I had a few things that I liked to run with IMTU, a survival laser rifle that came with a built in solar recharging system. Outta ammo? Just leave your gun in the sun for a few hours. This was in opposition a chem propelled round survival weapon.
I don't recall the exact system for heplar, I renamed it Plasma Focus in my system and my hand-wave explanation was the reactor converted the fuel into plasma in a containment chamber it moved from there into a reaction chamber where magnets crushed it down and it was pushed out the arse end of the ship in this crushed out super fast moving form.
Derek Stanley
Sent from my iPhone...
On 2012-07-12, at 11:10, wrote:
> 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.)
>
I don't recall the exact system for heplar, I renamed it Plasma Focus in my system and my hand-wave explanation was the reactor converted the fuel into plasma in a containment chamber it moved from there into a reaction chamber where magnets crushed it down and it was pushed out the arse end of the ship in this crushed out super fast moving form.
Derek Stanley
Sent from my iPhone...
On 2012-07-12, at 11:10, wrote:
> 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.)
>