[TML] jump weapons

[Tom Naro]

Jerry W Barrington jerry.barrington at gmail.com

>On 7/23/08 5:00 PM, "Tom Naro" <tomnaro at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> By TL14, military jump grids have enough redundancy and control capability to
>> isolate the area affected by the *Remora* and bypass the negative effects.  It
>> would take dozens of *Remora* to be effective on a TL14 military ship.

>Shouldn't *all* ships be able to detect damage and route around it?

Actually, the remora weapon does very little damage to the jump grid - it taps into the grid without disabling it.  (If it did a lot of damage, the weapon wouldn't work.)  The weapon uses the intact jump grid to exploit a venerability inherent in jump drives - they require controlled power flow in specific patterns to control the jump.  The remora interfears in that process.  Before the weapons triggers, the jump grid might have a little extra *noise* in its power flow.   (A really sharp engineer or navigator has a chance of detecting it.)  Advance tech ships can route around the problem - everyone else has to put on vacc suits and go EVA.  (Or send a robot to deal with it.)

IMTU: Civilian vessels are built to transport goods or people.  Having a jump grid that is better at absorbing combat damage is not going to help them transport more goods or people.  It would not be cost effective for civilian ships to have tougher (and more expensive) hulls or jump grids. Civilian hulls are not much more than metal skins for the ship - they are made to cover the minimum engineering requirements only.  If you want extra features you have to pay more. (IMTU Military hulls are more expensive: +25% but have redundant jump grids and effective damage sensors.)
 
(This message was trapped in the send buffer so might seem out of sequence.)