I'm sorry about the late reply, but it took me some time to try a few configurations ...
Thomas replied to me: > Why do you need any landing gear at all? What happens to stealth/cloaking surfaces when you get mud or scratches on it? Of course by TL11 stealth is four TL old, so it might no longer be as fragile as TL7 stealth (which caused serious maintenance problems even from raindrops, AFAIK). > Your "vehicle" is relatively > small and light, and its normal flying height is around one meter - so > even an emergency landing should be relatively smooth. Some stable > "balloons" should be sufficient for that - and for each terrain. Underbelly skids, as per VXi4. > And > when it has to go to ground from a higher altitude, it should > deccelarate accordingly, otherwise any kind of landing gear would be > broken anyway. > > The vehicle is not even required to keep upright position when on > ground; as I understood, reactionless thruster technology would even > allow to re-orientate before full take-off. I'm more concerned about the resting position than landing and takeoff. Unless the sensors are in a turret, a robot with underbelly skids which happens to rest nose-down will point any nose-mounted sensors to the ground. Of course there will be "rear-view" sensors for 360° coverage, but now I won't get away with smaller rear sensors and larger nose sensors. I'm thinking about a pair of 1,000-lb. designs. The "infantry warbot" will have ST 200 arms with hand motors to manipulate doors and the like. According to Mecha, it needs 4,000 lbs. thrust and 100+ body HPs to get Lift ST 200. The body is 8 cf and each arm is 1 cf, so it could be 48" long by 24" wide by 18" high with arms folded against the body. The shoulders are forward on the body and in cruise mode it folds the elbows back and hands forward to fire arm-mounted weapons forward. It is armed with an "assault rifle equivalent" and a "LAW equivalent". Arm reach would be 1, rounded down from 1.2, so one elbow joint will be enough (got to leave the barrels somwhere, after all). With "LAW equivalent" I mean high armor penetration and raw damage for the size, at the expense of RoF and Shots, while an "assault rifle equivalent" has a high RoF and Shots and a mediocre damage and penetration for its size. The "LAW" doesn't have to be an unguided shaped-charge rocket ... The "support warbot" could replace the two arms with a single turret to mount a more powerful weapon, possibly a "GPMG equivalent", a "ATGM equivalent" or a "mortar equivalent" _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
