Re: [FT] Operational game

----- Original Message -----
From: "Oerjan Ohlson" <oerjan.ohlson@telia.com>
To: <gzg-l@csua.berkeley.edu>
Sent: Sunday, February 09, 2003 12:24 PM
Subject: Re: [FT] Operational game

> On January 30th, Imre Szabo wrote:
> >If one pass doesn't do it, you can always loop around and make
another
pass
> >(with beams if not on the ground of planet with an atmosphere).

> Um. I've seen you mention this "beams can't hit ground targets through
an
> atmosphere" idea several times now - it's just that according to the
More
> Thrust space-to-ground rules, beams CAN hit ground targets regardless
of
> whether or not there's an atmosphere present...

> Full Thrust =|= StarFire, like :-/

Yeah, this is a spot where Imre's using the Starfire limits where they
don't
apply...

For my own take, I would assume that most FT weapons are quite effective
against ground targets, and some may be downright ecologically
catastrophic.

A beam would probably be effective as an orbital artillery weapon,
except
that it may not be designed to hit ground targets, so they wouldn't be
quite
as effective as they are out in space.	At least, this is the model
that's
been put out in MT that Oerjan refers to.

Missiles have been depicted as being some sort of warhead on par with
modern
nukes, if not quite a bit more powerful.  So salvo missiles would be
like a
MIRV with quite powerful antimatter warheads similar to the old Imperial
Starfire -- i.e. a few hundred of them would probably sear the bulk of a
planet's surface clean.  K-guns probably would be of similarly
shattering
effectiveness, essentially the equivalent of a fairly powerful kinetic
strike, although individually I don't think they'd probably be quite as
devastating as the right sorts of warheads on a salvo missile.

Plasma bolts, wave guns, nova cannons, and other such weapons... given
the
area of effect they typically take up and the size of a planet... as
described, these are not weapons you use on planets you wish to keep. 
One
could possibly postulate that an atmosphere might degrade them slightly,
but
more likely an atmosphere would actually make them far _more_
destructive
than they are in space.  At the very least, I would imagine that a
single
strike from any of them would induce nuclear winter, and a powerful
enough
one might even cause sufficient tectonic upheaval that the planet might
literally shatter.  The way the weapons are described, it really is
difficult to envision an astronomical body of a solid nature enjoying
getting hit by one of any particularly great power.

In this sense, I picture ortillery as being of a sort of weapon where
the
damaging effects are, if anything, deliberately dampened down from the
amount of destructiveness that most spaceborne weapons would have when
introduced in atmospheres.  Certainly the area of effect of them is a
lot
more precise and confined in the Dirtside descriptions than what the
technology available could allow if an orbital bombardment truly wished
to
cut loose on an inhabited planet with genocidal lack of inhibitions.

E
(aka Stilt Man)