Starwars Lasers BS?

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Ehran RE: What about destroying a Star ? Ehran 8/14/2004 3:47:13 PM

asking questions is good grum. awfully hard to learn anything without asking questions at some point or other hehe.

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Ehran RE: What about destroying a Star ? Ehran 8/14/2004 3:51:27 PM

if you look at how much mass you have to accelerate to what speed to actually make even a small sun explode you see pretty quickly that the brute force method isn't going to be feasible for a long time if ever. finding a way to make the sun burn hotter might be possible but again that's probably a long way off if ever. it would however be a trivial exercise to scald a biosphere off a planet in comparison. might help if we had some idea why grum wants to blow up a star?

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Ehran RE: Why the wait ? 8/14/2004 3:54:40 PM

because we can conceive of something and want it doesn't make it possible to do. for instance people have been wanting to fly like birds for tens of thousands of years and we still aren't there despite all the toil and brainpower deployed to solve the problem. still as he said " a man's reach should exceed his grasp"

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Ehran RE: Why the wait ?grum> 8/14/2004 3:57:34 PM

I can design those Universes or Spaceships you all speak of right down to a " T ", but I can't do some of the math you guy's USE so I have to go about it in theoretical way. without the math it's just wishful thinking grum.

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doggtag We ARE (or were) the stars. 8/14/2004 6:20:09 PM

"...finding a way to make the sun burn hotter might be possible..." That's the idea of how stars work anyway: despite their massive sizes, they only have a limited amount of "fuel" to consume, at which time solar physics makes some changes in what the star "works with": to survive, the sun must start fusing its other elements it has created from its earlier fusion cycles, which is what makes the difference between white, red, yellow, blue, and brown dwarfs and giants ("sun" types). This should confuse y'all a bit...or make things more clear: link I have a book laying around somewhere that says what "phase" a star goes into during it billions-of-years-lifetime that says what elements it's fusing after its hydrogen then helium are used up. And like the above link states, iron is "typically" the cut-off,.. but not always. Solar physics is very complex and even interesting. Especially considering that our own sun is among the "small fry" category: we have observed/measured other stars that fall easily into the "giant" class, having diameters as big as the Earth's orbit around our sun. These beasties have used up all their hydrogen, and have begun to fuse heavier elements, creating massively larger temperatures, sizes, and gravity wells. Certainly suns CAN and DO fuse heavier elements than iron under the right conditions: all that blown-off matter from novae and supernovae is what creates our cosmic supply of "stuff": the aluminum and iron in your car, the copper and tungsten in your computer, even the carbon in your body, all used to be "sun stuff". All those elements didn't just "congeal together" out of primordial post-Big Bang dust. So it makes sense to me that the universe is expanding: as stars "burst", they send forth a new "batch" of elements, to later be used as planet material (or asteroids, comets, etc). Perhaps all the Big Bang really created was the elemental hydrogen of the first stars... and after enough of it gathered together, gravity took over and with enough heat, fusion began, as did the creation of the rest of the universe's "stuff". But that's just one theory. You used to be a hundred stars, GRUM. How's that for metasphysical thinking, eh?.

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andyf nice weapon idea 8/15/2004 1:42:24 PM

heres one that james follet had: build a seriously strong magnetic containment vessel, open at one end. line it with metres of carbon. put a hell of a current into the continment field and detonate a tac-nuke inside it, nucler plama cannon. It'd take a while to reload but it'd be a sod to dodge

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andyf starkiller technology 8/15/2004 1:47:06 PM

I have it!! al you need a a way of altering the relative strengths of the strong and weak nuclear forces. if you can do that..... fire the beam.. suddenly a chunk of the solar core stops fusing. massive collapse,,- keep the beam on it- black hole forms turn the beam off-- supernova -- im gonna go get my electronics bits out, I always had a deep irrational hatred of Rigel!!

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Ehran RE:nice weapon idea 8/16/2004 12:45:13 PM

sounds like the hellbore from the bolo series.

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andyf RE:nice weapon idea 8/17/2004 10:28:55 AM

not read that . any good?

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Ehran Bolo's 8/17/2004 12:59:58 PM

i rather enjoyed them so far. i believe they are a creation of Keith Laumer (sp?) who also did the retief novels. basically truly giant ai controlled tanks vs various enemies. there are some shared world bolo books.

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wkwillis mass drivers as fission aids 8/18/2004 4:05:32 AM

You can fission smaller quantities if you make them denser, so there is less chance of a neutron escaping before it fissions an atom. Just squishing it flat doesn't work, though. It doesn't prevent leakage.

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andyf time dilated nukes 8/18/2004 11:53:01 AM

heres an idea, if youve got spacecraft propulsion drives that enable you to reach relatavistic velocities,, put a small nuke on it and detonated it before it even gets near the target. the time dilated explosion would smack into the target- you cant shoot a fireball down' wonder what it would look like to a 3rd party though. a beam?

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Ehran RE:Ehran and Bolo's 8/18/2004 10:12:00 PM

if you do a search for bolo and sf you should come up with a list of books in pretty short order. once you have the author's name you should be able to get a complete list of bolo novels and then it's off to the library to expand your mind.

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Ehran RE:time dilated nukes 8/18/2004 10:14:30 PM

more trouble than needed. even if you hit an object with a nuke the vapour still has enough KE to smear the target thoroughly. as you begin to approach the speed of light the amount of energy in the projectile goes up to literally astronomical values.

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eon RE:Bolos and Laumer-eon to GRUM 8/20/2004 12:11:56 PM

Keith Laumer wrote the original "bolo" stories starting in the 1960s. They were about giant cybernetic tanks used by Earth to fight a very nasty interstellar war. The average Boilo was about 200 feet long, weighed about 3,000 tons, moved on fusion-powered tank tracks (big ones, I assume to avoid sinking into anything less refractory than solid bedrock), and carried weapons ranging from IRBMs with H-bomb warheads to heavy fusion cannon to "infinite repeaters", anti-personnel weapons similar to our 20mm Vulcan cannon (about 50 of them per side of the vehicle). The Bolo stories were interlinked with Laumer's Reteif series, about Earth's most successful diplomat (whose worst enemy was his own chain of command). Either set of stories is well worth reading, along with just about anything else Laumer wrote, and he wrote a lot..

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