What would this be equivalent to?

PrinceofLowLight · Post by **PrinceofLowLight** » 2003-06-29 12:29am

An impact of 69935584550400000J. In level of destruction, I mean.

SyntaxVorlon · Post by **SyntaxVorlon** » 2003-06-29 12:52am

Gah!
Use 6.99*10^whatever and we'll give you a good estimate.
Alright I'll do it for ye. Looks like 69 petajoules or 69*10^15 Enough to blow a hole through a planet.

nechronius · Post by **nechronius** » 2003-06-29 01:00am

That's roughly 7.0x 10^ 16 Joules. Roughly 16.7 megatons of TNT.

So how is this energy being released? I assume you mean in an impact scenario (most popular scenario). I'm too simple to try and break it down into the number of possibilities, but figure that 98%+ within 9 miles or so will be wiped out.

Airbursts tend to be more dangerous however. There's less room to hide and less structures to use as shelters when the explosion has a direct line of sight.

SyntaxVorlon · Post by **SyntaxVorlon** » 2003-06-29 02:02am

GAH I got exponents mixed with product values. It's less than a billionth of what would destroy the planet not half.
*slaps head.

Raxmei · Post by **Raxmei** » 2003-06-29 02:07am

That's an awful lot of precision for an idle inquiry. May I ask where that number came from?

nechronius · Post by **nechronius** » 2003-06-29 02:18am

Raxmei wrote:That's an awful lot of precision for an idle inquiry. May I ask where that number came from?

Conversion to scientific notation simplified down to a single significant digit helped legibility. Conversion to megatons was a simple matter (tons of online calculators for that sort of thing for the sick and twisted individuals needing to know how much they have to pack into a suitcase nuke to take out a small city). After that conversion there are many factors to consider to determine teh nature of the explosion. A ground strike is usually the most popular request (i.e. a backpack nuke, an asteroid strike) but airbursts are also relevant (i.e. Tunguska).

After that it was just a SWAG based on prior though experiments, questions, various explosion scenarios, and research.

SWAG - Scientific Wild Ass Guess. Apparently many things come out of my ass.

Seggybop · Post by **Seggybop** » 2003-06-29 02:23am

69935584550400000J = 69935584.5504GJ
1ton TNT = 4.184GJ
69935584.5504GJ / 4.184GJ = 16.7 megaton
The calculation of nechronius is confirmed

Raxmei · Post by **Raxmei** » 2003-06-29 02:25am

Actually, my question was for Princeoflowlight. 69935584550400000J is not a very round number, which leads me to believe that it came from somewhere.

nechronius · Post by **nechronius** » 2003-06-29 02:28am

Sheesh.

Obviously you don't subscribe to Stephen Hawking's philosophy on writing books. Keep the equations to a minimum to avoid losing readers.

PrinceofLowLight · Post by **PrinceofLowLight** » 2003-06-30 03:44am

Friend was using my account because the one he never used got killed in a purge, but I think he was asking for was a VERY rough estimate of a Stardestroyer's mass in steel hitting something at .9c. That's just a tad low, making this thread more than a little pointless.

Unless you have one of those calculators handy that I could be linked to. No reason.

Post by **Sea Skimmer** » 2003-06-30 04:10am

PrinceofLowLight wrote:Friend was using my account because the one he never used got killed in a purge, but I think he was asking for was a VERY rough estimate of a Stardestroyer's mass in steel hitting something at .9c. That's just a tad low, making this thread more than a little pointless.

Even built out of steel and to the standards of a modern warship it would mass hundreds of millions of tons.

Einhander Sn0m4n · Post by **Einhander Sn0m4n** » 2003-06-30 04:16am

Seggybop wrote:69935584550400000J = 69935584.5504GJ
1ton TNT = 4.184GJ
69935584.5504GJ / 4.184GJ = 16.7 megaton
The calculation of nechronius is confirmed

And that kind of explosion would look something like this:

Technical Details about Castle Bravo

Post by **Sea Skimmer** » 2003-06-30 04:22am

Einhander Sn0m4n wrote: And that kind of explosion would look something like this:

Only if it was a nuke. A kinetic impact would look nothing like that.

Raxmei · Post by **Raxmei** » 2003-06-30 04:47am

Arbitrarily using a mass of 200 billion kilograms and taking relativity into account, I calculate the kinetic energy of an ISD at .9c as 5.230E+28. Thanks to Mike Wong for providing a relativistic kinetic energy calculator. That divides out to 1.2E13 megatons. Actual yield will vary based on what an ISD's mass really is.