RE: Big Guns and Small Ships (was Re: house rules/offline)

On Mon, 20 Oct 1997, BEST, David wrote:

<SNIP>
>   Once you have a target in your sights a beam weapon will almost
always
> hit unless you are more than 186,000 miles away  at which point you
have
> 1 second to evade.  Anything closer...  This can only mean that the
> problem is targeting versus armour and it boils down to how long does
it
> take to target and how difficult is it for a smaller more
manoeuvreable
> ship to evade.  Personally I think targeting systems would always win
> out over moving ships (inluding fighters) unless you take into account
> very high target speed
> 
Actually you don't have to be that far away, in fact you want to be as
close as possible to move out of the attackers firing arc as quickly as
possible.  

Actually acquiring the target is the trivial part of getting a kill. 
I.e.
radar can easily track anything bigger than a golf ball flying more than
a
few hundred feet above the Earth a speeds from 0 to 25,000 mph the
problem
is delivering the weapon to intercept.	In the case of lasers it's easy
to
hit a target, but do get enough energy transmited to the target to get
significant results - i.e. beam dispersion, target moving/rotating so
that
a new area is exposed (alderson fields in Mote in God's Eye). Unless
your
precision is such that you can keep a conventrated beam on a target area
maybe a few meters square for milliseconds at 20-100k miles you aren't
going to be able to do squat with beam weapons.  A tiny vibration in the
weapon may cause a deviation measured in meters or km at the receiving
end
totally negating the weapon.

--Binhan