RE: house rules/offline

On Fri, 17 Oct 1997, Tim Jones wrote:

> On Friday, October 17, 1997 2:12 PM, Roger Burton West 
> [SMTP:roger@firedrake.demon.co.uk] wrote:
> > On Wed, 15 Oct 1997, Chris McCurry wrote:
> >
> If you look at wet navy history a ship like Bismark was
> deadly to escorts and destroyers as well as to Hood.
> 
> In one destoyer attack a salvo from Bismark totalled
> a destoyer and the others were very wary. In the
> future fire control is likely to be better even for the
> bif stuff.
> 
I agree that targeting systems will only get better.  In WWII you had to
fire thousands of rounds from many many guns to bring down an airplane.
Nowadays you can bring down missiles skimming the sea surface at Mach 2
with a single point defense emplacement.  One reason standoff missiles
are
so popular today is that it's lethal to get too close.

Another example would be modern armor battles.	They now can occur at
huge
ranges, 1-2 km that would have been impossible in WWII.  Tanks can now
move and shoot with nearly the same accuracy as when standing still and
have great penetration at much longer ranges.  

If there is FTL travel in FT, why couldn't sensor systems use a similar
technique for ranging?	Sending out an FTL "pulse" and then checking for
the return pulse or at least the gravitic disturbance generated by
objects
in the path of the pulse (this would only be half as effective since the
return signal would be limited by the speed of gravitic waves)	Most of
the arguments for tracking systems being terible at astronomical
distances
revolove around current technology where we are limited by the speed of
light.	If we can make the intellectual leap to FTL travel, there
shouldn't be a huge leap to make FTL sensors (i.e. Star Trek's Sub-space
sensors/communication etc) available in FT.  With accurate tracking
information it's not a huge leap to have massive computers that will
calculate predicted positions for thousands of milliseconds in the
future
and be able to present it in a timely manner. 

Part of the problem of small ship massacres is not that they're too easy
to hit, but often they're the only target available.  I'm sure that if
people placed their cap ships up front the escorts would survive a lot
longer... :)

--Binhan