Intergalactic Summit

Maybe you'd have better luck opening the hatch and throwing spears at them?

Slugthrowers? Really?

And you call yourself Amarr...

I'm a sharp shooter mate. I hit the spot and board the pot. I don't shoot to slave I shoot to save. Then I sell the musical grave to a musician who can pay.

There's some pretty amazing whiskey coming from the Thukker caravans roaming the Great Wildlands. I also rate the ales that come from Mikramurka as some of the best I've tasted. For wines I stick with the old chateau vintages of Caille.

Make fun of projectile weapons all you like but they're still very efficient and quite effective. The bigger the hole the better as far as I'm concerned. Also, there's a lot to be said for the ability to continue fighting after having one's capacitor neutralized.

And for those who like to do all that at very long ranges there's your friend the humble missile.

Modern projectile guns project a microwarp tunnel. The field collapses just short of the target so as to allow the round to actually hit rather than just phasing through the matter of its intended victim. That and the turret aiming array account for pretty much all of the power draw on those things. Without the microwap field those guns would have hardly any power draw at all, but they'd also have an effective range of... oh, about ten kilometers at the most? Against large and slow targets?

Then there's the sheer flexibility of projectile ammo. frankly, that's an area that's not properly been explored yet. Sure, mixing it up with EMP, phased plasma, or just good old-fashioned morphite-enriched nuclear fission is all well and good, but some of the larger calibers are so big you could do damn near anything with them. How about... CRU rounds full of combat clones? Interdiction field rounds that clamp onto the hull? Grey goo rounds full of Ravager nanites?

Given the comparatively slow speeds these things move at in real terms, inertial stabilizers would more than do the job of keeping such specialist ammunition intact.

Claiming that projectile weaponry is "primitive" and "useless" betrays a terminal shortcoming in both imagination and in powers of observation.

what do you think all that powergrid draw is going on, the loading mechanism?

If all of those combined require even a single megawatt, let alone the kind of draw that is actually siphoned into a ship's gun, then the Matari reputation for engineering genius may be a touch overrated.

You will be surprised how much power all the mechanical parts consume. Especially the mag-clamps and the magnetically-driven chambering mechanisms. Our turrets are very, very heavily mechanized. Do not underestimate the power draw of a fully mechanized weapons system, especially semi-intelligent mechanized weapons systems that can track targets independently and perform ballistic calculations, with much help from the capsuleer's own brain power, autonomously.

Remember, when you are fitting a gun turret on a ship, you are not just clamping turrets onto the hard points, you are also fitting the entire gunnery deck with support machinery specialized for this particular turret. All of that consumes alot of power. That's why it's called 'high slot'.

If we were projecting microwarp tunnels with our turrets our turrets would be drawing capacitor.

Energy is Energy. Doesn't matter if it comes from the cap or the powergrid, it's all the same.

Stop allowing MWD modules that are used to shunt whole starships around to confuse you. There's nothing magic about warp fields which states that the energy HAS to come from a capacitor, that's just how it works in the specific case of starship MWDs because that's the most practical way to hold some power in reserve and apply it when needed.

When you get down to it, the energy stored in your capacitor and the energy flowing through your powergrid are exactly the same thing. The cap is just a means of storing energy and rapidly releasing it on demand, it's not a different category of thing.

Pick up any piece of cheap store-brought consumer electronics and you'll be holding an item which itself contains at least one capacitor. A capacitor is nothing ore or less than a device for storing charge and releasing it when needed.

Starships don't contain one capacitor, they contain thousands. As do lasers, railguns, blasters and, yes, autocannons and howitzers.

Meanwhile, here is a piece of news for you: it is not physically possible to propel a round to anything remotely resembling a relativistic speed using chemical propellant alone, no matter how efficient the burn or the shape of the chamber. I won't go into the full detail of compressible flow here, but suffice it to say that the maximum velocity of a gas is given by the following equation:[link]

Where cp is the specific heat of the gas and Tt is the stagnation temperature of the flow.

Obviously, a projectile cannot reach a speed higher than that of the expanding gas which is accelerating it. Which means that, if we left it to pure chemistry, this equation would put a hard cap on projectile muzzle velocities which would make them utterly useless for ship-to-ship combat at anything but the most extreme close-range.

Getting those rounds out to hundreds of Km and scoring an effectively immediate hit requires the intervention of a technological solution. Without it, howitzer rounds would move slower than missiles, without the benefit of on-board guidance.

That solution is microwarp fields. I don't know why you're so hung up on insisting that the power for this MUST come from the ship's capacitor, or that the gun itself is not capable of housing its own capacitor systems to provide the necessary timed discharge. As I said, energy is energy. So long as it produces the goods, does it really matter where, how and through what circuits that energy is channeled?