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Timothy Groves wrote:
>>  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.
> 
> But what if instead of a beam, it fired a wedge or cone?
> 
> This would also explain why exactly a faster-than-light effect would be
> limited to such a short range.  If it is broadcast rather than focused,
> inverse-square would play havoc with the range.
> 
> Of course, a wedge or cone would have difficulty firing through a
> sidewall gunport without shorting out the attacking vessel's own
> sidewalls, unless it also includes gear to maximize the size of the
> gunport just before firing.
> 
	True. However, since it works by inducing a harmonic in the enemy
sidewall generator, it effect could conceivably be filtered in the
firing ship.

>>  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.
> 
> Not to mention that her wedge was down when she hit King Roger with the
> Grav Lance.  Her points were hot, but the wedge itself was struck.
> 
	True, I had forgotten that.

	Your model is pretty nice. Now all that's lacking is to see it
animated ;)

		Jerome

PS: BTW, all "official" representations of warships from the HH
universe have their broadside weapons clustered near the middle of
the ship just like yours. That always struck me as a little strange
(I had initially imagined them spread over the entire ship length)
especially since one of the acknowledged problems in having too
heavy a broadside is the minimum separation required between missile
to avoid wedge interference...

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