[Torg] Weapons and long range contradictions

[Kansas Jim]

bill writes:

>  From my experience of using a laser pointer, the laser beam is always 
> connected to its emitter. So a laser gun wouldn't need to cause a LRC 
> anyway.

Yeah, I thought about bringing up how 'realistic' of a laser weapon
we wanted to go with but decided to leave it for later. If we're going
with the typical sci-fi kind of laser weapon, it'll shoot individual
bolts and we have a situation analogous to bullets. A more realistic
take on lasers and we'd instead have a continuous beam, the effect stays
connected to the weapon (and thus to the user) until you stop firing it.
It doesn't help that the Cyberpapacy SB uses both beam and bolt to
describe what's fired out of its laser weapons. (Tharkold doesn't say
either way.)

> Plasma cannon would be another matter..

Yeah. For simplicity's sake I rule that all plasma weapons create
LRCs since their bolts explode when they hit something, affecting
a blast radius. Based on the descriptions though, it's a little more
complicated than that.

Tharkold's plasma weapons are definitely LRCs, the plasma bolt is
contained by a magnetic bottle until it hits something and then the
bottle collapses, releasing the pressurised plasma which explodes out.
The LRC there is actually not the explosion but keeping the bottle
closed while it's travelling from gun to target.

The Cyberpapacy's plasma weapons though might be functioning more
like a flamethrower, the plasma ball flows through an ionized tunnel
of air (created by a low-power continuous laser beam) from the weapon
to the target and then instead of exploding it's probably more like
a splash effect when the plasma exits the tunnel and hits the target.
The ionized tunnel and the laser beam that creates it suggest that
it's always connected to the user so wouldn't be a LRC at all.

-- 
Kansas Jim, Torg guru (ksjim (at) sdc (dot) org)
Torg website: http://www.sdc.org/~ksjim/index.html