I was calculating the damage of weaponized high speed rail and wolfram alpha told me "infinity joules" and was confused where I messed up the math.
-
Uh. Weaponized WHAT? Against what?
-
Sir Isaac Newton may be the deadliest son of a bitch in space, but if you hit LA with a train going lightspeed, Einstein will tell Newton to step aside and let the big boys play.
-
@foone would infinite joules be a consequence of relativistic mass increase?
-
I thought the infinity joules were what Dr Robotnik was after
-
@futurebird the terminating station, in this case.
-
The terminated station, more like it.
-
Shiitake Toastreplied to myrmepropagandist last edited by
@futurebird @foone I will be disembarking at the penultimate stop, thank you.
-
I was joking on Tumblr that two things I think the US should do are:
1. Revive the Superconducting Supercollider project (canceled in 1993)
2. Build a ton of high speed rail.So why not combine the two? With a Superconducting Supercollider Train you could cut the travel time between New York & LA down from 6.5 hours to 13 milliseconds!
-
@ShiitakeToast @futurebird @foone
Probably still in the blast radius.
-
with the minor downside that if the brakes fail you'll hit LA with more kinetic energy than a supernova, instantly destroying the earth, then the rest of the solar system and any inhabitable worlds within 53 parsecs.
-
Relativistic weapons are a hell of a drug.
-
M [email protected] shared this topic
-
This, by the way (looking up some formulas on Atomic Rockets and a few google searches on the mass of trains and speed of the Large Hadron Collider) is more math than was done on the Hyperloop at any point
-
@foone 13 milliseconds to a stationary observer.
-
@uep true! it's like the "blow up the asteroid" problem: Instead of a big hit of kinetic energy when it hits the ground, you get millions of pebbles carrying the same energy burning up in the upper atmosphere. So instead of getting flattened you get cooked alive
-
@plaidtron3000 right. Compared to an observer on the train going the opposite way, they're going EVEN FASTER
-
@mattdm @ShiitakeToast @futurebird in this case the blast radius is measured in lightyears, so yes.
-
@munin I think that's Juuls. He wanted to vape forever
-
@dr_a yeah. As you get closer to c, your mass increases. at c, your mass is infinity, as is your kinetic energy.
-
multiple people have pointed out that even if the breaks work, they'd have to dissipate 10^46 joules of kinetic energy, which is a LOT of heat to dump into the area.
