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Gravity Bombs

Posted: Sun Nov 16, 2014 7:35 pm
by drewkitty ~..~
I am looking for anywhere there is a listing for gravity bombs, size & damage listings in any of the PB Gamebooks.

Re: Gravity Bombs

Posted: Sun Nov 16, 2014 8:47 pm
by eliakon
I don't think there IS such a thing as a 'Gravity Bomb' in any book. Your well into 'making stuff up' territory there.

Re: Gravity Bombs

Posted: Sun Nov 16, 2014 10:48 pm
by glitterboy2098
depends on what you define gravity bomb as..

i've seen that used for 'Iron bombs', that is freefalling explosive ordinance. those are, according to palladium, the same as missiles but -4 to strike and range is "overhead" (so a minibomb uses minimissile stats, a light bomb srm, etc)

in the military, a gravity bomb is a kind of hypothetical kinetic impactor.. basically a mass of metal dropped from a high altitude, high speed aircraft (or even a spacecraft in some proposals), which inflicts damage from pure kinetic energy. the 'gravity' name is to reflect it's arc and final speed is controleld by earth's gravity.

palladium does not have stats for those.

if your talking about a weapon that uses gravity for damage.. the closest you get to that is the singularity cruise missiles employed by the transgalactic Empire, found in both the Anvil galaxy and fleets sourcebooks.

Re: Gravity Bombs

Posted: Mon Nov 17, 2014 3:14 pm
by drewkitty ~..~
glitterboy2098 wrote:depends on what you define gravity bomb as..

i've seen that used for 'Iron bombs', that is free-falling explosive ordinance. those are, according to palladium, the same as missiles but -4 to strike and range is "overhead" (so a mini-bomb uses mini-missile stats, a light bomb SRM, etc)

PB uses the term gravity bomb for these, and these are what I meant.

in the military, a gravity bomb is a kind of hypothetical kinetic impactor.. basically a mass of metal dropped from a high altitude, high speed aircraft (or even a spacecraft in some proposals), which inflicts damage from pure kinetic energy. the 'gravity' name is to reflect it's arc and final speed is controlled by earth's gravity. ...snip

These a K.E.W.'s or Kinetic Energy Weapons. The 1st time I encountered this concept was in the Heinlein book "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress".
These are easy enough to calculate the damage for. Using height or speed it can be done canoncally with in the PB rules sets. It is determining the Terminal velocity that is a bit tricky. The drag cross section is something I had to do by fiat when trying to figure things out for a char of mine a few years ago. But determining the Term.V is not something that the rules really care about.