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Karl Streiger, on 12 January 2015 - 02:10 AM, said:
another opinion?
while i have read about the energy equitation - well energy is nice - but sometimes the impulse is important as well.
consider the good old example - a back of sand - and you are firing with a 9mm pistol and a arrow from a compound bow at this sack.
While maybe the 9mm has more energy - the projectile will have a hard time to punch through the sack - while its likely that the arrow will make two holes and has still enough energy after it passes the sack.
So a Gauss Slug that travels much slower won't have the energy of a couple of particles at relativistic speed.
But hey we don't know how many particles a PPC fires. On the other hand - where does those particles come from?
Important is - don't mistake a PPC for a lighting gun - simple discharge some tesla coils and look what happen?
So without any scientific backround - i would guess - a PPC fires compressed air - that is charged - and after wards propelled through a particle accelerator - and maybe this "charged accelerated air" has much slower speed than we might suspect.
So a PPC is a air gun that fires charged compressed particles - and maybe this time the PPC "ball" has some mass
while i have read about the energy equitation - well energy is nice - but sometimes the impulse is important as well.
consider the good old example - a back of sand - and you are firing with a 9mm pistol and a arrow from a compound bow at this sack.
While maybe the 9mm has more energy - the projectile will have a hard time to punch through the sack - while its likely that the arrow will make two holes and has still enough energy after it passes the sack.
So a Gauss Slug that travels much slower won't have the energy of a couple of particles at relativistic speed.
But hey we don't know how many particles a PPC fires. On the other hand - where does those particles come from?
Important is - don't mistake a PPC for a lighting gun - simple discharge some tesla coils and look what happen?
So without any scientific backround - i would guess - a PPC fires compressed air - that is charged - and after wards propelled through a particle accelerator - and maybe this "charged accelerated air" has much slower speed than we might suspect.
So a PPC is a air gun that fires charged compressed particles - and maybe this time the PPC "ball" has some mass
I can't really talk in detail to the arrow analogy without knowing the mass of the arrow and the velocity on impact, but the thing with more energy will usually over-penetrate to a greater extent than the thing with less energy unless geometry comes into play (and it does). I can tell you that the arrows from my 40 lb. competition recurve tend to stick in the first sack and call it a day (if I'm actually using sacks...it'll over-penetrate targets easily at 30 yd.). I can also say that an arrow is more massive than a 9 mm, and will retain its energy better than the 9 mm round, so that could also be a factor.
The PPC's particles probably come from some canister of hydrogen (or other gas) somewhere in the 'Mech. It could also be a solid chunk of metal that gets pieces shaved off and boiled into a gas to be ionized and fired. Let's just chalk the potential differences in operation up to manufacturer choice, eh?
As for how many particles a PPC fires...a lot. If it's enough to get a visible beam going, it's a lot. Billions. Remember, any atomic nucleus is freaking tiny, and there are billions of them on your fingertip. Shoot, five million million hydrogen atoms can fit on the head of a pin.
And remember, the OP asked about the PPC in lore, not in MWO. In lore, the PPC is a beam weapon. It doesn't fire a ball of particles, it fires a stream of them. But, yes, the particles in the beam do have mass, which is why the beam never actually reaches the speed of light (but it does come close)
Apocryph0n, on 12 January 2015 - 02:20 AM, said:
PPC is no where near the speed of light. It's a Particle (!) Projector Cannon, not a laser.
Edit:
Should probably even be slower than AC's, since the AC bullet speeds we have in MWO are a joke, physics wise. Tho needed for balance.
Edit:
Should probably even be slower than AC's, since the AC bullet speeds we have in MWO are a joke, physics wise. Tho needed for balance.
The name means nothing. Sarna said it's a beam weapon. While it is physically impossible for the particles in the beam to move at the speed of light, it can move fast enough that it makes no difference in practical application. A particle stream would also not do diddly to you kinetically unless the particles were moving at a significant fraction (read: close to) the speed of light. Even a billion of the things moving at some meh speed (read: 99% of c) wouldn't amount to much; 0.91 joules. My 'Mech is totally trembling in fear of that...
And yes, ACs in the games are a joke. The AC/20 should carry its energy better than the AC/2, etc.
And where's the gorram recoil for both ACs and PPCs, eh?
Mitchell Headington, on 12 January 2015 - 12:49 AM, said:
I think the gauss would be faster because the gauss barrel is going to be riffled and the projectile would be aerodynamicly designed. The PPC wouldn't be able to use any of that so it would have much worse wind resistance.
Gauss barrel is not rifled. It can't be, and there'd be no point since the round doesn't even touch the walls in a gauss rifle. When you see the barrel of a Gauss, you are looking at the frame and bracing holding a series of exponentially spaced, ring-shaped electromagnetic coils. The round is held at one end, and then pull-pushed through this series of magnets.
The PPC is way faster because for a series of particles like protons to do any damage at all in the amount of time we're looking at for combat effectiveness, they each have to be moving near the speed of light.
A particle beam would be terrible in atmosphere, though. More likely to scatter and lose forward momentum.
You know what? Read this, guys.
Hexidecimator, on 12 January 2015 - 12:36 AM, said:
I asked my Physics teacher and he said that technically a projectile like Gauss would slow down over time, and the Particle cannon would remain at the same speed until it dissipated its charge, so in essence the PPC would be faster.
Not how it works; it's not a laser, which is what your Physics teacher seems to understand the PPC to be like. The particles have mass and also slow down over time in the presence of friction. The PPC is faster, though, simply because the particles exit the weapon much, much, much faster than the mere hypersonic velocities afforded by the coil gun.
Edited by Yeonne Greene, 12 January 2015 - 04:16 AM.
Later the description switches to "Ion beam" once, for whatever reason. So, we don't know what they do to these poor particles that makes them so dangerous.
