Spring RTS Engine

yer. It would have Recoil. Just because of the projectile sizes and the fact it has no Propellant the recoil would be really small.

Drone_Fragger wrote:yer. It would have Recoil. Just because of the projectile sizes and the fact it has no Propellant the recoil would be really small.

nope, just the same. it's simple conservation of momentum:

1: launch a projectile of a certain mass at a certain speed (IE give it some kinetic energy)
2: you can't create energy, so there has to be an equal and opposite K.E (this is held by the gun itself, absorbed by whatever it's mounted on/held by)
so... if the weapon is doing the same damage (purely using KE) as a machinegun then the recoil will be the same.

and it certainly would knock satellites out of orbit. unless you fire a stream of bullets in the opposite direction to the target. and then you've got to make sure the launcher is lined up exactly with the centre of rotation of the satillite otherwise it'll start spinning

still though it sounds a damn sight better than machineguns

It would have a different form of recoil, when the projectile is unlinked from the rotor the rotor's center of mass moves and until it's reloaded will cause some sidewards forces.

The whole laser thing is odd.

Yes you could have a laser in the killowatt range that burns a hole through a tank very quickly, but that hole is gonna be too small to be of any significance. Thus you need to make the area focused on bigger which means more energy, which is the main reason why laser technology hasnt been in use of decades as a primary weapon and remains expensive.

The good thing about the dread is that it can have huge energy to mass ratios and unlike a gun, you can take the extra time to speed up the ammunition to unfathomable speeds giving them more and more energy then let them loose at a huge speed to cause massive damage. At high enough speeds the projectiles and the target would have small melting effects as the kinetic energy transferred would cause a lot of localized heat.

I can imagine a system similair to MTHEL could be made using the dread and numerous ballistic equations through a computer. That way the dread need only fire a volley of projectiles so that they all cross a wide section of the projectiles path so that at least one hits the projectile, although maybe not as useful for much faster weapons

The problem is not the power input. You can charge huge capacitors which release their charge in a matter of milliseconds
The problem is the laser itself. You can't easily build one that delivers Megawatts of power!
A common laser diode produces about a tenth of a W. (The ones in laserpointers far less)
A laser tube about 100W max.
The one used on the MTHEL is a chemical laser as far as i know. They're capable of delivering high amounts of power, but they're a huge pain in the ass to actually build and maintain!

Laser is good against missiles and warheads since they explode when heated highly. Also they are very hard to hit with guns or missiles. But laser travels at the speed of light! (doh.)

A kilowatt is not much of power, it's something like 1.5 hp. Your (or your family's) car has probably 50-100 kW of power (75-150 hp).

Currently the most powerful lasers are chemical, but they have to be reloaded with propellants for every firing. Solid-state lasers that can operate with electricity (just have to be cooled between shots) are increasing in power all the time though.

TRW produced megawatt-class chemical lasers back in the eighties already. (Reagan and all that star wars stuff if you're old enough to remember.)

You need a mini-telescope to aim a laser focusedly far. At least that MTHEL seemed to have one. Doesn't work if there's smoke or fog or clouds or rain/snow/dust! ABL is a chemical laser inside a boeing jumbo jet, the beam is directed through mirrors to a nose turret that is aimed at a rogue state icbm. The target is acquired and "painted" by a smaller solid state laser.

In EE, the NI anti air is lasers.

If I understand how the dread is working, the recoil is put into the drive shaft, and cushioned that way