Technical questions

Daryl wrote:Thanks all, I do appreciate the feedback. One clarifier, in regard to the inherent in light speed operations, I never considered ships. However multistage missiles do crowd C where E=MC2 gets interesting above 0.9C.
As some wag once postulated, it isn't true that in SiFi no object can achieve exactly C. At C, mass is infinite, so one can, one per universe.

As mentioned, MDMs were not part of the original foundation of the Honorverse - in fact were mentioned to be impossible until they were introduced with a previously unconceived widget that allowed someone to cheat previously known physics.

In the original books, High c fractional impacts could only happen in the most contrived of situations against moving targets, and they always were a concern against stationary objects, which got the blanket cover of not happening because no one wanting to poke the sleeping SLN with anything approaching an Eridani Edict violation.

Once MDMs were added, it seems David never went back and revisited their full implications on the basic foundations of the series. Of course, <handwavium> can always be used to cover any plot holes.

Joat42 wrote:It can be inferred from textev that kinetic energy from an impact on the wedge or the sidewall is transferred to the ship (ship shaking from impacts, see textev from the Yawata-strike where the tugs are using their wedges on debris). My guess is that the energy is dumped into the sump with some bleedthrough since no system is 100% efficient.

The energy level of a fracC weapon is so absurd that this kills everyone.

For example, a 200 ton weapon moving at .9c (ignoring relativistic factors) is 7.3*10^21J. That means each kilo of a million ton ship get to absorb 7.3 terajoules. Which I suspect turns the crew into steam.

kzt wrote:

Joat42 wrote:It can be inferred from textev that kinetic energy from an impact on the wedge or the sidewall is transferred to the ship (ship shaking from impacts, see textev from the Yawata-strike where the tugs are using their wedges on debris). My guess is that the energy is dumped into the sump with some bleedthrough since no system is 100% efficient.

The energy level of a fracC weapon is so absurd that this kills everyone.

For example, a 200 ton weapon moving at .9c (ignoring relativistic factors) is 7.3*10^21J. That means each kilo of a million ton ship get to absorb 7.3 terajoules. Which I suspect turns the crew into steam.

I'll just point out that your calculation isn't supported by textev, ie how kinetic energy and mass is absorbed into the sump by the compensator isn't as straightforward as you think it is. If we were talking about theoretical real-world examples it would be correct but since we are talking about Honorverse-physics it's largely irrelevant.

kzt wrote:The energy level of a fracC weapon is so absurd that this kills everyone.

For example, a 200 ton weapon moving at .9c (ignoring relativistic factors) is 7.3*10^21J. That means each kilo of a million ton ship get to absorb 7.3 terajoules. Which I suspect turns the crew into steam.

Joat42 wrote:I'll just point out that your calculation isn't supported by textev, ie how kinetic energy and mass is absorbed into the sump by the compensator isn't as straightforward as you think it is. If we were talking about theoretical real-world examples it would be correct but since we are talking about Honorverse-physics it's largely irrelevant.

Do note that something accelerated that 200-tonne missile to 0.9c and it wasn't the launching ship's mag-rail guns. It was the wedge on that missile. So we are already outside known physics to begin with.

If you accept that wedges can bring that much energy into our universe, there's no reason to deny them the ability to erase it too.

kzt wrote:The energy level of a fracC weapon is so absurd that this kills everyone.

For example, a 200 ton weapon moving at .9c (ignoring relativistic factors) is 7.3*10^21J. That means each kilo of a million ton ship get to absorb 7.3 terajoules. Which I suspect turns the crew into steam.

Joat42 wrote:I'll just point out that your calculation isn't supported by textev, ie how kinetic energy and mass is absorbed into the sump by the compensator isn't as straightforward as you think it is. If we were talking about theoretical real-world examples it would be correct but since we are talking about Honorverse-physics it's largely irrelevant.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Do note that something accelerated that 200-tonne missile to 0.9c and it wasn't the launching ship's mag-rail guns. It was the wedge on that missile. So we are already outside known physics to begin with.

If you accept that wedges can bring that much energy into our universe, there's no reason to deny them the ability to erase it too.

Exactly. Although some of the interactions that occurs when an object "enters" the wedge can be inferred. And when it comes to sidewalls we know you'll get secondary effects like how light is twisted and bent when passing through it and from that we can make some guesses on how relativistic masses would behave. This has been discussed in another thread where I made the point that both sidewalls and wedges isn't akin to a wall or any other physical manifestation that can be "impacted", anything entering the boundary layer of a wedge or sidewall is accelerated away by the gravity shear.

Joat42 wrote:

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Do note that something accelerated that 200-tonne missile to 0.9c and it wasn't the launching ship's mag-rail guns. It was the wedge on that missile. So we are already outside known physics to begin with.

If you accept that wedges can bring that much energy into our universe, there's no reason to deny them the ability to erase it too.

Exactly. Although some of the interactions that occurs when an object "enters" the wedge can be inferred. And when it comes to sidewalls we know you'll get secondary effects like how light is twisted and bent when passing through it and from that we can make some guesses on how relativistic masses would behave. This has been discussed in another thread where I made the point that both sidewalls and wedges isn't akin to a wall or any other physical manifestation that can be "impacted", anything entering the boundary layer of a wedge or sidewall is accelerated away by the gravity shear.

The Grav sheer is also strong enough to break chemical bonds, so what would exit a sidewall from a c-fractional strike would be closer to a cloud of dispersed plasma than wreckage. Not that relativistic plasma isn't dangerous, but with the sidewall redirecting it as well, it shouldn't have as large an effect on the ship, even if it did penetrate.

Logically, in universe, I would actually expect a C fractional hit to have the same effect as a contact nuke - a high probability of disabling or burning out a particular sidewall generator - so enough such hits would leave a ship defenseless, but a single hit wouldn't do much more that destroying a generator. However, this is my deduction, and NOT supported by text.

Theemile wrote:The Grav sheer is also strong enough to break chemical bonds, so what would exit a sidewall from a c-fractional strike would be closer to a cloud of dispersed plasma than wreckage. Not that relativistic plasma isn't dangerous, but with the sidewall redirecting it as well, it shouldn't have as large an effect on the ship, even if it did penetrate.

We also know you can't see through wedges, unless you know the particular energy configuration it is in. From this, I infer that the gravity gradients are very chaotic, which in turn means this plasma cloud is actually -- as you said -- dispersed. That means it's spreading over a large volume once it exits the wedge on the inside (in-universe we've never heard anything going through the wedge) and it's probably moving slowly too.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:We also know you can't see through wedges, unless you know the particular energy configuration it is in. From this, I infer that the gravity gradients are very chaotic, which in turn means this plasma cloud is actually -- as you said -- dispersed.

It's more complicated than that, a modern wedge consists of three stress-bands. And outer that's impenetrable, a middle that's equivalent to a sidewall and an inner that's also impenetrable (see OBS where this is explained). That means that to see through (ie compensate for the distortion introduced) you need to know the strength and "direction" of all three bands. If you only had a single band you could theoretically compensate and see through it.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:That means it's spreading over a large volume once it exits the wedge on the inside (in-universe we've never heard anything going through the wedge) and it's probably moving slowly too.

Nothing exits on the inside, it's all directed to the edges of the wedge. The interesting thing here considering the gravity gradient present in a wedge is that the forces are so fantastically large that some of the matter entering the wedge should perhaps exit as degenerate matter in some form.

kzt wrote:For example, a 200 ton weapon moving at .9c (ignoring relativistic factors) is 7.3*10^21J. That means each kilo of a million ton ship get to absorb 7.3 terajoules. Which I suspect turns the crew into steam.

Let's compare that to the level of energy that the wedge is producing to accelerate the ship.

It can accelerate a nearly 9-million tonne ship at 5.75 km/s². If you multiply the two, you get a force of 50 teranewtons. In terms of kinetic energy, it's gaining 1.45*10^17 J every second. We also know that the ship's acceleration is limited by its compensators, not the wedge, so the wedge being able to produce 1 exawatt is not out of the realm of possibility.

However, we're still several orders of magnitude from the energy you calculated. To make matters worse, you'd be dissipating that energy in a very, very short period of time: if you decelerated that missile from 0.9c to zero in the span of 1 km, it would take only 7.5 µs. That means the power dissipation would be 10^27 W. That's a number so large I have to look up the SI prefix (and it looks like it was standardised only last year!). It's also nearly 3 times the energy output of the Sun.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:However, we're still several orders of magnitude from the energy you calculated. To make matters worse, you'd be dissipating that energy in a very, very short period of time: if you decelerated that missile from 0.9c to zero in the span of 1 km, it would take only 7.5 µs. That means the power dissipation would be 10^27 W. That's a number so large I have to look up the SI prefix (and it looks like it was standardised only last year!). It's also nearly 3 times the energy output of the Sun.

That depends on how the missile is decelerated. If it is decelerated because it runs into another mass there will be a release of energy. If it on the other hand runs into a gravity field that decelerates it there wont be any energy dissipation assuming the object is uniformly affected by the field.