It could.

What I'm thinking of is simply if I want to build smaller railguns on smaller ships, that seemed like it would necessitate a long/thin sort of ship design to not waste space.

Following from the notions of the 4 Ton launches being kind of the most you could stick into a small frame, I was wondering about whether you could could build a 100 ton ship with a decent railgun down the center and a Manouver 3+ drive in order to make having a railgun not such a hassle. The other aspect was wondering if I have fair sized railguns relative to my ship's width, broadside mountings couldn't work (in TNE, the bays for accelerators is set to be long and thin as they are all linear accelerators so there are some interesting formulas there).

What brought that up was:

I have a ship that has amazing sensors or is accompanied by a companion vessel that does.

I have one minimum size ship with a fairly decent railgun.

If my eyes reach out farther than my foes and I see them first, if I put a bunch of rounds out onto their trajectory, as long as I've seen them before they've seen me and can get a good firing solutions (good sensors!), I effectively ambush him and might just gut him because the first sign he'll have of me is my railgun rounds carving through his hull without warning.

I'd *always* want to see further than my enemy because if I could put out rounds on his projected trajectory and he has not seem me, and I go dark after firing, he's likely to continue along rather than maneuvering and if my aim is true, they could take a serious hit at the very start of an encounter (while they were not at alert even perhaps).

On Thu, Sep 24, 2020 at 12:46 AM Ethan McKinney <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:

Join one of the online Squadron Strike: Traveller games and fly a ship with a spinal mount. You'll see just how not exciting super-long weapons are :(

OK, spinal mounts are very powerful, but boy, they remove your maneuver options!

On Wed, Sep 23, 2020, 13:48 <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:

It strikes me that some weapon systems in Traveller would require a lot of length.

For instance, I suspect the most power efficient mass driver (for nickel asteroids) or a large railgun/gauss gun may be the one with the longer barrel (vs. shorter barrel which means the acceleration must be piled on faster meaning likely a higher net energy input and perhaps more losses and a much heavier set of coils/etc).

I also think that might be true with PAWs/CPAWs (particle weapons) as they nowadays take a long acceleration path (see LHC in Europe!).

Comparing that to a missile tube or a laser, a much longer length.

So? Fair question.

If you are trying to shoehorn some of those systems into the smallest volume of hull, although the rules don't address this, I'm thinking those sorts of performance realities and weapon system geometries would mean that you could put it into a smaller tonnage conical/wedge or needle type of hull vs. a sphere or cube layout because you'd minimize the amount of other space around the weapon systems which would have the run of the ship.

Fighter launch tubes probably also fit that category.

Does that seem like something that might be reasonable to expect?

And would it be more reasonable without gravitic controls (which might be used in some high TL weapon systems like railguns or mass drivers)?

Meson guns I'm less clear on but if you need to accelerate the meson particles, I'd guess it too would have the same issue.

Obviously, a big enough cube or sphere could support one, but it'd be very large in overall volume. If you got a needle, wedge or cone, you'd have less excess space in order to meet the needs of a long acceleration path for the projectiles or particles.

Tom

Tom

--
“The only stable state is the one in which all men are equal before the law.” ― Aristotle

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