Doshii Jun said:Rude way of putting it, but Zack's right. Could Yamataians go kamikaze and destroy entire planets by ramming them? Yes. But we don't because it's lame.
Soresu said:Doshii Jun said:Rude way of putting it, but Zack's right. Could Yamataians go kamikaze and destroy entire planets by ramming them? Yes. But we don't because it's lame.
Second.
Doshii Jun said:Rude way of putting it, but Zack's right. Could Yamataians go kamikaze and destroy entire planets by ramming them? Yes. But we don't because it's lame.
So the danger isn't from FTL travel. It's from sufficiently advanced STL velocity that you may blow up a planet with a can of ravioli.As we pass Cerenkov 1.0 in the target, we get a new phenomenon -- Cerenkov
radiation. This is that distinctive blue glow seen around water-cooled
reactors. It's just (relatively) harmless light (harmless compared to
the other blast effects, that is). I mention it only because it's so
nifty...
At around .9 c (Cerenkov 1.1) , the ravioli starts to perceptibly weigh
more. It's just a relativistic mass increase -- all the additional weight
is actually energy, available to do compressive heating upon impact. The
extra weight is converted to heat energy according to the equation E=mc^2;
it looks like compressive heating but it's not.
[Here's where I'm a little hazy on the numbers; I'm at work and
don't have time to rederive the Lorentz transformations.]
At around .985 c (Cerenkov 1.2 or so), the ravioli now weighs twice what
it used to weigh. For a one pound can, that's two pounds... or about sixty
megatons of excess energy. All of it turns to heat on impact. Probably
very little is left of the space-cruiser.
At around .998 c, the impacting ravioli begins to behave less like ravioli
and more like an extremely intense radiation beam. Protons in the water
of the ravioli begin to successfully penetrate the nuclei of the hull
metal. Thermonuclear interactions, such as hydrogen fusion, may take
place in the tomato sauce.
At around .9998 c, the ravioli radiation beam is still wimpy as far as
nuclear accellerator energy is concerned, but because there is so much of
it, we can expect a truly powerful blast of mixed radiation coming out of
the impact site. Radiation, not mechanical blast, may become the largest
hazard to any surviving crew members.
At around .9999999 c, the ravioli radiation may begin to produce
"interesting" nuclear particles and events (heavy, short-lived particles).
At around .999999999999 c, the ravioli impact site may begin to resemble
conditions in the original "big bang"; equilibrium between matter and
energy; free pair production; antimatter and matter coexisting in
equilibrium with a very intense gamma-ray flux, etc.[1]
Past that, who knows? It may be possible to generate quantum black holes
given a sufficiently high velocity can of ravioli.
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