?

cthia wrote:

And they're never described as 'reflected'. Rather they're described as "bent", or "defocused".

Thanks again. I can see that I equated bent with deflect. This is a good example of how things can become lost in translation.[/quote]
It doesn't really specifically say how much they are bent, so I can see where you could read it as being bent back (reflected away).

But given that they these beams still sometimes still strike the hull afterwards I think it more reasonable to assume that the bending deflection is more like you'd get from passing through materials of dissimilar optical properties (maybe 5-15 degrees?) and not bent like reflecting off a mirror (which could be up to 180 degrees; depending on the angle on incidence).

OTOH writing this did make me reflect (no pun intended) on the concept of critical angles when crossing between mediums; so despite the bending happening due to a sharp gravitation gradient there might still be some (shallower) angles where the sidewall might reflect away the beam (total internal reflection - though it seems odd to talk of the outside of the sidewall as "internal" )

cthia wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:And they're never described as 'reflected'. Rather they're described as "bent", or "defocused".

Thanks again. I can see that I equated bent with deflect. This is a good example of how things can become lost in translation.

Jonathan_S wrote:It doesn't really specifically say how much they are bent, so I can see where you could read it as being bent back (reflected away).

But given that they these beams still sometimes still strike the hull afterwards I think it more reasonable to assume that the bending deflection is more like you'd get from passing through materials of dissimilar optical properties (maybe 5-15 degrees?) and not bent like reflecting off a mirror (which could be up to 180 degrees; depending on the angle on incidence).

OTOH writing this did make me reflect (no pun intended) on the concept of critical angles when crossing between mediums; so despite the bending happening due to a sharp gravitation gradient there might still be some (shallower) angles where the sidewall might reflect away the beam (total internal reflection - though it seems odd to talk of the outside of the sidewall as "internal" )

But if they are bent into the hull, shouldn't that cause damage?

cthia wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:It doesn't really specifically say how much they are bent, so I can see where you could read it as being bent back (reflected away).

But given that they these beams still sometimes still strike the hull afterwards I think it more reasonable to assume that the bending deflection is more like you'd get from passing through materials of dissimilar optical properties (maybe 5-15 degrees?) and not bent like reflecting off a mirror (which could be up to 180 degrees; depending on the angle on incidence).

OTOH writing this did make me reflect (no pun intended) on the concept of critical angles when crossing between mediums; so despite the bending happening due to a sharp gravitation gradient there might still be some (shallower) angles where the sidewall might reflect away the beam (total internal reflection - though it seems odd to talk of the outside of the sidewall as "internal" )

But if they are bent into the hull, shouldn't that cause damage?

Sometimes -- sidewalls aren't perfect. That's part of why ships take damage from laserheads before the sidewall completely fails.

They just take far less damage than without a sidewall.

And when they're bent and hit the hull I think that's because they weren't bent enough to completely miss the hull (turning a dead on shot into a glancing blow) -- I'm given then impression that the sidewalls consistently bends the shots away from the hull (so it shouldn't turn a miss into a hit -- except maybe if it's defocusing and spreading effect was larger than it's bending effect; causing a very near miss to expand enough that the fringes of the weakened beam now graze the hull) -- but can't always bend them enough.

Still, the defocusing and spreading effects that the sidewall has on the beam means that usually the ship's rad shielding and physical armor can more easily handle the beam remnants -- generally preventing any one beam from causing major damage. (Hence why you need to pummel SDs with hundreds and hundreds of hits to kill them or knock them out of the fight -- so all the little damage eventually adds up to major, critical, damage)

tlb wrote:You have agreed that the object can be torn apart when it encountered the focused gravity field, down to the ionized plasma level (or did I misunderstand you when you wrote "will get secondary effects due to internal friction when atoms accelerates faster than its surrounding companions plus you have atomic bonds being broken which also tend to release energy"?). So where does the kinetic energy reside at that point? It has to be in the ionized atoms of the original object. If you say it is "never released", then there is no other place for it to be.

I said it's never released as an explosion when encountering a gravity field, it's changed, and with changed I mean energy is added or subtracted because the object travels through a gravity field. Each constituent part of the object has it's kinetic energy within that context which is why they can punch through a sidewall for example.

I also said that the projected gravity field is tightly coupled to the projecting equipment but for wedges it doesn't really matters in almost every case, but for sidewalls it matters since we know generators can blow out when overloaded, ie the energy demand to keep the field strength up becomes too much to deal with particularly energetic hits.

I had one thing partially wrong though, I said the remaining particles retain their kinetic energy but that was because I didn't consider what happens to them in the long run. They keep traveling in the gravity band where the field bleeds off their kinetic energy. So where does that energy go? Into the ship as transferred momentum.

Let's check some textev of what it means for an object to enter a wedge:

Mission of Honor, Chapter 29 wrote:Something large, jagged, and broken—it looked, in the fleeting glimpse he had, as if it were probably at least half of a heavy fabrication module, which must have massed the better part of thirty-five thousand tons—went screaming past Quay's prow and impacted on the inner surface of her wedge's roof. Or, rather, was ripped into very, very, very tiny bits and pieces in the instant it entered the zone in which local gravity went from effectively zero to several hundred thousand gravities in a space of barely five meters.

The ship shuddered and bucked as other multiton chunks of Vulcan's shattered bones slammed into her wedge. Not even her inertial compensator could completely damp the consequences of that much transferred momentum without shaking her crew like a terrier with a rat. But she'd been built with generous stress margins for a moment just like this one, and she came out the other side intact, already turning to bring tracking systems and tractors to bear on whatever had gotten past her.

In other words, a ship can be killed by 0.9C missile, but it will killed by the transferred momentum that will rip the ship apart when the internal compensators fail - not an explosion of kinetic energy released by a wedge/sidewall.

tlb wrote:There is no other place for what is now the gas to go except to expand outward. That was the behavior mentioned in the text. Whether it expands straight out or to a side is of little interest to me. As it moves it will radiate, as also mentioned in the text.

That's your assumption, because the textev you gave only said the bullet disappeared in a fiery flash, and if there is one thing I know is that bullets don't do fiery flashes because of their kinetic energy unless we are talking about armor penetrating ones that relies on spalling to kill anyone on the other side of the armor. A 15 gram bullet have to travel pretty fast to elicit such a behavior and it could then never be fired from a handgun. The amount of kinetic energy a 15 gram bullet could release is insignificant to the energy released while it is being ripped apart by a steep gravity field, this is self evident because there isn't enough propellent in a casing to make the bullet disappear in a fiery flash when it's fired in the first case.

tlb wrote:PPS. I hope you are not making the mistake of thinking these artificial fields must have a simple, although very steep, gradient. Since they are artificial they could be composed of multiple paired layers of opposing directions; just as an example, since we do not know how they are generated.

As explained by the textev above, we know how steep they are. We know the field must be projected length/height-wise because any other type of orientation will give anomalous effects that has never been described in textev.

Loren Pechtel wrote:

Joat42 wrote:Synchrotron radiation only occurs when a fast traveling charged particle is subjected to strong magnetic or electric fields - see Larmor's formula. A particle only affected by strong gravitational fields does not produce synchrotron radiation, it only changes it's speed and direction.

Ok, I'll revise my opinion. I thought it was simply from forcing it to change direction, I didn't realize it was due to a specific force causing that direction change. Or is it, though--we have no other force capable of causing such deflections, do we even know?

Gravity acts on a mass, it doesn't care about a particles charge or momentum (note: mass in this context includes the momentum) - it just applies a force vector on it and the particle is none the wiser. If no other external forces are in play everything is in free fall regardless of the strength of any gravity field so there are no deflections going on from a localized perspective. An outside observer may say something is deflected but then you are outside the local context of the object in question.

AFAIK synchrotron radiation is specific to charged particles and magnetic/electric fields, but it has been a long time since I studied physics so it may have changed but I doubt it.

Joat42 wrote:That's your assumption, because the textev you gave only said the bullet disappeared in a fiery flash, and if there is one thing I know is that bullets don't do fiery flashes because of their kinetic energy unless we are talking about armor penetrating ones that relies on spalling to kill anyone on the other side of the armor. A 15 gram bullet have to travel pretty fast to elicit such a behavior and it could then never be fired from a handgun. The amount of kinetic energy a 15 gram bullet could release is insignificant to the energy released while it is being ripped apart by a steep gravity field, this is self evident because there isn't enough propellent in a casing to make the bullet disappear in a fiery flash when it's fired in the first case.

To be clear, what is your explanation for the observed behavior?

Note that I did not say the flash was due to kinetic energy, the dominant effect was the disintegration of the bullet due to gravitational forces. What I did say (in answer to a question from you) was that the kinetic energy would added to the mix.

Joat42 wrote:That's your assumption, because the textev you gave only said the bullet disappeared in a fiery flash, and if there is one thing I know is that bullets don't do fiery flashes because of their kinetic energy unless we are talking about armor penetrating ones that relies on spalling to kill anyone on the other side of the armor.

Thought here: The bullet is hitting an extreme gravitational shear--this will reduce it to powder. Is the "fiery flash" simply that powder very quickly losing it's kinetic energy due to air resistance?

Joat42 wrote:That's your assumption, because the textev you gave only said the bullet disappeared in a fiery flash, and if there is one thing I know is that bullets don't do fiery flashes because of their kinetic energy unless we are talking about armor penetrating ones that relies on spalling to kill anyone on the other side of the armor.

Loren Pechtel wrote:Thought here: The bullet is hitting an extreme gravitational shear--this will reduce it to powder. Is the "fiery flash" simply that powder very quickly losing it's kinetic energy due to air resistance?

I have tried to to do a quick and dirty estimate how much energy each atom would receive, if a 45 ACP bullet were disintegrated and its kinetic energy was spread over those atoms. A 45 ACP bullet weighs 15 grams and has a muzzle energy of 540 joules. The molecular weight of lead is 207, so the bullet has about one fourteenth of a mole of atoms. If I have the numbers right and did the calculation correctly, then each atom gets about a tenth of an electron volt from the kinetic energy; assuming there is no added energy and that the energy is spread evenly. Since we do not believe either assumption is true, it does seem we are in the ballpark for a flash of light.

PS: Armor piercing or other bullets are not reduced to plasma, so are not comparable in effect.

tlb wrote:I have tried to to do a quick and dirty estimate how much energy each atom would receive, if a 45 ACP bullet were disintegrated and its kinetic energy was spread over those atoms. A 45 ACP bullet weighs 15 grams and has a muzzle energy of 540 joules. The molecular weight of lead is 207, so the bullet has about one fourteenth of a mole of atoms. If I have the numbers right and did the calculation correctly, then each atom gets about a tenth of an electron volt from the kinetic energy; assuming there is no added energy and that the energy is spread evenly. Since we do not believe either assumption is true, it does seem we are in the ballpark for a flash of light.

PS: Armor piercing or other bullets are not reduced to plasma, so are not comparable in effect.

I'm not so sure your assumption is correct about how kinetic energy is converted. Plus, considering the properties of lead - it's not a metal known for sparking regardless of any amount of mundane energy applied to it.

Joat42 wrote:I'm not so sure your assumption is correct about how kinetic energy is converted. Plus, considering the properties of lead - it's not a metal known for sparking regardless of any amount of mundane energy applied to it.

You have been strong on criticism, but perhaps weak on giving us a narrative of what you think happens when the bullet "hits the wall".

I wonder if that is because you will have to criticize RFC and say that he is wrong about the "fiery flash". It certainly seems as though you doubt its existence. As for me, I will insist (unless RFC makes a retraction) that lead bullets do make a flash as their structure is reduced to individual atoms by the focused gravity wall.