- Zero_Patience
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- Honorable Member
Wow. There's quite a LOT that needs to be corrected:
- First, kinetic energy is merely the measurement of the velocity change of an object in motion; which means that unless the MAC round tunneled it's way to the core of the planet, it would expend almost all of it's energy once it hit the lake bed. This was CLEARLY not a 50 gigaton detonation, since the entire lake (and the surrounding mountains) wasn't turned to vapor in microseconds.
- Second, the object CLEARLY wasn't relativistic, and the fact that we see it in motion (rather than a column of light that burns your retinas out of existence due to sheer air friction) indicates that it was moving at several km/s at most. Unless the object weighed hundreds of thousands of tons it would not even qualify as a kiloton level impact.
- Third (and I'm shocked this has to be said - please for the love of God stay in school), but kinetic energy is still energy, which means that object with sufficient mass moving fast enough will still create an explosion - so yes, you will still get a lot of heat and light; after all what do you think happens when an asteroid hits the Earth?
In the case of a 3,000 metric ton shell moving at 12,000 km/s that is a LOT of heat and light, and a big explosion to boot. Even if the air and water failed to provide sufficient resistance, hitting solid Earth would cause it to rapidly vaporize, thus causing the expansion of superheated matter, otherwise known as an explosion.
- Fourth, the Corvette's structure failed to provide sufficient resistance to the MAC round. Thus since KE is measured in velocity change, the Corvette would have only absorbed a small fraction of the energy delivered by the MAC.
- And finally, how do we know that the "big" MAC figures haven't been retconned entirely? Reach has stymied all of our preconceptions of what glassing actually entails thanks to the data pads, has it not? UNSC material resistance has taken a nosedive to the point that gigajoule beams can cut through Titanium-A like wet paper? Right? Even the relativistic combat presented in Nylund's novels (where vessels engage one another at decent fractions of light speed at distances of hundreds of thousands to millions of kilometers) has now been reduced to World War II broadside combat where fighters and ships fight like their terrestrial analogues.
So by all logic, shouldn't all the big MAC figures be retconned if the universe were to have any internal consistency?