[Spaceships] 'Triple' bomb size instead of triple ammo count?

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

No, it wouldn't. All it would take is mass impacting at multiple miles per second. Kinetic energy weapons are the preferred tank killers today, and they strike at around one mile per second. A properly-delivered Spaceships missile or bomb strike will hit at least a few times faster than that. A Spaceships missile given a good runup hits like nothing I can think of referents for...it makes rail guns look underpowered. At a fairly leisurely 2 mps, that 44lb bomb delivers about 500lb TNT energy equivalent, and it's directed into the target's hull, probably carried by a few purpose-built high-density penetrator rods.

What if they only have Pseudovelocity drives?

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Molokh

What if they only have Pseudovelocity drives?

That pretty well rules out most forms of kinetic weapon, and especially limits the use of bombs since they presumably can't be 'thrown' at all by a pseudovelocity ship. Or at least can't be thrown forward. Dropping them in front of your enemy might work, if they can hurt themselves with a pseudovelocity impact.

Or, depending on how it works, it might make them all bizarrely effective by allowing you to carry around weapons with momentum from some other orbital frame of reference which will instantly pseudoaccelerate to devastating velocities when released.

Or by the book, it doesn't matter, because it doesn't say anything about the ship's drive type having any influence on objects it launches. Pseudovelocity drive missiles apparently get to hit at an arbitrary 10mps (or actual relative speed if that's somehow less), but an engineless bomb or shell presumably can't have pseudovelocity... That's probably an oversight though.

That is to say, calling them 'pseudovelocity drives' doesn't really specify the behavior of the drives very well.

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

That pretty well rules out most forms of kinetic weapon, and especially limits the use of bombs since they presumably can't be 'thrown' at all by a pseudovelocity ship. Or at least can't be thrown forward. Dropping them in front of your enemy might work, if they can hurt themselves with a pseudovelocity impact.

Or, depending on how it works, it might make them all bizarrely effective by allowing you to carry around weapons with momentum from some other orbital frame of reference which will instantly pseudoaccelerate to devastating velocities when released.

Or by the book, it doesn't matter, because it doesn't say anything about the ship's drive type having any influence on objects it launches. Pseudovelocity drive missiles apparently get to hit at an arbitrary 10mps (or actual relative speed if that's somehow less), but an engineless bomb or shell presumably can't have pseudovelocity... That's probably an oversight though.

That is to say, calling them 'pseudovelocity drives' doesn't really specify the behavior of the drives very well.

How about saying that bombs have a pseudovelocity field, which prevents them from losing pseudovelocity upon launch, but since their velocity is pseudovelocity, it still doesn't count for the purposes of kinetic damage (and thus delivers explosive damage only, be it conventional or nuke . . . or the X-burst)?

[Anaraxes]

Even just falling from orbit makes for a respectable punch. No high fractions of c are required. A crowbar in orbit moves five times faster than those anti-tank rounds, and so has 25 times the energy. The pseudovelocity drive saves you from the planetkillers, but access to space by any means still gives you weapons.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Molokh

How about saying that bombs have a pseudovelocity field, which prevents them from losing pseudovelocity upon launch, but since their velocity is pseudovelocity, it still doesn't count for the purposes of kinetic damage (and thus delivers explosive damage only, be it conventional or nuke . . . or the X-burst)?

Conventional HE would probably be pretty useless, between the lack of atmosphere to propagate blasts, the low mass and lower impact mass of missiles, and the tendency of ships to carry armor.

If we assume you can fit a full-diameter shaped charge into the warhead, and that you can get it to the target's hull, such a warhead would do approximately half the damage on the conventional warhead damage table (maybe a bit less before TL10), with no multiplication for velocity and a (10) armor divisor. You also should probably treat any armor Metallic Laminate or better as being laminated and thus doubled against the shaped charge, and you might see EMA bringing that up to triple.

It looks like that would still be enough to sting ships, at least at the small end. Even a 16cm warhead could still penetrate an SM+10 ship with 2 layers of hardened nanocomposite, albeit barely. Small fighters wouldn't usually be killed by a missile hit, but their armor wouldn't help very much. Midsized ships get damaged through their protection, but only a little bit.

There's absolutely no proximity detonation mode for these conventional warheads, though, which is a big drawback.

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

There's absolutely no proximity detonation mode for these conventional warheads, though, which is a big drawback.

Why? Isn't proxdet a case of Fragmentation hitting thanks to the explosion + pieces of the bomb's 'armor'? (How else would you get 10 hits per bomb?)

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Molokh

Why? Isn't proxdet a case of Fragmentation hitting thanks to the explosion + pieces of the bomb's 'armor'? (How else would you get 10 hits per bomb?)

Sort of, but it's highly sophisticated fragmentation and its damage comes from the pre-fragmentation collision speed of the warhead, not particularly from any onboard explosives.

A blast-fragmentation attack would have essentially no reach at all on space scales unless the fragments somehow keep their pseudovelocity, and as far as I know there aren't actually any rules for figuring out how a fragmentation attack is effected by flying at the target really fast. And it doesn't make much difference anyway...a 10cm HEDP warhead has [5d] fragmentation damage, not dDamage, and it seems to be diameter-proportional. So a 112 cm supercapital warhead might manage [56d]...which is something like [5d+2] dDamage. If it does hit anything, the thing it hits probably won't care.

[cmdicely]

Originally Posted by Molokh

Why? Isn't proxdet a case of Fragmentation hitting thanks to the explosion + pieces of the bomb's 'armor'? (How else would you get 10 hits per bomb?)

Not in the sense of usual explosive fragmentation where the energy for the fragments comes from the explosion; Spaceships proximity detonation seems much more likely to be a relatively small explosive charge to generate separation among a series of penetrator rods that make up almost all of the mass of the warhead. The energy that provides damage still comes almost entirely from the relative velocity pre-explosion; the explosion spreads the penetrators in a plane that is, ideally, perpendicular to the vector of the relative velocity between the missile or bomb and the target.