DFW said:
atpollard said:
I don't know if it is still true in Mongoose Traveller, but in previous versions of the game, any fissile material passing through a nuclear dampening field was rendered inert. So a nuclear dampener did not absorb the radiation of a nuclear warhead exploding, it rendered the fissile core inoperative - so there was no boom, just a harmless pop.
There's been no changes. That's why they don't build these types of torps in the rules.
There IS non-nuc bomb "pumping". It is called, Explosively Pumped Flux Compression Generators.
http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread59555/pg1
This would be the the way lasers would be bomb pumped in the torps. That way Nuc dampers wouldn't deactivate them.
Possibly. I was aware of the devices as described in the link in the application of EMP delivery. And on a quick read don't see the link mentioning (except perhaps peripherally) other applications. Or I missed it in my quick read. Care to offer the paragraph if I did?
The peripheral application I mention is where it notes the electrical power output. Certainly that could power a laser of sufficient energy, however the difference as I understand it between the nuke version and the conventional version is the nuke directly excites the rods to produce the laser, all of which is consumed in the explosion, while the conventional produces electricity by powering a generator. I'm not sure there'd be time to direct that electricity into a laser generator before the whole thing was blown to bits. Its utility is (again as I understand it) in producing an explosive EMP without the dirty effects of a nuke.
Certainly a small enough generator could be built to contain the explosive blast and be reusable (see TNE MHD powered lasers for the game application for one). But we're talking a one shot bomb/missile idea here. To make it powerful enough and a laser generator that isn't consumed by the blast is a waste of design. You'll pack a bigger punch by just creating an explosion, or an EMP burst to fry the electronics.
Now that makes some sense, and is perhaps what the original author was aiming for. A penetrator missile that once inside the hull detonates an EMP pulse to fry the electronics of the ship. A "laser" delivered by a missile and detonated inside the hull still makes no sense to me.
So, nuke dampers vs conventional bomb pumped EMP missiles are not going to have an effect, agreed. EMP effects external to the hull are not going to be effective (imo, consider the usual EMP a hull deals with, so routinely that it's not even mentioned) so for an EMP to be effective it has to get inside the hull. Our problem then becomes creating a penetrator capable of actually doing that. And delivering it's warhead intact. That's going to be tricky. A simple (perhaps) methodology might be to require the missile be armoured greater than the hull. Easy to do for unarmoured hulls, not so easy for higher TL heavies. So if your missile armour is greater than the armour of the hull you manage to punch through and deliver the warhead (whatever it is) into the target. EMP will score an electrical kill (computers and all electronics fried, ship essentially dead, crew alive and ship reasonably intact), conventional will score a section kill (one area of the ship within the bulkheads killed, all crew in the section killed, rest of ship intact), and nuclear will score a total kill, ship destroyed. I still say a nuke going off inside a ship will obliterate it. Bulkheads are not going to mean squat, and armour is meant to keep stuff out and will much more easily yield from the inside. If anything a stronger hull will mean more complete destruction inside.
