Online devastation calculator

[Karlos]

Make your projectile dense, large and fast enough and you get a transient crater larger than the earth :-D

You'd think they'd cap the velocity - you can enter values > c ;-)

[Karlos]

Aye, I managed to get a fireball so big it would be over your horizon even 20000km away. Or on the opposite side of the earth, to be a bit more precise :-D

[Karlos]

KennyR wrote:
I went to the other side of the scale, standing 5 metres away from a 5cm rock hitting at 500 m/hour - and I got second degree burns? :crazy:

Cool. I did try the micro end of the scale too, but I couldn't get anything so small to traverse the atmosphere. Maybe I had the velocity too high :-D

[Karlos]

I wonder, just out of curiosity, if you had a material that would heat without shattering and ablate in a controlled fashion as it traversed the atmosphere, what sort of initial size/velocity a chunk of it would have to be to land as a sufficiently aerobraked harmless pebble...

[Karlos]

@Kenny

Dude, you solved the martian terraforming problem :-D

We should hit mars with a steady stream of sharpened degenerate iron projectiles that will sink to the core and increase its mass enough to give it a decent gravitational pull :-P

-edit-

Im sure we mused over this material before. I really don't think you could have a pebble sized chunk of it. It probably only exists when there is enough pressure to form it and requires some sort of critical mass to continue existing in absence of the forces that created it. The internuclear repulsion would easily overcome gravity unless you had a stonking big hunk of the stuff.

[Karlos]

KennyR wrote:

Blobrana wrote:
If you could collect enough wimps an inject them into the Martian core, then you would increase the gravity of Mars...

But how would you hold them in, if they go straight through normal baryonic matter? ;-)

Surely they'd just oscillate about the common centre of gravity and gradually come to rest at the centre, right?

I mean, you plop into mars at one point, it sinks trhough, accelerating towards the core. Once it hits the core its moving at its maximum speed and as if flies out the other side it will be decelerating again.

No matter how weakly they interact I doubt they'd travel trhrough an entire planetary mass without some kinetic energy lost to other processes somewhere.

[Karlos]

I thought we were working on the assumption we'd fished them out of the sun?

Or you are implying theyd just drift all the way back to the sun as the solar systems centre of mass?

Degenerate iron shells it is then :lol:

[Karlos]

Aye, you sure don't wanna leave a black hole lying unattended in the sun's vicinity.

Ever read the Night's Dawn Trilogy? A doomsday superweapon called "the alchemist" is in the second book, based on the principal of creating an intense gravity well sufficent to create an event horizon, or just crush surrounding matter to neutronium depending on the setting. When it does get used (albeit fired into a poor unsuspecting gas giant), the imagery described is awesome :-)

[Karlos]

blobrana wrote:

@Karlos
No never read the book...

Aww. Your'e missing out. I read the whole trilogy a few times and enjoyed it just as much each time around. All the people I know who read it enjoyed it, I'm sure you would too :-D

hum, the  warping of space , as an alternative to using a black hole  (messy), would be a better solution....

Plenty of that goes on too. Living, organic, sentient spacecraft (voidhawks and blackhawks) warp space to create wormholes for travelling, whereas conventional (that is technological) spacecraft create a massive space warp around their hulls to squeeze themselves out of the universe at one point and back into it somewhere else.

Er, now all we have to do is discover 25^th century physics...or perhaps some alien artifact... :-)

Well, the story begins in 2583 or so in a universe where mankind has populated some 800 star systems, but the main story starts in 2611 or something.

Read it, you know you want to :-D