[Basic] Throwing things with TK

[Black Leviathan]

I don't know if your TK player needs advice but why is he throwing the grenade? Why not float it out to the tank and insert it directly in the barrel? Or slip it under the turret axis, or down the pants of the tank commander?

[Bruno]

If he does that, it's just a very expensive rock.

It's not a hand-grenade, it can only be triggered by a sufficient impact.

[smurf]

Originally Posted by Black Leviathan

I don't know if your TK player needs advice but why is he throwing the grenade? Why not float it out to the tank and insert it directly in the barrel? Or slip it under the turret axis, or down the pants of the tank commander?

The PIAT was 100mm in diameter but the Bazooka round was only 75mm in diameter. With the exception of the Tiger II and the Russian behemoths most barrels were 75mm, some a bit larger and many quite smaller (50 and 37mm early war).

[Plane]

I thought you calculated throwing distance based on Striking ST, I don't know that higher Lifting ST influencing how much you can lift overhead in 1 second actually translates into stronger throwing velocity, whether talking normal ST or TK.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by Black Leviathan

I don't know if your TK player needs advice but why is he throwing the grenade? Why not float it out to the tank and insert it directly in the barrel?

He's done that with hand grenades. He wants something better. This larger, shaped-charge, impact-fuzed grenade will penetrate armour in a way that a hand grenade won't. Landing them on the top deck of a tank, or the sides or rear of the turret, avoids the need to hit small targets.

[Anaraxes]

Originally Posted by smurf

The PIAT was 100mm in diameter but the Bazooka round was only 75mm in diameter.

60mm, actually (if we're talking about the M1 / M1A1 / M9 / M9A1 bazookas used by the US in WW II). They didn't increase the diameter of the warhead until the M20 and the Korean War, when the US had a 90mm version.

[Rupert]

When I introduced my players to the PIAT (which I thought was a fine weapon for people on ruined worlds in a Traveller: The New Era campaign to have) they were horrified, and then, after it trashed their ride, terrified.

I was going to suggest that having the ST/TK to fling the thing about as far as the PIAT could throw the bomb would be a good measure of whether or not the fuse would reasonably work. That seems to require about ST30. My gut feels that this is excessive. Your ST13 TK can throw the bombs a bit over 30-yards, which seems a reasonable lower-end to me. However, it's just a gut-feeling with nothing concrete backing it up.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by johndallman

Good find! That led me to what appears to be the right document reference (AVIA 44 434) at the Public Record Office, and I've requested a quote for a copy of the document.

The quote was fairly reasonable, so I've placed the order.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by Anaraxes

Actual primary sources. Sweet.

And I have the document now. It adds a bunch of detail, but nothing fundamental.

The PIAT round in production by the time the campaign has reached is the MkIV, which solves the problem of fragments coming back and hitting the firer. They eventually discovered that the fragments were the back of the shaped charge's container, the cap of the tail tube and the head of the cartridge. The shaped change was blowing these back through the tail tube at about 3000 fps. The solution was to add two mild steel discs, one behind the container and one ahead of the cartridge. The increased resistance presumably slows down the fragments a lot.

The MkIV also has the No.426 graze fuze, which significantly improves the reliability of detonation, an improved RDX/TNT filling and a better filling procedure, which restored the original standard of penetrating 100mm of armour.

Separately, I've found in Stuart Macrae's Winston Churchill's Toyshop that the No.425 and No.426 fuzes were manufactured by MD1, the organisation that had created the PIAT. This is a close-to-primary source, as Macrae was second in-charge of MD1 for its entire existence. They'll probably be receptive to requests for small numbers of modified fuzes from another "interesting" organisation.