On Fri, Aug 29, 2014 at 11:53 PM, Onno Meyer <[email protected]> wrote: > Evyn replied to me:
>> In essence you are making an long range Amtrac. I would of said Helo >> but they tend not to linger in the Area of Operations once they have >> delivered their combat load. >> >> Or you envision a Over the horizon "amphibious" vehicle with a APCs >> over the beach capability, I don't see a problem with that. > > But the Amtrac or the more recent AAV are pretty bad as ground combat APCs. > Bg, clumsy, poorly protected. No army would switch over to AAVs as standard > infantry carrier. All the Amphibious Tractors are a wonderful load of trade-offs, they are slow in the water, limited to how much armor they can carry, and the sheer number of Jarheads they have got to move. Not to mention the inherent limitation of how close to the beach their launching ship has to be. But it is the same sort of question you asking which about what the minimums are. The aforementioned Amtrac has got to float and be maneuverable in water, carry a minimum amount of armor, generally defence vs artillery fragments and have some on board self defense. SoP is for it to progress to the Area of Operations and to deploy it's troop compliment a the nominal point of contact with the opposing forces. Then to remain in contact with it's troops as a mobile baseline of their operations with limited contribution to their base of fire. > > One dividing line is supersonic speed -- if it is supersonic it can also go > to orbit -- and another dividing line is more than 3 or 4 G acceleration. 3 > G from multiple separate thrusters is enough to keep a VTOL flying with > redundancy on any reasonable planet. What cut are you willing to accept in > the armor and armament so that your AFV can keep up with Navy forces > maneuvering at 6 or 8 G? At this point you're kinda backwards, in that the Naval assets job in escorting you is to keep the bad guys away. Here we are in the Helo model, in comparison to jet fighters Helos and even the Osprey are much slower that and as such they will use the Marine flight as their baseline to flit out and provide Air Superiority and Ground Fire suppression in the zone that could affect the APC. Also consider this the sprint to orbit and beyond is a special evolution in that the craft might only need the reserves to do it as exit strategy. > > A VTOL tank could have more than 10k points of frontal armor, and side armor > in the high thousands. A FTL-capable dropship would be in the low thousands, > even without long-occupancy bunkrooms. The question here is How much armour does it need to get it's baseline mission done? Note most troops assigned to APCs tend to have some anti-armor capability native to their normal equipment load out, said Anti-Armor is usually more than enough to do for the APC as well i.e. disable. -- Evyn _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
