Optional Rules For Ground Weapons VS Starships [Revised]

[Beastttt]

we are talking about enough energy to slag a MBT even at low power there is going to be distortion
this is what your fire control is for to attune the laser so it is unaffected by the atmosphere
running at 20 % of full power is a waste ,as your power plant can fire at full power and slag it's target with a grasing hit(why give the wounded a chance to fire back)
firing at 20% still costs the same fuel consumption as if your firing at 100%(fuel consumption is based on time not shots fired for energy weapons

A Fusion Y gun will have a larger damage radius than a ships pulse laser.

I doubt it, mainly because a ship's laser fired through an atmosphere will
have a beam which will get wider with the distance to the target. If you
are looking for a way to reduce the damage of starship lasers, you could
rule that the damage declines with the atmosphere's density and the dis-
tance to the target.

1. No, lasers do not defocus that much through a atmosphere with relatively clear weather. Even a simple laser pointer will still make a small dot after travelling miles. Very powerful lasers cause their own atmospheric turbulance and are more likely to defocus. Which is a very good reason for a starship to use a lower power setting in an atmosphere.

2. If a ships laser beam got to be 5 meters wide at the target, it might be able to give a few troopers a tan at best, but it would not do any damage.

 

[Solomani666]

we are talking about enough energy to slag a MBT even at low power there is going to be distortion
this is what your fire control is for to attune the laser so it is unaffected by the atmosphere
running at 20 % of full power is a waste ,as your power plant can fire at full power and slag it's target with a grasing hit(why give the wounded a chance to fire back)
firing at 20% still costs the same fuel consumption as if your firing at 100%(fuel consumption is based on time not shots fired for energy weapons.

One of the reasons that ships weapons can only fire every 6 minutes is that capacitors probably need to charge between shots. This also explains the rapid shot option for spinal mounts. If a starships turret laser can fire at full power in an atmosphere, then it can do the same in space. Requiring a rewrite of the space combat rules.

Using the optional rules at the start of this thread, a ship could slag the first target or two with a full power burst, then fire low power bursts every 18 seconds.

Starship lasers are designed with space combat in mind and are not designed to work in and atmosphere. Lasers not designed to work in an atmosphere have many inherent problems, some of which have been listed earlier. Something not mentioned is that in a atmosphere, a more powerful laser, after some point, does not deliver much more energy to the target. Most uf the energy goes into turning the air into plasma. A laser that is too powerful will likely blow up the firing ships turret and anyone outside the ship in a plasma explosion.


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[rust]

Starship lasers are designed with space combat in mind and are not designed to work in and atmosphere.

There are dozens of Traveller starship designs and Traveller adventures
which demonstrate that starship lasers are both designed for use in an
atmosphere and commonly used in atmospheres.

 

[Solomani666]

How are you going to get a 5 meter beam to actually deliver 400 MJ at the target.

You are aware that 1 Gigajoule, 1,000 Megajoules, is the equivalent of
only 250 kg of TNT ?

One really does not need a Death Star for a laser powerful enough to
transfer the energy of 100 kg of TNT through the atmosphere to a target.

In space, more energy means more energy to the target.

In an atmosphere too much laser energy causes the air to, turn into plasma which reduces the energy delivered to the target. Your 5m laser would just set the atmosphere on fire and blow up the firing weapon and everyone else near the thing. Expect a much bigger explosion if it is raining.

Lasers in an atmosphere behave very differently that in space.

 

[locarno24]

1. When firing at a starship, every additional ground weapon beyond the first can add its full damage dice if its primary damage radius is 5 meters or more, before dividing the total damage dice by 50 in order to calculate the total damage.

Curious; I understand why you might want ground forces to be better able to attack beached starships, but why should (for example) multiple frag grenade launchers be better able to support one another than multiple ARMPS - which are precise enough to concentrate fire on the same system and more or less designed for this sort of thing? Hency I wonder about the blast requirement.

 

[DFW]

In an atmosphere too much laser energy causes the air to, turn into plasma which reduces the energy delivered to the target. Your 5m laser would just set the atmosphere on fire and blow up the firing weapon and everyone else near the thing. Expect a much bigger explosion if it is raining.

A lot of that depends on the EM frequency used. As the lasers are tunable across the spectrum, I don't think that is much of an issue.