Yep, waiting on a description of the layout of the hanger. Doesn't matter if we blow up most of the shuttles as long as we leave one for evac. Since a couple of us are colonial militia/rebels, we presumably could also expect evac at some point if we succeed... The thing is, I'm the one with the actual bomb in my mech, because yay antimatter reactors. It's especially bad because it's a light little thing that sounds remarkably easy to destroy.
As for the Gauss gun, currently it's noted as a weapon that fires heavy slugs at supersonic speeds. It will pierce the armor of most things it hit, and if it doesn't, it's will knock them back a few meters and ensure their armor is utterly broken.
I can change it to being a supersonic version of a machine gun, but that will reduce it's impact quite a bit.
"Heavy slugs" that are roughly as wide as my pinky finger. Unless they're made out of ferromagnetic slade, I don't think you can reasonably explain such a small ammunition capacity in non-gamey terms. Hell, it's not like we want much, but two of us literally have no offensive weapons apart from a single Gauss cannon, so /any/ fight is going to see us run out of ammo right quick, especially if we're trying to take down anything with decent defenses. Even just something like upping it to 30 or 40 rounds instead of 20 would be more feasible.
That aside, the actual limitations on real-world coilguns are completely unrelated to ammunition in part because when you get a chunk of ferromagnetic material up to several times the speed of sound, it doesn't matter very much how it's shaped, given that most of the damage is caused by the release of kinetic energy rather than the piercing we think of with bullets. Likewise, you want to increase the /mass/ of the projectiles, not the volume, which isn't much of an issue for a mech suit. (On a related note, a Russian built a single-stage coilgun back in the '70s that accelerated a 2 gram ring to 5000m/s [around 16-17x the speed of sound).
If we're going for remotely realistic problems with coilguns, here are a few:
1. Power switching in multi-stage coilguns means that it's very, very difficult to fire rapidly. Ergo, coilguns only fire in single-shot semi-auto.
2. Recharging capacitors. It's a bad idea to wire your reactor in directly to the electromagnets, which means you need time to recharge the capacitors. Again, this decreases rate of fire.
3. Generally speaking you tend to get diminishing returns on projectile velocity increase per coil. This means that you've got an upper limit to velocity.
4. Simple wear. Coilguns are better about this than railguns in that the projectile isn't in physical contact with the weapon, but unless the barrel is a vacuum you do still have some frictional effects, alongside wear on the electrical components (the electromagnetic coils, the capacitors, the solid-state switches for multi-stage coilguns, &c.).
5. Power costs. A coilgun or railgun is actually much more like a directed energy weapon insofar as that (proportional to the weapon platform) ammunition is inconsequential but power costs are significant. IIRC that railgun that the U.S. Navy was testing was supposed to be pretty much a dedicated primary weapon for that reason among others.
6. Inefficient transfer of magnetic flux from the coilgun to the projectile. Modern coilguns tend to lose a portion of the charge of each shot due to this, and the partial solutions that exist are expensive, dangerous, or both. On a related note, the projectiles have an upper limit of magnetic flux saturation which they can achieve before the efficiency of that stage of the weapon falls off.
The tl;dr summary: Realistically, coilguns are limited by their power supply, the speed at which they can cycle (which is inversely proportional to the size of the coilgun; longer weapons take longer to discharge a shot and recharge their capacitors), and the fact that (barring miraculous future-tech electrical components) they need reliable maintenance despite being essentially solid-state weapons.
On a related note: the "heavy slugs" reasoning is sort of BS handwaving. First, as mentioned above, the projectiles are tiny. I called them ball bearings because that
is a realistic projectile profile, for several reasons:
1. Each coil must be switched off as the projectile passes the halfway point, lest it 'catch' the projectile in the barrel rather than accelerating it out. The longer a projectile is, the longer each coil must be, and therefore the larger and less-wieldy the coilgun must be to achieve the same velocity.
2. They're ~1cm wide. Again, that's the width of a pretty small human finger. Of the various ferromagnetic materials which currently exist, the most dense are cobalt and nickel. One cubic centimeter of cobalt masses roughly 8.9 grams; even if we assume that we're going with something like a 6cm long rod or spike, that's still only ~50 grams per round.
real tl;dr: Neither weight nor volume should
ever be an issue for magnetic accelerators that are remotely proportional to the platforms that they're mounted on. I understand the need for game balance, but there are ways to approach it that are both less astonishingly unrealistic and less boring. As above, a real limitation is the rate of fire (for a number of reasons). There's also the fact that the two of us who actually have heavy gauss cannons have
nothing else with which to attack, which means that we get a single shot per turn. Unless you're rolling nothing but exosuits for enemies, we're not going to turn the tide of battle with the current damage on it.
Basically so you don't kill him off in the rp sections (Cause you people would so do that.)
You might be mixing up cause and effect there.
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Topic: Illion : Mech RPG: 6/5 Players (Read 30125 times)