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Made in ca
Stormin' Stompa






Ottawa, ON

I'm curious if any books have given us a number for travel time within a star system. For example, if a ship breaks warp at the edge of the system, how long would it take to reach the inner planets?

I'd personally like to think it would take at least a few weeks or months. That's still a blistering speed by today's science and is also reminiscent of trans Atlantic travel times for sailing ships. Something that fits nicely within the semi fantasy setting of 40k.

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2023/05/26 18:57:07


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Servoarm Flailing Magos




Germany

 Mr Nobody wrote:
I'm curious if any books have given us a number for travel time within a star system. For example, if a ship breaks warp at the edge of the system, how long would it take to reach the inner planets?

I'd personally like to think it would take at least a few weeks or months. That's still a blistering speed by today's science and is also reminiscent of trans Atlantic travel times for sailing ships. Something that fits nicely within the semi fantasy setting of 40k.


One of the Ciaphas Cain novels involves this as a ploit point. You are in general terms correct, it takes on the order of weeks to a few months to get to the system if you make the warp jump at the outer edge of the system. The novel in question (The Last Ditch, iirc) involves a warp-translation mishap that leads to the ship coming out of the Warp much farther out than usual, and mentions that that's a great nuisance, but easily survivable with on-board rations etc. - however, the circumstances that lead to the mishap also prevent them from navigating and steering, and it's said that they'd overshoot the planet and would hurtle them into space on a wide, eliptic orbit that would only return them to the system after years, at which point in time they'd long be starved or suffocated. In the weeks between their translation, they try to fix the issues, but ultimately have to settle on a desparate gambit...
   
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The safe point of Warp Translation is referred to as the Mandeville Point.

But, what makes that safe is…kind of vague. It could simply be the nearest point between a solar system and empty space where a ship can translate from The Warp without having to worry about gravity wells etc.

If that is indeed the base measurement, exactly how close one can Warp Translate may boil down to the skill/recklessness/stupidity of the crew.

In terms of real space speed? That you’d need someone who has a better grasp of physics than I. A very cursory Google suggests the Mars Class Battlecruiser has an acceleration of 2.3 Gravities.

I’m comfortably on the lower left slope of Dunning Kruger when it comes to physics, but I kind of assume those aren’t figure of Pure Madeupium?

   
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Germany

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
The safe point of Warp Translation is referred to as the Mandeville Point.

But, what makes that safe is…kind of vague. It could simply be the nearest point between a solar system and empty space where a ship can translate from The Warp without having to worry about gravity wells etc.

If that is indeed the base measurement, exactly how close one can Warp Translate may boil down to the skill/recklessness/stupidity of the crew.

In terms of real space speed? That you’d need someone who has a better grasp of physics than I. A very cursory Google suggests the Mars Class Battlecruiser has an acceleration of 2.3 Gravities.

I’m comfortably on the lower left slope of Dunning Kruger when it comes to physics, but I kind of assume those aren’t figure of Pure Madeupium?


It's in the right ballpark at least, and anything other than ballpark estimates are rendered futile by mumbo-jumbo-spacemagic physics anyway. Real rockets have a huge problem in that they need a lot of fuel to do anything, but you have to bring that fuel to space in the first place, so usually the supermajority of your total weight is fuel and fuel you need to burn to get that fuel to where you actually need it in the first place. 40k ships work with plasma drives and other methods that need close to no fuel in comparison, so you also dont need to dump huge amounts of energy to move that fuel around, so imho it's fine that the numbers look a little low on the first glance (for example, a Saturn V rocket used 4g, but needed a total mass of ca. 3000 tons to get a payload of 50 tons to the moon; 2000 tons of fuel were necessary just to get to lower earth orbit)
   
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 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
A very cursory Google suggests the Mars Class Battlecruiser has an acceleration of 2.3 Gravities.

I’m comfortably on the lower left slope of Dunning Kruger when it comes to physics, but I kind of assume those aren’t figure of Pure Madeupium?


It actually isn't. 1 g acceleration is 35 kmh per second (so you gain an additional 35 kmh to your speed each second), and that's a lot. With 2.3 g constant acceleration you can reach Pluto from Earth in around a week and Mars in less than a day. It is pretty fast.

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 AtoMaki wrote:
 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
A very cursory Google suggests the Mars Class Battlecruiser has an acceleration of 2.3 Gravities.

I’m comfortably on the lower left slope of Dunning Kruger when it comes to physics, but I kind of assume those aren’t figure of Pure Madeupium?


It actually isn't. 1 g acceleration is 35 kmh per second (so you gain an additional 35 kmh to your speed each second), and that's a lot. With 2.3 g constant acceleration you can reach Pluto from Earth in around a week and Mars in less than a day. It is pretty fast.


Can you translate that into car type speeds? And is the 2.3 Gravities simply doubling (and a bit) or is it exponential squaring like the Richter scale.

Or at least my understanding of the Richter Scale.

   
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Having just been reading through a chunk of the Horus Heresy books it seems to be… variable (to say the least!)

A lot of them work exactly as you describe, where it takes weeks or months to work your way in from the Mandeville point and hours for ship engagements, but then some authors seem to describe ship movements more like aerial combat, where stuff is happening in seconds. I much prefer the first take, it makes much more sense to my brain, although I guess the Mandeville point could vary considerably depending on the system. I imagine that it would be influenced by realspace gravity, so Lagrange points, etc. could offer shorter journeys and I assume it would also depend on the warp currents on the other side of the veil, but still it should still be something slow and ponderous (days or weeks), not something that happens in minutes (bearing in mind it takes 8-minutes for light to get from the Sun to Earth, and we’re really close in).

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 Zed wrote:
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 AtoMaki wrote:
 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
A very cursory Google suggests the Mars Class Battlecruiser has an acceleration of 2.3 Gravities.

I’m comfortably on the lower left slope of Dunning Kruger when it comes to physics, but I kind of assume those aren’t figure of Pure Madeupium?


It actually isn't. 1 g acceleration is 35 kmh per second (so you gain an additional 35 kmh to your speed each second), and that's a lot. With 2.3 g constant acceleration you can reach Pluto from Earth in around a week and Mars in less than a day. It is pretty fast.


The thing to bear in mind with real space speed and acceleration is the need to decelerate too.
If you accelerate all the way to your destination you’ll be going much too fast when you get there and shoot past it, or into it. To stop at your destination you would need to accelerate towards it for half the distance then decelerate as you approach for the second half, effectively doubling the journey time.
   
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 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
 AtoMaki wrote:
 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
A very cursory Google suggests the Mars Class Battlecruiser has an acceleration of 2.3 Gravities.

I’m comfortably on the lower left slope of Dunning Kruger when it comes to physics, but I kind of assume those aren’t figure of Pure Madeupium?


It actually isn't. 1 g acceleration is 35 kmh per second (so you gain an additional 35 kmh to your speed each second), and that's a lot. With 2.3 g constant acceleration you can reach Pluto from Earth in around a week and Mars in less than a day. It is pretty fast.


Can you translate that into car type speeds? And is the 2.3 Gravities simply doubling (and a bit) or is it exponential squaring like the Richter scale.

Or at least my understanding of the Richter Scale.


Gravities is a measure of acceleration, not speed. 2.3g acceleration means, from a complete dead stop, the battlecruiser will increase its speed(relative to its origin point) by 80.5 km per second. Which in km per hour is 289,800 kmh increase in speed every second that you apply acceleration.

So from a dead stop a Mars Class Battlecruiser that applies maximum thrust(I assume the listed thrust is maximum output) for a period of exactly 1 second would be traveling at 289,800 kmh. Which is 1/3700ish the speed of light.

Mars is 54.6 million km from Earth. Meaning a Mars Class Battlecruiser could reach Mars from Earth in approximately 188.4 hours just by holding the accelerator for 1 second. At the halfway point you would then rotate 180 degrees and hold the accelerator for a short time to decelerate. That said, inertial dampeners are mentioned as common tech on 40k ships, so presumably the ship can more or less instantly decelerate when needed rather than have to slowly decelerate over time.

These sort of speeds, and the distances the ships fight at, actually implies that the Imperium's targeting technology on their ships is capable of dealing with time dilation as even at these tiny fractions of the speed of light you would be dealing with major time dilation issues.

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the math can get complicated, but a friend of mine worked out this chart for quick reference for battletech, and the basics would apply here too.

With 1G of acceleration available, you can travel...

from Earth to the moon or Earth-moon Lagrange points (~400,000km) in 3.5 hours.
0.3 AU in 37 hours (Venus-Earth closest approach)
0.5 AU in 49 hours (Mars-Earth closest approach)
0.6 AU in 53 hours (Mercury-Earth closest approach)
1.5 AU in 84 hours (Asteroid Belt-Earth closest approach)
2.5 AU in 108 hours (Mars-Earth farthest opposition)
4 AU in 138 hours (Jupiter-Earth closest approach)
10 AU in 217 hours (Saturn-Earth almost closest approach, or Earth-Sol Jump Points)
40 AU in 434 hours (Pluto-Earth closest approach)
G's do not linearly decrease travel time. it's a function of square roots. That means if you travel somewhere at 2Gs, you do not divide the 1G travel time by 2. You divide by the square root of 2. If you want to get somewhere in half the time as at 1G, you need to travel at 4Gs. It gets progressively worse. To get somewhere in 1/3 the time, you need to travel at 9Gs.

note that this does include the deceleration burn, but not the time spent doing the flip over. which shouldn't add more than a couple hours for most ships, a day at most.

depending on where you place the Mandeville Point (which likely is more of a 'shell' distance limit around the star than a literal point), you can guestimate how long it would take for this hypothetical 2.3g battleship will take.

rounding down to 2g's (since very rarely do military ships use their full power outside of battle), you could do earth to pluto in ~307 hours, or 12.7 days.

it seems likely that the Mandeville Point is a lot closer than that since in more than a few of the horus heresy novels ships seem to exit the warp fairly close to what appear to be inner planets, or leave a battle over an inner system planet and their opponents worry that they'll reach the Mandeville Point before they can send ships to respond.

This message was edited 3 times. Last update was at 2023/05/29 21:37:29


 
   
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Aash wrote:
 AtoMaki wrote:
 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
A very cursory Google suggests the Mars Class Battlecruiser has an acceleration of 2.3 Gravities.

I’m comfortably on the lower left slope of Dunning Kruger when it comes to physics, but I kind of assume those aren’t figure of Pure Madeupium?


It actually isn't. 1 g acceleration is 35 kmh per second (so you gain an additional 35 kmh to your speed each second), and that's a lot. With 2.3 g constant acceleration you can reach Pluto from Earth in around a week and Mars in less than a day. It is pretty fast.


The thing to bear in mind with real space speed and acceleration is the need to decelerate too.
If you accelerate all the way to your destination you’ll be going much too fast when you get there and shoot past it, or into it. To stop at your destination you would need to accelerate towards it for half the distance then decelerate as you approach for the second half, effectively doubling the journey time.

I already calculated with flip&burn. But spacecraft in 40k very obviously don't do that and decelerate with Space Opera Science, so that battlecruiser arrives at her destination even faster.

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 Grey Templar wrote:
 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
 AtoMaki wrote:
 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
A very cursory Google suggests the Mars Class Battlecruiser has an acceleration of 2.3 Gravities.

I’m comfortably on the lower left slope of Dunning Kruger when it comes to physics, but I kind of assume those aren’t figure of Pure Madeupium?


It actually isn't. 1 g acceleration is 35 kmh per second (so you gain an additional 35 kmh to your speed each second), and that's a lot. With 2.3 g constant acceleration you can reach Pluto from Earth in around a week and Mars in less than a day. It is pretty fast.


Can you translate that into car type speeds? And is the 2.3 Gravities simply doubling (and a bit) or is it exponential squaring like the Richter scale.

Or at least my understanding of the Richter Scale.


Gravities is a measure of acceleration, not speed. 2.3g acceleration means, from a complete dead stop, the battlecruiser will increase its speed(relative to its origin point) by 80.5 km per second. Which in km per hour is 289,800 kmh increase in speed every second that you apply acceleration.

So from a dead stop a Mars Class Battlecruiser that applies maximum thrust(I assume the listed thrust is maximum output) for a period of exactly 1 second would be traveling at 289,800 kmh. Which is 1/3700ish the speed of light.

Mars is 54.6 million km from Earth. Meaning a Mars Class Battlecruiser could reach Mars from Earth in approximately 188.4 hours just by holding the accelerator for 1 second. At the halfway point you would then rotate 180 degrees and hold the accelerator for a short time to decelerate. That said, inertial dampeners are mentioned as common tech on 40k ships, so presumably the ship can more or less instantly decelerate when needed rather than have to slowly decelerate over time.

These sort of speeds, and the distances the ships fight at, actually implies that the Imperium's targeting technology on their ships is capable of dealing with time dilation as even at these tiny fractions of the speed of light you would be dealing with major time dilation issues.


I’m afraid your maths is way off Grey Templar; 2.3g is an acceleration of 22.563 metres per second per second, which means after 1 second it is doing 22.563 metres per second, which is ~81km/h (or about 50mph).

You need to use the equations of motion (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equations_of_motion); we know the initial velocity (u=0), the acceleration (a=2.3g) and the distance (s=54,600,000,000m), so using s=ut+1/2at^2, which you can rearrange using the quadratic equation (which I’m not going to try and write out here!), you get t=69568 seconds, which is 19.3 hours to get your ass to Mars. Pretty quick, as AtoMaki said.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Oh, and assuming you don’t want to stop! As has been mentioned, you basically have to double the journey time, as you can only spend half of it accelerating and the other half decelerating.

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2023/05/29 13:36:21


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 Zed wrote:
*All statements reflect my opinion at this moment. if some sort of pretty new model gets released (or if I change my mind at random) I reserve the right to jump on any bandwagon at will.
 
   
Made in de
Servoarm Flailing Magos




Germany

 Jadenim wrote:
 Grey Templar wrote:
 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
 AtoMaki wrote:
 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
A very cursory Google suggests the Mars Class Battlecruiser has an acceleration of 2.3 Gravities.

I’m comfortably on the lower left slope of Dunning Kruger when it comes to physics, but I kind of assume those aren’t figure of Pure Madeupium?


It actually isn't. 1 g acceleration is 35 kmh per second (so you gain an additional 35 kmh to your speed each second), and that's a lot. With 2.3 g constant acceleration you can reach Pluto from Earth in around a week and Mars in less than a day. It is pretty fast.


Can you translate that into car type speeds? And is the 2.3 Gravities simply doubling (and a bit) or is it exponential squaring like the Richter scale.

Or at least my understanding of the Richter Scale.


Gravities is a measure of acceleration, not speed. 2.3g acceleration means, from a complete dead stop, the battlecruiser will increase its speed(relative to its origin point) by 80.5 km per second. Which in km per hour is 289,800 kmh increase in speed every second that you apply acceleration.

So from a dead stop a Mars Class Battlecruiser that applies maximum thrust(I assume the listed thrust is maximum output) for a period of exactly 1 second would be traveling at 289,800 kmh. Which is 1/3700ish the speed of light.

Mars is 54.6 million km from Earth. Meaning a Mars Class Battlecruiser could reach Mars from Earth in approximately 188.4 hours just by holding the accelerator for 1 second. At the halfway point you would then rotate 180 degrees and hold the accelerator for a short time to decelerate. That said, inertial dampeners are mentioned as common tech on 40k ships, so presumably the ship can more or less instantly decelerate when needed rather than have to slowly decelerate over time.

These sort of speeds, and the distances the ships fight at, actually implies that the Imperium's targeting technology on their ships is capable of dealing with time dilation as even at these tiny fractions of the speed of light you would be dealing with major time dilation issues.


I’m afraid your maths is way off Grey Templar; 2.3g is an acceleration of 22.563 metres per second per second, which means after 1 second it is doing 22.563 metres per second, which is ~81km/h (or about 50mph).

You need to use the equations of motion (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equations_of_motion); we know the initial velocity (u=0), the acceleration (a=2.3g) and the distance (s=54,600,000,000m), so using s=ut+1/2at^2, which you can rearrange using the quadratic equation (which I’m not going to try and write out here!), you get t=69568 seconds, which is 19.3 hours to get your ass to Mars. Pretty quick, as AtoMaki said.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Oh, and assuming you don’t want to stop! As has been mentioned, you basically have to double the journey time, as you can only spend half of it accelerating and the other half decelerating.


Your calculations are correct, the previous stuff was way off. You can readily see that by two basic sanitiy checks:

1. Things falling on earth are approximately accelerated by 1g (it's a little less because of atmospheric resistance etc.) and stuff that falls for multiple seconds does not get anywhere near a sizeable fraction of the speed of light.

2. Large rockets, like ICBMs, the Saturn V et al fire at much higher accelerations than 2g, for several seconds, and also don't get close to approach even a fraction of the speed of lihgt.
   
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Oh, and you’d be doing about 1.5million metres per second (3.5million mph) as you sailed by Mars, which is about half a percent of the speed of light.

Constant acceleration is great, that’s why ion drives in the real world are such fun!

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 Zed wrote:
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 Jadenim wrote:
Oh, and you’d be doing about 1.5million metres per second (3.5million mph) as you sailed by Mars, which is about half a percent of the speed of light.

I don't think this matters because 40k spacecraft don't follow real-world physics that much (if, et all). Otherwise, that 2.3 g constant acceleration would be pretty funky for the crew onboard and I shudder to imagine what engine tail that output would have!

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 AtoMaki wrote:
 Jadenim wrote:
Oh, and you’d be doing about 1.5million metres per second (3.5million mph) as you sailed by Mars, which is about half a percent of the speed of light.

I don't think this matters because 40k spacecraft don't follow real-world physics that much (if, et all). Otherwise, that 2.3 g constant acceleration would be pretty funky for the crew onboard and I shudder to imagine what engine tail that output would have!


In that case the whole premise of the question addressed is not relevant. If the vessels can decelerate instantaneously then they can also accelerate instantaneously, but assuming the figure given above for a Mars class battlecruiser accelerating at 2.3g is accurate, then it’s fair to assume that it would have to decelerate too.

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2023/05/29 14:17:01


 
   
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Aash wrote:
 AtoMaki wrote:
 Jadenim wrote:
Oh, and you’d be doing about 1.5million metres per second (3.5million mph) as you sailed by Mars, which is about half a percent of the speed of light.

I don't think this matters because 40k spacecraft don't follow real-world physics that much (if, et all). Otherwise, that 2.3 g constant acceleration would be pretty funky for the crew onboard and I shudder to imagine what engine tail that output would have!

In that case the whole premise of the question addressed is not relevant. If the vessels can decelerate instantaneously then they can also accelerate instantaneously, but assuming the figure given above for a Mars class battlecruiser accelerating at 2.3g is accurate, then it’s fair to assume that it would have to decelerate too.

I think the 2.3 g data given is just pretending fluff like the Leman Russ' 180mm armor. That's a lot of acceleration that requires a lot of engine power for something the size of a Mars-class battlecruiser, so if we take it at face value then every battlecruiser has an Exterminatus-class weapon on it because if you turn those engines towards a planet then it will get messy. And we ain't even touching the issue of the propellant here. So personally, I wouldn't read much into it, and handwave away the hard sci-fi details (like deceleration) to save the headache.

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Yeah, I don’t even want to think about the inertia calculations and propellant/energy required to achieve that kind of acceleration with a ship the size of a city…

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 Zed wrote:
*All statements reflect my opinion at this moment. if some sort of pretty new model gets released (or if I change my mind at random) I reserve the right to jump on any bandwagon at will.
 
   
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Ottawa, ON

I like to take the approach of Star Wars and The Expanse where they have turbo charged ion engines. No idea how that works, but for them it does.

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A possible way to decelerate near a planet is to use the residual atmosphere. Some techno babble about a magnetic drag sail or whatever sand you can use it to slow down quickly. My understanding of inertia dampeners is that they "mask" the force of the deceleration on the cargo/crew of the ship so they slow down with it.

An alternative would be a magnetic tether, I bet there are some possibilities to use the magnetic field of a planet without requiring a several kilometers long cable by the 30th millennium.

Ion engines are interesting as they use highly accelerated particles for propulsion. The generated force depends on the speed and mass of the fuel. Turbo charged ion engines might additionally use the electric field interaction between ship and propellant to gain some extra acceleration.
   
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40k has magic science too. Their inertial dampeners could use some spatial distortion effects to "drain" inertia making it better able to handle deceleration. Effectively turn off select laws of physics.

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2023/06/04 06:15:58


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Cato Sicarius, after force feeding Captain Ventris a copy of the Codex Astartes for having the audacity to play Deathwatch, chokes to death on his own D-baggery after finding Calgar assembling his new Eldar army.

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The Shire(s)

 Jadenim wrote:
Yeah, I don’t even want to think about the inertia calculations and propellant/energy required to achieve that kind of acceleration with a ship the size of a city…

Did FFG give us the tonnage of ships? That could be used to roughly calculate the energy required.

Yes- a Mars class is ~33 megatonnes, and can accelerate at 2.3g.

I will leave the maths to someone who can be bothered.

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2023/06/04 08:24:51


 ChargerIIC wrote:
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I think it will be (33000000000*2.3^2)/2 = 2.88x10^21 Joules. As a comparison, it is roughly ten times modern Humanity's entire energy usage (3.9x10^20 Joules in 2013).

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 AtoMaki wrote:
I think it will be (33000000000*2.3^2)/2 = 2.88x10^21 Joules. As a comparison, it is roughly ten times modern Humanity's entire energy usage (3.9x10^20 Joules in 2013).

I am a bit confused, should this not give a power output rather than just an energy figure? Is that actually 2.88x10^21 watts?

That energy is ~688000 megatons of TNT, or a bit over double the total solar energy hitting the Earth per hour.

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2023/06/04 11:36:27


 ChargerIIC wrote:
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 Haighus wrote:
 AtoMaki wrote:
I think it will be (33000000000*2.3^2)/2 = 2.88x10^21 Joules. As a comparison, it is roughly ten times modern Humanity's entire energy usage (3.9x10^20 Joules in 2013).

I am a bit confused, should this not give a power output rather than just an energy figure? Is that actually 2.88x10^21 watts?

No, it is the energy required to accelerate that mass from 0 to 2.3 m/s^2 in a single-frame environment (like space).

 Haighus wrote:
That energy is ~688000 megatons on TNT, or a bit over double the total solar energy hitting the Earth per hour.

Yeah, hence why I said that the ship's engine would be an Exterminatus-class weapon. I'm not even trying to figure out its Specific Impulse or the size of its exhaust cone, I just accept that it would be able to torch a planet no problem.I also dread to think about the power source, because its energy output must be larger than the engine output due to conversion efficiency, especially if it is a propellant-less drive so it needs multiple times the energy to produce that output.

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Well, the Nimitz class carrier is powered by what we could consider "world-ending" tech, and other sci-fi franchises have their ships powered by reactors that are highly destructive. Warp Cores in Star Trek are a good example and a Core breach is usually the sign that a ship is a few minutes away from being atomised.
Seems reasonable for 40k Imperial ships to be similar.
   
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 Gert wrote:
Well, the Nimitz class carrier is powered by what we could consider "world-ending" tech, and other sci-fi franchises have their ships powered by reactors that are highly destructive. Warp Cores in Star Trek are a good example and a Core breach is usually the sign that a ship is a few minutes away from being atomised.
Seems reasonable for 40k Imperial ships to be similar.


At or around that speed, any chunk of mass is pretty much game over for livable planets anyway, no need to put something especially explodey on it.
   
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Oh yeah absolutely.
   
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 Gert wrote:
Well, the Nimitz class carrier is powered by what we could consider "world-ending" tech, and other sci-fi franchises have their ships powered by reactors that are highly destructive. Warp Cores in Star Trek are a good example and a Core breach is usually the sign that a ship is a few minutes away from being atomised.
Seems reasonable for 40k Imperial ships to be similar.

The point is... why have Extermiantus weapons then? Why are they a big deal? Why have the ship carry any weapons even? The ship's exhaust cone is probably the length of a solar system, so should I imagine non-warp travel like that bike race from Tron where each ship draws an instant-killing "wall" and all other ships must dodge around it to reach their destination? Things like that.

So I guess I would rather take my space opera nonsense and not try to apply hard-SF.

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 AtoMaki wrote:


So I guess I would rather take my space opera nonsense and not try to apply hard-SF.


Yeah, this is obviously the sensible takeaway in a setting where you regularly sling your ships through literal hell, laser beams are slow enough people can dodge them and so forth. The physics of all of it are as hard or soft as the story demands it, which is often enough pillowy-soft, going on butter
   
 
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