Re: Sand

David Brewer wrote:
>Since the damage part of the sand cloud concept has caused such
>controversy, I feel moved to question the wisdom of having sand
>cause any damage at all. Your basic sand launcher has a mass of 1.
>In FT a 2 mass ship ramming an enemy has an absolute limit of 6 
>damage points inflicted, with it's mass highly concentrated. A 
>sand cloud represents half the mass, spread liberally over, well, 
>the scale of FT is nebulous, but I'm sure we all think of 1" as 
>well over 10km. Orders of magnitude greater.

Good point.  Personally I really don't like the idea of using a sand
caster
for a offensive weapon in the first place.  It's use might be helpful
for
short range contacts, but the idea of billowing sand clouds in a battle
field would seem to hinder my own forces as well and any ships passing
through that region of space in the future.  It only tool a small
granule of
matter about the size of a grain of salt to put a nice crater in a
viewport
of one the space shuttles. 
My understanding of sand casters from popular sci-fi was to maintain a
cloud
of highly reflective crystals using magnetic fields.  Over use, the
crystals
would disperse from hits and would require additional expenditures of
supply
to keep the "screen" in place.	The crystals had little to no mass, but
highly reflective properties to help disperse energy weapon attacks.

Mike Miserendino