Central Supply Catalogue- Disintegrator Question
- Thread starter Imperium
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far-trader
Mongoose
Things that make you go whaaaaaat???
Seriously, I know this is probably not that germane, and I don't have CSC, but the question has me wondering...
...just how does a disintegrator KNOW how much armour it has to evaporate before getting to the juicy ugly giant bag of mostly water center?
...why bother with a damage roll for the weapon at all? Surely if it can completely disintegrate any armour between it and the target, the aforementioned ugly giant bag of mostly water doesn't have a hope in hell.
...do normal clothes count as "armour"? ...is this a nudegrator too? ...or do I keep my dignity AND laugh tauntingly at the pitiful damage?
No, really, this inquiring ugly giant bag of mostly water (ok, last time I use that line, in this thread ;-) ) wants to know what the designer's idea behind this weapon really is.
...you know it sounds a little like they were aiming for a personal meson gun?! What TL is this puppy? Can I have one for my main turret? Maybe I could duct tape a dozen on it if they aren't too expensive. I suppose the range sucks though :-(
Seriously, I know this is probably not that germane, and I don't have CSC, but the question has me wondering...
...just how does a disintegrator KNOW how much armour it has to evaporate before getting to the juicy ugly giant bag of mostly water center?
...why bother with a damage roll for the weapon at all? Surely if it can completely disintegrate any armour between it and the target, the aforementioned ugly giant bag of mostly water doesn't have a hope in hell.
...do normal clothes count as "armour"? ...is this a nudegrator too? ...or do I keep my dignity AND laugh tauntingly at the pitiful damage?
No, really, this inquiring ugly giant bag of mostly water (ok, last time I use that line, in this thread ;-) ) wants to know what the designer's idea behind this weapon really is.
...you know it sounds a little like they were aiming for a personal meson gun?! What TL is this puppy? Can I have one for my main turret? Maybe I could duct tape a dozen on it if they aren't too expensive. I suppose the range sucks though :-(
It doesn't. It's just that it's effect is neither increased nor decreased by having to go through a layer of metal first.
Because, like a 40k conversion beamer, its lethality is proportionate to the density of the thing it's decombobulating - denser material = more damage. So if it passes through a layer of cloth armour, then a layer of battle dress plate, then a human, it does 5 damage to the cloth, 18 to the battle dress, then 2D6 to the human.
You'll probably have a small hole in clothing/armour where it hit you, below which is the wound from the weapon. You could laugh tauntingly, but - since you've just taken damage equivalent to being shot with a crossbow - I'd suggest the word 'ow' would be more apt.
2D6 isn't great but 2D6-plus-whatever-armour-the-enemy-is-wearing isn't half bad. It means an average of 12 against someone in cloth armour (not bad), 21 against proper soldiers in combat armour (ouch!), and a freakin' impressive 25 (more than a plasma rifle) against some git in battle dress.
It's an anti-armoured-dude weapon. Even the lightest weight disintegrator can hurt the most heavily armoured opponent - or even a heavy tank. It won't do much damage, but the vast bulk of man-portable weapons will do squat. When someone in artillery battle dress with advanced subdermal armour is walking around with a damage reduction in the mid twenties, with gauss fire ricocheting off like a light summer rain, the disintegrator becomes very attractive...
Somewhere in the region of TL25 for a personal meson gun, according to Secrets of the Ancients:
Of course, that's slightly less effective against non-organic targets (hardly surprising as it's a radiation weapon).
Captain Jonah
Mongoose
Ah the good old disintegrator.
How does it work. It reduces everything in the beam to its component molecules. How does it do that. Handwaves all round. :roll:
Still since it must somehow sever the intra or inter molecular bonds. I would guess it does the intermolecular bonds and reduces anything inside the beam to a vapour of what ever it was before hand. Still that’s a lot of explosive expansion for 2D6 damage.
After all we, the afore mentioned mostly watery meat sacks, tend to react fairly badly to going boom.
Lets see. A 1mm beam of disintegrator. It reduces an area 1mm by 1mm and as deep as the object is to its component molecules. So a water sack would be reduced to, well lets call it steam since that is water is a vapour form.
Now steam is what, approximately 1600 times greater in volume than water. So a watery meat sack that is, lets say for example 25cm from front to back through the torso. 1mm square times 250mm means 250 cubic mm of said victim is converted to vapour by the Disintegrator, “Instantly”. So from 250 cubic mm to 400,000 cubic mm of vapour.
That’s 400 cubic cm. Which just expanded inside your chest cavity. Instantly. That’s not like steam boiling off a kettle. 250 cubic mm of you just became 400 cubic cm, inside your lungs or heart. At an expansion rate probably getting on for that of low explosives (a few hundred metres per second).
And that causes you to go “Ouch I almost lost an entire stat to that 2D6 damage”. :roll:
Traveller, a 1970s sci fi game set in the 1770s using 1950s technology :lol: :wink:
How does it work. It reduces everything in the beam to its component molecules. How does it do that. Handwaves all round. :roll:
Still since it must somehow sever the intra or inter molecular bonds. I would guess it does the intermolecular bonds and reduces anything inside the beam to a vapour of what ever it was before hand. Still that’s a lot of explosive expansion for 2D6 damage.
After all we, the afore mentioned mostly watery meat sacks, tend to react fairly badly to going boom.
Lets see. A 1mm beam of disintegrator. It reduces an area 1mm by 1mm and as deep as the object is to its component molecules. So a water sack would be reduced to, well lets call it steam since that is water is a vapour form.
Now steam is what, approximately 1600 times greater in volume than water. So a watery meat sack that is, lets say for example 25cm from front to back through the torso. 1mm square times 250mm means 250 cubic mm of said victim is converted to vapour by the Disintegrator, “Instantly”. So from 250 cubic mm to 400,000 cubic mm of vapour.
That’s 400 cubic cm. Which just expanded inside your chest cavity. Instantly. That’s not like steam boiling off a kettle. 250 cubic mm of you just became 400 cubic cm, inside your lungs or heart. At an expansion rate probably getting on for that of low explosives (a few hundred metres per second).
And that causes you to go “Ouch I almost lost an entire stat to that 2D6 damage”. :roll:
Traveller, a 1970s sci fi game set in the 1770s using 1950s technology :lol: :wink:
alex_greene
Guest
LMAO @ the Star Trek reference! To some of my NPCs, they are "walking protein sticks," or occasionally "a soft cheesy centre with tasty calcium bits."far-trader said:
Technically, the original advanced disintegrator concept was an advanced version of the nuclear damper, which posited an effect that caused an unstable nucleus to shed neutrons until they reached stable isotopes. Of course that meant subjecting whatsoever they impinged upon to an unbelievably lethal concentration of neutron radiation as the freed neutrons spilled every which way, forcing their way through whatever material impinged between them and freedom and leaving pretty much everything surrounding the damped object ... highly radioactive through secondary neutron bombardment, but that is by the by.
Presumably the handwavium here posited that the neutrons were somehow actually unravelled into energy, that energy being somehow absorbed into the damper to power it so nothing was irradiated and you'd be left with basic stable lead, iron or hydrogen gas.
The advanced tech disintegrator goes one stage further, presumably unravelling not only the neutrons in unstable nuclei but also the neutrons and protons in stable nuclei, leaving behind nothing and releasing a considerable amount of energy to fuel the device.
Just so you know, that's the total conversion of, let's say, 100 kg of mostly water - protons, neutrons and electrons too, presumably - into energy. Work it out with E = mc^2. Your calculator will probably give up before you do, unless you've set it to scientific notation (which you should do by default anyway).
Maybe disintegrators have some sort of [highly advanced technology] dimension portals to shunt the excess energy to, because if all that were to be released on the surface of a planet there wouldn't be much habitable surface left ...
Did you read my article in Signs & Portents on disintegrators, by the way?
far-trader
Mongoose
Thanks everyone for the... can I still call it enlightenment if I remain confused :lol:
I think I have a basic grasp on it now.
It's actually sounding more like the gun from the story... title and author escape me now, of course. Backyard tinkerer invents energy pistol with tiny battery power pack, shoots it (accidentally?). It goes through bench (mm hole), through wall behind bench, across yard, through tree(couple mm hole), through garage, into ground beyond (few mm hole). Wow! That packs a punch! Goes to make sandwich and think, sees breaking news story about "mysterious UFO" on other side of world that came racing out of ocean, narrowly missing a ship and plane before streaking away into sky, reportedly meters in diameter. Later news has something about meteor of several meters hitting the moon on Earthside. Inventor wisely smashes gun to pieces and destroys plans. Or something like that. The gist of it being the beam goes forever, slowly expanding, and totally disintegrating anything in it's path but without any nasty side effects, just a neat ever widening circle of total oblivion.
No, I keep meaning to find time to actually read stuff I've downloaded, S&P included
I'll try to have a hunt for that though while the subject is... ohhhh, shiney! *
* distracted already
I think I have a basic grasp on it now.
It's actually sounding more like the gun from the story... title and author escape me now, of course. Backyard tinkerer invents energy pistol with tiny battery power pack, shoots it (accidentally?). It goes through bench (mm hole), through wall behind bench, across yard, through tree(couple mm hole), through garage, into ground beyond (few mm hole). Wow! That packs a punch! Goes to make sandwich and think, sees breaking news story about "mysterious UFO" on other side of world that came racing out of ocean, narrowly missing a ship and plane before streaking away into sky, reportedly meters in diameter. Later news has something about meteor of several meters hitting the moon on Earthside. Inventor wisely smashes gun to pieces and destroys plans. Or something like that. The gist of it being the beam goes forever, slowly expanding, and totally disintegrating anything in it's path but without any nasty side effects, just a neat ever widening circle of total oblivion.
alex_greene said:
No, I keep meaning to find time to actually read stuff I've downloaded, S&P included
I'll try to have a hunt for that though while the subject is... ohhhh, shiney! ** distracted already
alex_greene
Guest
Mild disendarkence.far-trader said:
Yes, that is a word now.
It is actually quite simple, as long as the transplasmonicfar-trader said:
containment discriminator supplies the duo-regenerative
flux initiator with hyperharmonic power, the polymetric
amplification emitter will generate a focussed disintegra-
tion fieldstream. :wink:
I would add some formulae and blueprints, but I have to
bring my dancing avocado to the hospital, it seems to have
a sore throat ...
Which S&P is that disintegratorarticle reference.
Yes, I concur the stats for damage by even the lowest grade hand disintegrator is... weak. Ok, laughable... like it belongs in a Murphy's Rules. I mean, if you simply want to handwave something, why don't you just mandate that it ignores all armor, which is what you are doing with the Effect rule anyway? Is there any gain in stating this in terms of Effect as it is versus just stating that the disintegraotr ignores all armor?
Its not an uncommon phenomenonin CT and its descendants, making something simple, complicated :roll:
Then we are left with the actual damage inflicted... 2d6. While this may pass some sense of game balance rule, it doesn't fly through the "realism" path. Small nuclear explosion (FGMP) versus atomic decomposition (disintegrator). The damage for even the lowest TL version must certainly be higher.
Thoughts?
Yes, I concur the stats for damage by even the lowest grade hand disintegrator is... weak. Ok, laughable... like it belongs in a Murphy's Rules. I mean, if you simply want to handwave something, why don't you just mandate that it ignores all armor, which is what you are doing with the Effect rule anyway? Is there any gain in stating this in terms of Effect as it is versus just stating that the disintegraotr ignores all armor?
Its not an uncommon phenomenonin CT and its descendants, making something simple, complicated :roll:
Then we are left with the actual damage inflicted... 2d6. While this may pass some sense of game balance rule, it doesn't fly through the "realism" path. Small nuclear explosion (FGMP) versus atomic decomposition (disintegrator). The damage for even the lowest TL version must certainly be higher.
Thoughts?
Yeah - I found a lot of the CSC combat rules a bit 'over thunk'... this one even manages to put an exception to a standard mechanic while wiping out a major aspect (DMs impacting damage).
Thanks - I always get the duo-regenerative flux initiator confused with the quantum motivator, myself.rust said:
Captain Jonah said:
So, if we bring the disintegrator concept into the 21st-century of sci-fi gaming, are we talking about (in its most basic/lowest form) 4d6, 6d6, 8d6 or more damage? On an average, I'd think we would be talking 6d6 to have a chance to disintegrate the average man-sized target (3 x 2d6 stats). Then again, do we add more for the need to inflict more damage not merely to kill, but to "disintegrate" or is disintegration merely an fx effect? Should there be some explosive effect to nearby objects to what gets disintegrated?
alex_greene
Guest
Don't you mean the Illudium PU-36 Explosive Space Modulator?rust said:
