On Tue, Jul 07, 2015 at 07:22:51PM -0400, Kurt Feltenberger wrote:
> If they engaged from a range of 30km, and the projectile velocity
> was 10km, it would leave a lot of chance for the target to purposely
> change their location (climb, dive, turn, change velocity, etc).

I doubt that multi-kilometre-long ships can turn in just a couple of
seconds.  Not without splattering their crews, at least.  Then again,
I don't know much about the technology of BSG.  Maybe they do have
structures and inertial dampers that can handle a hundred gees.

> The damage caused by a 1m kinetic round at 10,000m/s is already
> pretty insane and in Traveller terms would probably punch through a
> Tigress from side to side without much problem...and possibly the
> Tigress next to her.

A Tigress is small on the scale of these starships.  It seems
reasonable that the guns from a ship with at least ten times its
volume would totally destroy it.

> So here's my question:  Just how fast would the railguns or coilguns
> reasonably be?  50,000m/s?  100km/s?  More?

The Speed of Plot ;-)

The limits on electromagnetic projectile launching are mostly a
question of how much power you can feed into a given space while
avoiding it turning everything to plasma.  That is, mostly a question
of technology rather than physics.  There are some fundamental limits
to our current approaches, but there's nothing to say that BSG would
use those methods.

- Tim