Keep in mind rotational inertia. You can't just accelerate in any direction that you want at a moment's notice.

You want a kinetic round with a diameter of 1m? Ummmm... Let's say it's a cylinder 1m long. That's a volume of 3.14 m^3. If it's only the density of water, that's 3.4 million cm^3, or 3,400 kg. If it's steel, you multiply by about 7.8, for 26,520 kg. 26 metric tons ... That's just a ridiculous mass. Over how far a distance are you going to accelerate this thing?

If you want to get to 10,000m/s with a barrel length of 100m, you need to accelerate it at 100G (give or take). That's not overwhelming, but that's not a turret-mounted weapon and you're going to need an immensely strong structure. After all, the force is 26,520,000 N, if I got all the decimal points in the right places ... If you want a shorter barrel, you need to increase the acceleration, so a lot more newtons. A 20m barrel pushes it up to about 125,000,000 N. Ouch.

Converting to GJ is left as an exercise for the reader.

On Tue, Jul 7, 2015 at 4:22 PM, Kurt Feltenberger <kurt@thepaw.org> wrote:
I'm still trying to work though some details trying to use Traveller (any version) to simulate BSG.  One of the problems I'm running into with the kinetic weapons approach is that when you have ships that are 1000 meters to almost 3000 meters long shooting at each other, they would tend to stay at some distance and not get so close that if one turned that another couldn't get out of its way.  If they engaged from a range of 30km, and the projectile velocity was 10km, it would leave a lot of chance for the target to purposely change their location (climb, dive, turn, change velocity, etc).

The damage caused by a 1m kinetic round at 10,000m/s is already pretty insane and in Traveller terms would probably punch through a Tigress from side to side without much problem...and possibly the Tigress next to her.

So here's my question:  Just how fast would the railguns or coilguns reasonably be?  50,000m/s?  100km/s?  More?

Thanks!
--
Kurt Feltenberger
kurt@thepaw.org/kfeltenberger@yahoo.com
“Before today, I was scared to live, after today, I'm scared I'm not living enough." - Me
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