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Tanasha has a point

Very nifty GN update, Jason A. D. 3nodding The Epion is very impressive!

Somebody pointed out the 'Verp' gun on page ten of the recruitment thread, and I'm at a bit of a loss to figure out how it would work.

If it's silent then it can't be using chemical propellant, yet a visable puff of air left the barrel following the shot. If it was a shockwave effect, then that would have been audible. That leaves electromagnetic acceleration as the only option.

Second, kinematics works, so to counteract recoil there must be an equal force in the opposite direction. That would mean either a blast of air or a second projectile - either of which, by the by, would be lethal to stand behind, meaning that it would have to be fired from the shoulder or the hip.

Third, shattering hardened armor plate takes a lot of force, and that force is delivered from some combination of mass and velocity. It can't be speed as supersonic projectiles are quite loud, so therefore it must be really heavy. Since it must be using ferrous ammo as a result of the electromagnetic acceleration, that means that the best ammo for it would be steel as a result of it being a cheap, dense iron alloy. Using a coated DU round would eliminate the possibility of using a railgun as a result of the increased resistance causing the projectile to melt. Coilguns would allow less-ferrous projectiles without a problem, but are far less efficient and yield much lower velocities.

Ergo, the projectile must be rather large in order to shatter Level IV plate.



Oh, and also: Blasters are not better than bullets any more than a torch is better than a baseball bat. One is an energy weapon, the other is an impact weapon. One does damage by burning, the other does damage through physical trauma. It's worth noting that good anti-energy-weapon armor is notoriously poor at stopping kinetic energy; it shatters with relatively little effort. Conversely, armor made out of, say, kevlar doesn't really do much of anything to stop energy weapons.

That said, anti-blaster armor would indeed be vulnerable to a P90. 3nodding

Metalstorm is just a way to fire a million rounds in a few seconds, it's not silent, it's not stealthy, and it's far from recoilless. ^^

I think that we can handle things this way: we'll allow certain things on the recruitment thread, for the sake of being accessible to the public, that don't necessarily fit our guild canon. Ganale's Verpine weaponry might work fine at the outpost... but here in the guild proper, things are a bit different.

I know it's a bit of a double standard, but we can't jump all over every a*****e with a Gundam, or we'll be spending more time OOC than IC. Besides, we've got enough failsafes against munchy stuff - the AM fields, etc. - that we can afford to be a little lenient, ne?

Okay, I forget there's someone here who's proven himself to be an actual human being while at the same time piloting a Gundam. sweatdrop But you know the type of RPer I'm evoking.

I consider myself fairly lenient, actually. However, I try to keep as much technology as I can grounded firmly in physics.

Generally, if it's generally accepted as theoretically possible - even if we aren't capable of building it yet - then it's allowed. Fusion power, weaponized lasers, space cities, etc...

The problem is that I can't figure out how the verp gun does everything it's supposed to do the way it does it without violating one or more of the basic laws of physics.

For one, it's a recoilless rifle that you gain fire from a proper position without injury, meaning that it makes something go forward, but not backwards. That's fairly similar to achieving flight by grabbing onto your hair and pulling yourself up.