On 22 Sep 2016 at 16:07, George William Herbert wrote:

>
> Leonard:
>     Of course, no GM would ever do this to the PCs, right?
> I once started a TNE campaign introducing the player characters'
> exploration fleet to fusion rocket torpedos.
>
> "Uh, Team 3, hold your position we have multiple extreme range
> targets and... Holy shit, they're firing on us!  Those aren't fusion
> guns, they're missile drives!  Inbound at a hundred Gs... Team 3,
> stay grounded and we will pick you up later if able.  Do not take off
> you may escape detection."
>
> Followed by a lot of daylight visible bright streaks and comm
> silence.

Yep, those'd be bad news.

For that matter, at *short* range (ie in orbit) things like the old
Sprint missile would be bad news. Especially if they'd gone with the
accel of some of the test missilers (I recall hearing one set of test
missiles hit 1000 gees!)

Sure they don't have a lot of range, but tracking won't be prepared
for them.

If you want really scary, switch universes.

Something that *ought* to be doable with Honorverse tech is making
antimatter rockets.

They'd have a bunch of advantages. No grav signature worth mentioning
(only grav tech on board would likely be the containment).
Acceleration and range at least as good as multi-drive missiles.

And the remaing fuel adds to the warhead.

Even worse, while they may get shredded by the sidewalls and the
wedges, the gamma rays and pions will still hit the ship and make a
mess of things. Hell, some of the *antimatter* may make to the ship,
if only as stripped atoms.

And since the exhaust is high energy gammas with some pions, they
aren't visually detectable either.

They'd be a rude shock and scary as hell.

Fortunately, they can't be made at "normal" Traveller TLs. But once
they are, things will get ugly.

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