Steve Bonneville [email removed] Wrote
[ Brilliant Analysis Deleted]
> If one is willing to armor an expensive battleship a little better
> than a DE, at 1.77 % of ship volume you can have 71.5 cm of bonded
> superdense armor plating, and an armor rating of 2002. This is just
> sufficient to stop a TL15 500 kT nuclear detonation x-ray laser dead.
>
> Note that either value is sufficient to stop any of the "pea-shooter"
> class PAWS in _Brilliant Lances_.
>
> These armor ratings are very definitely not ridiculous. If anything,
> they may turn out to be conservative.
I would say quite conservative. At TL 14 you can construct a 9.5m bay laser
(there is no point in building much larger) feeding 6000 Mj (only 4* a standard
barbette laser) which will throw a penetration over 2000 out to 80 hex
range. That will not a lot of Damage after pen (about 15 points), but it
is not zero.
Note also there are some trade-offs we can do to get a small ship with a
laser that has 2000+ pen at very close ranges.
> It looks to me like the lighter weapons are really only useful for
> anti-missile fire or to try and scrub the communications and sensory
> antennae off a ship.
True for the smallest weapons, but is it such a bad idea? Also, you are
going to want to protect your own antennae.
> The only other thing I can think of doing with
> them is to try to saturate a big ship's anti-missile defenses and get
> a fusion weapon right up next to it. So I suppose the *really* big
> ships like the _Tigress_-types will depend more on what we'd currently
> consider very heavy weapons to do any real damage to the enemy line.
> I have no idea what sort of power the TNE equivalent to the meson-T
> delivers on target, but it is probably massive. The big ships will
> need to depend on heavy bays to back up the main gun, though, since
> the turrets and "pea-shooter" spinal mounts on escorts won't do much
> good. I'm not sure if the 100-ton bays can cut it; I haven't checked.
>
I think what we may have here is a classic race between armour and armament.
I am not sure how to develop any sort of "optimal" solution for a given
tech level, I guess its the sort of thing that would have to "come out in the
wash" in a given campaign.
While you would depend on the "big gun" spinal mounts to deliver ship-killing
critical hits, I think correct use of Light units (properly designed
for doing damage against armoured targets) would be an important tactical
consideration.
> As for the _Chrysanthemum_ in a fleet action, well, I guess it really
> is a cheap "tin can". I suppose it's supposed to be an SDB hunter
> and commerce cutter.
>
And anti-whatever screen...
I presume BL is built around small combatants (a sort of Mayday on Steroids?)
Les Howie
Prograph International