On Jan 26, 2014, at 11:42 AM, Onno Meyer <[email protected]> wrote: > Hello everybody, > > it always appeared clear to me that battlesuits in a TL12 superscience > setting ride down in dropships. I have a draft which should do 10 G in > space and 10,000 mph at sea level. The design is still a few tons > overweight and I wondered if I had been trying too much. > > * How useful is a beam weapon (in this case an x-ray laser)? The beam > can't be intercepted by point defense, but should the dropship get > into a direct line of sight with a target?
In my opinion, any weapons should be defensive weapons to take care of normal surface to air attacks. If the ship is to do extraction from hot zones, it will get into areas where there is line of sight but hopefully not heavy mounted weapons. > * Using a generic hyperdrive as in VE39, what good is a stardrive in > a dropship? It helps if the mothership can stay in deep space, and > it takes just a few percent of Lwt. A cheap, small hyperdrive might be included in order to get out of a system that is a hot zone. I would say this depends heavily on the philosophy of the military using the ship and how they see it fitting into their overall strategy. > * Of course FTL capability implies the ability to operate beyond the > direct supervision of the mothership -- sensors, navigation, commo, > redundant life support ... Minimal and unlikely to have fully redundant life support. > * Should artificial gravity go without saying or is it an expensive > luxury? If military training includes heavy zero-g training then it is a luxury. If it doesn't, more likely to include it. > Part of it is probably a desire to give the characters in a dropship > varied and independent courses of action, a starship in miniature. Is > that prudent or silly. > > Regards, > Onno > _______________________________________________ > GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> > http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l The biggest variable would be how important is it to the military to preserve trained personal. If the attitude is that drop troopers are quick and easy to replace, there aren't going to be any extras. If they are always short of trained soldiers, the drop ship is going to have a lot more equipment making it more likely that it can get people back out of there. I could easily see a military structure that puts a full trauma autodoc, short distance hyper-drive and fully redundant life support on every drop ship just to improve the odds of getting people back. I could also easily see a ship just barely able to drop the soldiers off with absolutely no extras if life is cheap and they can always just fast-grow new clones. -Bret_______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
