http://www.army.mil/article/82262/Picatinny_engineers_set_phasers_to__fry_/ First PPC prototype under testing at Picatinny Arsenal.
Actually that sounds exactly like the TSEMP from the BT: Dark Ages. The TSEMP's damage is pretty damn pathetic (to actual armor), but the electrical side-effects make the 'Mech Taser look like a kiddy toy.
Yes pretty much the TSEMP and I can already hear the cries of EARTHWANK if it was suggested for the GDI arsenal.
F*** Em. If it's a real life piece of equipment, then it's not us wanking something totally fictional.
It's not Earthwank for it to be developed, in fact various IS labs likely have done the same. Now why they haven't used one: 1. They do, that's what the mech taser is. The rules say it is not, but the rules are wrong. 2. Ragnarok proofing laughs at your puny lightning bolts. Folks say a little chicken wire is enough to EMP proof their electronics against everything, so the IS version will definitely work. 3. Goddamn ROM sabotaged the research and what data was left suggested it was not worth repeating. 4. That lightning cannon looks impressive against a civilian vehicle but lacks range and power needed for military. If it needs more power(meaning it causes more heat) to reach 2 miles and causes less damage than a PPC, laser or cannon, IS and GDI have better things to waste their money on. 5. Outside a lab the electricity will keep arcing into something else and can't penetrate armor anyways.
i would go with the cammaron dickery, told everyone it was usless with rag Ragnaroking while keeping it in there toy box comstar simply keept it up so that more stuff get's totaled simple, fit's in the fluff, and can exsplain why the GDI can come up with it, just make sure that the rest of the IS pick up the idea maybe do it even better thank's to thier tech base that more suited to TSEMP
Go with Captain Melgar's idea. Just expand upon it. Have the GDI/CSN/SWA (whatever era it's discovered) find that Comstar, in it's hidden archives that were partially wrecked/corrupted after it's fall, had the weapon system all along from as far back as the fall of the 1st Star League, and even improved upon it several times, but never put it into production. Analysts, who look back at the CBT books make an educated guess that, after the Jihad, the Republic's R&D found the old datafiles and worked on them, eventually resulting in the TSEMP. Also have a side-note that the current design in use developed on Motherlode*, which does work, is only 1/2 as strong, with 2/3 the range, compared to the SLDF/Comstar prototypes. A nice little "sonnvabit....they were STILL ahead of us. And we did all this over the past XX years that was completely outside everyone else's R&D." Something to smear a few CSN egos. * that's the current Motherlode model. Original Motherlode prototypes & mass production models were, at best, 1/4 as strong, with only 1/2 the range. They just kept at the R&D due to the sheer potential it had, and the fact that it was possible from the 'potential future' the sourcebooks showed. Again, they got blindsided by game balancing (and Comstar).
I was under the impression that large catigories of Earth tech had been officially nerfed in order not to make it a wank. Railguns for example. This is why (I assume) enemy mechs aren't being delt with by mach 3 cruise missiles carrying half ton warheads and fitted with terminal guidence systems. On the basis that if a Hellfire is good, more is better... Is there a list of nerfed technology, or am I seriously wrong about all this?
It is really depressing when we have to nerf real actual (or soon to be deployed, or in advanced R&D) military technology just to not curbstomp the state of the art military hardware of supposed 31 century future interstellar polities , Battletech is so chock-full of Zeerust and game balancing fluff and antics, that is beginning to break my SoD.
You do realize that a Battletech "railgun" tends to fire a slug that masses more than a man at escape velocity, right? I mean the earthwank here is assuming that a naval railgun is even within spitting distance of the gauss rifle, not the other way around. Most of the other technology has reasons for not being deployable in-universe (ECM, every SL-era mech having well-maintained active electronic warfare suites that put out enough watts and are sophisticated enough to make guided weapons unreliable). It's just that to be entirely fair to both sides, people aren't using those explanations to their fullest extent (and to be fair, those explanations do have plenty of holes in them). Which is an entirely different thing from not using them at all.
Quick question : How good is the current CEarth/IS biotech-related sciences? Is it powerful enough to detect the millenia-degree genetic drift between the BT universe and the ISOTed Humans? I had this random idea of using a portable DNA variance gadget thingie to scan incoming/outgoing personnel transiting between the GDI core worlds. It could potentially detect IS/Com* intelligence operatives attempting to insert themselves into our populace, greatly reducing intelligence leaks and whatnot.
Ours don't. But Maybe it would come in a kit or something, including a smaller, portable spectrometer. Or Something like this : DNA
Modern DNA testing is expensive, inconvenient, and requires a DNA sample. PCR lets small samples work, but PCR isn't picky and means you will almost certainly be facing errors. Finally, humans have survived a population bottleneck. Our genetics are similar enough that detecting genetic drift is a huge problem. We aren't as bad off as cheetahs but we aren't genetically diverse.
detecting the presence of certain DNA markers could be viable. Find certain genes that were modified heavily by the Hegemony or Star League and only test for the presence of that particular gene. IIRC there are certain products under developement that are designed to very quickly test for specific genetic diseases. If I'm not misremembering their existence one of those modified to idenitfy a specific gene mod would be viable.
We can do that *now*, since personal DNA sequencing is becoming really cheap - but a few years ago... Yes we could but it would be really easy to fake it as a standardised test. It would probably be an icing on the cake forensic result that suspect X has genetic junk from hundreds of years of viruses that a C-Earth human really shouldn't have.
The thing with railguns is, that you need to think of them less as ballistic weapons, and more like energy weapons. In fact, that might actually be the best way to approach them. Have even the light railgun/railcannon, the one that you can mount on a 100 ton or smaller vehicle, do ten heat per shot. And that it fits into the energy weapon category much like the Plasma Rifle does. Which means even on tanks you need 10 heat sinks. Which right there is a major hint that you should mount a fusion reactor and not ICE. Then outright state that you have to mount a fusion reactor just to fire the damn thing, just like with the Heavy Gauss Rifle/iHGauss. Then you pretty much remove any tank's ability to mount a large amount of secondary energy weapons (probably 1 ERML, ML, MPL, MXPL at best) considering that every heat sink needed after that is one more ton needed to be put into heat sinks and not into armor, ammo, or other equipment.
sounds good but i say it should be fluffed up to be a form of artilery not a front line weapon that and the "ammo" that it fire's should be cheap as hell apposed to the "silver bullet" that gauss is as all you ned for a rail gun amount's to a big ball of iron/nickel. maybe a rod if you want to get fancy
I'm sure I remember certain people saying, "The thing about railguns is that they'll tear themselves to pieces!" ^.^ The RL USN wants to get up to a 100MJ railgun. With a 1MW ICE turboprop/generator, that energy would take 5 minutes. (Assuming 40/90/90 efficiency.) How big is your battery? How many shots are needed to kill a mech? How much advanced notice do we have of battle? Can we count on the odds being in our favour? Can we use open-cycle cooling systems? Can we afford to design for non-continuous warfare? You seem to be insisting on building weapons that can power up quickly, and then fight all day long, and rejecting everything else. That is certainly the battletech way, but it's not the only way. Again, how much of Earth tech/design philosophy is nerfed? Though just to be clear... I have no books or games and I'm getting my info from the battletech wiki. It doesn't mention railguns, only gauss weapons, and I'm quite aware it may be inaccurate/out-dated in areas. Where are you getting your info from?
The gausses, judging from the figures, are in the GJ range. As for railgun heat, I believ that fore my... somewhat controversial piece I went with 50 heat, 10 dissipated by the reactor, 28 by the vehicle (one per item slot; seems consistent with the Long Tom) and 12 for the heat sinks.
Railguns are only mentioned in the MechCommander2 game, when you visit a Periphery world that was a lost SLDF R&D colony (which also had a truly enormous underground WMD cache of all three WMD types). While you're there, you find several Railgun prototypes that you can fit to your 'Mechs. The scenario is semi-canon, as the planet is canon in the overall game, but the actual battle there is considered coming from a secondary source and thus not top-tier canon. We just ran with the idea that the railguns really are there, and the various canon levels are the game developers nerfing things in the name of 'gaming balance'. While reality on the other hand is a bit more of a bitch.
