Re: railguns

Well in my defense, having only just joined the list I was unaware that
railguns
had been radically, unofficially revamped so I used the stats out of MT.
 Which
is where I got my max engagement range.  As far as the energy yield
goes, I was
going by what was presented here, so if it was wrong then naturally all
of the
comparisons are going to be wrong.

I don't really see that targeting considerations are germain to the
discussion
of slug mass and velocities, which is why I didn't address them.  A mass
moving
through space is fairly predictable which is what the targeting
computers are
for.

There are several factors which are overlooked in the discussion of
railguns,
all of which would really render them inadequate in a long range weapon
capacity.  Factors like power consumption, projectile material,  target
composition, recoil (a really big problem), and a host of other things. 
Since
Jon gave the KV railguns, that's what we use.

I must say I find it interesting just how big a range of velocities you
see
people talk about on this list.  Oerjan says his capitals move at V, of
18 and
his escorts of 36.  I would think this would take a VERY large table,
otherwise
everything would just go screaming off the other side of the table and
that
would be the end of the game.  Most games I've watched on standard 4x6
or 4x8
tables have velocities of around 8-18, depending heavily on the
nationality and
maneuverability of the ship.

JMO,
Bill

"Oerjan Ohlson" <oerjan.ohlson@telia.com> on 09/16/99 01:04:36 PM

Please respond to gzg-l@CSUA.Berkeley.EDU
							      
							      
							      
 To:	  gzg-l@CSUA.Berkeley.EDU			      
							      
 cc:	  (bcc: Bill Brush/InfSys/Revenue)		      
							      
							      
							      
 Subject: Re: railguns					      


Mostly good thinking, but an important figure in the input data was off
by four orders of magnitude and no consideration was given to the hit
probabilities, so here goes:

bbrush wrote:

> Max engagement range is 36".	Equals 36 million meters.

Max railgun range is 30", but it doesn't matter much for the
calculations.

> Turn length is 7.5 minutes which gives you a turn of 450 seconds.
> A kton of TNT is equal to 6.31*10^8 joules

Sorry, no. Not unless modern explosives are more than ten thousand
times stronger than TNT is, and I'm pretty certain they aren't...
otherwise we would've stopped using TNT in non-nuke warheads decades
ago. See my other post for this.