Quote:
Originally Posted by Agemegos
The radiation is repulsive, and less intense than a weapon
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I'm wondering at what point that detail no longer holds true - where the radiation becomes stronger than, say, five hundred thousand d6 damage per second.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Agemegos
The shields on spaceships in the Lensman universe make them immune to weapons with beams far more intense than that. The wall-shields on a speedster cope easily with particles of dust and molecules of interstellar gas impacting at 120 parsecs per hour.
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That might be more due to the physics of the Bergenholm generator than purely the shields. Such a generator produces a field with a particular volume, and presumably shape; Doc Smith didn't go into the details, but it's plausible that the field is shaped to extend in front of a ship, far enough to 'catch' potentially-hazardous particles and render them at least partially inertialess before those particles impact the shields. (GURPS Lensman mentions that it takes a certain number of milliseconds for an inertialess field to fully form, but I'm not sure if that can be extrapolated to figure out how much time it would take to de-inertia-ize a random dust grain.)
I've been eyeing 4e's Spaceships 5, page 40, which contains a table describing how much dDmg a STL ship takes from ablative dust-grains. However, that damage appears to scale with the Lorentz factor of how fast the ship is going, which kind of breaks down when an FTL drive is in play. Still, it gives some potentially useful numbers. At 0.9c, the Lorentz factor is 2.294, and a ship suffers 48 dDR per year. (Or 48*3d=144d6 dDmg, if dDR runs out.) That would mean that at Lorentz 100, at 0.99995c, a ship would ablate 4,000 dDR per year (or 12,000d6 dDmg, or 120k d6 dmg per year, or about 48 dmg per hour). I just might be able to work up some further numbers for denser-medium relativistic impacts based on that.
I seem to recall some mention that damage-scales were tweaked between GURPS 3e and 4e, something about squares versus cubes. Does anyone know what the factor of change (if any) was?