| [Ben]: | Odd comic commentary | No discussion found | Source
For those of you not familiar with the principle of a kinetic weapon, perform the following experiment. First, take a brick. Now throw it as hard as you can against a mailbox out on some lonely rural highway. Observe the damage.
Now, take that brick with you as you accelerate your automobile to the point where you cannot accelerate any further. Gently lob the brick out the window at the same mailbox. Observe the damage. The brick does a lot more of it when moving at 110 mph.
Now, take that brick as you accelerate your auto to relativistic velocities. Drop it out the window (ignoring for a moment the incongruity of a lightspeed auto, or an open window at those speeds). The brick will slam into interstellar hydrogen (assuming we are in space, which is further incongruous, but bear with me), releasing some hard radiation. This is a warning sign to you. Anything moving fast enough to shed hard rads is moving way too fast to be safe. When the brick hits its target, most of the brick's kinetic energy will get turned into heat, and the brick will put a noticeable hole in the world.
The point? When you are going as fast as these warrior attorney-drones are going, you can use little cones of tin-foil as weapons. Technically, a non-exploding missile is a sabot, but at these speeds, these cee-sabots would explode pretty impressively. |
| 2004-07-08
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