Well, if you like your vehicles to also be usable as a colander...

Again, right tool, right job. MPUVs are multi-usage vehicles not exactly designed for front-line service. Recon and Skirmishing, for the most part, just like Jeeps and Kubelwagens in WWII. Their small size would also make them useful in tight streets where larger vehicles would get caught up and stuck in ambush positions (Of course, a city is just one big ambush waiting to happen, but that's a different story.).

One use I'd have for them is as a "Go Anywhere Drone Launch Platform", have a Rigger Cocoon inside, a Drone Rack instead of the Hardpoint, a Retransmission Unit to give it some range... Find a nice hiding spot and there you go. By the time the Drone is shot down, you're already back on the road before the artillery can shift to where they zeroed in on your transmissions.

And, frankly, which would you choose, a Technical or a MPUV?

Here's my problem with the vehicle system.

Any damage that can go through a heavily armored vehicles armor rating.. will almost certainly instantly destroy said vehicle.

It depends on the Body/Armor matchup, but it is a problem (from a gameplay POV). :/ From a realism POV, isn't that how many situations are? Perhaps not for a battleship, but for light armored vehicles and (some) aircraft? We do hear stories about the F-15 that landed missing a wing, but my uninformed understanding is that damage in many cases is either very minor, or catastrophic.

SR4 definitely has room for improvement in the difference between zero damage and minor damage, though.

General Dynamics Stonewall vectored-thrust MBT, Body is 36, Armor is 28, with rating 15 Smart armor. Im' under the impression most people forgot the days of the 10 boxes condition monitor are over. The Stonewall condition monitor would have 26 boxes (8+36/2).

Buying hits against AV missile (AP -6) : Smart armor reduces the AP to -3. 15 hits to resist.
The minimum DV to get past the armor is 26. Minimum damage is 11 boxes. The required DV to make an instant kill (26 boxes to fill) is 41.

Rolling dice against AV missile (AP -6) : Smart armor reduces the AP to -1 on average. 21 hits to resist, on average.
The minimum DV to get past the armor is 28. Minimum damage is 7 boxes. The required DV to make an instant kill is 47.

I'd say that anything applying major wound penalties is practically the same, but yes: it depends on the specific vehicle's Body/Armor matchup.

Why does a vectored thrust vehicle in WAR have more body than a Frigate in Arsenal?

USS Boston Class Patrol Sub: 30 body/20 armor
The SeaCop is 14/14

I guess noone actually read Arsenal before putting those things together.

Heck, in arsenal it's not even possible to have more than 20 armor.

Remember, the modification rules in Arsenal is just that, Modification. Purpose Built is different.

The body part, yeah, I'm with you on that.

The Striker, which is effectively the same thing as the USS Cole.. only has 20 armor.

So, the Stonewall and the Centurion are supposed to be main battle tanks using vectored thrust engines, right? With heavy cannons?
Now, how the hell do you fire a heavy cannon from such a platform without either landing first (like light hovercraft do in RL before firing anything over 30 mm afaik) or having said vector thrust engines change the direction of thrust instantly to negate the effects of the recoil? If the latter, why don't they have handling of like +6?

Magic. I mean, it's incredible that they can hover at all, just as it's incredible the T-birds function at all. It's expulsion of disbelief, and then disbelief is sent to juvie.

Simple Momentum?
If it's several tons going one way with some speed, then the recoil of the cannon isn't going to do much to change that . .

Well, T-birds - not really. They're not that different from, say, Osprey. The more pull you can fit in a unit of weight and volume, obviously, the less your engines become.
So for birdies I have no questions.
For tanks... uhhh... ok, I can believe in SR having tech to fit incredible power capable of holding some 30 tons in the air into a reasonably small casing, I just ask why its usage is inconsistent.

Have you ever seen a tank fire? It's thrown back pretty significantly - even a heavy tank like we have in RL.

IF/WHEN STANDING STILL!
Ever seen the same Tank fire while in full speed ahead?

Ever seen the same tank hit anything while in full speed ahead?
Besides, don't forget, the tank in question is not crawling on tracks, it's flying. There's a reason planes don't get 122 mm guns.
Oh, and tanks don't always fire the same way they go...

If you follow the old Rigger Black Book on standard armament, the Banshee heaviest weapon would be a Vigilant rotary autocannon, while the Stonewall would have a railgun. I can only hazard recoil of a railgun may be easier to compensate than a regular gun.

Do 105 mm howitzers count? That's what an AC-130 aircraft carries and aimed out at one side, and granted they fly in a circle around a target for firing. But yeah, the amount of recoil you see a tank gets while firing their cannon, I shudder to think how much design is needed to make it even possible to compensate for it on a tank that's hovering. As Nath stated, have you considered the railgun? Also, maybe they're using lasers on the tanks instead.

addendum: and yes, the howitzer has a much less muzzle velocity than the guns on the tank.

The M1A1 MBT (and its various cousins) is pretty good at that... That is what a Good skill and Technology is there for, after all; to compensate for the movement of the vehicle while you are actively firing at an opponent...

Leopard 2 German MBT is pretty good at hitting moving stuff while moving too.

Aha, during demonstrations, T-80 hits targets during a jump, too. Pheh.

For recoil it does not matter how the projectile was accelerated. If anything it gets more complicated without propellant gasses, as the standard techniques for recoilless cannons (which would be my explaination) won't work.

A Recoilless Cannon in a tank? Oooooooooooooo, going to be awfully hot in there when the back blast goes into the compartment!

You could have an unmanned turret.

Hover tanks work on quantum mechanics, just watch Sgt. Bilko...

I was wondering when Sgt. Bilko was coming into play.

The blast would obviously be directed outside, otherwise it would't have the desired effect anyway


And now that Shinobi said it, is there anyone who did NOT think of Sgt. Bilko?

Actually it does, a constant acceleration along the lenght of the barrel of the gun produses a different kind of recoil then a normal tank cannon does.

"If a force acts upon a body, then an equal and opposite force must act upon the body that exerts the force". Recoil is an "equal and opposite force", but it is much more complicated than "an equal force in the opposite direction" ; the force of a confined blast of gunpowder behave differently from an electromagnetic push. As far as I understood (which is, not that much), some theory says the recoil of a railgun do not exert on the breech, but along each rail.

The "recoil curve" will look different but the bottom line still is a crapload of recoil to compensate...and since the primary selling point of railguns seems to be the extreme v₀ it should be an even biger jackload than a conventional KE round.


PS: Are there actually any plans for T-Birds in alt.WAR? As a huge fan of Hardwired I'm constantly disappointed at how they seem to be ignored in recent publications

Well, I plan on writing up a couple of Russian ones, produced by MiG.

They can, but generally they don't. Flank speed puts incredibly heavy stress on a tank's powerplant, transmission, and tracks. The recoil forces on an MBT cannon are significant enough that the added force makes catastrophic failure even more likely.

That said, it's probably down to Rule of Cool.

Getting hit by a heavy metal rod at mach 5 certainly puts more stress of the chassis. That's why tanks will do their best to stay on the move and frogleap from cover to cover, unless they are in a comfy hull-down position somewhere.


@Fatum: What I would wish for would be some general background which gives TBs a place in the setting. Right now I often hear/read people asking "what are those things, anyway?"...

Shoot and scoot. Shoot and scoot.

Especially if you're driving Bun-Bun!

I remember that railguns consist of a magnetically charged barrel and projectile. Basically using the effective of repulsion to accelerate the projectile. So in theory there would be no recoil or sound (beyond the projectile breaking the sound barrier).

*bzzzzz* Sorry, but newton says otherwise. Just as the magnet pushes something, so is the magnet itself pushed. The trick is to make it harder to push the magnet then the object one wants to accelerate. The recoil may have a different acceleration, but it will be there non the less.

Additionally, real-life coilguns and railguns make a LOT of noise, at least the high powered ones.

The power supply alone is going to make a considerable buzzing noise.




-k

doublepost




-k

Since I can't build one in my backyard(yet), isn't the force on these distributed down the rails? I know they want to blow out against their mountings, but I haven't seen one in action to know which way the recoil's going.

Does it matter where it's distributed? Unit A expels Projectile B with Momentum C. C is recoil. Right?

"Equal and opposite reaction" is the phrase to remember. If you throw something out the front of a gun the entire gun wants to move back.

Much more complicated. The exploding gas that propel your something out of the front of the gun want to move back, slowing it down, but not fast enough to prevent it from exiting the muzzle. The rest of the exploding gas is pushing in the other directions, causing recoil.

That's just details.

Direct those people to Osprey description?

It's not like this is an issue for a tank. Especially for a tank that also has vectored-thrust engines keeping it in the air - imagine how much noise that makes!

You can. There's a bunch of railgun project descriptions on the web.

And yes, of course railguns have recoil, even if it's a bit more tame than for conventional weapons. What happens when such a railgun fires from a platform floating forward at a target at 3 or 9?

Budgeting and power consumption is my chief issue.

Well, that and getting a permit from the city to build a potentially devastating (to my neighbor's minivan) weapon.

Do you mean that T-birds are Osprey-like in their mission roles? Because they're actually big flying armored bricks, in form, and even their roles don't have that much overlap.

Nope; T-birds are armoured close-range support - something like Mi-24, but bigger and meaner.
And Osprey is "what the hell they are", except with less "oversized propellers" and more "hypereffective turbines".

So, that's why I'm confused.

I just want my MPUV.

Don't forget to hitch the phalanx mounted on a trailer to your MPUV, you seemed to forgotten about it.

Said unstabalized trailer would flip were the phalanx to be fired. Seen it IRL...not pretty. As far as rail guns go...besides power requirements the greatest problem is that the rails tend to want to launch in opposing directions as well. Take a look at the DDX-1000 boards as LM or NG is testing a rail gun for that hull and much of the info is cross posted there.

With the inclusion of the XM25/307 into the American inventory we may see (in a few years) the phalanx system replaced with 25mm airburst grenades. Provided they can expand the range & rate of the XM25/307. Personally I'd ditch the R2D2s and replace them with Metalstorm.


::EDIT:: 25mm not 20mm