Alexander SquidLord Williams

Er, but can we just get a few walking tanks, maybe? Or at least some bits put in to make modding them in easy?

My friend Eric, who I have not quite lured successfully into the mind-gnawing evil that is DropTeam, and myself were juggling around numbers on how much effective tonnes of TNT were in a vehicular AM fuel cell. They rumble out to about 24 tonnes of TNT per microgram of AM. That's a lot of explosive force we don't see go off on the battlefield when there's a holed battery. Mind you, the battery itself is so large, the AM must be stored in some extremely diffuse, cellular lattice, as I was talking about before. Regardless, a sabot through the chamber should do a little more than set the vehic on fire, since it'd be reacting directly and uncontrollably with at least some of the AM in the store. If vehicles were dangerously capable of fratricide with a holed AM battery it would be somewhat more realistic. Setting off 60 - 80 tonnes of TNT in the guts of your Paladin can't be good for folks parked the next spot over. (Plus, opportunity for a cool ripple shockwave effect!) I described the 6mm ion as "the most annoying weapon on the battlefield" in conversation last night. Let's be honest, it fires continuously as a target closes in from 4km, because otherwise it just leaves the operator's initials half-scrawled across the chassis in wild arcs with little other effect. Like dan/cal, I'd rather have some kind of TOW-esque missile system, preferably energy-based, since we have such a lot of it. Now, if/when we actually get the Ogre scenario, then we might be talking about fractional-kilo AM loads, again, either for its disgustingly huge main cannon or for forces deployed against it.

If Javelins had no mass and required nothing more than a 10in by 10in by 10in box to produce an infinite number of them, a HUMMWV would mount a lot more than twenty of them at a time. They'd mount a Javelin-box on everything larger than a Segway and possibly a number of things smaller. While the LiveShips can't necessarily abstract the theory of ion beams to much larger calibers, the idea of mounting more of them on a given frame is pretty trivial. Clearly, given AM cores, power is not a limiting factor. AM-supplied power is near infinite in the masses we're talking about and the infantry-carried ion beam has no ammo limit. Extrapolation is both obvious and trivial. (Me, I'd love to have an ion beam weapon replacing the secondary coax or top-mounted MG on most if not all of the vehicles; infinite ammo, way better accuracy, and almost no decrease in actual inflicted damage vs infantry. Its really a no-brainer.)

It occurs to me, after a leisurely breakfast, that the only reasonable way to figure the vehicular AM cores are to assume some sort of passive containment system. What we're talking about is some form of Unobtanium© which creates a magnetic matrix, probably in a crystaline matrix. During its formation, its injected / innoculated with AM hydrogen, each atom suspended within a crystaline / magnetic cell, and requiring no power to maintain seperation. Liberating power from the system probably involves physically damaging the matrix, liberating the AM in a way that propels it away from the remaining coherent fields and toward what they hit the matrix with, which then reacts with the AM and liberates a relatively small quantum of energy (comparitive to, say, a full-bore unconstrained AM detonation; the energy needed to liberate the AM has to be a tiny fraction of the released energy to be worth the effort). Juggle the numbers on the volume of the matrix material vs the volume of the cell vs the volume of AM contained to get numbers which fit the size of the AM cores on the templates. They specify "micrograms of AM," which is reasonable. Of course, they have to be using "combustion" in some sense which we don't in regards to their "ICE Engines" (shades of BattleTech), since on Earth "combustion" is about materials combining with oxygen energetically. Since AM really doesn't require any specific form of reactive matter, oxygen or nae, they can't be using it in the conventional sense. If we assume they use the term to mean any energetic release from a physical matrix, it makes some vague kind of sense. As dan / cal suggests, it probably makes more sense from a hard SF perspective if the fuel cells and patently not antimatter, because of all the points he makes. If its important they be so, we can certainly construct reasonable things around that, but its harder than it looks, in part because of observed failure-modes in the game as we clearly observe.

Actually, there's a great reason not to use uncontained antimatter explosives on the battlefields we're fighting over: We probably want to actually have folks live there, after. I'm thinking not a lot of folks really want to deal with a gamma-saturated city. The cascade effects, the irradiated plant-life, the utter lack of airable farmland ... No, thanks, antimatter may make a pretty and effective attack vector outside the atmosphere, but I think I like to keep it out of the planetary biome that I'll be shifting colonists to. That said, I have to wonder how the vehicular systems keep from going critical in big, ugly ways when their engines get a penetrating hit. Forget catching on fire and emitting smoke, why don't they go up and take a foul chunk out of the planet? The AM cores have to be sustaining the AM in some unknown fashion, so that a rupture in containment shifts the AM into a less, shall we say, energetic state. This seems to be the critical bit of energy-supply technology the backstory doesn't really cover well enough for my tastes.

I thought I was the last DP9 fanboy left on Earth, Jalinth.

Unfortunately, a throttle-control would be exactly the wrong thing for someone with fingers all drawn-up into nearly-immobile claws. But thanks for the attempt. While this may be a "Windows thing," if the library is incompatible with a fairly (for assistive technology) widespread tool it would seem some kind of grousing is in order since your ap leverages the library. Linux has its own approach (AccessX) which likely works directly through the modkeys X interface and doesn't hit the same issues. Regardless, 'tis a bug report of interoperability proportions. I've done my duty as a patriotic game-purchaser and player.

Because I have a physical impairment, I can push at most two adjoining keys on the keyboard at once. As you can imagine, this makes lots of gaming "interesting" in the Chinese proverb sense. As an aide, I use Microsoft's StickyKeys to make typing reasonable. Unfortunately, some applications / games have issues with this. DropTeam is, sadly, one of them. In DT, shift-toggling doesn't work at all, and ctrl/alt toggling can put the game into a state where I cannot return to the Tactical screen with space at all unless I switch to another window and back after using the shift / ctrl keys there. My suspicion is its because of the "one toggle" mode not being read well, where I hit, for example, Ctrl-M to shift to minimap targeting and then want to continue on. Often, the system won't let me swap back to Locked mode, either, moving off the vehicle when a direction is pushed, regardless of Tab-toggling. And while I'm in here :cool: , it would be nice if there was an interface option to make switching to the Gunner's view sticky instead of only while 'E' is held. You can just imagine what kind of fun that provides me. Discovering the vehicle you hit on the move best with is a hover-artillery piece can lead to odd self-perception.