============ OGREverse list, May 14th (Last: May 8th) ============= ===== Proposed names for armor units From: Steve Jackson ===== Ogre Book second edition From: Steve Jackson ===== Ogre Mini JPEGs From: Steve Jackson ===== Spamming of Ogre Message boards From: Trey Palmer ===== Conventional firearms in a vacuum From: "Coates, Clinton" ===== GURPS OGRE From: Servitor@aol.com ===== OGREs as three letter words From: Nyrath the nearly wise ===== Ogre Luna Rationalizations (LONG!) From: "William Spencer" From: "O'Donnell, Patrick" ===== Map Symbols From: SRKOALA@aol.com ------------------------------ From: Steve Jackson Subject: Proposed names for armor units If anybody can shoot holes in any of these, or has a far better idea, let me know direct to sj@io.com (don't wait for the next edition of the mailing list) - because GURPS OGRE goes to bed soon. Combine: HVY - Lee (this was a WWII tank, but we could say that's on purpose) SHVY - Alamo (fortress); Ohio (after the battleship class) MSL - Banshee LT - Yankee GEV - Raptor LGEV - Gremlin GEV-PC - Mercury, Roadrunner HWZ - Crockett (name was used for a US missile system in 1950s) MHWZ - Bigfoot (to be cute) or Sioux CRAWLER - Unity Paneuro: HVY - Dunkirk SHVY - Thor MSL - Wolfhound LT - Hammer (which is German for "hammer") GEV - Galahad LGEV - Corbeau (French for "raven") Or Cossack. GEV-PC - Napoleon, or Seguro (spanish for "Reliable") HWZ - Arquebus MHWZ - Eisenfaust CRAWLER - Draco ----- [I thought the Fench favored the Lt Tank. Why would they give it a German name instead of something like Jerry Louis? -HJC] ------------------------------ From: Steve Jackson Subject: Ogre Book second edition 98% of the material we'd put in this book has already gone up on the web. I'd welcome comments here - should we not even bother to put out a second edition, or would it be worthwhile considering that there would be revisions, commentary, some new material, illustrations, and the whole thing would be in one place in hardcopy? ------------------------------ From: Steve Jackson Subject: Ogre Mini JPEGs In late 1997, somebody sent me some nice JPEGs of the Combine HVY, MSL and HWZ. But I don't seem to have saved their cover letter - at least, I can't find it now. How embarrassing. At any rate, if the creator of those JPEGs is reading this, please contact me! Steve Jackson - yes, of SJ Games - yes, we won the Secret Service case Learn Web or die - http://www.sjgames.com/ - dinosaurs, Lego, Kahlua! The heck with PGP keys; finger for Geek Code. Fnord. ------------------------------ From: Trey Palmer Subject: Spamming of Ogre Message boards Henry, First, thanks for taking the time to read this email. I appreciate it. Second, you're doing an amazing job, which is also appreciated. However there is one little problem - the Ogre message boards ( http://www.sjgames.com/ogre/board/ )keep getting spammed. Is there anything you can do to filter out the noise there? I've also sent another version to kira as well. Thanks much, ===== Bowden "Trey" Palmer Sneering at something is an admission to failure. You are claiming superior talent or insight ... but declining to use it. The best way to "sneer" at something, if you must, is to improve or out do it. ----- [Sorry, it's beyound my control. If I had the time to read SJG's web site, I wouldn't have been surprised to find the new edition of GURPS Japan I've been asking for in the local gamestore. -HJC] ------------------------------ From: "Coates, Clinton" Subject: Conventional firearms in a vacuum Hi Henry, Some interesting points are raised: >Assume you have an Earth weapon that fires a chemical (gunpowder >derivative) charge. The projectile ways, I dunno, 10 oz. The rifling and >sights on the rifle are (I presume) set for a certain ballistic formula for >bullet drop (there's that atmosphere and gravity thing again). Take that >gun to the moon. First of all, you'd have to figure out a casing that has >an O2 charge in it to make it fire, or encase the gun in an oxygen tank. >Next, what happens to the bullet when it fires? Does it retain accuracy in >a weightless environment and vacumn? Lets take these points one at a time (Heinlein dealt with this stuff in "Rocketship Galileo": 1) Rifling and sights are set for a certain ballistic formula. Rifling will have no change. Rifling imparts a spin to the projectile in order to stabilize it so that the bullet keeps proper orientatin while it is bulling its way through the atmosphere. If a bullet tilts off axis in an atmosphere, it looses all semblence of accuracy. In a vacuum, the bullet could be going sideways and it will still describe the same ballistic trajectory as if it was going point first, since it has no external force acting on it. The spin is barely affected by air (fire a .50 BMG straight up, the bullets stop at some point wayyyyy up there and fall back down base first...hissing wiht the huge rpms (second hand information from a cousin in armour)). As far as sights go, it is a trivial task to calculate/test and change the sighting for rifles. Most military rifles right now have an effective "point blank" range of around 200-300 metres. This range would simply be extended. If anything, it would be easier to calculate this stuff as you would have no velocity reduction to mess up your calculations. It becomes a simple high school physics quiestion. To figure out the drop at some range, all you would need is the velocity of the bullet (a constant) and the gravitational force acting on the bullet. Doing the same thing on earth is a bit more difficult as you have an additional variable of the projectile's delta V from atmospheric drag (and the drag is not constant, it changes with the velocity). 2) Gun powder does not require atmospheric oxygen to work. The whole shebang is already stuffed into the case in a chemical form, oxidizer and oxidizee mixed together. A loaded round of ammunition is generally stuffed absolutely full of powder and has very little airspace, certainly not enough to sustain any kind of significant reaction. Guns can be fired under water as well. 3) A rifle would be more accurate in a vacuum. Accuracy in a rifle is the inverse of a sum of several variables, including internal, mechanical oness like pressure on the barrel, headspace, powder charge/bullet consistency, how consistent the shooter holds the firearm etc. The big external problem in shooting is wind. Good shooters are able to hold an "accurate" rifle to a point where a ten round groups into a circle about 0.10" at 100 yards. Add a 10 mph wind in there, and that group could open up to 2-3 inches or more, depending on the bullet and velocity. At really long ranges there are other bizarre things like the Magnus effect, where the spinning of the projectile interacts with the atmosphere to pull it off course as well. Long range shots would be dependent only on the shooters ability to hold the firearm properly, the proper estimation of range, and the rifle/ammo system's inherent accuracy. Now to the good stuff ;-), the downsides to all this: 1) temperature. MOdern firearms are designed to work more or less in an envelope of temperature ranging from about -40 C to +60 C. Get to the extremes of these ranges and the firearms get pretty cranky. Tolerances change as different parts change temperature. WHen you heat a rifle up, the ammunition heats up as well. Hot ammunition tends towards higher pressures than cold ammunition. So a load set to work in Virginia in the fall on deer might not shoot to the same point of aim in the Sahara at high noon in the summer. Take it to extremes and the pressure can reach dangerous levels. Now on the moon, you are going to get some pretty wild temperature swings which would, I think, play havoc with standard firearms. I do not know what would happen to a rifle soaked in -150 celcius for awhile then fired, but I would not want to be nearby. Likewise, one soaked at +150 or whavever the moon gets to during its "day". 2) vacuum welding. One probelm with unprotected metals in a vacuum is that they like to stick together. I am sure we can think of some other interseting problems, but to my mind, these are the two biggies. I could see a "first" military expedition to the moon using conventional weapons keeping the firearms in some kind of protective/reflective sack to keep the operating temperaturs within some reasonalbe range. I think that the vacuum welding thing can be dealt with with some innovative dry lubricants, probably also with frequent excercising of the firearms action. NOte that I bet plastic stocked rifles may not do so well in the temperature extremes. It owuld be cool to see the military de mothball 100 year old wood stocked M14 rifles becuase they would work better in a vacuum/temperature extreme environment than the latest whiz bang assault rifle... Just some thoughts. Clinton ------------------------------ From: Servitor@aol.com Subject: GURPS OGRE GURPS OGRE?!?! This is a belated April Fools, right? No? Hmmm.... Wonder if I could/should drop my unfinished G.E.V. JOCKEY RPG into your unsuspecting laps... best, flunky ----- [Please see: http://www.sjgames.com/ogre/ (Yes, the page has been updated, don't ask me how! ;-) -HJC] ------------------------------ From: Nyrath the nearly wise Subject: OGREs as three letter words TAZ said: > I think the difference is in the user interface. Bolos are sages > of war and interface well with humanity. OGREs, even if human > learned to care about them, would have names that are hard as steel. > Like Bastion of Blood (aka BOB), Widowmaker, Sword of Vengence, > Steel City Killer, etc. It entirely possible that they might give > names to each other, Ninety Eight Percent Kill Ratio. Heh. In Iain Bank's "Culture" novels, the huge warships have very off-beat names. There was a contest on one of the newsgroups about a year ago to name a Culture ship. Some of the names would do nicely as Ogre names: Collateral Damage Not In My Back Yard I've Added You to my Kill-File Factoring the Prime Directive Picturesque, If Ultimately Lethal Oops. Candygram for Mongo Extreme Prejudice General Protection Fault War Office, Wanna Fight? The Weather ( as in: "Everybody talks about The Weather but nobody does anything about it...") He Went Mad, So I Shot Him Let Us Prey Clear and Present Danger Sufficiently Long Lever "Look, I'm a Plowshare!" You Look like a Nail Happy Birthday! Would you like fries with that? They looked hostile to me... Nasty Brutish and Short No Rest for the Wicked Peace Sells, But It's Really Too Damn Expensive Sorry, My Trigger Finger Slipped Nothing Up My Sleeve Funny Meeting You Here Come on, Everybody's Doing It ----- [OK, as long as you don't name that OGRE "Speaker to Animals". -HJC] ------------------------------ From: "William Spencer" Subject: Ogre Luna Rationalizations (LONG!) >From: "Walter O'Hara" >1) Why would units be fighting on the moon at all? Isn't it a whole lot >cheaper to fight back on Earth? > >2) How would all those ground units get there? The other mailing list I'm on, the Ground Zero Games list (makers of the space combat game Full Thrust, which I play, and ground-pounder games Dirtside and Stargrunt, which I haven't yet), has been discussing this lately - in a real, hard science fiction universe, there's almost no way to get interstellar wars started...the costs are far too high! (You need materials for ships and fuel, power for thrust, a workable FTL drive, and all of these cheap enough to make colonies in other solar systems viable before you can even THINK about starting a war...and even then, it would be mere skirmishes - no armadas, no armies...no fun, for a wargame!) So, we cover it up with the term "sci-fi" and pretend it works. :) I don't see chemical >charged weapons (which would require a great deal of modification to work >in >a vacumn) to be very effective. Why? Well, ballistics would be very >different on small arms. I'm not a physicist, so this is a very general >hand wave: Assume you have an Earth weapon that fires a chemical (gunpowder >derivative) charge. The projectile ways, I dunno, 10 oz. The rifling and >sights on the rifle are (I presume) set for a certain ballistic formula for >bullet drop (there's that atmosphere and gravity thing again). Take that >gun to the moon. First of all, you'd have to figure out a casing that has >an O2 charge in it to make it fire, or encase the gun in an oxygen tank. >Next, what happens to the bullet when it fires? Does it retain accuracy in >a weightless environment and vacumn? > Guns in vacuum: from all I've heard and read, nothing will stop bullets from firing in vacuum, because the propellant doesn't require oxygen to combust. (Or it already includes its own supply.) Admittedly, vacuum might cause parts of the gun to seize up or act screwy (no air-cooled guns, folks!), but that can be fixed by special design - and you already said that Lunar equipment cost more. Or perhaps, the effects could be included as part of the problem of generally keeping equipment going in a hostile environment. The bullet itself should be fine - no atmosphere to slow it down, less gravity (the moon isn't weightless) to pull it down. The REAL problems in low-G are: Gunsmoke. "Smokeless" powder isn't really smokeless - in low-gravity, the expelled gases would float around for a while, getting in your way. Annoying, but since visual targeting is obsolete in OGRE, no problem. Recoil. This might be weird - I'm not sure if its mass or weight that is the deciding factor in absorbing recoil. However, I thought that OGRE weapons were railguns, not firearms, so the only problem is recoil. (And even that's reduced if you use "recoilless" weapons.) I've >always read that these grandiose "space explosions" we've seen on Galactica >and Star Wars, etc. are so much bunk. Things don't blow up that way in a >vacumn. Does this effect "submunitions explosions"? I would consider this >questionable. SHADIS magazine (now, alas, defunct) ran an article about this one...wish I remembered which issue it was. Basically, stuff still explodes, just differently from the way you see it on TV. For one thing, no sound, except a CRACK! as the shockwave passes you (if it hasn't dispersed by then). You can have fireballs if you ignite fuel or atmosphere, but they'd disperse differently in zero-G. Shrapnel in zero-G and vacuum will keep going for a long, long way - but it will have dispersed by the time it reaches a distance target. Concussion will probably be reduced - no atmosphere to press. The physics of explosions and chemical reactions still work, whether in gravity or no, vacuum or no. Stuff still explodes. Just somewhat differently, due to the different atmosphere and gravitation; but it still explodes. William Spencer williamspencer@hotmail.com ----- From: "O'Donnell, Patrick" Subject: Ogre Luna Rationalizations (LONG!) 1) Why would units be fighting on the moon at all? Isn't it a whole lot cheaper to fight back on Earth? One doesn't really have to go into Sci-Fi mode for this one. H^3 is what you are looking for. To the best of my understanding it is supposed to be the "Best" fuel for fusion. The moons surface is repleat with it. H^3 "Crawler" like mining vehicles need only scrape up "Moon-Dirt" from the surface ... process the H^3 out of it ... and dump the remains in the whole that was just dug. He who owns the vehicle at "Harvest Time" gets the resource. All others get to produce more H^3 mining crawlers and start out in the whole. This in and of itself is reason enough. Add to this the fact that scientists now believe there is enough water in the form of ice at the Lunar north and south polls to sustain life and you have your fuel for the factories (H^3) in the original post and precious water for humans. Furtherstill, in the realm of the purely theoretical is the idea that better micro-chips can be built out of the leftovers of H^3 depleted moon-dirt (Harvest Time gets even more meaningful). Hmmmmmm ... (REAL)untapped resources ... possible limited sustainable life support ... a race of beings who seem at times more willing to kill than to wheel and deal let alone talk ... Need I say more? This seems to be a no-brainer at first, since the Moon (from what we know of it) seems to be a worthless hunk of rock. This view has changed just recently. See above. ... If there's some commodity that could profitably be created in zero-g, wouldn't the Moon be a better site for factories than a space ... This comes much later, of course. The colonozation and resource control wars are the first scenarios. (Read that not a lot of established bases just a lot of sudden death from sudden depressurazation of your battle-suit.) PJ ----- [You can get a lot more heavy hydrogen out of the oceans. It stands out in Lunar samples because there's so little hydrogen there. -HJC] ------------------------------ From: SRKOALA@aol.com Subject: Map Symbols > here were symbols for individual units (like, a single tank instead of a > squadron of them): are there symbols for singular GEVs? (Either today, or > in someone's imagination.) Use a size modifer, for a single unit it's a dot on top of the box. > Should there be a separate symbol for unarmored infantry ("militia")? If > so, what should it be? Designate the standard inf as "heavy," make the right line heavy. > And, of course, what should I use to represent OGREs? I used the armor > symbol, but added a dot-in-a-triangle (looks like an eye-in-the-pyramid) > symbol to stand for "artificial intelligence"; the same could be used to > represent BOPPERs or other automated units. (Thus, three lances of AI > tanks are probably a dozen Jack Boppers or Tiny Boppers and not a dozen > Mark V's.) take something from the UAVs. -Stephen ----- [UAVs have separate map symbols? I thought they where considered parts of recon units. -HJC] Henry J. Cobb ogre@sjgames.com http://www.io.com/~hcobb All OGRE-related items Copyright (c) 2000, by Steve Jackson Games.