============ OGREverse list, Sep 2nd (Last: Aug 29th) ============= ===== BPC manufacture and damage From: bryan rombough From: Alan E and Carmel J Brain From: jkajpust@concentric.net ===== Crushed Minis From: Servitor@aol.com ------------------------------ From: bryan rombough Subject: BPC manufacture and damage > From: Steve Jackson > > I always believed that it was cast in very big units. But some parts can't > be BPC and must be fastened on somehow. Weld? Glue? Rivet? Rivets? Good Lord no! Not only are they ugly, they're a liability, back when tanks had steel armour attached by rivetting shots which may not have penetrated the armour but hit the rivets caused the head inside the tank to shear off and ricochet around like a bullet, imagine the force of a tac-nuke near miss causing all the rivets on one side of a tank to do that...ugh. Casting the armour as one big piece sounds attractive, but how do you deal with battle damage in the field? If the material is homogenous you could simply fill the hole, if it's layered you might want to produce the material in sheets so you could remove the damaged sections and replace them. > And what does damage look like on BPC? It's a biphase material . . . it is > more likely to look TORN than shattered. Of course, it could melt, or it > could be crushed. Thoughts? I imagine hits from nukes and HEAT weapons melting the material, while kinetic weapons would tear the stuff. Bryan ----- From: Alan E and Carmel J Brain Subject: BPC manufacture and damage > [Hmmm... Diamond can't be formed at ordinary pressures because the > graphite type "flat" bonds (as used in Buckyballs) are stronger than the > 3D bonds used in Diamond. Diamond is more compact and so is favored at > very high pressures. -HJC] ...unless you use nanomachines, or (closer to today's technology) a molecular sieve and template. Razor blades with no need to sharpen ever are a common (laboratory only at the moment) application. I attended a lecture by Robert L Forward back in 86 that gave predicted the use of assembled (as opposed to "squeezed and pressed") diamond sheets before 2020. Right now the best we can do is a few trillion molecules thick, not enough to do more than apply a super thin coat at radical expense. ----- From: jkajpust@concentric.net Subject: BPC manufacture and damage For what ever reason, I've always pictured BPC armour as looking something like blueboard foam. The surface would look more like concrete than metal. That bi-phase word brings to mind something without a grain or fiber -- nothing like fiberglass. I think it would be moulded into shape. It would be a slurry type compound that when poured into mold would harden into something tough, hard, and light. That would make it easy to patch in the field -- just mix up some extra solution and pour it into place. The patch wouldn't have the strength of a large monolithic molding though and would probably tend to chip or fall off. Jim Kajpust - Personal Responsibility - Personal Freedoms Michigan - http://www.concentric.net/~jkajpust ------------------------------ From: Servitor@aol.com Subject: Crushed Minis In a message dated 8/29/99 3:36:19 PM Eastern Daylight Time, hcobb@io.com writes: << [Please don't mention destroying the minis after it's taken this long to see them created! -HJC] >> Oops! Perhaps I should not mention my extensive collection of smacked up Martian Metal HVYs, GEVs, MSLs, HWZs and a MK V that I use for hulks (cringe). Yes everyone, I'm STILL working on the website (grumble, grumble. This must be revenge for that "pester Steve" faux pas.) best, flunky ------------------------------ [I was thinking of submitting a Murpy's Rules about how in Battlesuit armored troopers have at least twice the firepower of unarmored troopers, but in Ogre Minis the two units have the same firepower. (See my webpage for one possible solution, and click on that furry guy please...) But then I noticed that the game that really needs a point formula is Battlesuit, because the relative costs or values is never listed. The reason I dug up Battlesuit is because of the Starship Troopers computer puppet TV show. (4:30 AM weekday mornings, Sci-Fi channel. "Bug Rafting" will never mean the same thing again.) Hmmm.... Anybody got the Battlesuit stats for the Chitin-I bugs? -HJC] Henry J. Cobb ogre@sjgames.com http://www.io.com/~hcobb All OGRE-related items Copyright (c) 1999, by Steve Jackson Games.