((Edit: if i design a modified heavy gauss cannon that fires 1 meter long tungsten rods is anyone opposed to me actually using it?))
((Depends. What's your bonus to skill and will it be anywhere near anyone I care about?))
((Well its worth noting I came up with those before really seeing more then the initial description of the KA. The "terminal velocity" thing was born from poor understanding at best.
Piecewise seems like a pretty damned intelligent dude, he seems to have thought all this through and left relatively little room for cheating physics ))
((the fuck are you on about? the orbital drop will work exactly as you think it will, hell a tungsten rod between 1 and 10 tons in weight (cant remember the exact number) dropped from orbit is enough to reduce an entire island to nothing but a smoldering lump of molten slag... putting a kinetic amplifier on the end would vaporize half a continent.))
((Let's check the math...
Assume "orbit" is about 200 km, a pretty low low-Earth orbit, and that we have a 5-ton weight. Assuming Earth gravity, it will take about 143 seconds [someone check my math]; ignoring air resistance, this leads to a final velocity of about 1,400 m/s. With 5,000 kg behind it, the final force is seven
million N. Squaring that gives us 49
trillion N, which is probably enough to smash half of the crust to bits...
You know, this is a lot more fun than my physics homework. I wonder why.))
((Well its worth noting I came up with those before really seeing more then the initial description of the KA. The "terminal velocity" thing was born from poor understanding at best.
Piecewise seems like a pretty damned intelligent dude, he seems to have thought all this through and left relatively little room for cheating physics ))
((the fuck are you on about? the orbital drop will work exactly as you think it will, hell a tungsten rod between 1 and 10 tons in weight (cant remember the exact number) dropped from orbit is enough to reduce an entire island to nothing but a smoldering lump of molten slag... putting a kinetic amplifier on the end would vaporize half a continent.))
((Not really. I think some tests were run in VR. The issue is that the mechanism behind the squaring of the force loses efficiency as the amount of force increases. Which is why it says "up to square". With a Rod From God scenario, the kinetic amplifier loses most of the added energy in the form of light and heat, creating more of a conventional explosion, and barely adding 50% to the overall damage. At least I think that's what happened, unless my memory is mistaken.
Stapling more amplifiers on to strike all at once does give better results though. Additive, not exponential, but still.))
((Well that screws up my calculations.))