Minbari Loses

[ShadowScout]

Right, frob!

And antimatter like the Vree like to fire would just make spectacular fireballs in the upper atmosphere, but certainly don't get through it to do any good (or bad, depending on which side of the gun you sit)

Gravitic and molecular weapons would be least affected, going through atmopsphere while loosing only neglectable amounts of their energy.

Matter guns would get heated up that bad that the slug meets the tank looking more like a shot from an plasma cannon than a solid projectile - for matter guns to actually stay solid you'd need a much bigger projectile to allow for vaporization (which is exactly wehat mass drivers do - however, and such projectiles will be a Lot more effective in planetary bombardment, because they get extra acceleration through the planet's own gravity...).

Missiles... well, the common ship-to-ship missiles will probably not survive atmospheric entry, but missiles designed for that will. And there are even more specialized things... like the stuff the Dilgar shoot from their bomb racks.

And ionic guns are most likely as affected as plasma weapons.

So, that ought to be all weapon types...

Basic fact - when firing at planetary stuff, you need to be a Lot closer then usual, and only your big guns will penetrate to kill a ground target. That's why fighters which can go down and shoot at stuff from shorter ranges are so much better most time.

As a secondary side effect, many guns that react with the atmosphere will probably mess up a planet's weather badly when they do that.

[August]

Oh... what a thought. Now there's a cool tactic for the Vree in dealing with fighters and vessels rising up out of an atmosphere towards their fleets. Properly timed, the firestorm from their antimatter weapons would cause massive heat flares, pressure disruptions, and more damage than their weapons normally would.

Nifty...

(files that away for the League of Non-Aligned Worlds book, on the slate to be written in the first part of 2004)

Thanks!

-August

[ShadowScout]

Well, maybe not more raw damage - their AM guns are pretty bad against anything built of normal matter anyway.
But they certainly could for one shake apart any attempt at formation or attack timing with such explosions, and for another create their own little "suns" to blind enemy sensors with... (besides, at reduced intensity it makes for great fireworks too And we all know how much the Vree like stuff like that... blinking lights to spook cows with... they're famous for that. Well, and for anal probes, though I think they gave that up some time before B5... )

[August]

Never discount the morale effects of a round of anal probing...

There is a shining good reason Earth has given the Vree a wide berth before 2265.

I was going to add a joke about 'turning the other cheek', but it seems redundant.

-August

[El Cid]

It was my understanding that mass drivers had been outlawed by "all" races in some sort of agreement.

So, I'd conclude that they "all" could do it or at least know about mass drivers.

Let's face it hitting a planet with a fair sized asteroid shouldn't be too big of a problem and the effects would be devestating.

Just ask the dinosaurs.

Sidney

[ShadowScout]

So, I'd conclude that they "all" could do it or at least know about mass drivers.

Big deal - we could do that even today, though only with a series of precisely timed nukes playing "pinball" with an asteroid. Yees, mass drivers are otlawed by any civilised race, and there are probably a few other things that are outlawed - high-yield fusion bombs against planetary surfaces, biological weapons... Weapons of Mass Destruction - that sort of thing.

So some races will break (if they signed them like the Centauri) or ignore (if they didn't sign anything in the first place like the Dilgar) those treaties, while others will skirt the edge of what is not expressivley forbidden with a lawyers skill... ("No, it's not a Mass Driver, it's just a Heavy Railgun that happened to be fired at a planet... see, it did only half the damage a mass driver would have done, so we needed four shots to dest... aehhh, pacify that city!")