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Re: [GZG] Overloading screens

From: Robert Mayberry <robert.mayberry@g...>
Date: Mon, 25 May 2009 19:06:30 -0400
Subject: Re: [GZG] Overloading screens

This is my understanding; the book never actually comes out and says
it, but the scene where Lenin destroys MacArthur seems to indicate
this. However, this wasn't a typical battle. MacArthur used the
motie-developed expanding Field, so even when the field overloaded
there was a hulk left (rather than the ship vaporizing). Its field
lasted far longer than it should have.

http://www.webscription.net/chapters/0671741926/0671741926.htm

In the battle (cut from the prologue) which I linked above, things
moved much faster and less predictably. John's correct that lasers
don't normally cause burn-through; I'd also point out that Defiant had
trouble targeting MacArthur at all, let alone keeping the beam over a
burn-through. Lasers were mostly used to intercept missiles. The goal
is threefold: pump energy into the enemy's Field, cause burn-throughs
to hurt the ship itself, and finally eliminate the sensor masts that
are extended through the field to direct weapons fire.

Once the Defiant was on the brink of a field collapse, MacArthur's
lasers seemed to have been used to keep it there without further
expenditure of consumables. Lasers might also be useful against a
defeated ship precisely because they minimize the chance of
burn-through. The story points out that most ships on the brink of a
Field collapse are still in mostly good shape, all things considered.

I'd agree with John's interpretation of using a minimal number of hull
boxes, and a large number of slowly regenerating "Langston Field"
boxes that no weapon can bypass, plus a chance of a "critical" with
each shot (or each torpedo hit). The reason I like John's one-system
only rule isn't that a burn-through *couldn't* theoretically hurt more
than one system, it's just that burn-throughs in all the source
fiction almost never do as much damage as a threshold check. One or
zero systems down per burn-through is about right.

On Mon, May 25, 2009 at 5:38 PM, John Atkinson <johnmatkinson@gmail.com>
wrote:

> I'm going from memory, but the discussion in Mote seemed to indicate
> to me that the lasers were for (relatively) slowly dumping energy into
> the enemy's field, but that the nuclear missles would dump a lot of
> energy at once and had a much higher chance of burn through.  I could
> be in error.
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