Quote:
Originally Posted by TheAmishStig
The only dissonance I continue to have is "What about a great big cloud of submunitions?" Something like a frag mortar, or a cluster bomb, where it's "This hex is being carpeted with explosives. If you're in this hex, it sucks to be you" rather than "I'm going to sweep my machine gun across this group of infantry, then group of infantry, now I'm going to sweep this third group twice as long because screw those guys..." Something like that you can't just hold target for longer to do more damage...
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You have a fair point on the question of, say, a special howitzer with a 6(AP) attack. However, it's not hard to imagine that fewer/bigger sub-munitions -- capable of affecting true armor -- could still deliver the same effect versus battle-suited infantry. In that case, why have 6(AP) shells when you have 6(regular) shells that do the same job, plus they take out vehicles too???
We could just as easily imagine howitzer shells loaded with rice grain sized explosives that would be ineffective against anything tougher than Militia. (Even lowly regular BS-infantry are still armored in BPC!). But why build such a thing?
I'm not saying that a single 6(AP) attack is impossible, the laws of physics are pretty lenient on what can or can't be built by clever enough engineers. But there are lots of ideas in the pages of defense magazines that never make it out the door because of reasons. A solitary 6(AP) attack might be one of them because it's (*comparatively*) dumb, i.e. a little more design effort and you don't have the (AP) restriction nor have to stockpile two types of ammunition...
So, you can have a 6(AP) attack if you like (I don't *think* SJG will send anyone to stop you) while at the same time, fluff-wise, making it a weapon of 2nd tier powers (it was the best they could do...), or an experimental weapon pushed by some procurement officer gone bad (he/she needed a pet R&D project to embezzle), or simply the OGRE equivalent of using swarms of frigates armed with grav-lances to take on an Apollo equipped Manticoran SD(P) wall of battle: it's an idea, it can be done, but umm... good luck.