Hydrocarbon Fuel Cells for 3e

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by GURPS Fox

From my understanding, it's less 'ubiquitous' and more 'very common'... although it might be our definitions of ubiquitous being skewed.

Recent advances in technology have made ATGMs more man-portable while at least retaining effectiveness. I wouldn't be surprised that everyone would be running around with a light version of the Javelin-made-TAC Missile in the future. This is especially interesting given that the US Army has been implementing something akin to the TAC missile by using the radar variant of the Hellfire in its new SHORAD system.

Javelin is still a 35 pound round. General issue LAWs are generally under 20 pounds for the entire loaded (usually single-shot disposable) weapon. That's a pretty big jump.

Originally Posted by GURPS Fox

Think of it this way, just a while back Rathyon had revealed a 40mm micro missile that can be used in the bog-standard underslung grenade launcher. This capability gives soldiers a decent-sized boost to their anti-vehicle/structure capability using an HEDP warhead similar to the ones used in the standard HiLo grenades.

While the HEDP warhead wouldn't be dangerous for, say, a tank, it would be for something like light combat cars (like the humvee and successors) and APCs at the minimum with certainty against any electronics and other sensitive equipment.

Remember that the primary defense of a modern combat vehicle, like a modern infantry soldier, is cover and concealment. The real HMMWV wasn't designed to be a midget APC and it didn't exactly do a great job when turned into one.

Is this thing immune to small arms? Because if not, worrying about whether it's safe against 40mm missiles is kinda missing the point.

Originally Posted by GURPS Fox

The energy ADS system is for hypersonic missiles, which would be immune to anything that doesn't use a UV (or X-Ray) wavelength pulse laser thanks to that plasma sheath. Note the only other weapon in that ADS unit is a 2mm gatling railgun that is fairly short-ranged compared to the UV pulse laser.

Well, the big problem is that you design your forces against your enemies, and when two of them love to make sure that they get fire in all directions (either with lots of launchers or quite a few rapid-fire launchers)...

... unless you've got your turrets using electromagnetic levitation mountings (i.e. instead of a traditional turret mounting, they're in a maglev environment, which makes them far faster at the fraction of the mass cost), you're going to need multiple turrets. Since you need NBC capability to keep out Tiberium (at the minimum)... EM turrets aren't going to be viable.

The problem is that you're trying to design a "humvee" that can stand off an attack that would threaten a carrier battle group. A war machine kinda needs to accept mortality at some point rather than evolving into an Ogre in a futile attempt to reject it.

Depending on what stats you're assigning it, a 2mm gatling railgun could easily be an appropriate main weapon for such a vehicle.

(Tangentially, since the ADS turrets are necessarily automated, it doesn't seem that there would be any conflict between the NBC seal and the maglev mounting. The entire turret assembly would just be outside the sealed crew space.)