Re: SG-Ortillary

On Mon, Dec 31, 2001 at 08:08:41AM -0800, John Atkinson wrote:
>Which leads me to believe
>that K'V rail guns a) have really spiffy predictative
>computers and b) fire long bursts.

The latter is consistent with the variable damage mechanic.

>So you've got this big alloy dart coming in at .1 c. 
>If e=mc^2, then a 100kg dart is going to release
>energy equivelant to what, a small nuclear weapon? 
>I'll leave the conversion to precise kilotonnage to
>those who are into that stuff.

If you ignore relativity, you get about 11 megatons (0.5 m v^2, TNT
releases 4.2E6 J/kg). In practice it's more, because you can't get away
with ignoring relativity at that sort of speed - you needed to put more
energy in to make the thing go that fast - but it only makes about a
0.5% difference.

If you drop the same mass from an infinite distance from Earth, you get
about 1.4 tons-TNT energy release; that's a working minimum. It seems to
me that it wouldn't be hard to downgrade the energy input of a K-gun
used for orbital bombardment, and tune it at the time of firing to
exactly the energy release that the firer wants, anything from a big
aircraft-dropped bomb to a strategic nuke.

This is sufficiently appealing an idea that I'd be inclined to make it
the Kra'Vak's only method of surface bombardment, and invent some other
mechanism for humans...