Re: (TFT) Magic Carpets and Brooms

[Jay Carlisle <maou.tsaou@gmail.com>]

 Okay, keeping the fires burning so to speak... although perhaps I
shouldn't speak so concerning WWI air combat now that I think about it.

Anyway, today I'll mull a couple of other points that have bugged me about
air combat.

One should be VERY 'obvious' to anybody but seems to be generally
'overlooked'.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGLKhP_32xA

It's the Vickers-Maxim that really forces the issue here as we're talking
the principal heavy rifle-calibre machine gun through both World Wars on
the ground and only slightly modified for air combat.

Sortta like mounting an M60 or two on the hood of your car, but that's
another story... involving J-ombies.

Here the issue is keeping a Vickers consistent from Melee (I guess it'd be
Statham with the Vickers rather than Stalone with the M60 but still...{Son
of Rambow}) through Squad Leader/Goblin like applications and on into stuff
like Car Wars or in this case Fokker Fodder.

This is directly related to questions like ''Can Conan punch a hole in a
Sopwith Camel?''

So the rule of thumb I use is, twice the distance away halves the subtended
angle of an object.

And I'm back to human proportions and hit locations here.

I'm gonna have to call SOMETHING here soooo...

''1 foot is 1 foot viewed at arms length (call it around 2 feet)''.

Also;

''Joe Averages active field of vision is about 3 feet or one hex-side
across.''

That's the distance from a hex-center to hex-side (half a hex) and makes
the count fairly simple as 5 hexes is 21.5 feet across.

At 5 hexes my 1 foot ruler should subtend just over an inch, 1.2 by the
rule of thumb and at a quick eyeball form 20ish feet I marked it as about
1.25 inch.

So these planes are roughly 5 by 5 by 2 hexes to keep the math simple.

Joe can't see much of the plane at once in his active field of vision at
arms length distance but he also can't see all of a 6 foot tall human
Figure at 2 feet distance either (he can fit a halfling though).

Back up 10 steps, or 5 hexes and the 20 foot long plane subtends 2 feet of
the 3 Joe has active.

100 steps, 50 hexes, or 5 pages back has the plane taking up about 2 inches
of Joe's field at ~200 feet, about 1/18.

At around a quarter mile the plane is subtending around a quarter inch
which sounds small but is only about 1/144 of the distance across the field.

The Atari 2600 had a resolution of something like 160 by 190 (@ 60Hz).

With a distinct enough silhouette even my old eyes can likely pick out the
major details down to a quarter inch box.

Not much more than that though.

Much beyond that quarter inch square (viewed at arms length) our 20 foot
plane becomes 'pixelated'.

Joe can still 'see' it but its pretty much just a spot in the distance
(~1/50 of an inch at about 2 miles compared to 72ppi assumed for a webpage
or 'standard' display).

When an object becomes pixellated has bearing on issues like effective
ranges and hit locations.


 6 foot at 2

About half a foot at 20 (~7.2'')

Still well over a quarter inch at 200

0.24 inch at 600

So Joe Average Hero, standing 6 foot tall, has his silhouette become
pixellated well inside of a quarter inch at a distance of around 150
Melee-hexes or 15 pages (just over 1/8 mile).

At the translation scale of 1 hex representing 2 pages J.A.H. becomes
pixellated between 7 to 8 hexes away (and only has an MA of 0.5).

Without optics or magic scrying etc. a Figure with normal human vision
probably couldn't recognize a human Figure farther than ~150 Melee-hexes (a
bit more than 200 yards) away.

The Marines call 550 m maximum effective and 3500+ maximum range (2 miles)
with the M16 on point targets i.e. a person e.g. J.A.H.

The Vickers is listed at an effective range of 2000 m and a maximum range
of 4000+ m with a rate around 40 rounds per turn.

I'll see if I can get a decent image of some of these distances at the
beach before the weekend is done.

This will have implications for aimed shots but before I break into my best
Steve Martin tone and suggest we 'get small' I wanna go the other way with
it.

Joe Average Hero has a skin surface area roughly equal to the area of a
Melee-hex at about 16 square feet.

That's a silhouette as a point target of about half a Melee-hex for Joe in
area.

A nifty little book I've heard about gives front, side, and top silhouettes
for a bunch of different planes.

In the top view, the largest silhouette offered by the plane much like
Joe's half a hex is his largest, only takes up about a third of the total
area described by the max dimensions, 5 by 5 hexes or 25 total.

Call the Sopwith top view silhouette something like 8.5 hexes in area or
roughly 136 square feet in area, roughly 17 times the area of J.A.H.'s
largest silhouette.


 Back up 10 steps, or 5 hexes and the 20 foot long plane subtends 2 feet
of the 3 Joe has active.

100 steps, 50 hexes, or 5 pages back has the plane taking up about 2 inches
of Joe's field at ~200 feet, about 1/18.


 Bear in mind that all of this gets buried in the dice as mods or added die.

This is what I'm trying to use to consider how to build those die mods and
keep them constant across multi-use with something like a Vickers (or a
cannon) that can serve a myriad of functions over a large group of 'frames'.

"That's about the size,
where you put your eyes,
that's how con-scious-ness pops qwf's (quantum wave functions)"
 Steve Weinberg returning from Texas
brings diminsions galore to preplex us
but the bulk of the all
are rolled up in a ball
so small that it never effects us

Aparently my "basement" floor lies somewhere between the centaur and the
hydra in the sky, my whole 'universe' darkly flowing/falling gently down in
a extreamly extream version of Action-time...

Swing the neutrinos round a tiny triangular-shaped "string" all
Witten/neutrino oscilliationie-like and point my observerness at the
syntheses side of the "universe" for my qwf-popping...
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