theltemes

Re: All Books In Warehouse: APG, Both 6th Ed Yay! Just placed my pdf+book order for Vol 1/2, Basic and APG!

Re: Reminiscing About Star Fleet Battles Yeah, the combination of Starmada and VBAM make for some really fun wargaming.

Re: Reminiscing About Star Fleet Battles Pffftt... There is no other version than the Doomsday™ edition. I like my ship combat rules to barely fit into a 3" 3-ring binder.

Re: Airlocks are for losers

Re: Hard Science Help It's all relative, baby. The person moving near c experiences no sensation of time being different - he/she observes that the rest of the universe's time has sped up. Likewise, an observer of the really fast moving person would say that their time is moving at the "normal" rate, and that the person moving near c has almost no change in time. It still takes a person moving near c a little over a year to travel one light year to the outside observer, but to the person in the craft the journey is nearly instantaneous because of the relativistic length contraction of space.

Re: Hard Science Help

Re: Tac-nukes vs. Nuclear Warheads A sphere minimizes the surface area of the mass, resulting in decreased number of escaping neutrons, hence minimizing the critical mass needed. A classic problem in nuclear engineering - determining the required mass for criticality: Geometric Buckling = Material Buckling

Re: Astrophysics question Traveling through a medium, the group velocity changes while the phase velocity remains at the speed of light in a vacuum.

Re: Modelling Explosives : TNT I guess today is a good day for picking nits. I changed my post from STR 10 to 8 so you can sleep tonight.

Re: Modelling Explosives : TNT As far as lifting mass goes, the FAA Human Factor Design Standard (HFDS) gives numbers for a 5th and 95th percentile lifting of weight to a height of 100cm. For males the values were 444.4 N and 931.0 N (average) and for females the values were 185.0 N and 443.0 N. If we assume the 50th percentile lies midway between the two extremes, the 100cm lifting strength for a STR 8 character is 687.7 N (male) or 314 N (female). Since the game mechanics don't differentiate between genders, let's go with the value of 687.7 N or 154.6 lb. So the work would be 688 N-m (70 kg-m) or 507 ft-lb. The 4184 J per gram of TNT is a defined unit. Although you found it on Wikipedia, it is indeed correct. The true destructive power of TNT is indeed its power (J/sec or Watts). TNT actually has a relatively low energy content per kilogram (4.184 MJ/kg). For comparison, the combustion of air-dried wood yields 15.5 MJ/kg, anthracite coal 31.4 MJ/kg, propane 50.3 MJ/kg. The advantage of TNT is that it doesn't need air to combust and the combustion rate is much higher.

Re: Another advanced and weird material Preach it, Curufea!

Re: Future Tech Links Coil guns (propelling an object through a solenoid) and a rail gun (propelling an object along a pair of conducting rails) are two drastically different technologies.

Re: Future Tech Links Princeton Plasma Physics Lab fusion website.

Re: Interplanetary colonies Does that estimate factor into account the capability to manufacture water and oxygen from the lunar regolith, or are they assuming that all consumables would have to be transported from Earth?

Re: That's no moon, that's a space station! Proving once again that life indeed imitates art.