Mike wrote: > Knights in Shining Armor, more like fighter jets than tanks..
The US Army has found out that armor on HMMWVs is a good idea after all, so "thinly armored ground fighters" are a bit iffy. By TL9 standards, a DR around 200 is thinly armored. David wrote: > Nonsense. The advantage of aerial forces is maneuverability I have written a TL9 helicopter with DR 250, two tons of payload (troops and ATGMs), a beam weapon and a speed of 300 mph. aMR is 6.75. The TL9 Mecha could be DR 240, two tons of payload (crew, ATGMs, rockets and ammo), gSpeed 75 and gMR 2.5; if there is no bug in my calculations. The helicopter is faster by a factor of 4-5 and both use super MHD fusion from VXii, so refueling is no issue. But if the helicopter really operates at 300 mph, can it make use of ground cover? > [...] and the > ability to jump over ground held by the enemy, without having to move > through it. A ground vehicle of any sort is no match. Taking a helicopter directly over enemy positions is a bit daring, I'd say. But swamps or forests are no problem for the chopper, while they slow a Mecha. > don't forget that at TL9 you get really good indirect fire weapons, that can > do anything that a mecha can do. Except fall over, not move, get stuck in > the sand. Interesting thought. * Ballistic indirect fire weapons can be backtracked by counterbattery sensors, and engaged in flight by area defense weapons. * But indirect fire doesn't have to fly on unpowered, ballistic trajectories. Juggling the thrust during the launch phase can obscure the gun position, OGRE had rules for evasive shells, and there is terminal homing to score a hit on point targets. * Shaped charges can be discouraged by EM armor, but can indirect fire use KE rounds? Maybe, if the arc is high enough ... * OTOH, missiles with HEAT warheads were just what I had in mind for the Mecha, so that point doesn't count. But if arty can replace Mecha, can it also replace tanks? Nigel replied to David: > Equally arguable: Sensors now can spot aircraft faster than ground craft > and from further away. So the aircraft advantage of approach will shrink in > the future and their lack of unpredictable manoeuvrability due to their > speed wil make them easier to kill with higher TL anti-air weapons. Using radar-type sensors, ground clutter is -4, while thermograph-type sensors have +2 for no ground clutter. But does NOE flight qualify as ground clutter or not, if the sensor is nearby on the ground? By the VE sensor rules, I'd have to track line of sight on a case by case basis. > Missiles are like fighters - they can't take ground, only drive people off > it. They are not multirole, so they can't do everything a mech or a tank or > a chopper can - only scan or attack _once_. My Mecha concept can't take ground, either. It doesn't dare to expose itself to LAWs that way. David wrote: > Mecha simply can't be armored enough to be useful on a high-tech > battlefield: their volume to surface area ratio sucks too badly. ground > vehicles (or even creepy crawly spider mecha) beat the pants off them. An area ratio of 1:2 or even 1:3 would be critical if armor is half or more of the weight of an AFV, but what if the armor percentage drops again? Perhaps because all AFVs (tracked, legged or VTOL) need to be faster? > Missiles are modestly expensive. I get the feeling that VE makes them too expensive -- jet fighters and tanks get an unreasonably low "mass production" pricetag, but missiles don't. > Guided artillery shells are dirt cheap. > And gurps gives unrealistic jamming and detection rules, mostly for > playability. it's quite possible to build guidance systems that aren't > jammable, nor even detectable. Not just "we can't find them" undetectable, > but actually theoretically undetectable. (It's not much fun to play in such > a battlefield, but that's what it's going to be like.) If your own receivers can detect them, and how else could the system transmit information, why can't enemies detect them? It might become more and more difficult to detect the system without knowledge of the settings, but how can it be impossible unless we're talking weird quantum stuff? Jon wrote: > I don't think that David was saying that there can't be mechs; on the > contrary, the sense that I'm getting is that his premise is that he > has no problem including them in a game; but that attempting to > justify them scientifically is a fool's errand. And that is very much > helpful to the topic, since Onno started out asking if his rationale > was a sound one. AFAICT, David is the only poster who actually took > up the challenge that Onno posed. And I want to minimize the number of glaring impossibilities. _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
