The Race to Insanity and Beyond!

[Jack Simth]

Renegade 13 said:
Why, post some more useless stuff, like I'm doing!

How is that useless? You answered a question, no?

[Renegade 13]

Jack Simth said:
\You keep making shamless plugs, but you never provide a link to where to view them....

Oops. Knew I forgot something. Here you go:

New Planets for SEIV!

[Jack Simth]

Renegade 13 said:
Oops. Knew I forgot something. Here you go:

New Planets for SEIV!

Planets? Bah! They are just pictures of a bunch of circles on black backgrounds with very pretty stuff in them to make them look like pictures of planets. Quite attractive, and lots of obvious skill in the artist, to be sure, but nothing you could grow crops on. Planets - hah.

[Renegade 13]

Jack Simth said:
Planets? Bah! They are just pictures of a bunch of circles on black backgrounds with very pretty stuff in them to make them look like pictures of planets. Quite attractive, and lots of obvious skill in the artist, to be sure, but nothing you could grow crops on. Planets - hah.

You've blown my cover! I had people convinced they were actual pictures of planets I had visited and was just now returning to show you all the wonders of the galaxy. Now everyone knows I'm a fraud, a charlatan. I'm so ashamed! Can any of you ever forgive me??

I'm happy you like the pictures

[Jack Simth]

You should be! Now make sure to give all those nice people to whom you sold tracts of land their money back!

[Renegade 13]

Jack Simth said:
You should be! Now make sure to give all those nice people to whom you sold tracts of land their money back!

You mean....I can't keep that? I was planning to retire on that money! You can tell all those people that they can pry the money out of my cold dead fingers. Or they could stop by and gently take it out of my fingers while I'm sleeping, which I think I shall do now. Good night all! Don't let the thread die while I'm sleeping.

[Jack Simth]

Renegade 13 said:
You mean....I can't keep that? I was planning to retire on that money! You can tell all those people that they can pry the money out of my cold dead fingers.

Don't temp m... um, my friend.

Renegade 13 said: Or they could stop by and gently take it out of my fingers while I'm sleeping, which I think I shall do now.

I'm sure ... my friend ... will do that.

[Will]

Haha... the Pythons...

She's got huge... tracts of LAND!

Oh, and I like the blue one.

[narf poit chez BOOM]

I'll just qoute this. It really doesn't need an intro. (From the Baen humor forum)

Subject: Culinary kinetic weaponry - how would Honorverse armour go?
Author: Leon Brooks
Date: 06 Feb 2005 07:28 PM
While on the topic of oldies but goodies, this text answers the
age-old question:

To: humor@MIT.EDU
Subject: glen mccready:
Under enough pressure, ravioli behaves as a gas.
Date: Tue, 29 Dec 1998 16:42:06 EST
From: "Nathan J. Williams"

There was still one aspect of the whole concept of a
ravioli-loaded railgun type weapon which we, lolling about
late on a weeknight, with only a few neurons randomly
firing, could not resolve. Would a chunk of metal (can of
ravioli) impacting another, larger, rest mass structure
(star destroyer) produce an "explosion" effect, or simply
punch an appropriately shaped hole as it passed through?

Bill?

What am I, the neighborhood blast physicist??? Well, maybe... :-)

It all depends on speed of impact versus the speed of sound in the
target (what is called the Mach number, where Mach 1 means the speed
of sound, Mach 2 is twice the speed of sound, etc), and the speed of
the ravioli versus the speed of light in the target (which I'll call
the Cerenkov number, where Cerenkov 1 is the speed of light in
anything; Cerenkov 1.3 is the speed of high-energy protons in a
water-cooled reactor (that's why you get that nifty blue glow), and
you can get up to Cerenkov 2.4 using diamonds and nuclear
accelerators. In the late 40's people used to talk about Cerenkov
numbers, but they don't anymore. Pity.). Lastly, there's the ravioli
velocity expressed as a fraction of the speed of light in a vacuum
(that is, as a fraction of "c"). "C" velocities are always between 0
and 1.

At low speeds (REAL low) the ravioli will simply flow over the
surface, yielding a space-cruiser with a distinctly Italian paint
job.

Faster (still well below speed-of-sound in the target) the metal of
the space-cruiser's skin will distort downward, making what we Boston
drivers call a "small dent".

Faster still, you may have a "big dent" or maybe even a "big dent with
a hole in the middle", caused by the ravioli having enough energy to
push the dent through, stretching and thinning the hull metal till
the metal finally tears in the middle of the dent.

Getting up past Mach 1 (say, 5000 feet/sec for steel), you start to
get punch-a-hole-shaped-like-the-object effects, because the metal is
being asked to move faster than the binding forces in the object can
propagate the "HEY! MOVE!" information. (After all, sound is just the
binding forces between atoms in a material moving the adjacent atoms
-- and the speed of sound is how fast the message to "move" can
propagate.) From this, we see that WileE Coyote often reached
far-supersonic speeds because he often punched silhouette-type holes
in rocks, cliffs, trucks, etc.

Around Mach 4 or so, another phenomenon starts -- compressive heating.
This is where the leading edge of the ravioli actually starts being
heated by compression (remember PV=nRT, the ideal gas law?) Well,
ravioli isn't a gas, but under enough pressure, ravioli behaves as a
gas. It is compressed at the instant of impact and gets hot -- very
hot. Likewise, the impact point on the hull is compressed and gets
hot. Both turn to gasses -- real gasses, glowing-white-hot gasses.
The gasses expand spherically, causing crater-like effects, including
a raised rim and a basically parabolic shape. In the center of the
crater, some material is vaporized, then there's a melt zone, then a
larger "bent" zone, and the raised rim is caused because the gas
expansion bubble center point (the bending force) is actually
*inside* the hull plate. If the hull plate isn't thick enough, then
the gas-expansion bubble pushes through to the other side, and you
get a structural breach event (technically speaking, a "big hole") in
the side of the space-cruiser.

Compressive heating really hits the stride up around 20,000 feet/sec
(Mach 4 in steel, Mach 15 in air) and continues as a major factor all
the way up to the high fractional Cerenkov speeds, where nuclear
forces begin to take effect.

Aside: the "re-entry friction heating" that spacecraft endure when the
reenter the atmosphere is NOT friction. It's really compressive
heating of the air in the path. As long as the spacecraft is faster
than Mach 1, the air can't know to get out of the way, so it bunches
up in front of the spacecraft. When you squeeze any gas, it gets hot.
So, the glowing "reentry gas" is really just squeezed air, which
heats the spacecraft heat shield by conduction and infrared. The
hypersonic ravioli can be expected to behave similarly.

As we increase speed from the high Mach numbers (about 10 miles/sec)
all the way up to about 150,000 miles/sec, not much different happens
except that the amount of kinetic energy (which turns into
compressive heat) increases. This is a huge range of velocity, but
it's uninteresting velocity.

At high fractional Cerenkov speeds, the ravioli is now beginning to
travel at relativistic velocities. Among other things, this means
that the ravioli is aging more slowly than usual, and the ravioli can
looks compressed in the direction of travel. But that's really not
important right now.

As we pass Cerenkov 1.0 in the target, we get a new phenomenon --
Cerenkov radiation. This is that distinctive blue glow seen around
water-cooled reactors. It's just (relatively) harmless light
(harmless compared to the other blast effects, that is). I mention it
only because it's so nifty...

At around .9 c (Cerenkov 1.1) , the ravioli starts to perceptibly
weigh more. It's just a relativistic mass increase -- all the
additional weight is actually energy, available to do compressive
heating upon impact. The extra weight is converted to heat energy
according to the equation E=mc^2; it looks like compressive heating
but it's not.

[Here's where I'm a little hazy on the numbers; I'm at work and don't
have time to rederive the Lorentz transformations.]

At around .985 c (Cerenkov 1.2 or so), the ravioli now weighs twice
what it used to weigh. For a one pound can, that's two pounds... or
about sixty megatons of excess energy. All of it turns to heat on
impact. Probably very little is left of the space-cruiser.

At around .998 c, the impacting ravioli begins to behave less like
ravioli and more like an extremely intense radiation beam. Protons in
the water of the ravioli begin to successfully penetrate the nuclei
of the hull metal. Thermonuclear interactions, such as hydrogen
fusion, may take place in the tomato sauce.

At around .9998 c, the ravioli radiation beam is still wimpy as far as
nuclear accelerator energy is concerned, but because there is so much
of it, we can expect a truly powerful blast of mixed radiation coming
out of the impact site. Radiation, not mechanical blast, may become
the largest hazard to any surviving crew members.

At around .9999999 c, the ravioli radiation may begin to produce
"interesting" nuclear particles and events (heavy, short-lived
particles).

At around .999999999999 c, the ravioli impact site may begin to
resemble conditions in the original "big bang"; equilibrium between
matter and energy; free pair production; antimatter and matter
coexisting in equilibrium with a very intense gamma-ray flux etc. [1]

Past that, who knows? It may be possible to generate quantum black
holes given a sufficiently high velocity can of ravioli.

--Bill

[1] According to physicist W. Murray, we may also expect raining
frogs, plagues of locusts, cats and dogs living together, real
Old Testament destruction. You get the idea...


Cheers; Leon

--
A: It interrupts the conversation flow
Q: What's wrong with top-posting?

[narf poit chez BOOM]

Again, from the Baen forums. (These numbers are probably way off, but who cares? It's funny)

Subject: Why I'm so Tired
Author: David Start
Date: 06 Feb 2005 10:38 AM
An oldie, but a goodie....


WHY AM I SO TIRED???

For a couple years I've been blaming it on lack of sleep, not enough
sunshine, too much pressure from my job, earwax build-up, poor blood or
anything else I could think of. But now I found out the real reason: I'm
tired because I'm overworked.

Here's why: The population of this country is 273 million.

140 million are retired. That leaves 133 million to do the work.

There are 85 million in school. Which leaves 48 million to do the work.

Of this there are 29 million employed by the federal government. Leaving 19
million to do the work.

2.8 million are in the armed forces preoccupied with killing Saddam Hussein.
Which leaves 16.2 million to do the work.

Take from the total the 14,800,000 people who work for state and city
governments. And that leaves 1.4 million to do the work.

At any given time there are 188,000 people in hospitals. Leaving 1,212,000
to do the work.

Now, there are 1,211,998 people in prisons. That leaves just two people to
do the work. You and me.

And there you are sitting on your ***, at your computer, reading jokes.
Nice, real nice.

Oh, and this link isn't funny, but if you like fantasy at all, it's really neat: http://atomfilms.shockwave.com/af/content/duel