Hi ho!
Greetings all, found something interesting here.
Tomorrow morning I start graduate classes in MEdical Physics, so, I
was starting to peruse the books. Radiation Biology. (neat stuff)
The first few pages included one particular fact that has kinda blown
my mind in regard to Traveller.
LD50 (a dose of radiation that will be fatal to 50% of a population)
is 4 Gray, that is, four joules of radiation per kilo. My text goes
on to say that the equivalent energy of this in heat is 67 calories.
(Not the diet Kilocalories, but calories) Which is about the amount
of heat your body would pick up from a sip of hot coffee.
Now, consider our X-ray lasers. I know in TNE the lasers are no longer
x-ray lasers, but lets think about them anyway. Ok, now these lasers
do their damage primarily by hitting the target and causing severe burns
through heat. (Flash heating tissue to steam, vaporizing bone... etc)
Ok, now if the heat of one sip of coffee is the deadly mark, imagine
how much energy is in the x-ray beam that can cause the kind of damage
we are supposed to expect of an x-ray laser rifle. I'd imagine it
would be many thousands of times LD50.
No wonder GDW got rid of hand held x-ray lasers!
But we still have the detonation x-ray lasers. Well, with such a piddling
amount of energy being deadly, and the det-lasers ability to chew through
coherant superdense armor, consider what it could do to the humble human
frame. By my guess, the X-ray laser should cause some SEVERE radiation
casualties. Perhaps we better go back to the Imperial "No Nukes" laws.
As to particle accelerators... If only a TINY amount of radiation leaks
through your hull armor. Boy are you dead in one big hurry.
Scott 2G Kellogg
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"We are Space Guys. We know what we are doing." -- The Space Guys
(Guys in Space) D. Pinkwater