Lagrange said:
I disagree with the specific logic of several of these, but not in a way that would necessarily change your results. I'm pretty sure we're never told that the suit's 4 thrusters consume most of the arc reactors output (there's certainly a lot of other systems in the suit that need power). The final suits that we see also seem to have thrusters on the back, and possibly the back of the calves.
True however the lower the drain of the thrusters the more the insane thrust you get for each watt of power and I figured this was a nice point.
Not to mention that really 3GW of power is a
lot of power. There really isn't anything else in the Mark III suit, which drained the 3GW reactor in the fight with the Iron Monger dry, to consume that much power.
Also, if anything, I'd expect the foot repulsors to have a smaller radius than the palm reactors, although they have much greater depth. It's also pretty clear from a couple of the flying scenes that Tony normally produces more thrust from the boots than the hands (see the initial garage flight scene, and the boot+glove scene in IM3). That doesn't mean their max thrust is any different, but I generally assume the hand's are tuned to be better at blasting, while the feet are better at thrust.
Again likely true but impossible to account for without just pulling numbers out of thin air.
As to replacing the main gun, keep in mind that straight kinetic energy won't have the same effects as a more complex combination of kinetic, explosive, and heat.
Well yeah but large amounts of kinetic energy should still be pretty devastating. For scale 1.4GJ of energy is required to melt a ton of steel. Frankly given what we see of the Repulsor Beam in the Iron Man 2 I'd expect it to basically cut through everything it comes in contact with.
santtu1976 said:
It's a thrust system also so the recoil will flip the vehicle.
Smaller vehicles need low recoil gun turrets to work but that way they can go to 120mm as long the hull doesn't break from repeat use that is, not all APC types can be converted to IFV with big gun.
Best example for this is US Stryker, it actually got regular 105mm from main battle tank as gun pedestal (not turret), if it fires with just that, the vehicle flips. At least 1 tester has been killed that way. Instead of putting in low recoil gun like sensible people do, General Dynamic just put in muzzle braker to fight recoil, which when used can permanently deaf people in 50 meters if not using protection and if driver has hatch open, his head will pop like ripe melon under sledgehammer. There is rumors that even ammo is watered down.
So yeah, nice idea for gun, to something which can take the recoil, try MBT.
Worst case scenario is that it gets downgraded into something with a recoil the Tiger can handle. No matter what it would still be a pretty deadly beam of cutting doom.
Hoyr said:
No GARDIAN network? Or repulsor GARDIAN network? Or did you intend for the MM launchers to fill that role?
Pretty sure I already answered this but just in case: I really don't think we can mount as GARDIAN network on the Tiger. If it was possible they would be using GARDIANs more often on the ground. Even if they didn't have the reactor tech for them in vehicles they would be still be used in military installations and we just don't see that.
Going by canon they really seem to be either things fitting in spaceships and really big ground installations.
Also I'm feeling more and more that we might want to re-think the use of Repulsors as weapons, the repulsor seems to have a very short range in iron man (movies) and the utility we're getting out of a 150 point tech seems to much, maybe have a few tech for properly weaponizing repulsors? But that's something for the QM.
Can anyone actually give an example showing the repulsor's supposedly short range? Because for the most part Iron Man likes to get into relatively close combat and I imagine at least part of the problem is that the palm of the hand simply isn't a really got mechanism for aiming long range, even with computer assistance.
Also it's really important to remember that the two fundemental techs in the Iron Man movies are Repulsors and Arc Reactors. Really from what I remember the only other notable techs are the cool hologram systems and JARVIS. Both of which already exist here.
So yeah Repulsors, just like the Arc Reactor, should have massive utility since they are the two technologies you connect with Iron Man.
Madfish said:
Also a quick wiki and google search suggests strongly, though doesn't confirm modernly, that the Repulsor is short ranged (in the order of a few yards) making it infeasible as a primary armament.
As above, evidance please? Especially since it's important to remember that I'm not talking about Repulsor blasts like Iron Man liked to use but sustained beams.
With a blast the energy will dissipate over the distance from having to displace the air in front of it however a beam will only have to worry about that at the front of the beam since everything behind that will be travelling through the wake/vacuum left behind it. So basically the range for a repulsor beam would be until the beam either spread out far enough that the energy density at the target is too low or until the distance at which energy losses to light are sufficient to drop the energy below the useful point.
Although this does remind me of another issue with the Repulsor compared to laser weapons. Speed. If possible someone would do the calcs but repulsor blasts seem to travel significantly slower then even bullets, my guess is probably baseball speed.
Hoyr said:
Unibeam is really more of a weird arc reactor thing through. I'll explain in a bit.
Esbilon said:
santtu1976 said:
Question for GM. I doubt the gardian system fit land vehicle but does the Gigajoule lasers fit or do we need miniaturization first?
Miniaturization is included.
Can you explain what you mean here since Miniaturisation is pretty clearly separate from Gigajoule lasers.
Crazy Tom 2.0 said:
From a practical standpoint, I would say bump up the number of drive repulsors to about a dozen. This will lessen the structural strain on any equipment-used to orientate that thruster and gives you a measure of redundancy as well as improved manoeuvrability. Unless the thrust or cost scales non-linearly with repulsor size, need GM input.
Probably. I was just basing it off the Mako having four thrusters but upping the numbers is likely better.
Esbilon said:
A bit of googling indicates that at least Iron Man's Unibeam (big Repulsor) has a decent range. The hand-based repulsors are used at pistol range without noticable reduction in their effectiveness.
Just to be clear I don't think the Unibeam is actually a big Repulsor. It seems to be more a controlled short circuit in the Arc Reactor that results in the Arc Reactor emitting all it's power out in that big doom beam. Possibly exploiting the fact that Arc Reactors and Repulsors share a lot of common tech.
Also neatly explains what the Unibeam can only be used sparingly and the talk of batteries. So the Arc Reactor is been used as a weapon no energy is going from it into the suit so everything else has to run off emergency power.
S1lverhair said:
space use of repulsors would be completely different.
Yep. None.
Everything I've seen in Iron Man tells me the Repulsors are waaay too slow to actually be used in space combat. They don't even seem to be bullet speed let alone the percentages of light speed required to hit evasive targets in space.
Esbilon said:
Micro-missiles are designed for use against soft targets in an atmosphere. If they're useful on a fighter, your enemy is doing something wrong.
That said, they could probably be adapted, but it doesn't seem like the optimal fighter weapon to me.
I wouldn't call anyone in Mass Effect combat armour a soft target. Not to mention that most modern day aircraft, including Fighter jets to the best of my knowledge, can be taken out by regular pistol rounds, although I expect military vehicles likely require rifle rounds.
Given that Mass Effect Fighters are basically destroyed by a single hit in most cases there isn't really any point in putting heavy armour or shields on them since like modern fighters they are better off been as light as possible to keep up their manoeuvrability rather then depend on armour that can't stop the weapons been fired at them.
So I wouldn't be surprised if a single micro-missile could take out a fighter. The problem is getting them there. Which is why putting them inside a missile casing would be effective.
A Tomahawk cruise missile could carry a W80 warhead which is 30cm in diameter and 80cm long. Assuming it's a cylinder, which it appears to be from the images, gives it an internal volume of 56,548,668 cubic millimetres. This gives it enough room to fit 19,290 micro missiles.
I don't think I need to explain how deadly a missile that gets close and then suddenly reveals 10k+ independently targeted warheads that can spread out and hunt you down. Even if every missile cost 250k (same price as our suits) it would still be well worth it if they could guaranty a kill on a 100m+ fighter. After all a single AMRAAM costs 300,000 to 400,000 USD with the latest version (2012) costing 1.4m each.
The most extensive
description I could find said that Repulsors were particle beams.
Fortunately that's not movie canon and really particle beams just don't fit with Repulsors.
Van Ropen said:
...yup, and that quote from Admiral Asshat was about ME cores, right?
So either way, the fighter probably shouldn't be 7 times that price.
Right now there are three estimates, AFAIK for cost:
Esbilion's initial:
Fighter Drive cores cost 10m, that's 50% of the fighter's cost. Fighter = 20m.
Mine off Drive Cores:
IRL Fighter's cost ~7.5 times their engine so that's 75m
Mine off relative prices:
Super Hornet = Super Scimitar
F-22 = Gladius
F-22 = 1.4x Super Hornet's sale price
Gladius = 1.4x SUper Scimitar sale Price = 1.4x 150,000,000 = 210,000,000 sales price
Applying the more realistic markup price of 1.2 gives us a production price of 175m and the current markup price of 2.5 gives us a production price of 84m
So we end up with:
- 20m*2.5 = 50m sale = 30m CHA profit = 3m PI profit
- 75m*2.5 = 187.5m sale = 112.5m CHA profit = 11.3m PI Profit
- 175m*1.2 = 210m sale = 35m CHA profit = 3.5m PI profit
- 84m*2.5 = 210m sale = 126m CHA profit = 12.6m PI profit
Hopefully that's everything I needed to respond to.
Oh and I'll try and update the tech tree to include the new tech, which I haven't really been keeping track of... oops, tomorrow. Or maybe I'll end up doing it today.
JTibbs said:
Am drives are almost certainly going to be an order of magnitude cheaper than a fusion reactor.
AM as fuel is just much more expensive.
From what I can tell AM drives are basically just fusion drives. What the military in ME does is they mix AM into the exhaust during combat giving them a significant boost in speed.
So think of it like putting NOS tanks in your car rather then a new engine system.
