Math problem

[Zparkz]

I am in the process of writing some software for designing starships with sub editors for weaponry.

I need an easy way to calculate how many laser arrays of radius X I can get into a mount that can hold an array up to radius Y, thus giving the mount several arrays to fire with at a single target.

I post here as this is a FF&S based problem, thus more interesting for the TNE crowd.

 

[Scott Martin]

How accurate do you really want this to be?

Perhaps a better question would be "Why are you doing this?" If the answer to this question is because in TNE you are (much) better off with 10 weapons on a single mount than having a single mount with 10x the ROF, then you may want to consider adopting a "house rule" that lets you reduce your autofire diff mod to any level you want, and increase the number of hits by that factor (so if your ROF is 100 and you fire it with no diff mod, AKA as a ROF 10 mount, if you hit, score 10 hits)

Failing that, I could give you the complex math for hexagonal close packed focal arrays, or I could tell you that you are fairly safe if you only use 50% of the available area of the mount for emitter arrays. (so a 4 m diameter mount can hold ~8 1 M arrays, or 2 2 m arrays... )

If you need more than that break them into "cells": a 3m diameter array can actually hold 7x1m arrays in a "hexagonal" pattern and this can be expanded out (so a 9 m array can hold 7 patterns of 7 cells of 1 m each etc.) basically figure out your diameter, determine how many arrays can fit across it and calculate the number of "cells" available.

Scott Martin