03-01-2020, 04:20 PM | #101 | |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Wellington, NZ
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Re: Coolant [Spaceships]
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Rupert Boleyn "A pessimist is an optimist with a sense of history." |
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03-01-2020, 05:24 PM | #102 | |
Join Date: May 2005
Location: Oz
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Re: Coolant [Spaceships]
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Besides which, as Fred Brackin points out, destroying a planet is hyperbole. But destroying a city is a very real possibility. And destroying a city with the people in it is
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Decay is inherent in all composite things. Nod head. Get treat. Last edited by Agemegos; 03-03-2020 at 02:28 AM. |
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03-01-2020, 06:20 PM | #103 |
Join Date: Feb 2016
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Re: Coolant [Spaceships]
I think that authorities could act with extreme prejudice. A TL10 SM+20 space station could have a tertiary weapon battery with 30 100 GJ VRF ultraviolet laser turrets to keep the peace (dealing 2d×50 (2) burn damage up to 100,000 miles away and costing $6T). With six of such stations guarding a planet, costing an average of $30T each, you could have complete protection for $180T (67% of the economy of the average TL10 world with 4 billion people). Of course, each station could hold millions of people without difficulty, so they would have their own economies as well.
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03-01-2020, 07:02 PM | #104 |
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Berkeley, CA
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Re: Coolant [Spaceships]
If it doesn't violate conservation of energy, it's pushing on something (you can't violate conservation of momentum without also violating conservation of energy), and while it isn't likely to create near-c rock problems, it's hard to avoid the dropping rocks from orbital altitude problem.
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03-01-2020, 07:25 PM | #105 |
Join Date: May 2005
Location: Oz
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Re: Coolant [Spaceships]
You can't conserve energy in all inertial frames without thereby conserving momentum.
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Decay is inherent in all composite things. Nod head. Get treat. |
03-02-2020, 07:36 AM | #106 | |
Join Date: Jul 2008
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Re: Coolant [Spaceships]
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Blowing the Millennium Falcon into dust-bunnies is arguably harsh (it's a small private warship operating in such a way as to threaten a population center in this scenario so...) but it's not mass-lethal. Most of the time that ship has only two people onboard. You only get 'shoot down the airliner' drama on the subset of kinetic attack incidents where your civicidal types are able to have their way with a sizable shipload of hostages, rather than just a ship.
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03-02-2020, 08:26 AM | #107 | |
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Iceland*
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Re: Coolant [Spaceships]
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By the time a spaceship is traveling at any appreciable fraction of c, 'shooting it down' is hardly something you can do, certainly not if you imagine it anywhere equivalent to shooting down an airliner. If you disable the spaceship completely, it's still the same mass heading in the same direction. The way to prevent the attack might involve the preemptive use of military means to topple a government or to strike against a terrorist organization inside the borders of another polity.
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03-02-2020, 08:39 AM | #108 |
Join Date: Feb 2016
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Re: Coolant [Spaceships]
A sand caster missile might be a good option against a RKK weapon. With 30 kg of sand released by an explosive a fraction of a second before impact, a 24cm missile would do horrible things to a RKK weapon (at 10% c, it's payload is the equivalent 6.6 megaton of TNT when hit by the RKK weapon, which would vaporize most spacecraft).
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03-02-2020, 08:53 AM | #109 | |
Join Date: Jul 2008
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Re: Coolant [Spaceships]
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A) You probably should look at the context. This is not specifically or primarily about relativistic attacks. B) Yes, you absolutely can shoot down a relativistic ship. It's really easy, put something of any remotely significant size in front of it and boom. No ship, and the mass is going to spread itself out quite quickly after the high-energy event of collision. Some of it may still spray the planet at c-fractional speed, but vastly less than the original impactor. This does of course require you see it coming, which is why depending on your assumptions r-bombers diving out of interstellar space may be infeasible to defend against, but if the attacker started out as a civilian vessel in-system seeing it well ahead of the attack is not a problem. But that trick never works, Bullwinkle.
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I don't know any 3e, so there is no chance that I am talking about 3e rules by accident. |
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03-02-2020, 10:01 AM | #110 | |
Join Date: Jun 2013
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Re: Coolant [Spaceships]
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