- #1
BigDon
- 74
- 97
As a way of explanation I have to say I've been reffing RPG's since the mid seventies, some four months after D&D first came out, as it took that long back then for game ideas to move from the Great Lakes region to the West Coast. (I was Class of '78)
So in the upcoming post vaccine era I'm planning a gaming event with several consecutive groups of players. Some, the older players, having done this scenario before and they enjoyed the hell out of it while the younger players, including my own adult children, looked on at the others and wondered what they were so happy about.
The scenario being one of the toughest is Scifi. And that is defeating one of Saberhagen's full sized Berserker units. (AKA "things that whisper in the void, in voices that speak only in mathematics.)
For those unfamiliar, Berserkers are ancient Von Neuman machines designed to sterilize planets. Artificial intelligences who's core programing consists of the mantra "The animation of matter is obscene."
And the most annoying of their units are *big*. A full sized "planet buster" (a misnomer as destroying planets ala the Death Star is a complete waste of energy when all you need to do is heat the atmosphere until the sea beds become ceramics.) resembles a squat, black chess rook with a top at each end. Double crenelated it was referred to as. Fifty miles in diameter and with an armor belt of solid nickel/iron three miles thick. (That ought to make a engineer or two wince at the prospect of trying to defeat.) I always wondered, barring "proprietary methods", how many centuries it would take something cast that thick to cool to the point of being structurally useful. A friend suggested they must have been carved and not cast to have any kind of timely production.
Youngsters have a hard time believing me when I say a 20 megaton contact explosion with an armor belt that thick wouldn't even get the inside surface warm to the touch. (Star Treks' photon torpedoes had a dial a yield of 6 to 20 megatons according to old canon. Though they never seem that energetic in the TV shows. Must be the vacuum of space hiding the effects by not propagating them.)
And it was the friendly physicists over at Cosmoquest who went into mathematical detail about the efficaciousness of c+ cannons in fighting these nightmares. In rounding the cow we assumed Berserkers were the same density through and through as homogenous nickel/iron. A one metric ton slug of lead propelled at light speed, (as the energy state c+ is undefined) would have enough energy leftover to put on a rather spectacular light show on the far side of the target. Something on the order of three or four megatons of energy left and a bunch of hot spew.
I miss those guys. (No, I wasn't banned, I'm better behaved than that.)
The battle has to be done in stages, and to have any real hope you need at least three ships large enough to mount c+ cannon. The first two days are just trying to get the force fields down and offline. As "force fields" are also an undefined, the question pertains to the post force field stage of the battle.
And the scenario my players who did it like so much?
Boarding parties.
The ultimate contested landing scenario, if you will. Successful runs and your Spacer could get a tattoo of a bursting red sphere on his arm. In the books the record was eleven. Amongst the players back in the olden days the record is seven. Tied a couple of times but not beaten.
In the post force field stage of the battle, dropships full of lunatics in power suits attempt to breach and destroy vital power systems and plant charges and such. And even try to get out again. In this darksome Universe it isn't difficult to find those that have lost everything to these mechanical horrors and thus harbor a hatred deep enough to keep the ranks full despite the grim odds. Smart gunners are vital in that they carry weapons that automatically lock up and fire on anything moving faster than three meters a second. (Otherwise don't bother showing up.) You want at least three for every twenty troopers.
Anyway, the actual question.
If you are fighting a purely non-living opponent on the scale of something like a Berserker in both size and threat potential do you engineer your warheads for maximal neutron or maximal gamma production in a space battle? If one assumes a common yield of 2.092e+24 ergs.
(Or fifty megatons, whichever does the maths better. :) )
Or maybe something else I'm unaware of?
I always have mixed thoughts about this and wondered if someone with a lot more knowledge in physics could settle the question. As far as I know gamma penetrates deeper, with unknown to me effects, while intense neutron fluxes cause untoward alchemical changes in existing materials. (And maybe gamma does too for all I know.) BUT the neutrons, as far as I know, won't penetrate nearly as far.
And I can't come up with an internal argument over which is more useful. Once a doctor on a long flight said the armor affected by the neutrons would probably become too brittle to be useful against a follow up shot of any sort likely to be used in such a circumstance, but he wasn't sure.
(And if someone has a better phrase than "alchemical transformation" for what swarms of unowned neutrons do to something I'll listen. :) )
Thank you.
I have another scifi weapon question, the *original* version of the PPC in BattleTech, but that's for another post.
Have a good night everybody.
So in the upcoming post vaccine era I'm planning a gaming event with several consecutive groups of players. Some, the older players, having done this scenario before and they enjoyed the hell out of it while the younger players, including my own adult children, looked on at the others and wondered what they were so happy about.
The scenario being one of the toughest is Scifi. And that is defeating one of Saberhagen's full sized Berserker units. (AKA "things that whisper in the void, in voices that speak only in mathematics.)
For those unfamiliar, Berserkers are ancient Von Neuman machines designed to sterilize planets. Artificial intelligences who's core programing consists of the mantra "The animation of matter is obscene."
And the most annoying of their units are *big*. A full sized "planet buster" (a misnomer as destroying planets ala the Death Star is a complete waste of energy when all you need to do is heat the atmosphere until the sea beds become ceramics.) resembles a squat, black chess rook with a top at each end. Double crenelated it was referred to as. Fifty miles in diameter and with an armor belt of solid nickel/iron three miles thick. (That ought to make a engineer or two wince at the prospect of trying to defeat.) I always wondered, barring "proprietary methods", how many centuries it would take something cast that thick to cool to the point of being structurally useful. A friend suggested they must have been carved and not cast to have any kind of timely production.
Youngsters have a hard time believing me when I say a 20 megaton contact explosion with an armor belt that thick wouldn't even get the inside surface warm to the touch. (Star Treks' photon torpedoes had a dial a yield of 6 to 20 megatons according to old canon. Though they never seem that energetic in the TV shows. Must be the vacuum of space hiding the effects by not propagating them.)
And it was the friendly physicists over at Cosmoquest who went into mathematical detail about the efficaciousness of c+ cannons in fighting these nightmares. In rounding the cow we assumed Berserkers were the same density through and through as homogenous nickel/iron. A one metric ton slug of lead propelled at light speed, (as the energy state c+ is undefined) would have enough energy leftover to put on a rather spectacular light show on the far side of the target. Something on the order of three or four megatons of energy left and a bunch of hot spew.
I miss those guys. (No, I wasn't banned, I'm better behaved than that.)
The battle has to be done in stages, and to have any real hope you need at least three ships large enough to mount c+ cannon. The first two days are just trying to get the force fields down and offline. As "force fields" are also an undefined, the question pertains to the post force field stage of the battle.
And the scenario my players who did it like so much?
Boarding parties.
The ultimate contested landing scenario, if you will. Successful runs and your Spacer could get a tattoo of a bursting red sphere on his arm. In the books the record was eleven. Amongst the players back in the olden days the record is seven. Tied a couple of times but not beaten.
In the post force field stage of the battle, dropships full of lunatics in power suits attempt to breach and destroy vital power systems and plant charges and such. And even try to get out again. In this darksome Universe it isn't difficult to find those that have lost everything to these mechanical horrors and thus harbor a hatred deep enough to keep the ranks full despite the grim odds. Smart gunners are vital in that they carry weapons that automatically lock up and fire on anything moving faster than three meters a second. (Otherwise don't bother showing up.) You want at least three for every twenty troopers.
Anyway, the actual question.
If you are fighting a purely non-living opponent on the scale of something like a Berserker in both size and threat potential do you engineer your warheads for maximal neutron or maximal gamma production in a space battle? If one assumes a common yield of 2.092e+24 ergs.
(Or fifty megatons, whichever does the maths better. :) )
Or maybe something else I'm unaware of?
I always have mixed thoughts about this and wondered if someone with a lot more knowledge in physics could settle the question. As far as I know gamma penetrates deeper, with unknown to me effects, while intense neutron fluxes cause untoward alchemical changes in existing materials. (And maybe gamma does too for all I know.) BUT the neutrons, as far as I know, won't penetrate nearly as far.
And I can't come up with an internal argument over which is more useful. Once a doctor on a long flight said the armor affected by the neutrons would probably become too brittle to be useful against a follow up shot of any sort likely to be used in such a circumstance, but he wasn't sure.
(And if someone has a better phrase than "alchemical transformation" for what swarms of unowned neutrons do to something I'll listen. :) )
Thank you.
I have another scifi weapon question, the *original* version of the PPC in BattleTech, but that's for another post.
Have a good night everybody.