Re: Kinetic Energy Missile--New weapon for DSII

Sometimes making a living designing anti-tank weapons has certain
drawbacks... 

I don't know anything about the 2300 universe, but comparing this KEM
with today's weapons and today's weapons with the vanilla DSII, some
details stand out: 

> "KEM attacks are resolved as if they were direct-fire guns, not as 
> missiles (i.e., treat KEM Guidance value as Fire Control value and
roll

> appropriate attacker die vs. target signature die). However, its
accuracy > and damage do not degrade with range, 

If the damage doesn't degrade with range, why is the damage at range 60
less than the damage at range 48?

> and all targets out to max range are engaged as if in
> the Close Range band. KEM is not affected by Basic or Enhanced PDS. >
Superior PDS and can be effective against a KEM, but their >
effectiveness is degraded.

Reactive armour should be effective, though. I know DSII doesn't give
reactive armour any bonus against HKPs etc, but it should :-/

> ECM is totally ineffective against a KEM due to its 
> guidance mode.

If the guidance mode is "no guidance", this is probably true <g> A
missile travelling fast enough to kill a tank by pure KE - we're talking
2-3000 m/s or so - would be... difficult to steer to say the least, so
"no guidance" (making the KEM a rocket-powered KE round rather than a
missile) sounds fairly likely. If it is fire-and-forget, it will be
vulnerable to ECM.

> All of those capabilities come for a price, however. Due to KEMs'
larger 
> size than GMSs, this system has a Mass of 6.

Well... Put it like this: One of the reasons the GSMs use shaped
warheads
is that they are too slow to kill by KE, and they are slow because a
light missile launcher isn't able to give it a high initial velocity and
a small missile can't carry very much fuel to accelerate with. 

Unless you assume that the KEM has an engine some orders of magnitude
more efficient than the GSMs (in which case it'd be a *lot* more
expensive rather than 10-20 pts, or else the GSMs would use it too),
you'd pretty much have to launch it from a cannon. Using today's
technology as a guideline, a HVC/4 derivative or so might be large
enough.

Later,

Oerjan Ohlson
oerjan.ohlson@telia.com

"Life is like a sewer.
  What you get out of it, depends on what you put into it."
- Hen3ry