I’m not a science-y person, but I love sci-fi. In a novel I read near a decade ago (Larry Niven’s Known Space series), he mentions occasionally kinetic weapons. I’ve seen this online as well with tungsten-based projectiles being discussed. So my question is how does mass and velocity affect the amount of damage? If I had a nickel-sized object, how fast would it need to go to cause city-wide devastation (would it be possible or would the damage output be capped based on either size or velocity)? Conversely, If I launched something at the speed of sound, would the damage output be the same if it were different-sized objects?
In: 5
Ok, I’ll explain like you’re five:
An object with mass and speed has energy (kinetic energy, to be specific). On impact, the moving object stops. All that energy doesn’t just evaporate, it has to go somewhere, so it’s transformed into “damage”. The greater the energy, the greater the damage.
As someone else pointed out, the energy grows the same as the mass grows (double the mass, double the energy). However, it also grows as the SQUARE of the velocity (double the speed, QUADRUPLE the energy).
Let’s say you have two objects: a lightweight, slow one and a heavy, fast one. The second object has DOUBLE THE MASS and DOUBLE THE SPEED of the first. Considering what I wrote above, the energy of the second object is DOUBLE^((because of mass)) x QUADRUPLE^((because of speed)) = EIGHT TIMES that of the first object – so the damage would be eightfold!
>Conversely, If I launched something at the speed of sound, would thedamage output be the same if it were different-sized objects?
Size doesn’t matter, only mass and speed. If two objects have the same speed, the ratio of their energies (and, therefore, “damage”) will be the ratio of their masses. Conversely, if two objects have the same mass but move at different speeds, the ratio of their energies will be the ratio of the SQUARES of their speeds.
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