CocoaJin, on 11 January 2015 - 03:01 PM, said:
PPCs aren't like lightening...if anything, they are anti-lightening. They are proton cannons, either firing streams, or blobs of plasma. Streams could travel pretty damn fast, but since they don't have burn time like lasers and are treated more like ballistics, I'd suspect they are cohesive blobs...which I'd think would significantly, if not severely, slow their flight speed.
The whole blob method means you get a lot of interaction with the atmosphere when fired within on. So lots of drag and attenuation of the blob. I won't even try to figure out how they maintain the containment of the blob once it leaves the barrel, but if required some type containment core to be fired within the blob, the PPC bolt is going to be limited to the projectile velocity of the core and the strength/ability of its magnetic field to maintain containment against the sheering effect of the atmosphere.
It's not plasma, it's a stream of ions (plasma contains ions, but also their free electrons). It's a beam weapon. Sarna even calls it a beam weapon. They don't each necessarily have to have a net charge and repel each other because you can neutralize the ions (aka, make them atoms again) as they leave the weapon, but they will still suffer from scattering effects same as anything that has to move through an ocean of other objects (even a stream of bullets through the air).
Brody319, on 11 January 2015 - 01:11 PM, said:
yes but the usefulness of a particle cannon would vary massively depending on the atmosphere of the planet. Its entirely possible that the other particles in the atmosphere or just the density could result in some very different results.
Also just because our current neutron guns require a lot of equipment to function doesn't mean future technology couldn't find another way to use them. since power isn't much of an issue since they have fusion engines it could be possible to make a neutron gun small enough for a mech to use.
A laser's effectiveness is also dependent on the atmosphere; the shorter the wavelength, the more its potency drops off for a given density due to scattering effects. A slug is also affected by density; it has to cut through the air and greater atmospheric density means a more rapid loss of energy to friction.
Now, the PPC is really a projectile weapon, not an energy weapon. It is an energy weapon only in the same way that a Gewehr 98 is an energy weapon; that is to say, it uses kinetic energy of an object impacting the target to do its thing. Sarna says it imparts thermal damage as well, but so do slugs. The EM effects should only come into play if you don't neutralize the ions before they exit the weapon, and I'm assuming they do otherwise everybody would just be scattering PPC beams (and they are beams) with battlefield EM bubbles, greatly reducing or even eliminating their ability to do damage. So, the EM part isn't totally off, but it's also being hand-waved in.
As for the neutron gun, doesn't matter. Why bother? It's not practical even if it's portable, and as a kinetic weapon would be harder to make effective over a distance than using ions of heavier elements (i.e. lead). You can detonate a small-yield neutron bomb over the battlefield to get the same result in a much more economical package. If neutralizing the net charge on a PPC round is what you want, you can run the projected cations through a field of electrons as they exit.
Top Gun Killer, on 11 January 2015 - 02:09 PM, said:
Guys we are talking Battle Tech LORE BASED not todays world or Mechwarrior online LORE LORE LORE does anyone have real facts that back up what they say ?? I'm sure someone out in the battle tech world has this info like how would the speed of the weapon not be listed ???
I felt compelled to comment when people started saying "good proof" and praising just because it [incorrectly] referenced things said in Through the Wormhole. While I applaud people for watching educational television and having even a passing interest in physics, it's not okay to let ignorance propagate. It's not okay when people are just eclectically pulling concepts from things they've seen on TV without realizing that most of that stuff has been distilled down into the simplest, most easily consumed morsels and that they generally leave out huge swaths of context. I'm not even an expert in physics, but I have more than a passing interest in it, I have some formal education on it, and it pains me to see people misrepresenting quantum mechanics and something as relatively straight-forward as Relativity itself.
Edited by Yeonne Greene, 12 January 2015 - 02:51 PM.
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