Everything is a bomb.

[Cy83r K0rp53]

In laymen's terms hitting the atmosphere in something like a power armor at speed is like hitting water from several stories up, that is to say, like concrete.

Anything of insufficient mass or structural integrity will easily disintegrate while plowing into an atmosphere and produce, I think, a large heat bloom at high altitudes while raining debris across a massive area.

Keep in mind that meteorites burn off a lot of mass and they're moving slow enough to reach a terminal velocity.

 

[Doshii Jun]

You guys, I assume, are talking about all this outside of a situation involving a PA entering the atmosphere with its shields up.

 

[Zack]

In laymen's terms hitting the atmosphere in something like a power armor at speed is like hitting water from several stories up, that is to say, like concrete.

Anything of insufficient mass or structural integrity will easily disintegrate while plowing into an atmosphere and produce, I think, a large heat bloom at high altitudes while raining debris across a massive area.

Keep in mind that meteorites burn off a lot of mass and they're moving slow enough to reach a terminal velocity.

What makes you think that? How big will the heat bloom be? will the debris be dangerous? Will a crater be left in the atmosphere? What kind of other objects would be able to reach terminal velocity? Does your comment actually add anything to this conversation or are you just paraphrasing what you think, providing no assistance what so ever?

 

[MissingNo]

In laymen's terms hitting the atmosphere in something like a power armor at speed is like hitting water from several stories up, that is to say, like concrete.

Anything of insufficient mass or structural integrity will easily disintegrate while plowing into an atmosphere and produce, I think, a large heat bloom at high altitudes while raining debris across a massive area.

Keep in mind that meteorites burn off a lot of mass and they're moving slow enough to reach a terminal velocity.

What makes you think that? How big will the heat bloom be? will the debris be dangerous? Will a crater be left in the atmosphere? What kind of other objects would be able to reach terminal velocity? Does your comment actually add anything to this conversation or are you just paraphrasing what you think, providing no assistance what so ever?

Uso, there are more tactful ways of saying that. Or you could have just left it at your first five questions and left the sixth question off altogether and it would have been useful. The antagonistic tone is not. Even if we are starting to expect that from you, this would be an instance of preferring that you don't live up to expectations.

Logically, compressing gasses makes them hotter. That's what plasma is, matter under high compression and high heat. The heat bloom of an object entering atmosphere isn't friction, it's compression. The heat would still cook whatever unshielded matter is causing the compression. It's like the next step beyond a sonic boom; the object moves faster than air can even get out of the way, that's why the impact would feel, as Cyber said, like hitting concrete. So...shielded, would an armor survive that? Or would the heat go through the shield to melt the armor? If the velocity is faster than terminal, would the damage progress faster or would the object just evaporate and leave the Event-like boom to disperse along its vector?

The heat bloom's size would be reliant on the size of the object entering atmosphere and the speed at which it entered. Definitely bigger and faster than a meteorite, so probably a significantly larger output. Enough to start fires before the object hit ground, I'd guess? If it hit ground at all. And, if it was aimed at an ocean, it'd probably evaporate enough to cause a good-size record in rainfall for a long time.

No, a crater wouldn't be left in the atmosphere. Maybe a hole would be made due to the shock, but since air is the way it is, it'd fill in the space like it would after someone busts a vacuum tube.

Unshielded, wouldn't Zesuaium withstand reentry without a problem? Being as resistant to heat as it is, a Zesu spork fired at sufficiently-close-to-c speeds should cause the same amount of kinetic damage as an armor without the loss of life and expensive hardware.

 

[Cy83r K0rp53]

Zesu breaks physics as it is, can we not bring it into this convo?

 

[Navian]

This came up today in a... let's call it conversation I had with Edto about the practicality of a pistol that fires 4 cm slugs. It came up that Edto had the idea that the slug would be impacting at 100,000 kilometers per second. First I realized that even a ball bearing fired at that speed would hit like a nuke, and a thumbtack would likely impact with far more energy than a stick of dynamite turned into a shaped charge. I decided not to try to work out just how many orders of magnitude were involved for the TNT equivalent, here.

Then ,I realized that this was something that could come up often in this setting, with ships engaging each other while moving at sizable fractions of c. Well, there's a solution for that other than just saying no, you can't use RKKVs because this game is supposed to be interesting, and that solution is 'pseudo-velocity'.

If the standard drives in the setting use pseudo-velocity when travelling STL, and their FTL methods 'reset' their actual velocity when they arrive in a star system, there won't be such absurd amounts of energy flying around to begin with, and it will be worthwhile to use explosives and high-powered guns without going out of your way to say 'no, we're not going to throw a wineglass at them while flying toward them at full speed and then watch the explosion'. (Though point defense can help here.)

I mean, if... we don't have to go into the technicalities of true versus real velocity, that's great, but when I hear someone's shooting something at 100,000 km/s, I really have to hope that it's cheating somehow, and it's still going to hit like a normal piece of artillery, instead of like something more powerful than any nuclear weapon.