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Heavy Gravity Beam

Zack

Zack

Inactive Member
This isn't a weapon system, it is more just a weapon type article.

The part articles I'm making for the larger ships have enough stuff on them to make them not really weapon articles so what I want to be able to do is have the parts listed on the ship, and then later on in the ship article link to this article saying 'the ship can fire this type of weapon'.

The article is generic enough that anyone could use it though, so it might make more sense to put it in the guide area? A strong gravity beam to rattle something isn't really a faction-specific piece of technology.
 
Please specify that you are referring to ships of the 4th Elysian Empire, @Zack, as to not do so would violate the Faction Rights of @META_mahn; additionally, please decrease the weapon’s effective range to 1 light-second in order to comply with the Starship Combat Guide, as an effective range of 3 light-seconds would require a muzzle velocity of 3c.

Additionally, @Wes and @Fred - are weapons allowed to ignore a target’s armor (and thus instantly destroy it)? If memory serves, weapons capable of “phasing” through other objects - including armor - are no longer allowed...
 
I agree; I'd rather not have this be associated with...whatever I have. *hides classified documents*

I also simply don't like this weapon because unlike @Rizzo and his EMP missile, which was made to introduce a degree of roleplay into PVE and even potential PVP (which is fun) this weapon simply says "Okay, your armor is ineffective." Combined with the power of the EMP warhead, whatever ship this is mounted on will become a powerhouse that goes around negating the defenses of everything.
 
Graviton beams have been used as improvised weapons before, but in previous depictions, weaponization is absolutely useless against graviton-based barrier systems... which has been demonstrated as basic barrier functionality in the Kikyo sector. This is not to devalue this weapon, so much as draw my own recollection on the topic - it's not me that makes the rulings on submissions.

I don't really perceive this weapon as achieving something much different than some railgun; you're directing physical trauma to a select portion of a ship. I figure the tougher the armor, the less easily it would be warped by the push/pull.

Of course, the example used is an extreme outlier: something 'heavy anti-capital' will wreck just about everything anyways.
 
To build on what Fred said: The weapon is shooting gravity. Wear all the kevlar you want, it isn't going to stop the earth's gravity from getting to you.

This is not any different from radiation-style weapons, scalar beams, etc. As far as SARP is concerned its just going to do the appropriate DR worth of damage to a thing when it hits it.
 
It, according to the Submission Rules, is not a valid argument to justify a submission’s potentially overpowered aspects by pointing to another submission, especially one of a different faction @Zack - and if you’re going by what Fred said, shouldn’t it be stated that this weapon is useless against graviton-based barrier systems?
 
FrostJaeger said:
It, according to the Submission Rules, is not a valid argument to justify a submission’s potentially overpowered aspects by pointing to another submission, especially one of a different faction @Zack [...]
Click to expand...
Sorry, but I find this to be a very oblivious statement. Zack is right: DRv3 doesn't care. He made his HGW Tier 15 so it's going to do Tier 15 damage. Describing how it defeats armor is the same as describing how a laser will superheat an armored surface and cause damage in my eyes. He obviously means it as flair; flavor-text. This is how weapons are supposed to be written as far as I'm concerned - to be evocative.

I'm not going to be the guy that says if this weapon would affect barriers or not. Historically, it shouldn't. That's a special property of graviton in this setting, perhaps.

What I would add, though, is that deploying gravitons like that usually has one other interesting property: it prevents ships from going FTL.

There's something interesting about a conditional weapon that achieves something useful even under suboptimal conditions... but the moment the target loses its barrier? SMASH. I find that this gives it a lot of identity; though it's also a shame to have a Tier 15 weapon not achieve what most competitors are able to do.

It seems like a terrific weapon to pair with subspace detonator torpedoes. I wonder how Zesuaium would fare against it (since Zesu has properties of its own).
 
The Elysian reference should be removed if @META_mahn meta would prefer it not referenced but mechanically there is no issue with this submissions description. I'm a bit confused though. You say it's a weapon type article but it has a DR like a component. If describing a type of technology it would be better for this article to focus on the mechanics and perhaps reference over to a component article.

I'll leave it to you to decide which you'd prefer. If a component for shipbuilding is what you want this to be please add a nomenclature, manufacturer- this section
* **Designer:** (Person(s), Group or Company, etc Responsible For Weapon's Design)
* **Manufacturer:** (Person(s), Group or Company, etc Responsible For Weapon's Manufacture)
* **Name:** (Insert Weapon Name)
* **Nomenclature:** [[international:standard_product_nomenclature_system|Nomenclature System Found Here]]
* **Type:** (Type Of Weapon, ie; Plasma, Gauss, Chemical Projectile Propulsion etc)
* **Role:** (Role Of Weapon, ie; Assault Rifle, Squad Support Weapon, Anti-Armor Rocket Launcher, ect)
* **Length:** (may also include width and height if appropriate)
* **Weight:** (in both imperial and metric, ie pounds and kilograms)
 
I'm more and more thinking this should be moved to guide:gravitybeam or something similar.

The idea is this is a generic article for a very specific type of gravity beam: One that is DR 15. If I wanted to write a generic article for a Gravity Beam of varying DR then I'd need to write a much larger and more comprehensive article which would have to cover basically everything you can do with a gravity beam. While something like that may come in the future, I think it is easier right now to focus on a specific type of gravity beam and detail that. The physical device that creates the beam could be any strong-enough gravity device that then links to this article in its weapon section. Since any super-powerful gravity device will likely have other applications (FTL/CFS/ETC) I think this makes sense as it will doubtlessly also need to link to other articles regarding those other functions.

As such the designer section has not been included as this is supposed to be the generic version of the article anyone can use.

As far as shields go, I think we've gotten to a point to where our shield articles 'cover everything' within reason. Perhaps its just gravity based shielding that works against this, or perhaps electrostatic fields also block electro-gravity? Either (or both) work as far as I'm concerned.
 
Making it a full on guide might yield the best results for what you're looking to get approved but don't feel obligated to cover every single possible application for it. Really, I don't think you actually need to make a guide. I made the GPD and only listed something like 4 possibilities for usage and came up with something new just the other day.

If you just want the weapon approvable it may be better to simply list the most basic functions and say something like 'full range of uses are limited by the users imagination' or something like that. I also wouldn't worry about shields too much. Tier X damage from gravity is still Tier X damage on a shield. It just cannot get through the shield until it breaks.
 
A full guide might yield the best results but 16 articles (one for each DR level) x 3 (Shake / Push / Pull) and then additional articles for 'fun stuff' is a bit more than I'm looking to do right now.

After all, you could use a Tier 15 gravity beam as a planet-wide speaker system... or send sound waves directly to a person's ear... or remotely heat objects like a microwave. The more I think about how to use the thing and what the implications are, the more uses I come up with.

So for now, I'd like to keep the focus very narrow.
 
I'm not so sure if there is a mechanical difference between a tier 1 gravity beam and a tier 15 gravity beam besides scale. You could basically remove DR from this and have a perfectly fine guide for the actual weapon submission on the other page. But by saying that only a tier 15 gravity beam acts this way is bizarre. Judging by the descriptions in the article it's describing the same things you can do with a tractor beam.
 
It is saying a tier 15 beam acts this way, and isn’t saying anything about tier 0-14. This is intended to be linked to by the devices that have this weapon mode so having a defined DR is important.

While a tier 14 beam would act the same way, I think eventually you’d get to a point where the beam doesn’t heat up the target a lot and just shakes it, eventually acting like a saw almost. An even lower level beam might just cause nausea or disorientation. I’m not really wanting to get into all the specifics of that right now so I’m keeping the focus narrow.
 
Maybe, but suppose I created a Tier 15 water gun that operates by shooting a pressurized stream of water. It's no different than a dollar store squirt gun, it's just the scale that has changed. It seems unnecessary to make entire article dedicated to just one tier level of a universal concept. I would prefer to see this information copy-pasted into the final weapon so that the weapon can be approved as an entire concept rather than just a theory and maybe later we can compile information from other graviton projection type items to make a technology article. This will greatly increase the quality of both articles.
 
I would disagree about how similar a tier 0 and a tier 15 water gun are.

At a low level, tier 0, a water gun would just make you wet.

At tier 1-2 a water gun might be like a firehose. It would knock you over / injure you by impact, but wouldn’t be super fatal.

A tier 5ish water jet would act like those industrial cutting machines. It could slice into you and amputate your arm.

A Tier 15 water jet would be the end of days. You wouldn’t even get wet. You likely wouldn’t even get water on you. As the water passes through the atmosphere it would be moving so fast that it would fuse with the molecules in the air. Depending on how far away from the water stream you are you would either be cooked alive just from watching, or flash-boiled, exploded, and then exploded again when the pressure wave hit.

Maybe this should be paired with an overall gravity manipulation article / guide, and then have the beam types and strengths as separate articles?
 
That does sound better, as long as we don't have 15 different articles. Damage description is already required for every weapon submission, so there is no need to detail every single tier. Otherwise things might get copy Pasty
 
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