Re: DS2/SG2 artillery/ortillery

On Mon, 29 Nov 1999, Roger Books wrote:

> After the egg on my face about atmosphere height I'm hesistant to
> post, however...

:>

> Aren't some of the newer sattelites using wavelengths to which the
> atmosphere is transparent?  Maybe Ortillery is a beam weapon optimized
> to penetrate atmosphere instead of reaching out and touching
spacecraft.

Your wavelength may be optimized to penetrate the atmosphere, but may
not 
be very optimized to penetrating the target or even causing much in the 
way of thermal affects. You are going to need an awfully large amount of

thermal energy to get any explosive affects. At least in the Dirtside 
time period you need an explosive of some sort to really accomplish the 
main use of ortillery. Supressing men and pounding targets. 

I'd use Ortillery for deep area supression (Corps level artillery). If I

have no surface artillery yet, then I'm going to use two things. Small 
corvettes optimized for atmosphereic flight with an ortillery system
(not 
unlike the DDs and LCRs and LCGs used during WWII and later) and more 
primarily a flight of ground attack aircraft attached directly to the 
jarheads on the "beach". 

You could use Beam based weapons for destroying point targets, but 
anything you could affect with a beam, isn't going to be very big or
well 
armoured. A deep penetrator would be much better. 

A side note to the Defense of planets make me recall a Berserker story 
about a planet that is seemingly serene and defenseless that some
seeming 
"good life" persuades a berserker to attack in stead of his home world. 
Well the serene planet actually has been fitted out with massive
defenses 
all hidden and all cooled using large heat sincs under the various lakes

and rivers. The thing about a planet is that you have less trouble re 
routing power and less trouble cooling things that need to be cooled. I 
can see a very well defended planet being a harsh place to be for enemy 
ships for that reason. Even craft optimized for shore bombardment. 

I have to wonder if we need rules for longer ranged missile ortillery 
against fixed positions from just outside of the orbit of the planet. 
Could you even get that kind of accuracy and penetration through 
planetary defenses?

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- Ryan Montieth Gill	  NRA / DoD# 0780 (Smug #1) / AMA / SOHC -
- ryan.gill@turner.com	    I speak not for CNN, nor they for me -
- rmgill@mindspring.com 	     www.mindspring.com/~rmgill/ -
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