67 replies to this topic

[Oxford]

Nightwish, on 10 August 2012 - 04:19 PM, said:

This thread is descending into a... somthing...
Also Kobura does have a point. Real scientist probbably lead much more buisy and productive un-lives than ours. Also its 1am where I am

Well, I am about to be awarded my PhD in Physics.
I've been skimming this thread and the flamer thread and resisting the temptation to get bogged down in a protracted discussion when I should be writing a job application due next Tuesday.

[Kobura]

Andrew Kase, on 10 August 2012 - 04:24 PM, said:

ANDREW KASE HAS RETURNED!!!!!!!! My exodus is now over, i have a working ppc now, thanks to iron avenger's GENIUS IDEAS of being able to understand FUTURISTIC FICTIONAL TECH. BEHOLD MY MIGHTY CLANS!!

Omigod man the clans are so last week (literally...)

(edit) Uh-oh now it's Oxford's page. Take care of it, fisty...

Edited by Kobura, 10 August 2012 - 04:28 PM.

[Andrew Kase]

PPC'S, PPC'S FOR EVERYONE!!!!!!!

[CocoaJin]

JFlash49, on 10 August 2012 - 03:01 PM, said:

FICTION!!!!!!!!!!!!.....

But we already know that ficition is frequently only a transitory state between present ignorance/inability and real-life future innovation. The mobile communicaror was fiction at one point, so was the laser, so was space travel, DNA splicing, faster than sound flight, computers, nuclear power.
Just stating 'Fiction" and leaving it at that is a cry of a lazy mind...my first thought would be lazy due to lack of knowledge and/or lack of imagination. I'd say stay put, maybe you'll earn something.

[CocoaJin]

Iron Avenger, on 10 August 2012 - 03:23 PM, said:

Again, about the armor, Why wouldn't you use the same material as on the inside of the reactor? And speaking of which, how can a mech reactor be breached?

Thermal resistance does necessarily mean impact resistance. Focusing kinetic energy and/or enough heat energy on to the reactor may be sufficient to breach the reactor physically, or damasge to reactor sub-systems maybe enough to disrupt its containment field, exposing parts of it not intended to come in contact with aspects of the reaction. Its like the turbo-prop engine I'm flying. the combustion chamber is designed to handle the heat of the combustion, but if you disturb the cooling features of the engine(like the air "training" the flame away from the combustion walls), you can end up with a fried combustion section on the engine. If the "flame" starts getting out the combustion chamber, you're looking at a burning engine as metals not intended to handle the heat of combustion fail, surrounding sub-systems like fuel and oil erupt into flames and I end up looking like a shooting star.

Oxford, on 10 August 2012 - 04:27 PM, said:

Well, I am about to be awarded my PhD in Physics.
I've been skimming this thread and the flamer thread and resisting the temptation to get bogged down in a protracted discussion when I should be writing a job application due next Tuesday.

See, you are exactly who we need to have providing input, i'd rather be corrected than left with an incorrect view on things. Ignorance may me bliss, but nerdiness rocks!!!

[Steel Spectre]

Evinthal, on 10 August 2012 - 03:14 PM, said:

Thank you Tesla.

http://www.tfcbooks..../1935-00-00.htm

also a more recent application.

http://www.army.mil/...asers_to__fry_/

The way the book describes it, it is NOT like a Tesla gun.
They are magnetically accelerated particles, they are not projected by creating a potential difference, and there are more than just electrons in the particle stream. The description of a PPC is rather like a linear particle accelerator with one end open.

/Physicist

[CocoaJin]

Steel Spectre, on 10 August 2012 - 08:03 PM, said:

The way the book describes it, it is NOT like a Tesla gun.
They are magnetically accelerated particles, they are not projected by creating a potential difference, and there are more than just electrons in the particle stream. The description of a PPC is rather like a linear particle accelerator with one end open.

/Physicist

So what might we be looking at? A tightly bound packet(s) of nitrogen or Argon gas(assuming hydrogen would be dangerous to store for usage) ? Could this ball of plasma I pressume have enough residual coherency from the launcher to stay together through the max range of the shot? Could that coherency be achieved in the particles like lasers do to light?

Edited by CocoaJin, 10 August 2012 - 08:18 PM.

[Meth Borm]

Im suprised this is less comon.

http://en.wikipedia....Carbon_nanotube

Considerably lighter and stronger than Top grade steel. Hardest known thioreticaly plasible material. At lest i think so. Somthing like this woudl go a long way tword protection. Also explain the light wait to size of mechs to some extent. At the curnet moment its not producible to capacity sufering kinda the same problem spider silk has and thats the inablity to make it 100% the same braking at the weekest link. But it has MANY propertys that are needed for MW armor MY gess is Ferro-Fibrous could easal be some sort of similer material or compound.

Heck its Fibrous not unlike carbon fiber that The tubes are not that far off of. And then asuing you had the capacity to produce it you can always compound armors or variations to add other protections. Think in combination with http://en.wikipedia....otection_system materials. Impact+Heat+electrical (tubes are suposedly incredible conductors read wiki)

Its thioretical + thioretical but hay its teh futur we got what a 1050 years to come up with a way to make this this stuff. Apoligize for the spelling.

[Steel Spectre]

CocoaJin, on 10 August 2012 - 08:09 PM, said:

So what might we be looking at? A tightly bound packet(s) of nitrogen or Argon gas(assuming hydrogen would be dangerous to store for usage) ?

Anything you could pull out of the air and ionize. Noble gasses are obviously the worst candidates, they like to hold onto their electrons. The LHC uses lead ions for its higher energy collisions, although obviously you're not going to grab lead from the atmosphere, hehe.

Quote

Could this ball of plasma I pressume have enough residual coherency from the launcher to stay together through the max range of the shot? Could that coherency be achieved in the particles like lasers do to light?

It is hard to say how much attenuation of the beam's strength there would be. Coherency in this case is a little bit different than with lasers; it can't be achieved the way that lasers do because lasers take advantage of light's ability to easily pass through substances that are transparent to them. They can pass through lenses to be focused and, if the wavelength is carefully chosen, air does not strongly attenuate them simply because the atoms in the atmosphere will be unable to absorb photons of that particular frequency. Nothing is "transparent" to a massive particle or ion, though.

Assuming you fire the particles straight, the beam will not decohere on its own. A particle in motion stays in motion until acted upon by an outside force, right? The problem is that those particles, even with a lot of energy and momentum, can be acted upon with plenty of force by running into the particles in the atmosphere. Plus, atmospheric particles are ostensibly the same ones we're shooting, so it's rather like trying to shoot a bunch of billiard balls in a straight line across a room filled with other billiard balls.

There could be ways around it, though. The simplest is to simply accelerate enough particles that the particles at the head of the beam "clear the way" for the ones that follow. Naturally this would cause damage to taper with range, would make the beam weaker in environments with thicker atmospheres, and probably isn't a very efficient method. There are, perhaps, more clever ways to move the air out of the way by exciting it with relatively low-power, specific-frequency lasers, or other things I can't think of at 1am. This would certainly be a place where innovations could help turn a PPC into an ERPPC

Edited by Steel Spectre, 11 August 2012 - 12:27 AM.

[Evinthal]

Steel Spectre, on 10 August 2012 - 08:03 PM, said:

The way the book describes it, it is NOT like a Tesla gun.
They are magnetically accelerated particles, they are not projected by creating a potential difference, and there are more than just electrons in the particle stream. The description of a PPC is rather like a linear particle accelerator with one end open.

/Physicist

I know what a PPC is. However it is described as "man made lightning" on several accounts, going as far as to include describing the smell of ionized atmosphere, and hair standing on end similar to a natural lightning strike. So in that respect, it is a good comparison. Is it a match? No, but it does come close.

Edited by Evinthal, 11 August 2012 - 10:49 AM.

[verybad]

The "man made lightning" part is the after effects. By the tiem you see it, it's already done the damage. The particle beam would charge the air aroudn the firing path, causing a lightning like effect. The real damage is done by the probably invisible particle beam.

[CaveHermit]

Remember Star Trek (ToS).. A lot of things in that tv series WERE fiction.. Now they are Real. Handheld commincitor = Cell phone.. Interactive computer panels = Computers with touchscreens.. etc..etc.etc..

Remember the time and technology as they both advance turn fiction into theory into reality. PPC, fusion reactors, etc are just a matter of time before reality.

[Lege]

If you can think of it, someone can make it a reality.

[CocoaJin]

Steel Spectre, on 11 August 2012 - 12:14 AM, said:

Anything you could pull out of the air and ionize. Noble gasses are obviously the worst candidates, they like to hold onto their electrons. The LHC uses lead ions for its higher energy collisions, although obviously you're not going to grab lead from the atmosphere, hehe.

Would Noble gases be worth it if teh reactor was able to provide enough energy to get their electrons to break free? I'd think they'd be easy to harvest on Earth like planets, easier and/or safer to store.

If Nobles gases were too difficult to use, how about chlorine or sodium...one of those likes to dump electrons right? both are easy to find...but would sodium mean the PPC beam should be orangish in color instead of blue?

[SakuranoSenshi]

CocoaJin, on 10 August 2012 - 04:48 PM, said:

But we already know that ficition is frequently only a transitory state between present ignorance/inability and real-life future innovation. The mobile communicaror was fiction at one point, so was the laser, so was space travel, DNA splicing, faster than sound flight, computers, nuclear power.
Just stating 'Fiction" and leaving it at that is a cry of a lazy mind...my first thought would be lazy due to lack of knowledge and/or lack of imagination. I'd say stay put, maybe you'll earn something.

Gonna take this apart because it comes up a lot. Short version: No.

"Communicators" remain sci-fi, mobile phone networks are not Star trek communicators (and Star Trek 'science' isn't, nor did it predict anything at all, this was all debunked in a book whose title escapes me that the more illiterate fans still try to use as proof of the very opposite). LASERs never were fiction, they're a real technology the name has been used and misused a lot since but old 'ray guns' were nothing like LASERs nor ever called such, it's also an acronym that describes what a LASER is and is not - Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation. That's a somewhat sideways way of saying 'coherent stream of photons forming a wave with a specific single frequency', in other words no slower than light bolts of something travelling to the target and actually not visible from any angle besides the receiving end (unless you get some scatter). Space travel as described is typical sci-fi is completely fantasy, very much fiction, even down to not understanding some basic facts of vaccuum, gravity and so on. "DNA splicing" is science fiction, still, in the way that it has been used in any stories, we can mess about with plants somewhat and we do some stuff with organ harvesting but what you don't get happening is altering an existing being's DNA and getting massive changes in phenotype. That's not how it works. Faster than sound flight has been with us for a long time, arrows and similar projectiles can be accelerated to that kind of speed by fairly simple technology, the end of a whip (even a makeshift one) easily breaks the 'sound barrier' - that's what the "crack" is, incidentally, not the whip hitting itself or something else. Computers are not fiction and weren't, we have simply used better and better technology - technically even an abacus is a computer and the fictional versions of computers are unintentionally hilarious in their limitations. Nuclear power wasn't fictional; it didn't turn up in fiction at all until after we had working nuclear technology as a result of the weaponizing of nuclear fission.

Stating 'Fiction' does indeed serve to point out this is not something that stands up to close examination and Battletech really doesn't, most especially its 'technology' and 'science' but also its economics.

[Iron Avenger]

Dude, him just saying FICTION does nothing but mock and annoy people who are trying to figure something out. He did it the exact same way the last time I made a physics thread.

[CaveHermit]

I gotta go troll on this.

The Masons built DC. Aliens build the pyramids. A weather balloon crashed in Roswell. and the world ends in 2012.

DNA Splicing is science fiction.. Then PLEASE explain glowing sheep. (or whatever animal it what that has gene for bio-luminescence SPLICED into it.)
If you ever want to read some good science fiction based on science theory.. Read anything by Robert L. Forward (Dr. Robert L. Forward.) http://en.wikipedia....bert_L._Forward

End of Troll

Apologies to all for that outburst.

And in the famous words of ASH. "Alright you Primitive Screwheads, listen up! You see this? This... is my boomstick! The twelve-gauge double-barreled Remington. S-Mart's top of the line. You can find this in the sporting goods department. That's right, this sweet baby was made in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Retails for about a hundred and nine, ninety five. It's got a walnut stock, cobalt blue steel, and a hair trigger. That's right. Shop smart. Shop S-Mart. You got that? "

[tyrone dunkirk]

I dunno, with all the technical threads Iron Avenger keeps starting.. I think someone's out to build him self a 'mech!
Possibly to avenge someone/thing if his pilot name is any indication...

[SakuranoSenshi]

CaveHermit, on 11 August 2012 - 12:46 PM, said:

DNA Splicing is science fiction.. Then PLEASE explain glowing sheep. (or whatever animal it what that has gene for bio-luminescence SPLICED into it.)

Going to treat you more seriously than I should, but here you go:

Bacteria. Not sheep, really simple organisms. In fact a girlfriend of mine was involved in precisely this. The descendants of the altered organism have the new gene in their sequence and express it. I'll repeat with emphasis, the descendants of the altered organism have the new gene in their sequence and express it. So aye, as typically written, as I already said, pure 'science fiction'.

[CaveHermit]

SakuranoSenshi, on 11 August 2012 - 01:16 PM, said:

Going to treat you more seriously than I should, but here you go:

Bacteria. Not sheep, really simple organisms. In fact a girlfriend of mine was involved in precisely this. The descendants of the altered organism have the new gene in their sequence and express it. I'll repeat with emphasis, the descendants of the altered organism have the new gene in their sequence and express it. So aye, as typically written, as I already said, pure 'science fiction'.

Did you read what you wrote?
Cause if your didn't it's highlighted in quote from you. You know that you just described gene-splicing. Also here are links to two science papers on the subject. http://www.guardian....ed-glowing-cats and http://news.discover...een-110801.html

Edited by Ghost, 11 August 2012 - 08:35 PM.