Relativity

tlb wrote:

Loren Pechtel wrote:Even vaporized a hit would be deadly.

Theemile wrote:In our universe.. yes. but not in the Honorverse according to everything Webber has set up.

Matter hitting sidewalls equals "fzzt"....

Loren Pechtel wrote:Up until the MDM I would agree. With an MDM, however, even a perfectly spherical release of the energy produced vaporizes nearly a meter of tungsten armor (everything else fares far worse) on the ship--and the destruction is supersonic so you have a brutal shockwave heading into the ship.

I think he just didn't realize the physics had changed.

But does an explosion at the sidewall result in a shock wave in the hull? It depends how much of the energy release is transmitted through the sidewall. If the sidewall holds, then perhaps much of that energy is reflected or otherwise dispersed? Certainly any energy passed would be attenuated.

I'm simply assuming the energy of the impact appears as radiation. From what we have seen the sidewalls are more effective against lower energy attacks, since this adds some zeroes beyond the biggest thing we have seen I don't expect the sidewall to do much. Much of what the sidewalls are described as doing is deflecting attacks--but that's meaningless in this case as I'm figuring an omnidirectional energy pulse.

The shockwave in the hull is from the vaporized armor. If the destruction is supersonic (in the material) you get a shockwave.

Theemile wrote:Contact nukes had the burn and boom modes. Burn would initiate a plasma bloom in an attempt to overwhelm the sidewall and burn the generator out - Boom would attempt to sneak it's way through the sidewall using special penetrators to sync with the sidewall, and explode next to the skin. Burn was never intended to harm the ship - only weaken or remove the sidewalls. We've never seen a battle where "some" of the energy gets though a sidewall from an impact or explosion. It's all or...nothing.

A missile ram puts several zeroes beyond the power of a burn mode hit. The sidewall should be gone even if nothing else happens. The second missile takes the ship out.

Once again, Loren, I'm not saying that I don't agree with you - in the real world. And you are correct, David set up everything for single drive missiles, and MDM changed the ballgame making Einsteinian overtake Newtonian physics. I'm just saying, in Universe, this has been the answer, and I have yet to see it contravened.

Yeah, he's sticking to how things used to be.

The energy released from a missile ram should at least burn out the sidewall generators, but it doesn't. Yet, TWTSNBN does. I guess the nameless one operated on frequencies?

tlb wrote:

cthia wrote:From whence are the measurements obtained, from inside the Schwarzschild radius? Inside the radius the ship is subject to the wormhole's effect and will pass thru or be destroyed. From outside the radius the instruments shouldn't work.

Theemile wrote:These are not Einsteinian Wormholes - there is a different mechanism at play. a ship can drive over a Honorverse wormhole in normal space and not realize it - or just feel some (otherwise) unwarranted grav turbulence. without the Hypergenerators and sails, an object cannot interact with the wormhole - let alone pass through it. However, ther are certain gravity patterns that are (usually) seen in coordination with the wormhole in normal space.

cthia wrote:Thank you The-emile! Now I can simply drop years of qualms about Honorverse wormholes!

Considering that, even I doubt the experiment would work.

The Schwarzschild radius is something that applies to black-holes (which are only conjectured to be wormholes; without any particular basis, so far as I know). The Honorverse wormhole is a gravitation disturbance, that is not caused by a concentration of mass (therefore not a black-hole).

Actually it applies to all singularities. The effect of the event horizon just isn't as strong as it would be if associated with a black hole. All singularities are gravitational disturbances. Wormholes are gravitational disturbances. Black Holes are simply one type of singularity. I mentioned elsewhere on the forum that the Schwarzchild radius is my pet project. Must have been long long ago because I can't locate it and it has obviously aged off the forum. At any rate, the event horizon of a Black Hole yields all of the same equations as traveling at the speed of light. These equations speak to you. Within these equations, I do believe, is where we can find the answers to a Theory of Everything. I have a supercomputer still crunching on equations like cereal.

You should be able to seek reparations from the power company for untimely and extended disruptions of energy. If you operate a supercomputer, a Generac is a must.

tlb wrote:The Schwarzschild radius is something that applies to black-holes (which are only conjectured to be wormholes; without any particular basis, so far as I know). The Honorverse wormhole is a gravitation disturbance, that is not caused by a concentration of mass (therefore not a black-hole).

cthia wrote:Actually it applies to all singularities. The effect of the event horizon just isn't as strong as it would be if associated with a black hole. All singularities are gravitational disturbances. Wormholes are gravitational disturbances. Black Holes are simply one type of singularity. I mentioned elsewhere on the forum that the Schwarzchild radius is my pet project. Must have been long long ago because I can't locate it and it has obviously aged off the forum. At any rate, the event horizon of a Black Hole yields all of the same equations as traveling at the speed of light. These equations speak to you. Within these equations, I do believe, is where we can find the answers to a Theory of Everything. I have a supercomputer still crunching on equations like cereal.

The formula includes the mass of the object, so you must be somehow assigning a value for the mass if you want to apply the formula to an Honorverse wormhole that is not associated with an object having mass.

The term was named after the mathematician Karl Schwarzschild, who first developed the formula: Rs = 2 GM/c2. M is the mass of the body, G is the universal constant of gravitation, and c is the speed of light. You can use this formula to calculate the Schwarzschild radius of any object.

And so, an object smaller than its Schwarzschild radius is known as a black hole. The surface of a black hole acts as an event horizon; a point at which nothing, not even light or radiation can escape it.

Note: copy and paste lost the fact that the denominator is c squared.

tlb wrote:

tlb wrote:The Schwarzschild radius is something that applies to black-holes (which are only conjectured to be wormholes; without any particular basis, so far as I know). The Honorverse wormhole is a gravitation disturbance, that is not caused by a concentration of mass (therefore not a black-hole).

cthia wrote:Actually it applies to all singularities. The effect of the event horizon just isn't as strong as it would be if associated with a black hole. All singularities are gravitational disturbances. Wormholes are gravitational disturbances. Black Holes are simply one type of singularity. I mentioned elsewhere on the forum that the Schwarzchild radius is my pet project. Must have been long long ago because I can't locate it and it has obviously aged off the forum. At any rate, the event horizon of a Black Hole yields all of the same equations as traveling at the speed of light. These equations speak to you. Within these equations, I do believe, is where we can find the answers to a Theory of Everything. I have a supercomputer still crunching on equations like cereal.

The formula includes the mass of the object, so you must be somehow assigning a value for the mass if you want to apply the formula to an Honorverse wormhole that is not associated with an object having mass.

The term was named after the mathematician Karl Schwarzschild, who first developed the formula: Rs = 2 GM/c2. M is the mass of the body, G is the universal constant of gravitation, and c is the speed of light. You can use this formula to calculate the Schwarzschild radius of any object.

And so, an object smaller than its Schwarzschild radius is known as a black hole. The surface of a black hole acts as an event horizon; a point at which nothing, not even light or radiation can escape it.

Note: copy and paste lost the fact that the denominator is c squared.

I was never fixated on Honorverse wormholes except for the fact they don't hold water. Now that I was informed they aren't Einstenian I can allow my ruffled feathers to straighten a bit. Other aspects of the Honorverse didn't sit well with me either, actually not as much as most sci-fi, but still too much for my obsessive sister to lose her aversion to everything sci-fi.

Consider how shocked I was to find that missiles follow some standard rules of physics. Some. I never bothered to check because using slide rules together with sci-fi give me indigestion from spoiled food. (Food for thought.) So, I enjoy storyline without the aggravation.

That equation is your starting point, but you're also going to have to juggle space and time. If you're serious. Which includes a solid understanding of physics, and mathematics including calculus thru theory. And the applications thereof.

cthia wrote:I was never fixated on Honorverse wormholes except for the fact they don't hold water. Now that I was informed they aren't Einstenian I can allow my ruffled feathers to straighten a bit. Other aspects of the Honorverse didn't sit well with me either, actually not as much as most sci-fi, but still too much for my obsessive sister to lose her aversion to everything sci-fi.

Consider how shocked I was to find that missiles follow some standard rules of physics. Some. I never bothered to check because using slide rules together with sci-fi give me indigestion from spoiled food. (Food for thought.) So, I enjoy storyline without the aggravation.

If I allowed it, then I could be aggravated by contra-gravity, gravity plates and compensators; but most specially by the incredible amounts of energy required to create something like a wedge, too much for any ship to muster.

But I waive that point. I do not press it. I look over it.

Actually, the most ridiculous thing that I have found in science fiction occurs in Star Wars where we see a image of a beast of burden pulling a contra-gravity cart.

tlb wrote:

cthia wrote:I was never fixated on Honorverse wormholes except for the fact they don't hold water. Now that I was informed they aren't Einstenian I can allow my ruffled feathers to straighten a bit. Other aspects of the Honorverse didn't sit well with me either, actually not as much as most sci-fi, but still too much for my obsessive sister to lose her aversion to everything sci-fi.

Consider how shocked I was to find that missiles follow some standard rules of physics. Some. I never bothered to check because using slide rules together with sci-fi give me indigestion from spoiled food. (Food for thought.) So, I enjoy storyline without the aggravation.

If I allowed it, then I could be aggravated by contra-gravity, gravity plates and compensators; but most specially by the incredible amounts of energy required to create something like a wedge, too much for any ship to muster.

But I waive that point. I do not press it. I look over it.

Actually, the most ridiculous thing that I have found in science fiction occurs in Star Wars where we see a image of a beast of burden pulling a contra-gravity cart.

I can accept the wedge far easier than the enormous energy required for missiles to attain stated velocities. And those stated velocities not being devastating to anything it hits. Which is why I would have nightmares if I carried a sliderule thinking about all of the wasted control missiles during launches that don't collectively target something instead of self destructing.

My sci-fi hampered sister - who almost became a physics professor but decided to study medicine instead - once had this conversation with me about some book I bamboozled her into reading ...

"Oh come on, missiles and warships reaching those velocities? They're breaking the sound barrier in space!"

"There's no sound in space?"

"Can you hear me now?"

My sister hates sci-fi. I don't read with sliderules, they'll turn me into her.

She actually likes the Mars Trilogy because it uses no handwavium.

cthia wrote:The energy released from a missile ram should at least burn out the sidewall generators, but it doesn't. Yet, TWTSNBN does. I guess the nameless one operated on frequencies?

Though the only time we've seen missiles impact the sidewall - when Rafe suckered the Masadan crew of Thunder of God/Saladin as got a salvo through all her point defenses - those SDMs were still under power. It's possible, somehow, that the sidewall blowing the missile's wedge makes it easier to resist that a pure kinetic impact.

After all, as I recall from the armor essay in IFF, the original purpose of sidewalls was to block wedge impacts from missiles; which was how early shipkillers worked.

(And the missiles definitely had their wedges still up because they're needed for the sidewall penetrator mechanism that all were trying to use to pop their warhead through the sidewall before detonation. The 2 that 'impacted' were the missiles whose sidewall perpetrators didn't succeed.

TWTSNBN is also a grav impact, but it has vastly more power than the wedge of a missile; being able to redirect a noticeable percentage of the power of a full up starship wedge onto the poor sidewall. At that point the sidewall loses. But it loses to something more akin to a wedge to wedge impact than to simple kinetic force. So it's just an entirely different damage mechanism that a relativistic impact would be.
(OTOH nukes in "burn" mode are hitting the sidewall with a focused plasma burst; which is far more similar to what a relativistic impact would do to a physical object - so I'm not sure what magic keeps a .25c impact - even one likely disintegrated a couple hundred microseconds before - from doing more damage than a, say, gigaton warhead in "burn" mode when the missile should have about 45 times the energy)

But normally the survivability of sidewalls in the face of high relativistic impacts is theoretically because it's nearly impossible for a missile to pull that off. It's just to easy for the ship to either kill it before it gets that close or roll so it has no angle.

Jonathan_S wrote:

cthia wrote:The energy released from a missile ram should at least burn out the sidewall generators, but it doesn't. Yet, TWTSNBN does. I guess the nameless one operated on frequencies?

Though the only time we've seen missiles impact the sidewall - when Rafe suckered the Masadan crew of Thunder of God/Saladin as got a salvo through all her point defenses - those SDMs were still under power. It's possible, somehow, that the sidewall blowing the missile's wedge makes it easier to resist that a pure kinetic impact.

After all, as I recall from the armor essay in IFF, the original purpose of sidewalls was to block wedge impacts from missiles; which was how early shipkillers worked.

(And the missiles definitely had their wedges still up because they're needed for the sidewall penetrator mechanism that all were trying to use to pop their warhead through the sidewall before detonation. The 2 that 'impacted' were the missiles whose sidewall perpetrators didn't succeed.

TWTSNBN is also a grav impact, but it has vastly more power than the wedge of a missile; being able to redirect a noticeable percentage of the power of a full up starship wedge onto the poor sidewall. At that point the sidewall loses. But it loses to something more akin to a wedge to wedge impact than to simple kinetic force. So it's just an entirely different damage mechanism that a relativistic impact would be.
(OTOH nukes in "burn" mode are hitting the sidewall with a focused plasma burst; which is far more similar to what a relativistic impact would do to a physical object - so I'm not sure what magic keeps a .25c impact - even one likely disintegrated a couple hundred microseconds before - from doing more damage than a, say, gigaton warhead in "burn" mode when the missile should have about 45 times the energy)

But normally the survivability of sidewalls in the face of high relativistic impacts is theoretically because it's nearly impossible for a missile to pull that off. It's just to easy for the ship to either kill it before it gets that close or roll so it has no angle.

There's another thing that would make me toss my sliderule. We already discussed the time it takes a huge ship to roll. But it is easy for it to out roll incoming missiles charging in at a significant fraction of light - from various angles launched from several or more ships. Even though they roll ahead of time, many are reaquiring. And again, they are coming in from different angles, having been launched from different ships.