67 replies to this topic

[Iron Avenger]

tyrone dunkirk, on 11 August 2012 - 01:04 PM, said:

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...

Maybe.... Maybe not....

Edited by Iron Avenger, 11 August 2012 - 02:08 PM.

[Omphalos Daemonium]

I must concur It should be interesting to hear.

[vikingatlarge]

I wish they would make them balls of plasma or lightning or whatever they are instead of a stream...it always looks to me like half the energy of stream or laser weapons is expended before it gets to it's target...wasnt one of the mechwarrior games designed with the ppc balls that shot out...now those were cool..splashinh on the center torsos of mechs lmao..

[SakuranoSenshi]

CaveHermit, on 11 August 2012 - 01:51 PM, said:

Did you read what you wrote?

Aye, but either you didn't or you didn't understand it. Reported for being insulting, I'd report you for being stupid too but that's not a breach of the forum rules.

P.S. Neither of your links are to (scientific) papers, they are both to popular media reporting on 'science news' with the usual simplifications, etc.

Edited by SakuranoSenshi, 11 August 2012 - 02:24 PM.

[JET 813]

I've haven't seen so many roundabout ways of saying "I don't know" in quite some time... The older Battletech books did really good jobs of explaining certain aspects of physics regarding weapons and technology. My favorite was explaining why fusion cores don't explode and take out entire cities. I'm not going to claim to be an expert, but my ethos is I actually am a physics major (junior) and I work for the Air and Space Museum in DC and I field a lot of similar questions and well, the laws that would govern how PPC's operate are phenomenally boring. They're boring. "Man-made lightning" is like about as layman as you can get, but I'd never explain it as such. So without any background in modern physics or nuclear physics or E&M or knowledge of really cool mathematics, think of PPC's as the phasers from Star Trek or the blasters from EVE Online or Imperial plasma cannons in Warhammer 40,000 etc. They're all the same because they're all based off of how plasma physics runs off of E=mc^2. You learn to hate that equation after a while in my field because no one cares about the result so much as how you got there. There are three states of matter you can really have fun with, the other you just throw at people in various ways. Fluids (liquids and gases) and plasma being compressed and then released into a less dense medium have quite a bit of KE behind them. Bernoulli and a bunch of other guys proved how this sort of thing works and it's why we have things like engines and rockets, and if cephalopods had lawyers they would have sued the human race for copy right infringement. Now, you've probably been bombarded with terms such as "magnetic field containment" and the like for how the charged particles are contained. Try to imagine those as rubber bands surrounding a bunch of Jello at a ridiculously high pressure. Imagine a gallon of water compressed into a sphere about the same size as the little plastic one at the end of a pin needle. Most plasma weapons in sci-fi work off of this really simple concept like how those little plastic rockets you and/or your kids messed with where you fill them a little bit with water, then pump them full of air, and let them go. Great for this time of year if you're in the Northern hemisphere or close to the Equator. Now the "hole" or "muzzle break" or "place where loud noises come from and things die" or whatever you want to call it has to be fantastically small, usually at the center of a concave dish (if you think Death Star, you're close enough) to keep the escaping particles moving forward instead of outward, or worse, backward because that's where the firer (you) is (are)!

Edited by JET 813, 11 August 2012 - 02:36 PM.

[AuGuR]

Breaching the reactor isn't so much the issue, damage to the controls to regulate it are. Take out the controls, reactor goes boom...

[JET 813]

AuGuR, on 11 August 2012 - 02:41 PM, said:

Breaching the reactor isn't so much the issue, damage to the controls to regulate it are. Take out the controls, reactor goes boom...

Err... No, it doesn't.

[Steel Spectre]

Evinthal, on 11 August 2012 - 10:48 AM, said:

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.

Atmosphere can be ionized by any number of things, including being whacked by a fast-moving particle.
I appreciate that they describe it being "like man-made lightning", but the actual technical description of a PPC in the BTech rulebook says specifically that it's a magnetic accelerator that accelerates bolts of protons or ions at the target. An electrical gun is quite different; instead of a magnet, it involves creating a potential difference (voltage) between the gun and the target and essentially "grounding" a charge (a stream of electrons) through the target. The characteristics of the accelerated particles are very different as is the process of getting them to move.

CocoaJin, on 11 August 2012 - 11:55 AM, said:

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.

Making the energy to ionize them isn't a problem necessarily, it's just less efficient. Whatever energy it takes to ionize the "ammo" (and get rid of the free electrons so they don't re-absorb them) is energy not spent propelling it. I imagine that the gun would simply use whatever was in the ambient atmosphere, but if you were to pick what you wanted to fling, an ion that is easy to strip electrons off of would probably be best. Stronger charge means a greater force applied by the accelerating magnets.

Quote

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?

Yeah, ionized sodium glows orange, although if you were to use a blend of atmospheric atoms the color would depend on what planet you were on which is kinda cool