True, but I don't think the shape matters all that much when the thing is slagging your power plant.
Meson gun damage
- Thread starter Enoki
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True, but I don't think the shape matters all that much when the thing is slagging your power plant.
True, but I don't think the shape matters all that much when the thing is slagging your power plant.
Very true!
Damage from spinal mounts adds up quickly what with the "... one extra damage (on each appropriate table) for each letter by which their size exceeds 9." rule.There are meson bay weapons however and, IIRC, meson turrets in MT. It's those weapons, plus the battery factor changes by TL for all meson weapons, that got me thinking all those years ago about the "shape" of a meson detonation's energy intensity.
Take a gander at the spinal table in HG2, especially the EP cost column. Nearly every spinal has a higher TL "sibling" which requires the same EPs and yet causes more damage. Spinals K, L, M, and N are the extreme case. All require only 1000 EPs and yet N receives six more damage rolls than K.
Look at the bay table too. The 100 dTon installation triples in effectiveness TL13 and 15 while requiring the same EPs.
It's this "More Bang For The Same EP Buck" progression that got me thinking about the particle distribution I've been nattering on about. What's the difference between that TL13 bay and the TL15 one? An ability to more "tightly" group mesons in time and velocity so that more of them decay closer to each other. The TL15 energy intensity bell curve will be steeper and higher than the TL13 one.
Icosahedron
SOC-14 1K
1. Carlobrand's fuel-air 'beaten zone' of micro-explosions works for me.
2. It also fits with Whipsnade's bell-curve (though I don't think it should be scrutinised too closely, like much else in Traveller. Tighter grouping at higher TL with the same energy overall would surely lead to a smaller blast radius - which would be counter-productive).
3. Working on CT alone, IMTU I quickly noticed that the input energy for a battlefield meson gun was the same as a turret but, since they weren't specified for ships, I decided that 250MW was insufficient to handle space combat ranges. They made very effective turret mounts for TL15 ground-attack gunships, though... :devil:
2. It also fits with Whipsnade's bell-curve (though I don't think it should be scrutinised too closely, like much else in Traveller. Tighter grouping at higher TL with the same energy overall would surely lead to a smaller blast radius - which would be counter-productive).
3. Working on CT alone, IMTU I quickly noticed that the input energy for a battlefield meson gun was the same as a turret but, since they weren't specified for ships, I decided that 250MW was insufficient to handle space combat ranges. They made very effective turret mounts for TL15 ground-attack gunships, though... :devil:
I don't recall Striker featuring a direct-fire mode for battlefield meson weaponry - which makes sense given the way they operate. You have to get the range exactly right, even when shooting straight at your target over "open sights", 'cause otherwise they just ghost straight through. Its a bit easier when the gunner can see his target, but the thing is still guaranteed to miss on the first shot unless you've preregistered the target zone, which you can't do on the fly.
Icosahedron
SOC-14 1K
My meson gunships flew like the craft in Robinson Crusoe on Mars, or, of you haven't seen the film, like a wasp-mimic hoverfly. They shot over the battlefield at high speed, decelerated very rapidly, pinpointed the target from standstill, fired and accelerated away. All in the blink of an eye.
6G lets you do things like that.
6G lets you do things like that.
I remember an explanation from either here or the TML that described the meson gun effect as breaking strong force bonds at a molecular level there-by liberating huge amounts of energy in a similar fashion to matter/anti-matter explosions.
That's all hand-wavium of course
But I'd always envisaged the primary effect of the meson gun to be total or near total conversion of matter to energy in a spherical focus accompanied by a release of radiation (I think the original discussion said mainly gamma rays).
But like a nuclear weapon there will be secondary and tertiary effects.
Blast: will tear outward from your nice spherical void and cause a lot of destruction. In a nuclear blast this would be called "Complete destruction". farther away there will be moderate damage.
IMTU there won't be EM pulse.
In a subterranean shot there will be an earthquake effect (results in broken ground as per Striker). Soil and rock will be disrupted and will fall back into that void space to fill it. Result a crater.
In an air shot (air is matter after all) there will be similar effects with a thunder clap when the air rushes back in to fill the void and after the blast.
Effects on board a starship should result in a chunk of the interior just not being there anymore. The adjoining areas will be subject to blast. Bulkheads and hull should be buckled and therefore damage control will need to think about sealing off large sections to retain atmosphere.
The interesting thing about the meson gun is that (IMHO) the point of affect doesn't have to be very large. Liberate all, or a large amount, of the energy in a cubic centimeter...thats a big bang.
Whats does a meson gun really do? I dunno, lets build one and find out
That's all hand-wavium of course
But I'd always envisaged the primary effect of the meson gun to be total or near total conversion of matter to energy in a spherical focus accompanied by a release of radiation (I think the original discussion said mainly gamma rays).
But like a nuclear weapon there will be secondary and tertiary effects.
Blast: will tear outward from your nice spherical void and cause a lot of destruction. In a nuclear blast this would be called "Complete destruction". farther away there will be moderate damage.
IMTU there won't be EM pulse.
In a subterranean shot there will be an earthquake effect (results in broken ground as per Striker). Soil and rock will be disrupted and will fall back into that void space to fill it. Result a crater.
In an air shot (air is matter after all) there will be similar effects with a thunder clap when the air rushes back in to fill the void and after the blast.
Effects on board a starship should result in a chunk of the interior just not being there anymore. The adjoining areas will be subject to blast. Bulkheads and hull should be buckled and therefore damage control will need to think about sealing off large sections to retain atmosphere.
The interesting thing about the meson gun is that (IMHO) the point of affect doesn't have to be very large. Liberate all, or a large amount, of the energy in a cubic centimeter...thats a big bang.
Whats does a meson gun really do? I dunno, lets build one and find out
Whats does a meson gun really do? I dunno, lets build one and find out
Meson accelerators were tested in the late 70's for cancer treatment.
They're as close to a Traveller meson gun as a bottle rocket is to a Saturn V but the principle is the same.
http://archive.is/78RW
I remember an explanation from either here or the TML that described the meson gun effect as breaking strong force bonds at a molecular level there-by liberating huge amounts of energy in a similar fashion to matter/anti-matter explosions.
[snip]
Whats does a meson gun really do? I dunno, lets build one and find out
That's not the canon description. The canon description is that it's a specialized PA firing unstable low-interaction particles that decay to energy inside the target. This decay causes explosions inside the target to energize and detonate.
the implication is damper tech at the weapon, not the target, and using the PA to time the decay inside the target. Also, the level of energy on target is huge.
Your drives let you do that. Your gun does not - at least not as it's envisioned in Striker. Nothing says you have to apply Striker, of course, but in that system it'd take you a few ranging shots before you locked down the point of aim - so you'd end up decelerating to standstill and hovering for a couple of minutes or so while you cranked off a few shots trying to get the range right.
As to why that is, I don't know. Getting the bearing right isn't terribly difficult, not given that you're ending in a big boom rather than trying to get one small thing to intersect another small thing. Getting the range - strikes me that a laser rangefinder and a decent computer program should put you right on target on the first shot if you're trying to use the thing for direct fire. If you're reluctant to give yourself away by using a laser, then two cameras and parallax should be more than adequate to put the center within a few feet of target, which is plenty when the blast zone is 50 meters in radius. Given inputs as to your speed and direction of flight, a good program should even be able to let you crank off shots on the fly. Makes for a nice main gun for a TL 15 tank destroyer, should do quite nicely until disintegrators show up at TL 18.
Sometimes Traveller's far future science isn't very futury.
Icosahedron
SOC-14 1K
My thoughts exactly.
If a TL15 battle computer can't provide your own and your target's GPS co-ordinates and figure out the distance between them, it's time to give up. Heck, we can do that at TL7. How many 'ranging shots' do you get with a cruise missile?
The weird flight pattern of my (Striker-generated) meson gunships was actually more about power allocation between drive and gun than about target acquisition (then I recognised the cool RCoM connection and decided not to bother with a work-around).
As you say, a simple laser rangefinder ought to give you the range to target that you need to pinpoint your POA (at least as near as makes no difference...)
Striker Rule 25 makes direct fire by indirect fire weapons possible, and in any case, Striker describes meson guns as 'technically a direct fire weapon' that only works as indirect if you can't see and don't know the range to target.
Fog of war, weather conditions and possible jamming of your electronics are the only reasons I can think of why you would need to play Blind Man's Bluff with TL15 artillery.
I totally agree:
If a TL15 battle computer can't provide your own and your target's GPS co-ordinates and figure out the distance between them, it's time to give up. Heck, we can do that at TL7. How many 'ranging shots' do you get with a cruise missile?
The weird flight pattern of my (Striker-generated) meson gunships was actually more about power allocation between drive and gun than about target acquisition (then I recognised the cool RCoM connection and decided not to bother with a work-around).
As you say, a simple laser rangefinder ought to give you the range to target that you need to pinpoint your POA (at least as near as makes no difference...)
Striker Rule 25 makes direct fire by indirect fire weapons possible, and in any case, Striker describes meson guns as 'technically a direct fire weapon' that only works as indirect if you can't see and don't know the range to target.
Fog of war, weather conditions and possible jamming of your electronics are the only reasons I can think of why you would need to play Blind Man's Bluff with TL15 artillery.
I totally agree:
lets scale back and examine just what effect the meson decay has.
Ihe Meson comes apart with a pair of particles produced that will force themselves apart from each other at an angle from the original vector, (or one may be slowed while the other accelerated), so the nice molecular scale foccusing that can be had from a PAW becomes a spreading beam with two cones, the more massive of the 2 particles in a narrow cone and the lighter in a wider cone.
Back to the macro scale, the meson gun beam that decays short of the target will likley catch the target in a diffuse beam of subatomic particles, with insufficent particle density to disrupt the armour or cause penetration of the same, the surface of the armour will have some materials changing isotopes, or becomming ionized depending on the nature of the interraction, but in general no effect.
A beam on target decaying inside will knock electrons off of atoms, disrupt chemical bonds and to a lesser degree transmute elements. Next atoms recapture electrons and emit photons as they capture electrons and the electrons decay into lower energy states, other atoms will asorb the photons getting a momentum kick, so we have the temperature of the materials increased, if enough beam intensity is there the materials will vaporize from these effects (there is your explosion: solids becomming gasses accompanied by a flash of light and a boom) as the beam intensity decreases due to the cone effect the materials may be melted in a range of meters then further out merly made hot then progressivley less so till the intensity decreases to the point that the energies fall below the point of causing macro scale effects, perhaps a few tens of meters. Note that the chemical bond breaking and ionization effects will generally be fatal to life as we know it, but of more immediate effect will be that ship shattering boom as a few m3 of solid machinery suddenly becomes a very hot gas.
The boarding party encounters an area where there was an explosion and then a cone of melted materials graduating into heat warped structurial members and secondary radiation with a wider area of no heat effects but a decreasing induced radiation effect. any crew within the area of effect cone are dead right there, killed by an instant body temp rise of no more than 6 or 7 degrees, you will have varying states of the crew bodies from cooked meat inside a still sealed vacc suit to exploded vacc suits as the people inside them were flashed into steam, and some in the outer area of the cone showing no outward signs of damage except for being dead of course.
Ihe Meson comes apart with a pair of particles produced that will force themselves apart from each other at an angle from the original vector, (or one may be slowed while the other accelerated), so the nice molecular scale foccusing that can be had from a PAW becomes a spreading beam with two cones, the more massive of the 2 particles in a narrow cone and the lighter in a wider cone.
Back to the macro scale, the meson gun beam that decays short of the target will likley catch the target in a diffuse beam of subatomic particles, with insufficent particle density to disrupt the armour or cause penetration of the same, the surface of the armour will have some materials changing isotopes, or becomming ionized depending on the nature of the interraction, but in general no effect.
A beam on target decaying inside will knock electrons off of atoms, disrupt chemical bonds and to a lesser degree transmute elements. Next atoms recapture electrons and emit photons as they capture electrons and the electrons decay into lower energy states, other atoms will asorb the photons getting a momentum kick, so we have the temperature of the materials increased, if enough beam intensity is there the materials will vaporize from these effects (there is your explosion: solids becomming gasses accompanied by a flash of light and a boom) as the beam intensity decreases due to the cone effect the materials may be melted in a range of meters then further out merly made hot then progressivley less so till the intensity decreases to the point that the energies fall below the point of causing macro scale effects, perhaps a few tens of meters. Note that the chemical bond breaking and ionization effects will generally be fatal to life as we know it, but of more immediate effect will be that ship shattering boom as a few m3 of solid machinery suddenly becomes a very hot gas.
The boarding party encounters an area where there was an explosion and then a cone of melted materials graduating into heat warped structurial members and secondary radiation with a wider area of no heat effects but a decreasing induced radiation effect. any crew within the area of effect cone are dead right there, killed by an instant body temp rise of no more than 6 or 7 degrees, you will have varying states of the crew bodies from cooked meat inside a still sealed vacc suit to exploded vacc suits as the people inside them were flashed into steam, and some in the outer area of the cone showing no outward signs of damage except for being dead of course.
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It is treated as indirect fire under Striker rules, but it is actually a direct fire weapon since it shoots through any intervening terrain. The indirect treatment is to bring it in line with the artificiality of the rules is all.
Thanks. Good details.
More like a lack of rules. I don't think it occurred to them that you might find a way to direct-fire a meson gun.
"Although technically a direct fire weapon (the beam travels in a straight line), a meson gun's ability to fire through intervening obstacles and the need to know the distance to target makes it functionally an indirect fire weapon."
Their assumption was that the need to know exact range precluded its use for direct fire, but that really shouldn't pose a handicap for a TL 15 society. As I mentioned, laser rangefinders or a camera parallax system would have made them deadly direct-fire weapons. Someone else mentioned GPS, assuming you have control of the orbital space: with that and a battle computer, you should be able to use the "eyes" of forward combat vehicles or drones as your own "eyes" and be able to hit with the first shot, instead of depending on some unlucky sap in a foxhole to call in coordinates.
They introduced future tech, but they tried to stick pretty close to the familiar combat paradigms rather than explore the real potential of the tech.
I had a player design a battle rider with a meson gun that fired through a 10m thick on one facing only armor and used remote sensor drones for it's targeting info. (T4 FF&S) worked out rather well for him as long as he "faced" only one enemy.
How do you keep one side facing the enemy while trying to maneuver? You're always thrusting toward the enemy and, if he's using meson weapons too, you've become predictable: you've only got one degree of freedom, one variable to throw at him instead of being able to maneuver through three dimensions. Or if it's on a side, you're always thrusting perpendicular to his axis and he ends up deciding the engagement ranges - and you're still somewhat more predictable than an ordinary ship. You're invulnerable to ordinary weapons but a sitting duck for meson fire.
We were using the time delay of the firing control loop to determine the effect of the evasive maneuvers such that at 80 hexes you have 32 seconds to change your vector enough to get completly out of a weapons CEP (Circular error probility). If you could do that then that is a miss, no dice roll. Conversly if despite your maneuvering his entire CEP was still on your hull then it's a hit, also without rolling the dice. The in between cases where the CEP area was larger than his facing hull's area then we calculated the % of his CEP that was and rolled the dice, and the other case where he got part of his CEP off the hull again we computed the relative area and rolled.
We had a table of things that would affect the CEP of a weapon, foremost of which was your own evasive maneuvering which would apply latteral stresses to the hull causing it to bend in a measurable amount thus throwing off the boresighting of the weapons, adaptive optics and hull flex sensors would try to mitigate this but there are time delays of a few miliseconds between the sensor readings and the corrections to the optics. But even crew movement can throw off a beam that's trying to hit a target at 80 hexes, that's an incredible long range and a relatively tiny target. Compare to trying to hit one of the sets of lunar lander landing gear we left on the moon from near earth orbit, say the hubble is your sensor... it can't resolve the landing gear, but you have a 10 meter spot you know it's at as your ship is in orbit you are going to have to change the ship's attitude to keep the laser trained on the target, with the sunlight hitting different parts of the ship causing bending due to metal expansion as it's heated even if we could focus our beam to 1 cm spot at that distance we'd not be able to point it to within a 100 meter circle (The hubble shades itself from the sun to avoid these pointing problems). You have crew on board moving to reach a switch and that movement will throw off your pointing.
He used a wedge design with the base of the wedge armoured and the thrusters in the "nose" so had some 20 degrees of maneuver around a base course.
He was expecting a large amount of laser drones to attack while still out of meson gun range and this was a well thought out plan to get to meson gun range without getting his sensors scrubbed off by the drones (ROF 400 1 DP at range 4) he mounted 400 laser emitters in a couple of laser "clusters" (actually turret) that were capable of ROF 400 themselves so had 400 shots/ 2.5 seconds bearing on any target within range 2 of the sides of his ships, the three riders in a triangle formation with his sensor drones hiding in the middle and evading like crazy.
My option was to try to get my drones to range 3 or 4 of the sides of his ship and stay there outside the effective range of his point defenses and pelt him till I knocked out his turrets, then send in the nuclear det missiles to try to kill the things from the side, all while trying to maintain myself outside the effective range of his riders.
My drone's navigation was not up to the task when he turned ship and vectored to in front of my drones and shot them down at range 2. then it was my one ship's spinal vs his three... I got one of them...
We had a table of things that would affect the CEP of a weapon, foremost of which was your own evasive maneuvering which would apply latteral stresses to the hull causing it to bend in a measurable amount thus throwing off the boresighting of the weapons, adaptive optics and hull flex sensors would try to mitigate this but there are time delays of a few miliseconds between the sensor readings and the corrections to the optics. But even crew movement can throw off a beam that's trying to hit a target at 80 hexes, that's an incredible long range and a relatively tiny target. Compare to trying to hit one of the sets of lunar lander landing gear we left on the moon from near earth orbit, say the hubble is your sensor... it can't resolve the landing gear, but you have a 10 meter spot you know it's at as your ship is in orbit you are going to have to change the ship's attitude to keep the laser trained on the target, with the sunlight hitting different parts of the ship causing bending due to metal expansion as it's heated even if we could focus our beam to 1 cm spot at that distance we'd not be able to point it to within a 100 meter circle (The hubble shades itself from the sun to avoid these pointing problems). You have crew on board moving to reach a switch and that movement will throw off your pointing.
He used a wedge design with the base of the wedge armoured and the thrusters in the "nose" so had some 20 degrees of maneuver around a base course.
He was expecting a large amount of laser drones to attack while still out of meson gun range and this was a well thought out plan to get to meson gun range without getting his sensors scrubbed off by the drones (ROF 400 1 DP at range 4) he mounted 400 laser emitters in a couple of laser "clusters" (actually turret) that were capable of ROF 400 themselves so had 400 shots/ 2.5 seconds bearing on any target within range 2 of the sides of his ships, the three riders in a triangle formation with his sensor drones hiding in the middle and evading like crazy.
My option was to try to get my drones to range 3 or 4 of the sides of his ship and stay there outside the effective range of his point defenses and pelt him till I knocked out his turrets, then send in the nuclear det missiles to try to kill the things from the side, all while trying to maintain myself outside the effective range of his riders.
My drone's navigation was not up to the task when he turned ship and vectored to in front of my drones and shot them down at range 2. then it was my one ship's spinal vs his three... I got one of them...
Okay, I see where you're coming from. Thanks!
There's an alternate way of viewing the rules that would make meson guns much more lethal. Since meson guns attack all targets within the burst radius, you could treat them like HE or nuclear rounds; all targets within the burst radius of your point of aim are attacked regardless of whether or not a direct hit is scored.
The mesons are going to decay at some precise delay dialed into the weapon as range. If that range is off by 10 or 20 meters, it doesn't really matter, the meson "cloud" decays centered on the actual impact point and inside every target within the burst radius (including the ground).
As you said, any decent rangefinder should get you close enough.
Granted there's nothing in the rules to support this; calculating the delay time could be so difficult that it has to be done by a fire direction center. As you said, it's a lack of rules.
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