Hello again,
Time to go over the 1/10C projectile again...
Scout Ship has accel of 2 G's. As such it will reach 1/10 speed of light
in (oops don't have my calculator...) approx 5 days (?) at which point
you toss your one cubic centimeter lead pellets out the airlock.
No big deal.
No Big mass driver
No Particle accelerator
If you use a 1 G Free trader multiply the time reqired by 2. A damn cheap
doomsday weapon if you ask me.
And for those of you who say an atmostphere will protect you...
Remember that pellet still has the same energy. It just gets transferred
to the atmosphere. ie an atmospheric release of energy instead of on
impact. If you use say a Cubic meter of lead, it will release
energy in the range of Gigatons of TNT. YES GIGAtons.
That is a very lot of energy. one billion tons of TNT.
No atmosphere will protect you. Kilometers of overhead rock won't either
You are Dead DEAD Dead dead Dead Dead dead deaD.
As far as I know, there is no navigational deflector (ala star trek) in
Trav, and as I said before, it would have 16 seconds to pick up the target
and act on it before the object streaked from Far Orbit range to impact.
No Defence. Well, you might try shifting your orbit randomly if you are
a ship or a space station (I'm sure they do to prevent this) But a
ground target is dead. On the other hand, If you got a stooge in the
control tower, they could order an orbiting craft into the correct orbit
in order to destroy it. But I'll leave that to you intelligence types.
Sorry for the rambling, it's 1:23 am here...
Good night,
Scott Kellogg
Physicist at Large