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

David wrote:

> An additional thought.   Who says the recycle rate of combat lasers or
> rail guns is negligible? Many SF universes like B5, Star Trek etc do
NOT
> fire big guns rapidly (although some do fire exended bursts with the
> risk of doing damage to themselves) but they power them up and then
let
> loose.  It could take a lot to hurl that much energy at some one.

It depends on what time scale you assume. If you play with very short
turns
(and thus pretty high accelerations during maneuvers, high speeds and/or
short distances), long re-loading times make sense (like Wave Guns, or
the
re-charge ideas in some of the FT-B5 variants). If, OTOH, you assume
long
game turns (I feel most comfortable with 1 turn ~ 15 minutes), long
recharging times make less sense.

> 
>   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.

Depending on the speeds you move at, and what maneuvers the target
makes.
Note that in case of a light-speed beam weapon, the target has no time
to
detect that it is being fired upon until the weapon hits; so if it
hasn't
already begun evading "just in case" between when the beam is fired and
it
hits, it won't escape. Provided, of course, that the attacker manages to
aim exactly right - if the target is an 1000-meter sphere and the
attacker
aims for the middle at a range of 1 light second, a deviation of
0.000096
degrees will cause the beam to miss. And then there's a little problem
with
focussing the beam, too - but who knows what we'll come up with in the
future?

Later,

Oerjan Ohlson

"Life is like a sewer.
What you get out of it, depends on what you put into it."
- Hen3ry