From: Alan and Carmel Brain <aebrain@w...>
Date: Thu, 27 Nov 2003 23:11:31 +1100
Subject: Re: [SG/DS/FT] Orbital assault
From: "John Atkinson" <johnmatkinson@yahoo.com> > As I have mentioned Agree. The following PSB and Rules has appeared either on this list or the test list. PSB: Beams work in Atmosphere, but rather too well. They're good for damaging the biosphere, but any target smaller than a continent will get overkilled. They're also lousy at taking out hardened targets - the beams cause the atmosphere to burn/glow, but can't bust bunkers. Think of it as using a shotgun firing small pellets in a crowd, where the enemy has full body armour. You'll kill lots of people, just not the ones you want to. For that you need precise, rapid-firing weaponry. That means PDS, or weapons that can be used as PDS. Or specialty Planetary Bombardment Systems. The MT/FT2 rules on Planetary Bombardment state that things that are the size of escorts get 1 shot, cruisers 2, capitals 3. So mapping onto no of PDS systems works pretty well. That takes care of the DS2/FT interface. But what about FT? IMHO the best way is to have hardened defences having an "infinite amount of armour" - only hits that penetrate armour count. But keep track of the damage to the "armour", because that's the damage you've done to the biosphere. Probably in terms of 100 Megatonne-Equivalents per point. A single point of damage is the same as 100 MT of H-Bombs going off at a random point on the planet. Not much, but it soon adds up, and your planet becomes a real fixer-upper. Specialised Planetary Bombardment systems only have a range of 6 MU, but ignore armour. Towns/Cities can be built like (large) passenger ships. Planetary Defences - or rather, Offences - may be constrained by the same problems that beams have. Whether the fire is outgoing or incoming, you still have the problem that you're irradiating a large smount of the atmosphere with "Quasi-Solid Lightning" if using electron charged-particle beams. Converting a few cubic km of atmosphere to plasma as hot as the inside of an exploding H-bomb (literally) is both wasteful of energy and ecologically unsound. This means that Planetary Defences will often be Pulse Torps or equivalent at long range, and masses of PDS at short range. Phalons can use Pulsars, KraVak can use Scatterguns ( K-guns are also Ecologically Unsound, and will hit a planet with devastating effect even when fired from 100,000 MU away), and the SaVasku Leech Torpedos, as they have essentially unlimited biomass. All are limited to a single 60 degree arc.