Re: Water Cooled Vickers Guns....

Hi folks,

This argument is getting a wee bit silly.  

One one hand we're talking about *powered armour*, and on the other
debating whether it makes sense to use twentieth-century technology
water
or air cooled weapons.	What about space/asteriod/moon surface/vacuum
use?
What about a Hoth -type ice world?  What about the hot side of Venus?
Water cooled machineguns on a moon?  I don't think so.	And ideally
you'd
want one weapon that suits *all* environments, right?

It seems to me that if you accept the idea of powered armour, then you
have
to look at it in either one of two contexts:

Either it is technologically complex and requires a great deal of
maintenance, spare parts (X hundred items on the check list to break it
out
of stores, etc...) in which case you're supporting it with a logistics
system designed for that level of complexity, and carting around weapons
with changable/disposable barrels coated with unobtainium buckyballs or
mechanical multiple barrels or whatever is a non-issue from a logistics
view (much more complex support for PA is already required).

OR

It is technologically complex but the technology is so clever that it
requires very little maintenance, in which case why not postulate
materials
technology capable of providing barrels made with unobtanium buckyballs
that never need changing, never overheat, etc etc.  Like they're gauss
weapons, or uberbeamers, or whatever...

If you're going to stretch the imagination to accept powered armour,
it's
reasonable, I think, to stretch the imagination to accept that weapons
technology will develop at a similar pace, and provide better materials
tech, etc etc and allow weapons suited to the armour, and *not* which
require something as archaic as water cooling when we have unobtainium
buckyballs going for $2.50 a kilo, brewed up fresh in your friendly
Alarishi nano-foundry...........

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Adrian Johnson
adrian@stargrunt.ca
http://www.stargrunt.ca

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