FF&S Chat

[Libris]

I just looked at batteries. Hmm, crunchie, complicated. Has anybody fiddled with the rules to give higher output batteries to power weapons? The battery discharge rate table is easily manipulated to give intermediate results. If I'm not mistaken something like a gauss rifle needs quite a lot of Watts of power but not a lot of storage (relatively speaking).

For example a 16,000J gauss rifle requires a 2.56kg battery at TL14 (p104 A.Battery Weight) to fire 40 rounds. Using p66. Batteries a battery witha 4 second discharge time will only weigh in at 1.76kg (isn't excel wonderful?!)

 

[Badbru]

There are alot of things that weigh too much in Fire, Fusion, and Steel. Take tube missile launchers for example, there is a requirement in one of the design sequences that the launcher weigh FOUR times the weight of the missile it is designed to fire. What Rot! Tow1, Tow2, Millan, Euromissile HOT, RBS 56 Bil, AT-3 Sagger, AT-4(5?)Spandrell, M-47 Dragon and Dragon Pip, none of these have a launcher that comes even close to Twice the weight of the fired missile. Discount the tripod and most of these have a tube that weighs less! and they'd all be considered TL-6 TL-7 and maybe TL-8 systems.

In many of my designs I've incorporated the materials table that is early in the book and assumed all the design sequences that follow deal with Hard Steel. If hard steel then has a Toughness of 2 and I'm building with Composite Laminates that has a Toughness of 6 then I need 66% less of it. Alot of my TL-8 to TL-10 slug throwers are made like this primarily to reduce barrell and receiver weight.

 

[Libris]

True. You could always steal the rules for advanced barrel and receiver materials from FF&S2. The weight of an item will not generally decrease linearly in weight with toughness. Minimum volume is still required in certain items to maintain rigidity - a superdense barrel is unlikely to be 1/14 as thick - this would probably give insufficient volume of material to cope with thermal or mechanical stress.

I've already developed accurate formula for interpolation of battery output versus storage and it would be fairly straight forward to do the same for weapons - with spreadsheets readily available some factorial of relative strength could be figured quite easily.