One of the things that fascinates me with Dropfleet is the scale. It boggles the mind a bit.
When reading through the rule book and background material, the scale really dawned upon me when I was reading about the UCM railguns. The name of the guns – UF-2200, UF-4200 and UF-6400 is the calibre in mm on the largest dimension.
2200 mm! Even the smallest railgun is gigantic.
2200 mm means that the smallest calibre railgun fires projectiles at about the same size as a mid-to-large-sized car by european standards. And naturally, considerably denser! I’m not sure how the loading system works, but I am curious!
And that is just the smallest calibre. What about the UF-4200? I was looking around to find something good to compare it with, and after looking at buses, excavators and trains and still being far from my goal, I finally landed on airplanes.
An Airbus A-321 – a fairly standard 6-seats-across airplane – has a width just short of 4 meters in the fuselage. Or in other words; the support-railguns of the cruiser of the UCM navy fires shells the size of a standard passenger airplane only they are probably considerably denser (and maybe slightly shorter).
That leaves us with the 6400 mm. This is a shell which is probably bigger than the house I’m living in – at least in volume! However, that scale does little for the rest of you so I took a peak into the world of airplanes and found my salvation. The Airbus A-380 – the worlds largest passanger airline – is a two-decker monster. The fuselage is just around 7 meters across – bigger than 6400 mm but since the cross section is more or less circular, I guess the overall area is about the same since the railguns are rectangular.
So the largest railguns of the UCM – of which the Berlin sports 4 (!) – shoot projectiles in size roughly equivalent of the largest passengeraircraft in operation today.
Oh and I almost forgot – a turret sports two or three railguns. So a UF-6400 turret (which sports two) fires two airplanes at once!
And in all of this I haven’t even touched upon the massive 8000 mm bombardment guns the UCM sports as well…
