Categorized by who, the Imperial government? Local governments vary, some care, some don't. There are a handful of worlds - Efate, for example - with the tech and population base to manufacture high tech weaponry and law levels low enough to not care who buys them. Imperial government could possibly screen for them as folk came into the starport from the local town, but they'd have to keep people from landing outside the starport to keep such arms from being sold and taken off-world. Broadsword's contingent included fusion gunners in battle dress, and the rest carried gauss rifles with integral grenade launchers. I don't think the Imperial government cares how you arm yourself, so long as it doesn't involve nukes.
Musings on the humble ACR
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Categorized by who, the Imperial government? Local governments vary, some care, some don't. There are a handful of worlds - Efate, for example - with the tech and population base to manufacture high tech weaponry and law levels low enough to not care who buys them. Imperial government could possibly screen for them as folk came into the starport from the local town, but they'd have to keep people from landing outside the starport to keep such arms from being sold and taken off-world. Broadsword's contingent included fusion gunners in battle dress, and the rest carried gauss rifles with integral grenade launchers. I don't think the Imperial government cares how you arm yourself, so long as it doesn't involve nukes.
Condottiere
SOC-14 5K
Since gauss rifles are the primary smallarms of unpowered armoured troops. technological level thirteen and above, as I recall.
ACRs are full-auto, and thus banned at LL3, along with most other military type weapons. LL4 takes care of any remaining doubts, as SMG's and Assault Rifles go away.
Expect end use certs needed for them if being bought on a LL4+ world.
mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
Yup, according to LBB:4 TL12 is when they are introduced as sniper weapons and for specialist use since they are expensive.
TL13 is general issue to unpowered troops.
IYTU you can do that, but are you explaining it by way of them having received or inherited advanced technology that enables gauss weapons? They could generally be TL 9 or 10, but with magnetics and the other necessary fields they could be 12 or 13 (if you subscribe to the T5 TL stage effects). That could add some really interesting other possibilities to the campaign
We could have Gauss weapons now but the power supply just isn't there yet for man portable ones.
Quite true. A very significant energy storage technology is really all that is needed. While this would also help lasers, I think gauss weapons are more useful to the average soldier than a laser rifle.
Lasers are absurdly easy to defend against. High Velocity impact very much less so.
Condottiere
SOC-14 5K
Going by the technology level improvement table, gauss technology becomes more energy efficient and/or miniaturized.
Note in FF&S Gauss weaponry starts at TL10. And nowhere in Book4 does say that there can't be lower tech Gauss weapons, just their performance would be the same as the listed model. Also consider that Laser weapons exist at lower tech levels and as such there is no reason early gauss weapons couldn't exist. I have often allowed the ACR to be a Gauss weapon as well.
Also note the VRF Gauss gun is a TL10 weapon as well.
Note both Mass drivers and the VRF Gauss gun are both available at TL10, so why not a lower powered Gauss weapon. A less than Ultimate option as the the listing describes the sole listing.
mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
You have to scale down the materials technology and the energy storage density has to improve by a couple of orders of magnitude.
There are folks putting up youtube videos of homemade gauss rifles - not powerful enough to be lethal but certainly powerful enough to break things. I don't doubt that a well funded R&D programme could make a usable gauss rifle with a E0 in the 2kj range. Battery technology is moving forward by leaps and bounds nowadays.
However, if you view it in the light of today's requirements it's a solution in search of a problem, just like liquid propellants or even caseless rounds.
The reason for this is that the current technology (cased rounds propelled by smokeless propellant) is considered to be fit for purpose. The weapons themselves are simple (3-4 moving parts in the main action) and therefore cheap to produce, reliable and easy to maintain in the field. Current tech is not viewed as problematic - the closest thing to this is various folks wanting better long range performance and coming up with cartridges like 6.8mm SPC. However, these cartridges can be fired by a modified AR so there is no driver for any fundamental technological change.
If you need to penetrate more armour with a given technological capability then you need more power. In context, a 5.56mm round has about 1.8kj of energy at the muzzle. A 7.62mm x51 round has about double that at 3.5kj or so. The practical limits of this sort of tech (for an autoloading battle rifle) would be something like 9.3x64, which goes up to about 6kj.
From the references available on the interwebs (with the appropriate caveats), a SVDK in 9.3x64 firing armour piercing ammunition is held to be effective against any body armour available today at 600m. As an aside, this is more powerful than the ballistics of either the ACR (2.2kj) or gauss rifle (4.5kj) as cited in LBB4.
In order for a gauss rifle (or other technology) to be worth developing it would (at the very least) have to offer a compelling advantage. More than likely the current technology would also have to reach some fundamental limit or be viewed as unfit for purpose in some way in order to create an appetite for change. I could really only see that happening if armour technology improved to the point that folks were considering a requirement for battle rifles with muzzle energy in the 10kj range or greater.
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Condottiere
SOC-14 5K
I think that armament procurement and doctrine is sort of fourth dimensional.
You are fighting your previous war, you are fighting your current war, you are trying to figure out how to continue to fight your current war, and you are trying to figure out how you'll fight your next war.
Against an insurrection, a super power tends to outperform in terms of logistics, but against a future near peer, it might become very important to outperform on economies of scale, so the other side bankrupts itself trying to keep up.
You are fighting your previous war, you are fighting your current war, you are trying to figure out how to continue to fight your current war, and you are trying to figure out how you'll fight your next war.
Against an insurrection, a super power tends to outperform in terms of logistics, but against a future near peer, it might become very important to outperform on economies of scale, so the other side bankrupts itself trying to keep up.
mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
Going by current trends in ammo advancement the Traveller ACR should probably have double the ammo capacity for the same cost and mass. Cased telescoping ammo appears to be a better bet than full caseless since the case takes away a lot of the heat management issues.
And it wouldn't require an over-complex mechanism like the G11.
Modern lithium ion cells are surprisingly dense, and the technology is moving forward really quickly. My phone power bank weighs less than half a kg (I think it has 4 18650 cells in it) and from the blurb on the package it holds about 360kj of energy (5vx20 amp-hours).
Even at less than 100% efficiency, that's enough to impart rifle bullet levels of kinetic energy to 100+ rounds and is equivalent in energy to the explosive yield of 85g of TNT. It's not hard to see why the authorities are getting toey about allowing big lithium ion batteries on flights.
Fast charge/discharge capabilities are also improving very quickly, and ultracapacitor tech is also undergoing rapid advancement.
Practically, to power something like a gauss rifle on fully automatic fire you would need something like 50kW, depending on the desired muzzle energy and the efficiency of the accelerator. Today, a high discharge 18650 can support drawing about 100w, and the batteries weigh about 45g each. With that capability (and assuming no scale efficiencies or heat dissipation problems) a 50kw battery pack would weigh 22kg and last about 3,600 rounds or 6 minutes of continuous firing.
On average, lithium ion battery tech is improving in capacity by about 8% per year, although at that rate it will be approaching the theoretical limits of the chemistry in 20 years or so. There is plenty of headroom in the discharge rates, although heat dissipation will become a problem.
If you put an ultracapacitor bank into the mix that could hold ready power for 10-100 rds (say one magazine) then you could have the ability to fire rapid bursts with a slower sustained rate of fire. It's not hard to envisage the tech being used to make a power pack weighing 5kg or so and capable of powering 1,000 rounds. It could be charged in an hour from a wall socket or a few minutes from something like an electric car charging point.
This tech could be available within a generation - possibly within the next few years - if someone came up with a requirement and a bucket of money for the R&D.
Timerover51
SOC-14 5K
Gauss Rifles do not eliminate the recoil energy of the firing weapon. The more energy you put into the projectile, the more recoil energy you are going to get.
You also then have to have some way of very rapidly charging the batteries.
You also then have to have some way of very rapidly charging the batteries.
Condottiere
SOC-14 5K
Gyrostabilizer would seem an appropriate addition.
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