Re: FT-HET Laers

Beth Fulton wrote:

> G'day guys,

>
> For the non-mechanically minded in the audience, what would be the PSB
for
> something that can ignore armour?? I can understand things that burrow
> through armour, but not one that skips it all together. Drawing on my
> biological knowledge the only things I could think of would be things
that
> work like microwaves <popping the ship from the inside... start on the
> bottom hull box and work up maybe ;)> or sonics which disable the
internal
> delicate mechanisms but not the external - mind you with no atmosphere
in
> space sonics as such aren't going to work, but I'm guessing your
shockwave
> is the interstellar equivalent??

That staple from Traveller, the meson gun (actually a pi-meson [pion]
cancer
therapy machine on uber-steroids).  A laser-like emitter produces bursts
of pion
with a very small range of energies, and these are then accelerated by a
very
tightly controlled and precise accelerator.  The pions have a very short
mean
lifetime, so they decay very quickly, but at near lightspeed, they can
go far
enough to reach the target ship.  Once they hit the ship, they are
forced to slow
down as light travels slower when not in vacuum, so their arrival is
heralded with
a burst of Cerenkov radiation.	Interactions with the target's hull and
atmosphere
slow down the pions enough that their time dilation is no longer enough
to carry
them outside the hull before they decay into a flash of gamma rays. 
Screens are
very effective against these beams, as they slow down many of the pions
before
they reach the ship.  Armor actually worsen the damage, as the armor
absorbs the
high energy gammas and reradiates low energy gammas, which are much
better at
interacting with the contents of the hull, so too little armor is worse
than none.

Mass: should be large, initial guess 16
Arcs: as per class 5
Range: 36
Damage: initial 8 dice (as beams, no rerolls), skips first row of armor.
 Ships
equipped with armor take an extra 4 dice.  Level one screens halve the
number of
dice, level two screens quarter it.  Screens only affect the number of
dice, not
the amount of damage determined by each die.

By unusual happenstance, the weapon was discovered by the NSL.	After
test firing
a non-deployable prototype, they spent a conspicuous amount of effort
failing to
make a practical weapon out of it, and enumerated a great many reasons
why it
would never be capable of fleet use.  Although, the funds could have
added two Von
Teghetoff (sp?) SDN's to their battleline, and the project was
hopelessly
penetrated by foreign intelligence services, they consider the
investment quite