51 replies to this topic

[Bishop Steiner]

Shadey99, on 01 August 2013 - 07:10 PM, said:

Your forgetting the mechanism that moves the ammo from wherever it is, to the gun itself... Some sort of loader is required and I'd assume part of the weight for such comes with the ammo. A 250 lb projectile is kind of silly for this type of item.

the feed mechanism is part of the gun, not the ammo.

[Cardos]

well actually its just like the starships in star wars.....you can hear sound from em in space cause someone decided its ok in the star wars universe, thus setting the laws of that universe slightly different than reality.
In the Battletech-Universe its the same.....and btw, before arguing with real science what to improve about a gauss....maybe start at some basics like why mechs have "safe" fusiongenerators without any kind of fuel....and without remodelling the whole area when it explodes.....^^

[Shadey99]

Bishop Steiner, on 02 August 2013 - 08:25 AM, said:

the feed mechanism is part of the gun, not the ammo.

The feed mechanism that gets the ammo from the torso, head, or legs is... in the gun...? I'm hoping you just missed the old school TT/P&P days when we actually argued that ammo in other locations besides the one hosting the weapon itself or directly adjacent to it should require crits for the mechanism to carry the ammo around... In fact I recall at one point a rule specifically to force the ammo to be adjacent to the weapon on the assumption that part of the ammo cost was the mechanism to feed the ammo to the weapon itself.

[DerSpecht]

Why would gauss generate heat? Theres Monorails using exactly the same technology in RL and they dont generate any noticeable heat at all. I admit that a projectile is different from a train by mass and acceleration but those monorails in europe and china have no speed limit in theory.

[Bishop Steiner]

Shadey99, on 09 August 2013 - 06:11 AM, said:

The feed mechanism that gets the ammo from the torso, head, or legs is... in the gun...? I'm hoping you just missed the old school TT/P&P days when we actually argued that ammo in other locations besides the one hosting the weapon itself or directly adjacent to it should require crits for the mechanism to carry the ammo around... In fact I recall at one point a rule specifically to force the ammo to be adjacent to the weapon on the assumption that part of the ammo cost was the mechanism to feed the ammo to the weapon itself.

and yet, oddly, none of those ever made it to official rules. Why? Because ammo is ammo. Feeds, locations may vary, and oddly, a ton of ammo in the Right Leg feeding to the Left arm... weighs exactly as much as ammo mounted IN that left arm. Implying, that ammo is indeed, just ammo. No "Critical Location Path" to run that feed up thru the CT, to the LT and then to the arm.

[DoktorVivi]

I know in at least a couple of the novels firing a gauss rifle DID take a massive chunk of the reactor's energy output. Like, it would make all the lights and readouts dim and stuff as most of the energy was redirected to firing the thing. I think it would be kinda nifty to tie that into engine size.

So that sort of thing could be really bad if you had a small engine (like fading the HUD entirely for a few seconds), but a bigger engine would handle it fine (and it would be even worse with double gauss).

[Shadey99]

Bishop Steiner, on 09 August 2013 - 08:26 AM, said:

and yet, oddly, none of those ever made it to official rules. Why? Because ammo is ammo. Feeds, locations may vary, and oddly, a ton of ammo in the Right Leg feeding to the Left arm... weighs exactly as much as ammo mounted IN that left arm. Implying, that ammo is indeed, just ammo. No "Critical Location Path" to run that feed up thru the CT, to the LT and then to the arm.

Are you really going to argue that each round is 250 lbs and so the whole weapon itself is spectacularly awful next to a modern naval railgun? Because not only is a naval railgun firing far lighter ammo, it causes way more destruction, and fires for miles... The US Navy's railgun trial fired a 7 lb. projectile with enough force to flatten a enemy naval ship at over 300km away... And the University of Texas @ Austin project fires a 4.4 lb. projectile 1.9 miles (over 3km) with enough force to come out the other end of a tank...

So either we figure in some sort of heavy feed mechanism that is hinted at strongly in lore... Or we have crazy *** size rounds and grossly ineffective weapons...

[Bishop Steiner]

Shadey99, on 09 August 2013 - 08:48 AM, said:

Are you really going to argue that each round is 250 lbs and so the whole weapon itself is spectacularly awful next to a modern naval railgun? Because not only is a naval railgun firing far lighter ammo, it causes way more destruction, and fires for miles... The US Navy's railgun trial fired a 7 lb. projectile with enough force to flatten a enemy naval ship at over 300km away... And the University of Texas @ Austin project fires a 4.4 lb. projectile 1.9 miles (over 3km) with enough force to come out the other end of a tank...

So either we figure in some sort of heavy feed mechanism that is hinted at strongly in lore... Or we have crazy *** size rounds and grossly ineffective weapons...

so, are we REALLY gonna argue about common sense and weight, wehn a 50 caliber Machine Gun in Btech weighs half a ton, the same as a 20mm vulcan rotary cannon?

When a LIGHT advanced 40mm Autocannon weighs more than than a primitive, clunky, 120mm Rheinmetal tank gun?

If you are expecting ANYTHING remotely logical about weight (or anything else, being made of blue sky sci-fi of the pre internet info age) in this game, I might suggest counseling.

[Shadey99]

DoktorVivi, on 09 August 2013 - 08:40 AM, said:

I know in at least a couple of the novels firing a gauss rifle DID take a massive chunk of the reactor's energy output. Like, it would make all the lights and readouts dim and stuff as most of the energy was redirected to firing the thing. I think it would be kinda nifty to tie that into engine size.

So that sort of thing could be really bad if you had a small engine (like fading the HUD entirely for a few seconds), but a bigger engine would handle it fine (and it would be even worse with double gauss).

Figuring a more or less real world railgun as an example, modern railguns use 8-32 MJ (megajoule) of power to fire. For comparison 1 kilowatt-hour is 3.6 MJ or 1 MJ is approximately the amount of energy of a 1 ton object moving at 160 kph (100 mph).

The US naval system uses a 9 MJ bank of solid state capacitors and a 32 MJ pulse power system for their naval railgun tests.

Ironically on this topic I did see a fully automatic handheld Gauss Rifle recently that fired nails at a whopping 40 mps. Just for comparison that means the projectiles impart ~5% the force of a .22 pistol round.

[Oni Ralas]

BT Gauss rifle is more akin to a mass driver. It doesn't use an array of coils fired in sequence to accelerate, rather a single induction field created by a super conducting material.

The total charge requirement is lower to achieve the same velocity.

What bothers me is that this hyper-sonic projectile makes "plshhhh" noise instead of breaking the damn sound barrier crack

[Menetius]

With respect to the original poster:

I believe the reason why Gauss Rifles generate little heat is because of the capacitors installed in the weapon itself. Your heat level is the core temperature of your battlemech, not the average level of heat in every weapon/component of your battlemech. The capacitors are charged by the reactor after discharge at a rate that does not tax the reactor, and therefore results in no heat generation.

Now, why don't lasers have the same capacitors? Think about how much a gauss rifle weighs with respect to the large laser; do you really want your high-tier energy weapons weighing upwards of 10 tons? I'd imagine a Large Laser, which fires concentrated energy in lieu of an actual solid projectile, would weigh at least 12 tons if it had the proper capacitors to discharge without drawing from the reactor and producing excess heat.

[Angel of Annihilation]

PanzerFurrry, on 01 August 2013 - 11:47 AM, said:

Projectile is propelled by a magnetic field created by the coil. That field is present all around the coil, but it is far strongest inside the tube/barrel, where flux lines are condensed. Flux lines do not end at the mouth of the tube/barrel, they reach out, but get dispersed in a radius.
That means projectile will start to accelerate inside the barrel, but will still get affected by the magnetic field outside the barrel (if only slightly). If it doesn't reach max speed inside of the barrel already, it will still accelerate outside of the barrel.
Since the damage of the projectile is kinetic based only, it is heavily influenced by its speed.

E_kin=(m*v^2)/2

Therefore we can conclude that there may be a minimum range for a Gauss projectile, until it reaches its maximum speed.

Ok so reduced damage at short ranges but how much reduced? Whether or not the slug is traveling full speed when it leaves the barrel, it is still going to be leaving the barrel at a very high velocity, probably at least 90% if not 98.9% its maximum velocity. Do we then give the Gauss Rifle a minium range of 90m but only reduce the damage to 14 inside that 90m range?

At that point, I would say it is not worth it from a programing standpoint. To implement that minimum range would take quite a bit of programing and effort all for a 1 damage reduction.