anticarrot wrote:fredgiblet wrote:Meh, the magnetic fields required to make a mass driver powerful enough to even consider would make structural integrity a huge issue, anything designed to come apart probably will, inside the gun.
Bare in mind everyone and their cousin have what amounts to 'electro gravity' in this world. It's a fair bet that they can build gravity coil guns that can do the job and would not suffer from this problem.
The difference between gravity and electro-magnetics wouldn't be as much as you are implying. The forces required to get even the CURRENT velocity out of a mass driver are incredible, getting one with useful velocity would probably end up requiring as much (if not more) power than the Wave-Loom all being dumped into a rather small projectile in the space of a few milliseconds, it's GOING to be a rough ride.
Today we can also build smart-fused and manoeuvrable shells that can survive very high accelerations in a cannon - and 40 years ago we could build the aforementioned sprint missile that could still function at 100g.
We aren't talking 100g, we're talking 1,000,000+g, and we're talking a force that penetrates THROUGH the shell (regardless of whether it's gravity or EM) and pulls apart on pretty much the entire thing equally, rather than a force that pushes it on a single axis of force.
And the same 'laws of physics' apply to the guns and engines. Either coil guns are weak and ships can't turn corners (in our world). Or ships can turn corners (as even heavily damaged Loroi ships can apparently do) and coil guns become infinity minus one weapons.
Not true at all. The amount of power needed to move a projectile down a given barrel length goes up
exponentially with velocity. And that's BEFORE losses to efficiency which will plummet as velocity increases. Increases in the requirements for engine power are linear with mass/acceleration because they aren't trying to do the acceleration in an ever-decreasing amount of time.
This is also why modern guns top out at around 3,000 fps, they can be made to go higher but it's highly inefficient, this is also why pistol rounds are much slower than rifle rounds, getting the same velocity out of them requires MUCH more power, hence the standard pistol bullet layout of high mass and low velocity.
you introduce smart fusing (at a minimum)
You mean some sort of tracking? Now you've added an engine and sensors increasing the overall mass and decreasing the launch velocity (meaning it's got EVEN MORE ground to make up) and you've essentially made a small, slow torpedo with a weak warhead.
and stop being schizophrenic about the involved technology (engine tech = gun tech) then the utility of projectile weapons rises significantly.
What's schizophrenic about it? The engines are basically giant anti-matter rockets, there's no connection whatsoever between them and mass drivers. If you are talking about applying inertial damping to mass drivers it doesn't require scizophrenia to come up with perfectly reasonable reasons that it won't work, interference from the firing of the guns, lack of sufficient capacity given the accelerations involved (i.e. inertial compensators won't work past 1000g or so), that's off the top of my head.
The bottom line is this: Mass drivers are not useful in Outsider, Arioch did not CHANGE the rules of physics to make this so, rather that is the natural state of mass drivers in the type of combat portrayed in Outsider and Arioch declined to alter them to make them useful. If you want to argue about inventing, or modifying, super-tech that fixes mass driver issues then you aren't talking about Outsider, you're talking about your own AU version of Outsider, the only in-universe ways to make a mass driver useful are mind-bogglingly high amounts of energy or barrels the length of the LHC (and merely obscene amounts of energy).