Re: [GZG] QUESTION: are SAWs becoming less significant...?

I agree with the others.

There's always going to be an advantage to having a weapon that's
bigger than what the squads carry. "Bigger" meaning everything from
physically bigger, to the same weapon with greater abilities. Greater
abilities come at a cost, and that cost usually comes down to
per-soldier weight penalties.

There are advantages to having a weapon that fires larger ammunition
further down range than the ARs carried by the regular soldiers. For
one, it allows you to fire at the enemy out of the range of _their_
ARs to suppress them while you manoeuvre some of your guys into
position. To get further down range with more energy is going to
require... well, more energy. That energy has to come from somewhere,
be it chemical, electric, or nuclear. The bigger weapon will use up
more energy, meaning that it's energy supply has to be greater, be it
bigger batteries or more ammunition. So you won't be able to have as
many of these bigger weapons in the squad as the number of base
weapons.

If your SAW uses the same ammunition as your ARs, has the same range,
the same _sustained_ rate of fire, and is just as accurate as your
ARs, then yes, you're going to see the SAW disappear in that form.
However, some bright spark is going to say, "You know, it would be
really useful if one or two guys in the squad had a weapon that had
greater range/greater sustained rate of fire/greater stopping
power/greater penetration. At which point, the support weapon comes
into being, albeit possibly in a different form than we see today.

I see what you're saying, Jon. If we extrapolate technology far enough
out we end up with everyone in, oh, let's say neutrino-powered
metallic hydrogen power armour with hellbeam projectors in their
finger tips. There is no bigger, badder weapon than the hellbeam, you
can't have a bigger, faster, or longer range hellbeam, and going with
bigger armour is useless as nothing can penetrate it but a hellbeam
(and see above, hellbeams can't come in bigger sizes). In this
setting, larger support weapons don't exist, and you get to a point
where every squad member's firepower is identical. (And we're
simplifying the idea that hellbeams can fire beyond line of sight,
otherwise there'd be a role for an indirect fire weapon other than a
hellbeam.)

But if you _did_ have a larger hellbeam, or one that fired faster, or
one that flew further downrange, or penetrated armour better,
presumably there's a reason you didn't give all your soldiers this
bigger hellbeam. That reason could be anything. Maybe it requires
bigger batteries. Or, maybe it's big enough that you only get one per
power armour glove instead of five, and so in close-in battles it's a
bit of a handicap. In this case, you'd give your squad one or two of
these bigger hellbeams, and we're back to a squad support weapon.

About the only time I see SAWs being useless is if the environment is
such that the SAW's capabilities are offset by the weapon's
disadvantages. If you're fighting bugs on a planet with deep tunnel
complexes with virtually no long straight corridors, and your SAW has
a long barrel, it may be more trouble than it's worth. In this case,
doing away with the SAW for this operation would be worthwhile.
(Though in reality, probably what would end up happening is that you'd
develop a shorter range SAW because I bet having the greater firepower
is useful to kill bugs; this is the exception that proves the rule.)

Allan

-- 
Allan Goodall		 http://www.hyperbear.com
agoodall@hyperbear.com
awgoodall@gmail.com

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