Re: [FT] Weapon Mechanisms

Anthony Leibrick wrote:

> How do members of the list envision what the various weapon mechanisms
> represent?For example I always think of the standard beam as almost a
> machine gun type effect, it blankets the area of the target with
> shots, the closer in the higher the percentage of possible hits.If you
> design a weapon, do you envision the effect you want to simulate, and
> design the mechanism to represent it, or do you think of a neat mech
> and nominate what weapon this simulates

The model of beams being energy projectors that pepper a region of space
where the ship could be is workable enough; although, really following
through on that theme would be to compute range bands as a function of
mass and thrust.  This is actually a good way to solve the problem of
little ships evaporating at long range.  A function that I would be
interested in testing would be a base value plus a modifier that
depended on the (mass)^(2/3), minus a modifier that depended on the
square of the thrust.  Proportionality constants keep the numbers to an
appropriate range.  To reflect that, at close ranges, no amount of
agility will evade a lightspeed weapon, the first range band has a
minimum value of 6mu.

This type of modelling has the potential to end the problem of escorts
being outranged by capital ships, and the calulations need only be done
three times for