Re: What do your ships look like? (was: Minatures)

Niko wrote:

>  On Thu, 25 Jul 1996, Adam Delafield wrote:
>  
>  > I've never seen the sense in this. Why not simply rotate the whole
damn 
> ship?
>  > No pivots to worry about then.
>  
>  Ever tried shooting out to the side form a rotating ship? Gunners
might 
>  start getting a bit giddy after a few minutes...
>  Also, the further away from the hull you can take the rotating part,
the 
>  slower it will have to rotate. Using this sort of artificial gravity 
>  during a battle, however, is stupid. A malfunction will put the whole

>  bridge into disarray. If a ship enters combat already at zero-G, this
is 
>  one less thing to worry about during a battle. A rotating section
would 
>  probably have the accommodation for the crew, so they'd get normal
(or at 
>  least partial) G during sleep, and would thus be empty during battle. 

Has anyone else read Stephen R. Donaldson's "Gap" series? (The 1st book
is
_The Real Story_; the 5th + last _This Day All Gods Die_ was released a
few
months back.) His ships rotate "the whole damn ship" to create G during
normal travel. They normally stop rotation before entering combat,
mostly to
simplify scan & targetting but also so there's "one less thing to go
wrong"
when the ship gets hit. There are a couple instances in the series of
ships
going into combat while rotating, because they have lost sensors on one
side
and have to keep rotating in order to see what's going on or similar
reasons.
You can imagine what a challenge this is to the crew! 

Scott Field