[TML] 20mm cannons and bulky aliens

[Jerry W Barrington]

On 1/23/08 10:42 AM, "Joseph Paul" <josephnjody at sbcglobal.net> wrote:

> 
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: tml-bounces at travellercentral.com
>> [mailto:tml-bounces at travellercentral.com]On Behalf Of Brad Murray
>> Sent: Tuesday, January 22, 2008 9:57 PM
>> To: The Traveller Mailing List
>> Subject: Re: [TML] 20mm cannons and bulky aliens
>> 
>> 
>> On Jan 22, 2008 3:19 PM, Joseph Paul <josephnjody at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
>>> That is not entirely true. The 'rhino' represents a larger than human
>>> opponenet. The combat suit is proportionately upgraded in
>> protective value
>>> because the opponent has the capability to carry more armor.
>> 
>> Does it?  As I understand it the proportional capacity to carry
>> doesn't scale linearly with mass, so in fact a larger creature may not
>> be able to carry as much armour per unit surface area as a smaller
>> animal (that is, while it would carry more armour, the thickness of
>> that armour might be less).  I would expect smaller animals to be able
>> to wear thicker armour and not the reverse (though as you scale down
>> you run into simple problems of mobility as thickness gets closer to
>> length between joints -- here the larger animals have mechanical
>> advantage).
>> 
>> --
>> Brad Murray (halfjack)
> 
> Carrying capacity is also influenced by shape. We are not very well suited
> to carry much at all. Four footed creatures are often better at it. I can't
> find anything on rhinos as they haven't taken to domestication well enough
> to measure a carrying capacity. I have a reference for Indian elephants at
> 545kilos but I think that is very conservative. The surface area of an
> Indian elephant is 20 meters square found here:
> http://idiosynchrony.wordpress.com/2007/11/15/a-half-wet-elephant/  That is
> 27 kilos of armor per meter square. Anybody got some ideas on how much armor
> that is in CT/MT/G:T terms? Humans have about 1.8 meters of surface area and
> 60 lbs (27.2 kilo) is about the max we can carry for armor without serious
> degradation of performance. That comes out to about 15 kilos per m^2. So in
> this case the big animal gets an edge it looks like.

Well, twice as much carrying/area, twice as many legs...

I think there's a connection there.  Don't forget though, all that armor has
mass.  Elephants aren't terribly agile to start with.

As for the herd of 3000: nukes don't care much about personal armor!