Gauss Vehicle Cannons and Artillery (Mid-Tech)

[Pratapon51]

Another thread mentions the imbalance of high tech level weaponry and I'd like to add my own suggestions to fill out the tree in my own thread.

(Charged) Gauss Vehicle Cannon
As with shields, it's strange that we can employ coilguns for personal infantry but not versions large enough to field on an armored vehicle. They would fill the niche of a highly-specialized version of a conventional HV gun that has even poorer soft attack ability but greater hard attack and AP, able to easily knock out unshielded vehicles fielding Liquid Armor without being greatly outgunned by vehicles using Laser Guns. Additionally, they would have lower ammo per shot cost than conventional guns, but require some energy for greater effect. Naturally, AT guns and Automated Turrets can also field this type of weaponry.

(Charged) Gauss Artillery
Higher-tech artillery fielded as a different model than conventional artillery. Computer-assisted targeting allows precise placement of inert shells at extreme range comparable to rocket artillery, but suffer from a greater attack penalty without sufficient reconnaissance. High-energy kinetic projectiles are effective for wearing down shielding and destroying hardened targets, but are relatively inefficient versus soft targets and their effectiveness when directly engaged is poor. Damage to assets is significantly lower than other artillery options, which may be a double-edged sword.


These options would also add to the arsenal of navies once we have those implemented in the future, so we can field battleships with massive railguns. [8D]

[demiare]

Railgun artillery is impossible on a world with ~earth-like atmosphere (ICBM warhead arrive at sealevel with a mere 2-3M despite it's initial speed over 3-6 km/s). Vehicle cannons will be nice to have, yes.

[gmsitton]

I agree that gauss artillery would not be ballistic, but line-of-sight.

[Malevolence]

Agree that Gauss "artillery" makes little sense. Railgun/gauss would be nice for orbital bombardment however, at some interesting percentage of c.

[demiare]

ORIGINAL: Malevolence

Railgun/gauss would be nice for orbital bombardment however, at some interesting percentage of c.

Microwave energy transmitter will be much, much better. Your regime prosper and enemies dying. Beautiful huh?

[Pratapon51]

I'm not really familiar with the science making such weapons impractical, but I did understand that the US Navy was interested in using railguns (with shells packed with submunitions) for indirect fire as well as direct fire. It's hard to see how successful they are in that pursuit since there are no practical models yet.