I will confess that I like to push the limits of a set of
rules. I hope that this post will show one end of the limit
of Meson gun design. I have read in the GDW-Beta archives of
a meson SMG design which I would love to see posted.
This extreme is an attempt to build the Star Wars Death Star
main weapon. Some time ago I retrieved the following from
rec.arts.sf.science, posted by Erik Max Francis,
[email removed], in response to a question there:
>The total energy required to give every little infinitesimal
>bit of a spherical, uniform mass escape velocity from every
>other little bit (also called the binding energy) is
>
> (3/5) G M^2/R,
>
>where G is the universal constant of gravitation, M is the
>total mass of the sphere, and R is its initial :-) radius.
>Of course, this will not be entirely true for a
>nonspherical, nonuniform object like a planet, but it's
>certainly within an order of magnitude or so.
Now for Earth, from the sci.astro faq, we have:
(1) G = 6.673e-11 N m^2/kg^2 (7e-11)
(2) M = 5.974e24 kg
(3) R = 6.371e6 m
Which, unless I have screwed up here, is about 2.25e32 j, or
2.25e26 Mj
So if we want to build a death star, we need a weapon (a
Meson Gun would seem ideal) which will feed that much energy
into the core of a planet in a reasonably short period of
time -- say about 30 minutes.
Lets assume that we can design the weapon with an ROF of 100.
This gives us a discharge energy of 2.26e24 Mj. Working at
TL 14 and selecting a tunnel length of 250 m (to give a short
range of 10 hexes, the other calculations fall out:
3a Effective Tunnel Length 300m
3b Tunnel Volume 5.62e24 m^3
3c Cross Sectional Area 2.25e22 (a diameter of 8e7 km !!)
3d Tunnel Mass 3.37e24
3e Tunnel Price 5.63e23 MCr
I won't bore you with damage values, which run from 7e12
down.
Well, so much for the Meson armed death star -- back to the
drawing board, Darth.
Les Howie
Prograph International