Here's another interesting aside, or at least I think it's interesting,
because once I start remembering these things it's hard to stop.
Laser personal weapons and their lack of penetration.
When we were working on lasers for TNE it was in the context of knowing we
would put out an FF&S, so the early design sequences were already in play.
And the one big test, the Holy Grail of laser design, was being able to
punch a starship hull out at one light-second and beyond. And since we
knew that we wanted to do laser design sequences starting from the present
day, and had a whole stack of SDI-derived research and technical
information, we had a pretty good basis to begin. But obviously the optics
didn't work. You couldn't concentrate that much energy at that distance
without a big technical discontinuity, which became gravitic focusing. So
we fiddled around with the numbers until we got starship combat
performance, declared success, and moved onto the next thing.
Now, you would think that if you can punch a starship's hull at 300,000
km, that would be the hard problem, and you can get a laser rifle to punch
personal amor at a few hundred yards, because that would be the easy
problem, right? No, the math didn't work that way. And we also had to work
the wavelength angle for atmospheric penetration as well. While it would
have been nice to re-tweak some numbers to beef up lasers at the personal
combat scale, that would have rippled through the space lasers and thrown
that out of whack, so we had to just stick with what we had. So the great
TNE emasculation of personal lasers was not a design plan, just a design
by-product. But since Traveller had already established that other things,
gauss rifles, energy weapons, etc., were the weapons of choice it kind of
dove-tailed with that. "The future ain't what it used to be." (Tom Petty,
among others.)
That's why Star Trek has phasers, because they don't have to follow any
rules. Which reminds me, the entire Star Trek visualization of starship
fire control is inexplicable. Sulu just looks out the front window and
eyeballs it. No sensor fusion in that universe at all, which I still find
utterly baffling every time I see it, because they have all of these magic
sensors that can tell if things many light minutes away are alive or not,
but they can't see a "cloaked" ship, which is apparently only cloaked to a
human Mk I Mod 0 eyeball, because when Uhura says, "it's gotta have a
tailpipe," they remember, "Oh, we have other sensors, they're just not
wired into anything."
Which all goes to show you that I am not immune to the impulse to nit-pick
other people's "games." It's just human nature.
Dave
> And that is one of their best mistakes. it enabled referees to design
> equipment that was internally consistent as everything was made (more or
> less) to the same yardstick. Mistakes exists. Some was corrected pretty
> quick (Fusion weapons) others are still in need of correction/revision.
> had GDW been able to live a few years more, I am sure new revisions with
> downloadable spreadsheets would see the day.
>
> All in all FF&S was after PoT the best Traveller product written for TNE.
>
> ---
> Roger Malmstein
> Administrator / Webmaster
> www.travellerfreeport.com
>
>
> From:
> Sent: Thursday, July 12, 2012 5:42 PM
> To:
> Subject: Re: [Traveller_TNE] Re: M256 Smoothbore / Rheinmetall 120mm L/44
>
>
> So when you get down to it, we're right back to, "only GDW makes
> mistakes," by agreeing to put the thing out.
>
>
>
>
because once I start remembering these things it's hard to stop.
Laser personal weapons and their lack of penetration.
When we were working on lasers for TNE it was in the context of knowing we
would put out an FF&S, so the early design sequences were already in play.
And the one big test, the Holy Grail of laser design, was being able to
punch a starship hull out at one light-second and beyond. And since we
knew that we wanted to do laser design sequences starting from the present
day, and had a whole stack of SDI-derived research and technical
information, we had a pretty good basis to begin. But obviously the optics
didn't work. You couldn't concentrate that much energy at that distance
without a big technical discontinuity, which became gravitic focusing. So
we fiddled around with the numbers until we got starship combat
performance, declared success, and moved onto the next thing.
Now, you would think that if you can punch a starship's hull at 300,000
km, that would be the hard problem, and you can get a laser rifle to punch
personal amor at a few hundred yards, because that would be the easy
problem, right? No, the math didn't work that way. And we also had to work
the wavelength angle for atmospheric penetration as well. While it would
have been nice to re-tweak some numbers to beef up lasers at the personal
combat scale, that would have rippled through the space lasers and thrown
that out of whack, so we had to just stick with what we had. So the great
TNE emasculation of personal lasers was not a design plan, just a design
by-product. But since Traveller had already established that other things,
gauss rifles, energy weapons, etc., were the weapons of choice it kind of
dove-tailed with that. "The future ain't what it used to be." (Tom Petty,
among others.)
That's why Star Trek has phasers, because they don't have to follow any
rules. Which reminds me, the entire Star Trek visualization of starship
fire control is inexplicable. Sulu just looks out the front window and
eyeballs it. No sensor fusion in that universe at all, which I still find
utterly baffling every time I see it, because they have all of these magic
sensors that can tell if things many light minutes away are alive or not,
but they can't see a "cloaked" ship, which is apparently only cloaked to a
human Mk I Mod 0 eyeball, because when Uhura says, "it's gotta have a
tailpipe," they remember, "Oh, we have other sensors, they're just not
wired into anything."
Which all goes to show you that I am not immune to the impulse to nit-pick
other people's "games." It's just human nature.
Dave
> And that is one of their best mistakes. it enabled referees to design
> equipment that was internally consistent as everything was made (more or
> less) to the same yardstick. Mistakes exists. Some was corrected pretty
> quick (Fusion weapons) others are still in need of correction/revision.
> had GDW been able to live a few years more, I am sure new revisions with
> downloadable spreadsheets would see the day.
>
> All in all FF&S was after PoT the best Traveller product written for TNE.
>
> ---
> Roger Malmstein
> Administrator / Webmaster
> www.travellerfreeport.com
>
>
> From:
> Sent: Thursday, July 12, 2012 5:42 PM
> To:
> Subject: Re: [Traveller_TNE] Re: M256 Smoothbore / Rheinmetall 120mm L/44
>
>
> So when you get down to it, we're right back to, "only GDW makes
> mistakes," by agreeing to put the thing out.
>
>
>
>