E-mag weapons builder

[onetrikpony]

I've had a lot of fun playing with the "Blaster and Laser Design" rules from Pyramid 3-37.

Does anyone have anything equivalent for Electromagnetic slug throwers?

I've tried, and failed, to reverse engineer the gauss guns from UT. I think the issue is hypervelocity air resistance, and I'm ready to admit that I'm just not smart enough to understand what's going to there.

I also failed to come to any conclusions by statistical analysis of the printed weapons...

Any help?

[Ulzgoroth]

I frankly would not start from the assumption that UT gauss guns are based on any sort of good physical model. And if anything would expect them to be ignoring the issues of serious hyper-velocity air resistance because if you run into that your gun probably isn't practical to use in an atmosphere.

[The_Ryujin]

Yeah, the projectile weapons in Ultra-Tech mostly followed the examples set in the basic set which in turn were more rule of thumb then built using a design system.

To give you an idea, The 4mm gauss rifle shoots a 2.7g bullet at around 1,500m/s that should do 8d+1 pi- instead of the 6d+2 pi- listed. I peg range (assuming non-APEP rounds) at 900/5,400.

While not ideal, right now the best you can do is use Douglas's ballistic spreadsheet to get damage and range (note that range figures from his sheet will be different then numbers gurps uses) and for small arms at lest take the square root of the rounds KE in joules divided by 3,000 and multiple it by 7.1lbs or 10.7 if the weapon is a heavy automatic to get the weapons weight. A TL10 C Cell can power 60 3kj shots.

[onetrikpony]

Originally Posted by The_Ryujin

To give you an idea, The 4mm gauss rifle shoots a 2.7g bullet at around 1,500m/s that should do 8d+1 pi- instead of the 6d+2 pi- listed. I peg range (assuming non-APEP rounds) at 900/5,400.

While not ideal, right now the best you can do is use Douglas's ballistic spreadsheet to get damage and range...
...and for small arms at lest take the square root of the rounds KE in joules divided by 3,000 and multiple it by 7.1lbs or 10.7 if the weapon is a heavy automatic to get the weapons weight. A TL10 C Cell can power 60 3kj shots.

Thanks for your post.

Douglas from Gaming Ballistic? I Havn't been able to find that spreadsheet.
Am correct to assume the metrics you're using are from the spreadsheet?
Does this spreadsheet cover hyper velocity shockwave and resistance?

If that's not the case can you help me understand how you arrive at;
900 yd 1/2 damage range for the 4mm rifle?
60 3KG shots / C-cell (I'm guessing the assumption is a 3600KJ rechargeable)?

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by onetrikpony

60 3KG shots / C-cell (I'm guessing the assumption is a 3600KJ rechargeable)?

Curious about that myself. The laser rifle in UT is consistent with a 30 kJ weapon in Spaceships (and probably the mentioned design article, but I don't have that to check), and would get 8.3 shots out of a C cell (the D cell it normally uses holds 10x as much energy as a C cell, and gets it 83 shots). 30kJ * 8.3shots/cell = 249kJ/cell, implying that's how much usable energy you get out of it. Assuming electromagnetic weapons have comparable efficiencies to laser weapons, that would mean a 3 kJ* gauss gun (say) should manage around 83 shots out of a C cell. The_Ryujin appears to be assuming the electromagnetic weapon will only have around 70% of the efficiency of the laser weapon.

[onetrikpony]

Originally Posted by Varyon

Curious about that myself. The laser rifle in UT is consistent with a 30 kJ weapon in Spaceships (and probably the mentioned design article, but I don't have that to check), and would get 8.3 shots out of a C cell (the D cell it normally uses holds 10x as much energy as a C cell, and gets it 83 shots). 30kJ * 8.3shots/cell = 249kJ/cell, implying that's how much usable energy you get out of it. Assuming electromagnetic weapons have comparable efficiencies to laser weapons, that would mean a 3 kJ* gauss gun (say) should manage around 83 shots out of a C cell. The_Ryujin appears to be assuming the electromagnetic weapon will only have around 70% of the efficiency of the laser weapon.

I'm assuming the issue is the efficiency of the projector / launcher. I've been thinking about my TL 10 setting in terms of projectile launchers being more efficient in terms of terminal energy than beams. Things would change a lot if that weren't the case.

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

Above 1600 meters per second pretty much any projectiles made from anything except but depleted uranium or materials like UT's "bulk amorphous tungsten" shatter and make shallow craters rather than deep penetrating hits.

Above 2200 mps even depleted uranium structurally fails. "Hyperdense might take you farther but how far depends on specifics. Traveller's "Bonded Superdense" at 2x as dense as steel but 14x as strong might take you to 3700 mps.

This concept is new to me!
Thanks Fred.
Where do I go to learn more? (even search terms would be OK) I'm guessing it has something to do with a threshold for energy transfer based on the (sheer?) strength of the projectile material?
This could definitely change my setting.

[The_Ryujin]

Originally Posted by onetrikpony

Thanks for your post.

Douglas from Gaming Ballistic? I Havn't been able to find that spreadsheet.
Am correct to assume the metrics you're using are from the spreadsheet?
Does this spreadsheet cover hyper velocity shockwave and resistance?

If that's not the case can you help me understand how you arrive at;
900 yd 1/2 damage range for the 4mm rifle?
60 3KG shots / C-cell (I'm guessing the assumption is a 3600KJ rechargeable)?

Looks like Douglas beat me about the sheet and kinda, his numbers do shorta break down at the extremes but that's because once you get to needing to cover for hyper velocity shock waves the math gets super complicated and requires you to know a lot of factors behind the projectiles material properties and shape and is math far beyond using a pen and paper and would require complex computer modeling. Unfortunately there is no easy way to handle it.

As for my 900 yards figure this is more of a estimation based on how GURPS handles ranges rather then hardcore physics and is not based on the spreadsheet either.

And derp, that's supposed to be 3 kilojoules not kilograms lol. I wrote that on my smartphone and I guess it got autocorrected. 3kJ is roughly the muzzle energy of the rifle, TL10 EM weapons are 50% efficient. Ultra-tech TL10 power cell holds 720kJ/pound.

Also someone asked about a weight factor, I'm assuming they mean the 7.1lbs? That's just the weight of an unloaded 4mm gauss rifle, the heavy automatic figure came from reverse energering the weights of weapons that had both normal and machine gun versions. The square weight of KE is just how the gun design system seems to handle it (at lest at the time I Iearned that, David Pulver has since changed some elements of how EM weapons are designed but I don't, sadly, have the actual numbers).

[Michael Thayne]

I've looked at the rules for building electromagnetic guns from 3e, and they seem like they'd work okayish for 4e. The biggest issue AFAICT is that for really big guns the weight seem implausibly low, because the empty weight of guns is based on the square of caliber rather than the cube or something like that.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by onetrikpony

I've had a lot of fun playing with the "Blaster and Laser Design" rules from Pyramid 3-37.

Does anyone have anything equivalent for Electromagnetic slug throwers?

Any help?

What you need is actually just a system for handling the upper end of conventional guns.

Some reasons why:

Above 1600 meters per second pretty much any projectiles made from anything except but depleted uranium or materials like UT's "bulk amorphous tungsten" shatter and make shallow craters rather than deep penetrating hits.

Above 2200 mps even depleted uranium structurally fails. "Hyperdense might take you farther but how far depends on specifics. Traveller's "Bonded Superdense" at 2x as dense as steel but 14x as strong might take you to 3700 mps.

At about the same speed (Mach 7) projectiles made out of conventional matter start to burn up like meteors in an Earth-like atmopshere.

So really, you don't need to go that far past what you can get with gunpowder. I've heard of rifle rounds that hit 1200 to 1500 mps and tank guns go toa round 1600.

Of course, this is for the projectiles. Stats for the guns are pretty speculative though soemupper limits can be calcualted using material strength math that is well beyond me.