On Fri, Sep 10, 2010 at 11:30 PM,
> <gzg-l-request@mail.csua.berkeley.edu> wrote:
> Â --- On Thu, 9/9/10, Roger Burton West <roger@firedrake.org> wrote:
Considering the number of electrical gizmos carried by infantry and
small vehicles in SG/DS, there is going to have to be several leaps
ahead in battery storage capacity. And as for discharge rates, the power cell
for a Gauss rifle magazine has to dump it's power in a series of discrete,
short pulses lasting a relatively small period of time (if you accelerate a
dart to several thousand meters per second muzzle velocity in 200cm...), so
that's one thing we know is a prerequisite for the setting depicted.
> Capacitor?
If it's that dangerous, they wouldn't be in common usage except for
applications where they had NO choice whatsoever. No one is going to want
effective hand grenades in the flashlight his kids take camping. And that
would be something that WOULD have a centrally located manufacturing process
(presuming, of course, they are rechargeable)
because of the safety/security considerations.
> On Sat, 11 Sep 2010, John Atkinson wrote:
> I was thinking more of Larry Niven's molecular-distortion battery:
Your point is well taken, but I think it's a matter of relative danger. We
don't see what it takes to force a md battery to critical failure.
It could be harder than a car-crash. We drive cars with 15-20 gallons
of gas around all the time.
John, have you given any thought about the mini fuel cell technology that
might make it into consumer technology? It would be like a ethanol powered
flashlight...
Well, the story quote says it's a simple rupture, which would tend to suggest
that it may not take a car crash... and even if it did, would you really want
to equip an entire platoon with these things, with the awareness that any
artillery shell that hits too close to them is going to basically set off a
chain reaction that'll wipe out your platoon, your buddies' platoon sitting
next to it, and so on down the line until you've got enough space between one
unit and the next to avoid having the next one go off with it?
This sort of reminds me of optional rules I've thought of for Full Thrust
where magazine or fighter bay hits (i.e. threshold failures) should perhaps be
just a little bit more painful than the loss of a system. These have been just
about every naval captain's worst nightmare for centuries, whether it was the
powder rooms in sailing
warships, or the spectacular magazine and/or ordnance hits that
destroyed several British battlecruisers at Jutland, the Hood in the Denmark
Strait, the Arizona at Pearl Harbor, the Yamato at Okinawa, or most of the
Japanese carrier fleet with a whole air wing's worth of ordnance sitting on or
near its flight decks at Midway. Throw that together with maybe a little more
spectacular results when a ship is destroyed (e.g. maybe a power core
explosion should actually hurt other
ships nearby and/or fighter screens), and maybe that'd be a more
effective deterrent to overloading on missiles, fighters, or bunched up ship
formations than trying to tweak the point defense rules.
E
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