On Tue, 11 Dec 2012, Onno Meyer wrote:
Johannes replied to me:
Based on common sense, rather then actual knowledge i would guess, that
ramming would work different for differently sized vehicles, as it does
not seem all invovled factors scale easily, with if vehicles of the same
size hit each other, they make less relative damage the smaller they are.
There is square-cube.
Matchbox cars barely damage each other, cars have minor damage, oil
tankers sink each other.
A matchbox car is about 1:64. If the weight was to scale, it would
be less than one gram.
In the formula you have given you do on average (your hitpoints) * (speed)
* (constant factor) damage. So if identical vehicles hit each other at a
given speed on average they loose the same percentage of their hitpoints,
independent on how large and heavy they are and how many hitpoints they
have. (only rounding errors are larger with smaller vehicles)
That does not seem realistic and it is independent on how the hitpoints
are derived from other stats.
For a ramming submarine and propably for some exotic surface ships as
well, you could come up with a different design, where a ram is mounted
like an outrigger, the actual submarine passes under the attacked ship,
and the ram rips off at a predeterminated breaking point. That should keep
the attacker from being damaged, and put some max damage on the ramming
damage. No idea about specific values though and how realistic it actually
is.
Or a ram on a spur with shock absorbers and a predetermined break
point (Sollbruchstelle, it seems there is no English word) on the
spur. VXi26 for a TL8 model.
I had the same translation problem, when writing my mail. I had thought
about that too, but i was not sure, if something like this was not already
in place in real life ramming ships. I suppose shipbuilders did think
about how to absorb the shock from ramming. And if you have the rammer
directly behind the ram, if the ram breaks off, you still do a standard
ram.
Sticking mines to a ship that way, likely is more efficient. But i
could imagine it as steam punk design.
Spar torpedo?
Effectvly it would be a driveless local controlled torpedo.
Regarding Victoria-Camperdown, according to the wikipedia article, pretty
much all the officers on both ships seem to have known, that the maneuver
was stupid, but they thought, that the admiral, who ordered it, had
something up his sleeve and thus it would make sense in the end. So it
seems to have more to do with information distribution systems, then with
sailing.
The Admiral (the most senior officer) screwed up and nobody was
sure enough to protest loudly.
What would you do if somebody told you to run a car into a wall?
A large organisation needs to find a balance, between underlings spamming
their superiors with whatever idea came to their mind, how things could be
done differently and underlings being afraid to give their superiors
critical information. Thats one of thoose tasks, where everybody knows how
it looks, if it works perfectly, but coming up with procedures to get
there is a challange.
If my driving instructor would have told me: "Today you are going to learn
something about the handling of a car, that you don't expect. Now drive
the car at this speed in that direction and wait for further commands" I
guess i would have used the breaks in time and told him, that i want to
try the maneuver with a cone first and only then with a wall. But then
that has been explicitly training for me handling a car on my own, with
safety as highest priority. In a military your job explicitly involves
following commands, thats wisdom you don't understand at the moment and
it is clear that your savety is not the highest priority. People erring on
the wrong side at times there is quite understandable.
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