It is absolutely ludicrous that you'd single out sandcasters as unrealistic in a game which also includes jump drive, gravitics, inertial dampners, psionics, light-second range lasers, comprehensible aliens, shirtsleeve biospheres, and dozens of other examples.
FTL drives of one sort or another, gravitics, psionics, lasers and so forth are staples of sci-fi and therefore, while difficult to imagine within the scope of current scientific knowledge, remain commonly accepted conventions. Same goes for shirtsleeve biospheres and comprehensible aliens (see Star Trek, among other sources). While the reader/viewer may objectively understand how unlikely they are (sometimes they don't), the reader/viewer suspends disbelief in the interest of the story - providing the story is good enough.
I don't know that clouds of ablative "sand" fit that description.
You take these issues awfully personally. Just out of curiousity, were you involved in the game's creation?
Personally, I think Bill's all wet about the HG/B2/Mayday trichotmy... they are supposedly the same setting, so the same match-up should have closely comparable results.
That they don't is a flaw, not a feature.
Further, that GDW won multiple awards is irrelevant when it is also clear they didn't do their homework on certain issues. Likewise, just because bill happily takes the designer's content with it as good doesn't mean any of the rest of us need to, nor even should.
Sand as written is f'ing magic... it makes only the barest sense, failing to be plausible to the science minded, and has 4 or 5 different treatments in canon...
My personal solution is to only allow it as missile defense, as the laser defense mode is bogus.
Who is Bill?
You are largely right. So is Whipsnade - in his typically abrasive way.
Yes, the awards are irrelevant. Yes, the conflicting treatments between game versions is a flaw - but it is hardly unique. You need not look far to find other evolving game systems where new rules made significant changes to the way the game world itself functioned, to the confusion and displeasure of the gamers playing that system. Easier to handwave away when playing a fantasy game, but I guarantee the affected players are equally discomfited.
However, my impression has always been that the game companies do this to answer the needs of different markets. Some folk like it quick-and-simple, others want a lot of detail. In the course of that, they seem more concerned that the game be internally consistent rather than consistent with previous versions - and they've frequently modified past conventions that players complained were problematic (often to the dismay of other players who relied heavily on those same conventions).
With respect to Book 2, the issue of sand offering absolute immunity to lasers (with sufficient stacking) was a problem, and playing out battles on a tabletop was tricky to impossible when the vectors involved got beyond a certain point. So, enter Book-5 - which finally gave us the big ships, gave us a simplified way to battle without need of living room floors to stage it on, and which reduced the effectiveness of sand. Also addressed concerns about the physics-defying immortality of sand clouds, though this may have been a side-effect rather than a goal. Did so imperfectly - why does one have to fire a separate sand battery against every laser battery fired from a single attacker, and how does one explain committing the sand battery only after the laser shoots? - but the imperfections tended to sacrifice "reality" to the goal of making the game flow more easily and be more enjoyable to the player. When the goal is to sell units, that tends to be the more profitable choice.
Which brings us to how Whipsnade is right: it's a game, not a simulation. It's made sacrifices of reality in the interest of playability. Play balance requires some sort of defense against lasers - else the game becomes, "Oh no, pirates," followed by your death as their nine lasers take a turn or two poking more holes in your hull than you can deal with and they match course with your drifting hulk to haul over cargo. There needs to be a SOMETHING that can be used to interfere with lasers and make the outcome less certain.
Most potential players would not have accepted a smokescreen-like barrier - any idiot knows a gas would rapidly expand away in vacuum. The designers thus chose sand - a solid dispersed in a cloud. Not a good choice for the detail-oriented technogamer, but the average person doesn't spend his day calculating volumes and dispersion rates. For the bulk of the community, it would be - and was - accepted with no more difficulty than those maneuver drives that put out so much thrust with little or no mass ejected. They - most of them - bought the game and played without giving it a second thought. Or they gave it a thought, frowned for a moment, and played on; anyone who's fought a battle recognizes their usefulness, even if one is troubled by the physics.
If it had been me, I'd have filled the canister with tiny reflective balloons, each filled with a drop of liquid so that, when the balloons entered vacuum, the liquid boiled up and the balloons expanded to form a better barrier against laser fire; remember, Book-2 was before Striker decided these things could cut through 20-30 feet of steel like butter (GAK!). It's easier to rewrite their explanations than to rewrite their rules. The bottom line is, for at least Book-2, they're a necessary part of play balance. Short of completely rewriting Book-2, we either invent our own handwavium explanation that allows us to play in comfort, or we drop it and are faced with players rolling up new characters every time they run into someone bigger than them.
