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[origin] Variable Plasma Carbine

I'd give the submission a brush over again, I saw a tiny bit of missing grammar. Also. By pierce armor, you mean 'melt', right? A thinner, more tightly compacted beam could do that as it would be more densely concentrated. Also. Piercing shields isn't exactly gone over in the Damage rating system. As it stands, you'll have to batter them down.

You'd just have a smaller AoE in terms of pin-point damage.
 
I have a question about this:

When unconnected, the VPC has enough plasma for twenty shots.
Click to expand...
How would the carbine get charged? Or is this only after its been powered up by a frame? Might be nice to have a charging station to allow it to be used in stand alone? And what about an optional vehicle mount to allow it to be added to armored vehicles?

Actually you could get away with giving it two different color beams at least in the description. As the piercing mode would have a very different energy signature.
 
Plasma as a super-heated gas wouldn't last very long (it'd cool) unless a constant flow is being given, or it had a small compressed 'gas tank' or outboard system to gather the necessary gas and or particulate matter as it were, with a power supply to heat it.
 
Ideally, you want to set some magnetic stabilizers on the end of the barrel (traditionally reperesented as south/northpole prongs like a tuning fork (you should recognize them) to achieve fairly basic performance you've outlined.

If you don't, the round density will be low and performance far closer to a vapor than a cohesive round (think flamethrower).


The notion of a gas-tank is also important unless you're combusting ultra-pressurized air (breaking the hydrogen from the oxygen and nitrogen chemically to get your plasma -- Which is a very immature technology almost noone has looked into (and hence any early "breaker/distilleries" will be quite unwieldy) witht the exception of the AMX-102 (which uses purified water, not air) so you really do need a fuel/munitions tank.
Think of it like a fuel tank full of non-volatile materials so you can armor and ultra-compress it so it's at something like 2000PSI (appr. 45lbs per cubic inch, using maybe 0.3 pounds per round you fire).

It might be worth integrating this into the rifle or having multiple tanks or even mounting it into a shield assembly or those thin rod-like tanks you'll know from Neue Ziel or Hi Nu.


If you want to mess with EM shielding, you'll be using plasma which has been electrically excited to carry an electrical charge which when it hits the barrier will disrupts it (perhaps not immediately).

The science behind this (if you're curious):

  • That disruption I mentioned deals stress on the shield generator manifold which has to cope with the backflow - sort of like pouring a different fuel into an engine so it has to work harder alongside the regular mixture, running that "bad fuel" out until the engine can return to normal performance.

    Working harder makes the manifold get very hot and it may need to go into emergency cooling or the charge may destabilize the field - to carry our metaphor over, the bad fuel creates a bad compression in the cylinder it wasn't built to handle and makes the engine either stall or blows the cylinder.

I hope that helps :)
 
Well, the question of how the plasma can be heated without a direct cable is up in the air too I imagine. If the plasma will cool quickly, you could likely re-heat it with concentrated microwaves to heat the gasses again. :?
 
Are we even sure that the plasma would cool that quickly, unless in atmosphere? I mean, the only way to lose heat in space is through radiation, which is kinda inefficient as we all know.

Hey, the laws of thermodynamics are working FOR me now.
 
In space the issue has nothing to do with the plasma losing its energy ('heat'), the issue is that you have a bolt of extremely high pressure matter traveling through a region of extremely low pressure. The bolt would fall apart incredibly fast. This is why any realistic plasma weapon fires a beam with a near-c velocity so that it can cover a useful distance before dissipating.

In a atmosphere the beam will also dissipate very, very rapidly, due to a combination of friction with the air and the above issue of the beam being very high pressure.

Really, the 'temperature' (which is really just a way of describing the average kinetic motion of the gas) is not the primary damaging factor of plasma weapons; it is the kinetic energy of the impact. Since the bolt is composed of plasma it exacerbates the damage since it can penetrate far more in to the target than a stream of un-ionized atoms would (and also makes most targets radioactive).

As said above the easiest way to solve this problem is to increase the velocity of the energy bolt.
 
I like this version better than the original. Good job, Five.

Anything else that needs to be addressed, or is this thing good to go?
 
RPG-D RPGfix
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