Meatshield236
Member
- Feb 10, 2020
- 135
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Eh, handwavey travel is a staple of scifi, so I can forgive them for this. I was surprised that ftl travel wasn't a thing, since you're hopping between different planets, and "lightyear" is a very literal unit of measurement. Also, basically anything that can be measured in relation to the speed of light would also double as the most dangerous weapon, but most sci fi settings ignore that fact because chucking rocks at people lightyears away is less cool than space battles.
Also I got the math wrong, it's 3,725,648 miles per minute, not second. It's 62,094 miles per second. Though at that speed the difference in damage is how much of the planet you turn to dust you make and how badly you fuck up the planet's orbit. There's a lot of variables that go into just how capital F Fucked a planet would be getting hit by something going that speed, but for comparison's sake, a ten mile-wide asteroid going at just 12 miles a second wiped out the dinosaurs and an estimated 75% of all life on the planet. At this speed, once the object hits atmosphere you're running into things like "turning the air into a super hot plasma because you're forcing atomic fusion from going so fast." Certainly enough to vaporize all life on the planet. It would be a painless death due to the insane speeds we're dealing with here, but that's the price you pay for cheap planetary annihilation.
Also I got the math wrong, it's 3,725,648 miles per minute, not second. It's 62,094 miles per second. Though at that speed the difference in damage is how much of the planet you turn to dust you make and how badly you fuck up the planet's orbit. There's a lot of variables that go into just how capital F Fucked a planet would be getting hit by something going that speed, but for comparison's sake, a ten mile-wide asteroid going at just 12 miles a second wiped out the dinosaurs and an estimated 75% of all life on the planet. At this speed, once the object hits atmosphere you're running into things like "turning the air into a super hot plasma because you're forcing atomic fusion from going so fast." Certainly enough to vaporize all life on the planet. It would be a painless death due to the insane speeds we're dealing with here, but that's the price you pay for cheap planetary annihilation.