Re: [FT] Operational game

> From: "Eric Foley" <stiltman@teleport.com>
>
> 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,...

I would think a significant atmosphere should be quite good at 
attenuating and scattering the damage of a non-specialized beam. 
Delivering significant power to the earth's surface from medium to high 
orbit  would be tough.

>  K-guns probably would be of similarly shattering effectiveness...

K-gun projectiles, unless they are made of something pretty phenomenal, 
would burn up very quickly in Earth's (and possibly even Mars' 
atmosphere. The amount of heat a fleet assault of K-guns could put into 
the earth's atmosphere in this way would be trivial on the planetary 
scale. _Possibly_ locally interesting.

>
> ... salvo missiles .... a few hundred of them would probably sear the 
> bulk of a
> planet's surface clean.
&
> Plasma bolts, wave guns, nova cannons, and other such weapons...
>  these are not weapons you use on planets you wish to keep...

Aside from the idea that a salvo missile would have to be quite 
modified (from its ship to ship capacity) to effectively deliver its 
payload to near the surface of a planet, this makes FT weapons scaled 
to Science Fantasy levels, and is wholly unsatisfactory. If you can 
show me that's not true, it then makes the presence of a non-allied 
missile equipped ship anywhere on the same gaming table as a planet the 
equivalent of putting a loaded Soviet Typhoon submarine in the 
Chesapeake Bay at the height of the cold war.

> 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...

I think you have to think of the Earth's atmosphere as Phalon type 
layered armor that gets applied to fresh to every ship firing through 
it and gets almost completely renewed every turn. Any given target on 
the Earth (say a city block) has at _least_ 3 layers: Minimum 1 or 2 
points from the upper atmosphere, 5-10 from the stratosphere, and 20-30 
from the Troposphere. You have to burn through all those levels to get 
near the surface, or have specialized delivery (ablative shields, entry 
cones, specialized beams, etc.) to get near the surface without burning 
up or getting dissipated. The only point at which things get more 
damaging in the atmosphere is when you dump so much energy into it that 
the atmosphere effectively gets co-opted into the weapon effect. 
Whether FT weapons would effectively do that as they are currently 
presented is a partially open question. Whether they _should_ be able 
to do that and stay anywhere near a "hard" SF simulation - the answer 
is no.

> 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 energies involved in planet cracking are comfortably more than can 
be produced by a fleet of warships in anything other than science 
fantasy. If nuclear winter were that easy, then most fleet battles 
_should_ be in deep space, since any planet with have an ounce of self 
preservation would put significant resources (in, for example, 
detection and interception capabilities) in to keeping that kind of 
firepower well away from the vulnerable target.

> ...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....

Which implies to me the descriptions need amendment.

Bizarre Lag Phenomena	    (Why it is sometimes hard to communicate 
with Noam Raphael Izenberg)