RE: Big Guns and Small Ships (was Re: house rules/offline)

Actually by extrapolating from current military laser experiments (if
this is safe) they work on a pulse effect.  You have a high yield energy
burst like a bullet not the long streams of energy so dear to the hearts
of sci-fi fans.   Therefore the blast will all go into one area.  My
point was that if you are close enough for a  beam to hold together for
damage to be done, all you have to do is have it in your sights when you
push the button and you hit.  They can't evade unless they are moving
incredibly fast which is then a targeting issue.  You are then left with
ECM to prevent targeting or the ablity of your gun mounts to swivel
quickly enough (depending on how they do it) to track.	I agree that the
farther away the target is the easier it is to track.

>----------
>From:	Binhan Lin[SMTP:Binhan.Lin@UCHSC.edu]
>Sent:	Monday, October 20, 1997 6:53 PM
>To:	'FTGZG-L@bolton.ac.uk'
>Subject:	RE: Big Guns and Small Ships (was Re: house
rules/offline)
>
>
>
>On Mon, 20 Oct 1997, BEST, David wrote:
>
><SNIP>
>>   Once you have a target in your sights a beam weapon will almost
always
>> hit unless you are more than 186,000 miles away  at which point you
have
>> 1 second to evade.  Anything closer...  This can only mean that the
>> problem is targeting versus armour and it boils down to how long does
it
>> take to target and how difficult is it for a smaller more
manoeuvreable
>> ship to evade.  Personally I think targeting systems would always win
>> out over moving ships (inluding fighters) unless you take into
account
>> very high target speed
>> 
>Actually you don't have to be that far away, in fact you want to be as
>close as possible to move out of the attackers firing arc as quickly as
>possible.  
>
>Actually acquiring the target is the trivial part of getting a kill. 
I.e.
>radar can easily track anything bigger than a golf ball flying more
than a
>few hundred feet above the Earth a speeds from 0 to 25,000 mph the
problem
>is delivering the weapon to intercept.  In the case of lasers it's easy
to
>hit a target, but do get enough energy transmited to the target to get
>significant results - i.e. beam dispersion, target moving/rotating so
that
>a new area is exposed (alderson fields in Mote in God's Eye). Unless
your
>precision is such that you can keep a conventrated beam on a target
area
>maybe a few meters square for milliseconds at 20-100k miles you aren't
>going to be able to do squat with beam weapons.  A tiny vibration in
the
>weapon may cause a deviation measured in meters or km at the receiving
end
>totally negating the weapon.
>
>--Binhan
>
>