Is this laser cannon really that big?

[DouglasCole]

Originally Posted by Kraydak

One of the examples of why hp=mass^(1/3) doesn't really work well, especially if damage is supposed to scale with energy linearly.

Fortunately, damage is not supposed to scale with energy linearly. It scales as sqrt(energy) for impact projectiles, and cube root (energy) for explosions and energy weapons that tend to vaporize stuff, IIRC.

[Kraydak]

Originally Posted by DouglasCole

Fortunately, damage is not supposed to scale with energy linearly. It scales as sqrt(energy) for impact projectiles, and cube root (energy) for explosions and energy weapons that tend to vaporize stuff, IIRC.

I admit to having misremembered the damage/energy relation for guns, but note that explosives to damage as sqrt(energy), given that damage scales with sqrt(explosive weight).

At the scale we are talking here (100 tons), the difference between a 1/3 power and a 1/2 power is a 1/6 power, here about a factor of 10. Not negligible at all. GURPS scaling works sorta-ok for single attacks on targets of less than a ton (1000^(1/6)=3) in mass, but go much over a ton or allow for multiple attacks and the scaling goes crazy. There is a reason GURPS battleships have absurdly low HP.

Unfortunately, GURPS damage doesn't actually effectively scale with sqrt(energy) as it scales linearly with the number of shots. 10 shots of our laser are doing 10X the damage and so apparently dumping 100X the energy of a single shot into the target.