Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!att!cbnews!military
From: bnr-fos!.uucp!hwt@watmath.waterloo.edu (Henry Troup)
Newsgroups: sci.military
Subject: Re: Particle Gun (was Particle Beam Gun)
Summary: In defense of the relativistic BB-gun
Message-ID: <10571@cbnews.ATT.COM>
Date: 25 Oct 89 04:04:16 GMT
References: <10315@cbnews.ATT.COM> <10412@cbnews.ATT.COM>
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From: bnr-fos!.uucp!hwt@watmath.waterloo.edu (Henry Troup)

Various objections were raised on the basis of resistance proportional to
square of velocity, heating, etc.

However, let's say I fire a pellet at .7c aimed at a target one kilometre
away.  It takes .7 / 300,000 second to get there, or 2.3 microseconds.

I don't think that's long enough for the pellet to vaporize; and it's 
certainly not long enough for the vapor to spread much.  So I hit the 
target with a very dense plasma 1cm across - that still has much of the
starting energy.
 
A more serious objection is that this had better be the main gun on a 
tank, because the recoil is going to be large.  If the pellet is .1 g, the
recoil force is 30 MN.  If the tank weighs 30 tonnes, it will acquire a
velocity of .7 metre/second.  Anyone want to fire one of these from their
shoulder ?
 


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