On 1/10/2013 2:09 PM, Johannes Trimmel wrote: >>> The sideways mounte turret would in fact make a lot sense when a tank >>> had >>> to fire quite often up- or downwards in extreme angles (close to 90°). >> >> If all tanks can fire upwards, that discourages overflights >> by gunships, drones, etc. so they don't have to use that >> capability very often. So they might go into a climb for a >> short moment. >> > > Regardless which other vehicles become more or less viable due to the > tanks, i would consider it likely that the tanks will shoot at other > tanks. And unless the tanks are forced by something to all operate on > the same height, that means shooting both upwards and downwards.
I think that we should ask if weapons still need turrets at that TL? If you watch some of the space battle episodes of Star Trek The Next Generation you see that the phaser array of the Enterprise is a phased array rather than single emitters. It can produce a single powerful beam in any direction, or split its power into multiple independently targeted beams for point defense. This is much like modern radar arrays which no longer need a single large dish to send and receive signals. The tank may be a disc or a flattened sphere with no surface features that hovers on agrav, moved by vectored reactionless thrust, with force fields and beam weapons that can fire from any point on the surface. Turrets may be obsolete. _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
