| From: | "James R. Angove" <jim621@********.edu> |
|---|---|
| Subject: | Re: Thor weapons ( was Killing in Shadowrun...) |
| Date: | Tue, 28 May 1996 16:31:20 -0700 (PDT) |
single last post involved but I am seeing a general tendency to view thor
as something it is not: a strategic weapons system. Thor is, on the
contrary a _tactical_ system. It does not have the strikeing power or KE
to deal massive earth shaking damage. Want to kill a brigade size armor
unit? 3rd ACR on your ass and you need to remove'em QUICK? Thor will,
in priniple, do this. Want to reduce the great NYC Met area to a
rapidly expanding cloud of plasma and dust the countryside with
radiocative ash. If thor's all the K-kill you have you are SOL. There are
kinetic kill weapons which do have this power and I will comment on them
shortly. My final comment on thor is this. Because of it's small size,
large numbers, and relative eltronic simplicity, it is very difficuly to
stop in the needed numbers /w current tech.
Regarding big K-Kill weapons. While it is possible to aquire such weaps.
under SR tech levels, the move to do so would be exceedingly obvious, and
would be opposed _ACTIVLY_ by everyone. Why? Because contrary to
something somebody implied, once a mid-size hunk of rock is tossed at a
planet it is very hard to stop. Toss a nuke at it? great. You now have
the same mass (less what? .02% of the mass in the actual plasma ball at
ground zero?) shotguning at you with basicly the same reletive verocity.
K-Kill it back? GREAT! all we need is a mass AT LEAST equal the the
dinsour killer (Or velocity exactly opposite, or some combo such that
[k1(v1*m1)+k2(v2*m2)]=0)* , in a orbit such that upon intersection /w
the rock it will take it out of both impact with the planet AND prevent
the rock from winding up orbiting (unless, o/c, you are trying for a
string of movies of the week by averting certain doom several times.
I know _I_ can pull that out of my pocket in 30 seconds flat.
*this equation is a slight fib. Ipso facto, the eqn. I gave assumes that
you are in basicly a direcly solar opposite orbit. The whole idea needs
to be expressed using calculus to build the equation, allowing us to
descibe a more inclusive set of possiblities. A clear contridiction to
my eqn comes, for example, when our `counter-weight' is in n orbit such
that the momentum vector of CW is prependicular to DK at the point of
impact. They would then (I may be wrong here I just realized NTL:) both
miss home sweet biosphere.
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