Some info on what the Arm from TA can do:
The Commanders are piloted by the best and brightest, and any conceivable tactic will be used if it insures victory. Even giving control over Moho-metal makers to other Commanders to cause them to drain their energy nets unexpectedly has been observed.Commanders: Commanders have anti-matter backpacks for power, blueprints and nano-lathes which them to, in a matter of hours, build up whole military industrial complexes, and special nano-technology born viruses which allow them to capture the intelligences running other war machines. Not expecting reinforcements for days or weeks after moving through a Galactic Gate onto a planet, the Commander must conquer or be destroyed
The commander can move at 14.4 m/s, with a linear acceleration of 1.8 m/s/s, has a full body rotation rate of 172 degrees a second (from in game stats screen). The commander generates 25 energy per second, and it takes 400 energy to fire a d-gun. So at most the commander can fire 2 d-gun blasts before needing to wait 8 seconds for enough energy to be generated before it can fire the 3rd d-gun blast. After that it requires 16 seconds to generate enough energy to fire the d-gun. The Commander is also armed with a ‘laser’ that requires no external energy and has a reload rate of .85 seconds.
In Game time is measured in the same units as real time, ie 1 hour in game is 1-hour real-time (at normal speed, higher game speeds alter how fast time goes) so the construction speeds are canon.
Some build times for stuff built by the Commander
- A Light Laser Tower(LLT) can be built in 15.54 seconds
- A Kbot lab can be built in 22.53 seconds
- A solar collector in 8.32 seconds
As for the size of a Commander, they are about >8 meters high, Scalling them to various objects yields similar, if not greater, results. (The cars & trucks that can be found in the urban maps)
A SIF on steroids, big steroids.Heavy Armour: Many times more dense than its ancient counterpart, heavy Armour is so resilient that, for an equal amount of protection, less weight is needed than traditional armour. This has lead to its near universal adoption as the protection for military units. However if it, or the generators that are maintaining it, are severely damaged, then it tends to catastrophically fail. It works by artificially strengthening and compressing matter to make the whole of the outside of the vehicle one giant molecule.
Weapons:
There are roughly 3 types of weapons: Plasma, Laser, Anti-matter explosives.
Plasma weapons are (in general) weaker than 'laser' based, but have a longer range.
All other explosives use anti-matter to get the required energy densities to be useful.
“Energy Cannon / Energy Shells: Energy cannons are similar to standard cannons, except that they fire energy shells. Energy shells are very powerful lasers, which fire for several seconds and are ‘frozen’ in a tiny grid of space-time. This grid is then launched in a manner similar to a rail gun, (but using vacuum fluctuations rather than electro-magnetic fields).
When the energy shell reaches the target, the entire energy is given off at once in a near microscopic area. No armor can with stand the temperatures generated, and the spray of metal plasma destroys the interior of the target (the spray of plasma is forced inside the unit by the intense light pressure) ”
This is the weapon the Peewee & Brawler use, not the most powerful ‘laser’ weaponry around.
“Lasers: A generic term for any sort of weapon that directs an ‘energy’ beam. As well as traditional lasers of coherent light, coherent matter beams and certain classes of pseudo boson beams are also included”
“Plasma Cannon: This fires a spherical force field with a highly pressurized 10 million degree plasma tightly contained with in it. When the force ball touches the target, the force field dissolves on the side touching the target and the plasma burns through the target’s armour. Simple heat and thermal shock may cause the kill. Heavy Armour is moderately venerable to high temperatures and multiple hits by plasma cannons can cause its breakdown. ”
Cannot argue that half the firepower is waste, it ALL gets diverted to the target.
Any human that makes contact with any weapons fire would be vaporized completely.
Plasma weapons (which are in general weaker than 'laser' based weapons) are composed of 10 million degree highly pressurized plasma. The temperature of core of the sun, is 16 million degrees Kelvin (K), this isn’t very far of the 10 million degree plasma in the weapons. (The differences between Kelvin and centigrade is 273). This stuff is hotter than the surface of the sun. (The corona, the sun’s surface, is extremely hot - millions of degrees Kelvin)
Lots of ECM are in use.Rockets: This is the generic name for a wide variety of weapon systems.
Generally they have a pre-programmed flight path to prevent an unsophisticated
guidance from being completely fooled by the ordinary ‘weak cloaking’
and electronic spoofing that all units possess. They carry a larger than
a smarter missile and this payload is almost invariably a small amount of anti-matter
“Anti-matter: Like normal matter but with the opposite charge and magnetic moment. When antimatter and normal matter combine, they turn completely into energy, releasing vast floods of gamma rays. Antimatter is used extensively for weapons and for energy storage were extraordinary energy density is required”
Proof of extensive use of anti-matter, there is even a suicide unit, which is a large matter/antimatter bomb.
As for what the weapons can do:
The D-Gun:
This causes the nucleus of an atom to spontaneously disintegrate, which would release an incredible amount of energy to be liberated (not quite the same level as a anti-matter/matter reaction but much greater than a normal nuclear reaction).Disintegrator: This is an ultimate weapon: no physical matter provides protection from it. It works by suppressing the quantum field strength of the ‘gluons’ that hold together atomic nuclei. The matter violently tears itself apart, leaving hydrogen, deuterium, and a burst of free neutrons. This is the major advantage of Disintegrators: anything is destroyed and Heavy Armour provides virtually no protection.
The weapon has a number of disadvantages: First the matter is disintegrated so no metal salvage is possible. Second, the weapon is short range, partly because of the inherent physical limitations of reasonable sized projectors, and partly due do atmospheric attenuation of the effect. The most severe restriction is the vast amounts of energy required to fire it.
A useful attribute of the weapon is that it damages everything in a cone of effect so it can destroy several units that are clustered together
Now to get some firepower calcs.(note these were by Bagus of Spacebattles.com)
The Arm missile truck does 40 ingame damage points, it is an area effect weapon but with a very small area effect (relatively to every thing else in TA). This allows us to calculate that each ingame hit point & damage point is worth :These are based not from much-maligned fanfic, but from canon Galactic War reports straight off the Cavedog website.Just to clarify, the relevant part of this quote is "Coldfire's troops pressed their final charge, overwhelming the last of Gnug's battered and surprised troops, driving them into the ground with gigatons worth of explosive power."Galactic War Briefing Update: Week 3
V-DAY!
NEWSBOT -- From out of nowhere came a single CORE Commander. Going by the handle of Coldfire, this lowly private put up the fight of his life to save his patterned brothers from seeing clones run free over the world of Core Prime.
The charges had been set. Central Consciousness was wired to blow in 1:30:00. Arm Commanders Ikill4laffs, wembly, Hawk, Klord, and Clone sat back and admired the handiwork of their charges, waiting for the time to press the button and destroy the center of patterned life. The only thing left was to eliminate the remaining Core Commanders who walked the surface of the world.
Ignatz vs. Ewok: With victory still in reach, CORE Commander Ignatz rolled his tanks into Ewok's fortified base. Using an air transport, he hoisted himself over the sea of enemy troops, sacrificing his own body that his soldiers may fight on and win. Ignatz's sacrifice and the resulting CORE victory raised the stakes even higher -- the war was still going in favor of the ARM, but now only by a single battle.
Coldfire vs. Gnug615: As the previous battle continued to blaze, ARM Commanders were kept feverishly on the edge of their seats as their veteran hero, Gnug615, took on the unknown soldier, Coldfire. Hawk relayed battle updates to the peanut gallery, wembly watched the countdown to detonation and Ikill4laffs scanned the horizon for another would-be CORE hero. None came. Now, it was all up to Coldfire.
At T minus 5 minutes to detonation, the battle still raged. Nuclear missiles were countered by both sides' anti-nuke systems, while flakker fire brought down entire wings of bombers and gunships.
T minus 4 ... minus 3...2...1...
With an explosion that cracked and fissured the armored surface of Core Prime, Central Consciousness was no more. The huge computer banks boiled away as matter/anti-matter charges detonated around its surface.
But on the surface, the battle raged on.
Thrown into a frenzy of rage at the scream of thousands of billions of patternings perishing in a single blow, Coldfire's troops pressed their final charge, overwhelming the last of Gnug's battered and surprised troops, driving them into the ground with gigatons worth of explosive power.
When the smoke cleared, Coldfire scrambled to complete the download begun over two hours previously. Central Consciousness may have died, but a remnant of the Core was determined to live on, at least in part. Coldfire strained against the flood of data before finally getting cut off. A single message flashed in monochrome green across his signal feed.
...SIGNAL HOST LOST...
Core Private Coldfire sunk to his knees, crushing a twisted scrap of metal and flesh beneath him, pounding an armored fist against the ground. He had won the battle, but the war had been lost.
Regaining his footing, Coldfire looked to the horizon. Already, the demolition crew was rushing the planet in celebration, raising the ARM flag high. A beacon light winked weakly in one corner of his field of vision. Shaking his head, he turned, hit the "Destruct" button on the Sector-span Gate and strolled through, gazing across the metal fields and mountains of Core Prime one last time before disappearing in a puff of logic-defying light.
Now, according to Gnug615, who I asked about this a few days ago, Coldfire hit him with 100-200 units at this point.
Assuming a fairly reasonable average of 20 shots per unit throughout the fight, 200 units, and 2 GT of firepower total, we reach an average yield of 500 KT per shot.
For an ultra-conservative figure, we can say 500 units (the unit limit in normal TA, it would've been impossible for more to have been involved, and this assumes no resource structures, factories, or anything but combat units) and 50 shots each (using the staple missile trucks, which fire once per 2.5 seconds, every unit would have had to have been firing constantly for 2 minutes. This gives us a bottom-end of 80 KT per shot.
A little bit more high end, let's say 100 units, 10 GT, and 20 shots each... 5 MT per shot. That's a tad ridiculous, but it establishes an absolute utter high end.
So, overall, this gives us a range of 80 KT to 5 MT average for ground weapons, with a reasonable range of 250 KT to 1 MT (IMO).
Comments? Criticism? Flames?
[80 KT, 250 KT, 1 MT, 5 MT] / 40
=[2 KT, 6.25 KT, 25 KT, 125 KT]
The Commander’s laser, doing 60 points of damage(focused). So:
60 points of damage equates to
60 * [2 KT, 6.25 KT, 25 KT, 125 KT]
= [120 KT, 375 KT, 1.5 MT, 7.5 MT]
So low end the Arm Commander laser does 120 KT of highly focused damage.
The commander has 3000 hitpoints, so damage absorption is
3000 * [2 KT, 6.25 KT, 25 KT, 125 KT]
= [6 MT, 18.75 MT, 75 MT, 375 MT]
So a low end 6 MT of damage.
Side note: the Krogoth can take 29918 points of damage. So a Krogoth can absorb:
29918* [2 KT, 6.25 KT, 25 KT, 125 KT]
= [59.8 MT, 186.98 MT, 747.95 MT, 3.74 GT]
So a low end 59.8 MT of damage!
but I can understand why wong didnt add one.
