Re: [FT] Vectorized K-guns

"Barclay, Tom" wrote:

> It occured to me in the discussion of vector-added SMs that maybe
K-guns
> should see some vectorish effects. So I thought about it.
>
> Assuming a 15 minute turn, and a 1000km distance mu.
> We know that the K-gun can hit range 30.
> Assuming the projectiles took the entire round to arrive, we're still
> talking about 120,000 kph.
> For a ship to hit the same speed, it would need to be moving at least
30 mu
> per turn.
> Now, thus if we presume railgun shots only move that fast (taking the
whole
> turn to arrive), then presumably
> any ship moving more than about 10-25% of this speed would start to
have a
> measurable effect on impact.
> Thus, any ship moving faster than about 3-8 mu would start to effect
the
> impact.

The false assumption is that the range of the K-gun is limited by the
distance
that the projectile travels in the course of a turn.  The limitation on
the
range of a K-gun is that past 30, you cannot reliably score a hit on a
ship
sized target.  Compared to the speed of the projectile, ships do not
move
appreciably, except in terms of the ship's size.  Your time and distance
units
give a velocity for a ship moving at 6 to be a whopping 6.6 km per
second, so a
n
infinitesimal error of 0.00001 radians in the target's direction (less
than one
arc second) and a flight time of 100 seconds (FT velocity of 270)
produces an
error of 66m.  At the distances that you go by, having accurate enough
targetting information to hit at all requires FTL target tracking with
amazing
resolution (even X-rays need large arrays to accurately locate ship
sized
objects at your range 30).

I would personally assume a shorter turn length and smaller unit of
measure,
because your numbers put a 1g acceleration equal to thrust 8.