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Timothy Groves wrote:

>>     BTW, had you seen this pic (unofficial, but nice):
>> http://harrington.suewebik.net/obrazky/thomas/00027yzs.jpg
> 
> Yes, very nice.  :)
> 
> Sadly. the Fearless that I've been working up is still a stock
> Courageous;  no Grav Lance, because I have no bloody idea what it may
> look like.  All I know for sure is that the single weapon may fire to
> either broadside.  Any ideas there?

	Well, according to the caption, the bottom one is the post-refit
Fearless. Except that apart from the color of some of the hull
plates, I can't really see the difference between the two...

	I have no real idea what it may look like either. I can see three
possibilities, but none is really satisfactory:

 1. It's turret-mounted on the top or bottom or the ship, or maybe
in one of the hammerheads. Problems:
    - Conventional beam weapons are already too big to be mounted
      in turrets. Somehow, I can't see the grav lance as being
      smaller;
    - Neither admiral d'Orvilles at the beginning of the book, nor
      especially the captain of PNS Sirius later on saw anything
      obviously strange about Fearless' appearance. However, a
      turret-mounted weapon should be pretty obvious.

 2. Like Alain said, it crosses the ship from side to side and can
fire from either end. Problems:
    - Such a setup could not be aimed other than by positioning
      the whole ship very precisely. That's completely
      impractical;
    - As an alternative, the weapon could be put inside a very
      large hollow cylinder with some rotation slack allowing it
      to move inside. However, we're back to a highly visible
      change.

 3. Instead of having an actual, physical projector, the weapon
works by inducing some kind of secondary effects from the impeller
nodes. Problems:
    - There's nothing in the book to support such a theory, except
      that later on, other interesting effects were done that way
      (the FTL com comes to mind);
    - By the time Fearless used the grav lance against Sirius, she
      had lost a large part of her drive (in fact, her forward
      impeller ring is half destroyed at that point). Moreover,
      the book explicitly states that the grav lance has burned
      out afterwards, however the drive is still operating enough
      to allow them to get back to Medusa.

	Of course, it could always be suggested that it is fully internal
and that it operates by creating its effect in hyperspace (so that
it doesn't affect the sidewalls of the firing ship). That way, you
won't even need to model it ;)

		Jerome
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