On 9 Jan 2015 at 23:39, Bill Rutherford wrote:

> All,
>
> The players are landing at a D starport which is pretty basic.
>
> The bad guys want to disable the players' ship to keep them from
> leaving but it's not politic to simply bombard it from space or turn
> the weapons of another parked ship on the players' ship.  A couple of
> thoughts that sprang to mind ito disable the ship include:
>
> a) Fry the ship's electrical systems by running a vehicle with a
> large capacitor aboard into one of the landing legs.
>
> -- Is this even practical?

Nope. You can't fry the electronics in your car by dropping a high
voltage power line onto it. That's because the body acts as a Faraday
cage.

Ships will be even better protected.

> -- Thoughts re: how this could be done without also frying any crew aboard?

The voltage would never get *into* the ship in the first place.

> b) EMP...
>
> -- Nukes would likely be off the table but could this be done with a
> high-voltage low amperage electrostatic discharge from the vehicle
> that contacts the landing leg?

For close range, an eMP bomb is rather smle to make. And doesn't
require a nuke. doesn't even require huge amounts of explosives.

But again, the ship will be pretty well shielded against that in the
first place.

> c) Simply ram the ship with a vehicle, collapsing a landing leg,
> possibly breaking seal integrity around the gear door?

> -- Any thoughts about likelihood of breaking integrity?

If the ship falls over, a lot of things will break.

If it doesn't then you'll have to inflict enough damage to prevent
retracted the leg properly without causing the ship to fall over.
Tricky.

Things that will prevent the ship from lifting fall into several
categories:

1. legal. they *could* lift off, but might be in big trouble if they
do. Maybe even enough to get the locals to send something to force
them down.

2. "practical". Maybe some of the crew, passengers or supplies aren't
on board. Lifing off may still be *possible* but would lead to
various levels of problems.

3. "physical". something is broken/missing/whatever. the ship is
*unable* to lift until the problem is corrected.

--
Leonard Erickson (aka shadow)
shadow at shadowgard dot com