KE weapons: late addition

In response to the long, painful discussion of KE, PE, and Kinetic Kill
weapons (read guns);

1)  Why do so many reasonably educated people always assume that our present
level of knowledge in physics is true and correct in every way?  Did we
develop a unified field theory while I was asleep last semester?  Has 'God'
told us that we have achieved perfection?  Hmmm?

Point being, you are all treating Conservation of Energy as Gospel.  It may be
true under all conditions (actually, we suspect that it is not.  According to
Hawking's speculations about naked singularities, conservation of energy
does not apply in their vicinity), but that is not really any more likely
than that Einstein's Theories will stand the test of time (note that it's
predecessor failed the test of time - it turned out to be a special case).
Why couldn't CofE be a special case?
And why can't the excess energy needed to make your numbers come out right
come from Superspace, or be extracted from the Universal gravitational field,
or something equally unlikely.  We (or at least I) don't know the limit of the
possible, so why not assume that MT maneuver drives work as described?

As to the problems in maintaining MT's pretty picture, we (my wife and I) have
been fiddling with that problem for years (since Traveller came out).  Almost
NONE of the MT picture makes sense without being massaged with a club.  The
"conquest" of Glisten is ludicrous.  The assumption that there is any
limitation on fuel availability is almost equally so.
Remember that MT is supposed to be 'space opera', not hard scifi.  If you want
hard scifi, use 2300AD, or create your own universe.  Stop trying to bludgeon
MT to make it fit.

2) Kinetic kill weapons are wonderfully lethal things, aren't they?  Their use
against planets is restricted by the following:

  a)  planets have bigger and better sensor nets than ships can have (unless
the ships are the size of the Skylark of Valeron or DQ).  They almost
certainly maintain a sky-watch to locate and neutralize such things.  After
all, a dinosaur killer can be an accident, much less an attack.

  b)  ALL major bodies ( > 10meters diameter) should be located and monitored
for orbital changes.  It helps with traffic control in those busy systems
anyway, and keeps loons from bombing you into the stone age, eh?

  c)  planetary defenses can deal with these things to a certain extent.  If a
rock moving 0.1c is located at the edge of the system (it probably is not TOO
much closer than that - it takes 5,625,000,000Km to go from 0.05c to 0.1 c at
6Gs), the defense force has over 5 hours to react.  Plenty of time to
intercept (your ships can move 9,000,000+Km in that time), or just eliminate
with a meson gun or nuke.

Yes, yes.  The energy will still be there, and it will still hit the
atmosphere as hot plasma.  life is tough all over.  That's why the defense
force gets paid the big bucks.  To stop this before it gets out of hand.

Yes, kinetic kill weapons can be used against planets.  If you assume good
planetary sensors, then the ship launching them will be spotted looong before
it gets up to speed.  It should be destroyed soon after (still long before it
gets to speed).  And if the launcher starts from out in the deep dark, it
better aim real well now, hadn't it?  not much mid-course correction available
on a rock.and a miss by 3 meters is just as good as no launch at all.




Let's try a new thread.  We have been trying to determine the effect that
densitometers have on a high TL battlefield.  According to MT, artificial grav
stands out like a sore thumb on a densitometer.  So what allows anyone to use
grav vehicles, when they can be detected and eliminated by a
densitometer/meson gun combo on the other side of the planet?  Why doesn't
everyone use tracks/wheels/air-cushions?  Any ideas?  Any design philosophies
for vehicles and military forces that take neutrino detectors/densitometers
into account?

                                    JSH.