a 10-ton fighter massing abt 75 tonnes or so and moving 42 km/sec
is about 7E13 joules, 70 terajoules. Around 10 megatons. Even assuming
a very glancing blow that only delivers about 10% of that energy to
the target ship, that's having a megaton class explosion on your outer
hull, which puts even the far end of most midsized space stations within
the total destruction radius. I don't think a bunch of rolls quite
covers the scenario; more like "Set the Character Sheets on Fire".
>BTW, do fighters have ejection seats? :) I think I've been
>way too generous with players who pull extremely stupid stunts. :)
Mine do, for various reasons. These little tiny 2 ton escape capsules,
in fact...
- -george william herbert