Re: 3 arc cost

>John Leary wrote:
>>
>> Greetings,
>>	I think that all involved in the mass/arc discussion are
>> stuck in WWII with the big gun battleship.
>
>	This is true enough, however, almost all table top (that is in
two
>dimensional) games involving "Fleets" of anything is going to be based
>on the WWII model.
>	Besides, paint the table blue, scratch FTL and the obvious SF
stuff
>(like Wave guns, Nova Cannons, and shields) then Kazam! you have a
>pretty good WWII navel simulation.
>
>>  The (personal)
>> problem I have with this is that our ships are armed with
>> (charged) particle beams and the turrets being talked about
>> are (more than likely) a manipulated energy field thru a
>> series of surface mounted emitters.	 All of the directional
>> changes would be handled thru different levels of energy
>> in the various emitters to change target and control the
>> field for focus (range) changes.
>
>	Whoa! Star Trek Physics.  Is that a quote right out of the ST
writers
>guide? The nice "look" of the Enterprise multi-emitter would take an
>order of magnitude more energy than a traditional turret.  Energy
>radiates from a source, it doesn't flow.  Adjacent emitters would not
>have any effect on each other.

Having designed and worked with antennas and electromagnetic radiation
for many years, and designed a number of phased-array antennas, I must
comment here. Adjacent emitters would not "have any effect on each
other",
but the statement is deceptive. The EM radiation from adjacent emitters
*would* combine, destructively and constructively, in "free space" once
radiated by the emitters. Otherwise phased-array antennas would not
work.
This applies for *any* form of EM radiation, including RF, IR, UV,
visible light, x-rays, etc.

>Sure you can affect the path of the
>radiant particles with magnetic fields or (reflective surfaces) but the
>strength of the field would likely crush any ship near it.  I would
>rather see all that energy dumped into my targets.  Put the energy (all
>of it) in the bottom of a reflective cone (or tube) and point it at the
>target. Simple. Now you could make a lot of low powered mini turrets
and
>point them all at the same spot on the target. Think of 10,000
>flashlights on spindles.  The first one is harmless.  10 starts to burn
>your eyes. 100 is painful. 1000 is blinding. etc.

But your flashlights, as non-coherent light, will add incoherently, so
the increase in power would be on the order of square-root(number of
lights).
If they were coherent (lasers), and the phase were controlled to make
them
arrive in-phase at the target, the increase would be on the order of
(number of lights). Oh...and it's a phased array of lasers. Which could
be
built today (albeit at lower powers and larger size than would be useful
in ship-to-ship combat, but we don't have star cruisers yet, either).

Back to SF: I envision the ST phaser system (a la Voyager) as a massive
plasma generator with smaller trigger plasma projectors for the various
fire quadrants. The plasma generator builds up a "shot" of plasma,
which is drawn off to the target "pickaback" on the smaller projected
plasma bolt. As good a PSB an any I have heard. ;-)

[snip]

- Sam

________________________________________
Samuel Reynolds
http://www.primenet.com/~reynol
reynol@primenet.com