Better situational awareness robocon@xxxxxx (17 Jul 2015 01:22 UTC)
Re: [TML] Better situational awareness Joseph Paul (17 Jul 2015 03:08 UTC)
Re: [TML] Better situational awareness Grimmund (17 Jul 2015 12:49 UTC)
Re: [TML] Better situational awareness Richard Aiken (17 Jul 2015 18:41 UTC)
Re: [TML] Better situational awareness Greg Nokes (17 Jul 2015 18:55 UTC)
Re: [TML] Better situational awareness Craig Berry (17 Jul 2015 19:00 UTC)
Re: [TML] Better situational awareness Grimmund (17 Jul 2015 19:47 UTC)
Re: [TML] Better situational awareness Bruce Johnson (17 Jul 2015 21:05 UTC)
RE: [TML] Better situational awareness Anthony Jackson (17 Jul 2015 21:44 UTC)
Re: [TML] Better situational awareness Jim Vassilakos (17 Jul 2015 22:54 UTC)
Re: [TML] Better situational awareness Grimmund (17 Jul 2015 23:14 UTC)
Re: [TML] Better situational awareness Craig Berry (17 Jul 2015 23:31 UTC)
Re: [TML] Better situational awareness Richard Aiken (18 Jul 2015 06:21 UTC)
Re: [TML] Better situational awareness Phil Pugliese (18 Jul 2015 15:32 UTC)
Re: [TML] Better situationalawareness Robert (18 Jul 2015 00:22 UTC)
Re: [TML] Better situationalawareness rupert.boleyn@xxxxxx (18 Jul 2015 04:06 UTC)
Re: [TML] Better situationalawareness Craig Berry (18 Jul 2015 04:59 UTC)
Re: [TML] Better situationalawareness rupert.boleyn@xxxxxx (18 Jul 2015 06:02 UTC)
Re: [TML] Better situationalawareness Rob O'Connor (19 Jul 2015 00:41 UTC)
Re: [TML] Better situationalawareness Craig Berry (19 Jul 2015 03:58 UTC)
Re: [TML] Better situational awareness rupert.boleyn@xxxxxx (19 Jul 2015 09:00 UTC)
Re: [TML] Better situationalawareness Rob O'Connor (20 Jul 2015 09:00 UTC)
Re: [TML] Better situational awareness rupert.boleyn@xxxxxx (19 Jul 2015 09:02 UTC)
Re: [TML] Better situational awareness Greg Chalik (22 Jul 2015 06:43 UTC)

RE: [TML] Better situational awareness Anthony Jackson 17 Jul 2015 21:44 UTC

From: Bruce Johnson

>> PD meson guns.  Pump enough energy into the rock, and it breaks up
>> into gravel.  :)
>
> Near-C gravel, which does pretty much the same amount of damage to your target as the original solid does. This
> is kind of like having a magic anti-bullet that turns an incoming 7.56 round to buckshot :-/

Well, enough energy will turn it into something expanding fast enough that most of it will miss the target, but that usually requires intercepting it quite a ways in advance, it's not 'point defense'.

> A near-c rock is going to have a gargantuan amount of inertial mass that will be well-nigh impossible to deflect. Even turning the damned thing
> into high-speed plasma won’t help you much….you just get a planet-sized plasma cannon hit.

It's not really that hard. If you have a 1,000 ton impactor, and you put a 1 ton object in front of it, the impactor turns into a cloud of material expanding at something like 10,000 km/sec. If you do it right, you may even get a donut-shaped cloud of gas, but even if you don't, blowing something up at the 100d limit will turn it into a cloud three times the size of the planet by the time it hits.