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cthia wrote:And... once the wedge or sidewalls fall, and they will fall, I will assume that the entirety of everything on the inside of the wedge (including the ship) is in total "vacuum"). The kinetic energy will totally consume the vacuum. Consider what an explosion from inside of an object will do to that object. The precise location of the ship inside the wedge won't matter.

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Joat42 wrote:A sidewall is a gravitational stress-band, not a physical object that can be hit. Anything that intersects with the stress band is ripped apart to its constituent particles and accelerated away along the stress-band so there will be no explosion from a kinetic energy conversion.

An object traveling at relativistic speeds that hits a wedge or sidewall will overload a ship's system (nodes, generators etc) to the point of failure though, and at that point some parts of the object may survive long enough to pass through the stress-band but deflected in a direction determined by the bands orientation.

Joat42 wrote:As I said above, there can be no impact because there is nothing to impact on. All you have is an interaction between a field and an object. Kinetic energy kind of matters but not in the way it does for a KEW, the amount of matter/particles you can push through the sidewall field for a given amount of time determines the energy needed to keep the field strength up, and if the generators can't deliver that energy you get burn-throughs - so an object traveling at relativistic speeds will push enough matter into the field to weaken it or blow out the generators but there won't be any direct conversion of kinetic energy as if it hit something solid.

You have to remember that an object moving into a wedge/sidewall doesn't stop moving, it's just that the object and it's constituent particles are accelerated sideways by the wedge as it passes into the field.

tlb wrote:There is no scientific difference between a "rapid acceleration change" and a "violent deacceleration". In the same way having its speed vector "brutally changed" is another way of saying it's having a "rapid acceleration change". You are trying to get around that by saying the change is instantaneous, which just means the acceleration in that instant was infinite (that is most likely an exaggeration).

tlb wrote:Given an "infinite" acceleration, it does not matter what speed the bullet was going; the violence of the focused gravity wall is what tore the bullet apart. Bouncing a marble into it would have had the same effect.

Loren Pechtel wrote:

Joat42 wrote:As I said above, there can be no impact because there is nothing to impact on. All you have is an interaction between a field and an object. Kinetic energy kind of matters but not in the way it does for a KEW, the amount of matter/particles you can push through the sidewall field for a given amount of time determines the energy needed to keep the field strength up, and if the generators can't deliver that energy you get burn-throughs - so an object traveling at relativistic speeds will push enough matter into the field to weaken it or blow out the generators but there won't be any direct conversion of kinetic energy as if it hit something solid.

You have to remember that an object moving into a wedge/sidewall doesn't stop moving, it's just that the object and it's constituent particles are accelerated sideways by the wedge as it passes into the field.

Disagree--we've seen wedges take far more energy than their generators could possibly supply.

Loren Pechtel wrote:

Joat42 wrote:A sidewall is a gravitational stress-band, not a physical object that can be hit. Anything that intersects with the stress band is ripped apart to its constituent particles and accelerated away along the stress-band so there will be no explosion from a kinetic energy conversion.

An object traveling at relativistic speeds that hits a wedge or sidewall will overload a ship's system (nodes, generators etc) to the point of failure though, and at that point some parts of the object may survive long enough to pass through the stress-band but deflected in a direction determined by the bands orientation.

Actually, it doesn't matter if the sidewall deflects the missile. Deflect an ultrarelatavistic missile and it's energy is going to appear as some very hot gamma rays--and they'll be heading on the path the missile was on. The target dies anyway.

tlb wrote:This is from TV Tropes:

The novel uses Fasset Drives — that is, a ship generates an artificial black hole that draws the ship toward it. At the same time, the black hole moves away from the ship since the ship is generating the thing. This leads to unlimited acceleration. When the ship hits 1.0c, something technobabbly happens and the ship enters wormhole space, where it can go much faster than should be possible (to the tune of several thousand times the speed of light).

Loren Pechtel wrote:TV Tropes has a lot of errors.

I'm remembering the drone having to reach .9c to wormhole.

tlb wrote:Given an "infinite" acceleration, it does not matter what speed the bullet was going; the violence of the focused gravity wall is what tore the bullet apart. Bouncing a marble into it would have had the same effect.

Joat42 wrote:But the point of the whole discussion was that an object's inherit kinetic energy is released when it "hits" a wedge or a sidewall but you just implied that the energy released come from the gravitic distortion tearing the projectile apart.

tlb wrote:What the forum has been saying is that he is frugal in the use of handwavium WITHIN a series.

Loren Pechtel wrote:

Joat42 wrote:A sidewall is a gravitational stress-band, not a physical object that can be hit. Anything that intersects with the stress band is ripped apart to its constituent particles and accelerated away along the stress-band so there will be no explosion from a kinetic energy conversion.

An object traveling at relativistic speeds that hits a wedge or sidewall will overload a ship's system (nodes, generators etc) to the point of failure though, and at that point some parts of the object may survive long enough to pass through the stress-band but deflected in a direction determined by the bands orientation.

Actually, it doesn't matter if the sidewall deflects the missile. Deflect an ultrarelatavistic missile and it's energy is going to appear as some very hot gamma rays--and they'll be heading on the path the missile was on. The target dies anyway.