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This topic has moved here: Subject: What the hell is a terraton?
  • Subject: What the hell is a terraton?
Subject: What the hell is a terraton?

Taken from the Halo wikia about the MAC cannons (super mac)


These cannons fire a 3000-ton ferric-tungsten round at 120,000 kilometers per second,impacting with a massive amount of kinetic energy, equal to approximately 9.98 terratons of energy.

  • 08.09.2011 8:03 AM PDT

You noob go frag yourself

''Terra'' is a prefix of 1.000.000.000.000.000 or something like that.
''Ton'' is a weight meassurement.

  • 08.09.2011 8:09 AM PDT

Old school Bungie, born and raised,
In the Septagon is where I spend most of my days.
Relaxin', maxin', posting all cool,
Talking about Halo, life and some school.
Got in one little argument, and the mods got scared,
they said "You're gonna get banned and your member title'll be bare!"

You've heard of the term kiloton, right? They are attempting to express the amount of energy being delivered upon impact of a MAC round in comparison to tons of TNT.

In this case, a standard MAC round hits with the same force as 10,000,000,000,000 tons of TNT! That's an order of 10 magnitudes more than Czar Bomba, the most powerful nuclear device made, a billion times more powerful (if my math is right, which I think it is).

Really, it should be expressed in Joules, as TNT would be horribly outdated in the 26th century. In that case, a MAC round would deliver about 40 Zettajoules of energy! Most of you have never even heard of that prefix! That's 40 x 10^21!

Mind blowing!

[Edited on 08.09.2011 8:25 AM PDT]

  • 08.09.2011 8:15 AM PDT

question everything...truth has no pedigree

1 teraton = 1,000 gigatons

= 1,000,000 megatons

= 1,000,000,000 kilotons

= 1,000,000,000,000 tons

= 2,000,000,000,000,000 pounds

So yeah, that's two quadrillion pounds.

In the context of explosives, they're talking about an explosion equivalent to the detonation of that many pounds of TNT.




[Edited on 08.09.2011 8:25 AM PDT]

  • 08.09.2011 8:22 AM PDT

O I C

[Edited on 08.09.2011 8:38 AM PDT]

  • 08.09.2011 8:37 AM PDT
  • gamertag: Poy357
  • user homepage:

I'll make it easier.

mb = megabyte
gb = gigabyte
tb = terabyte.

The prefix is the same, so 1 teraton = 1 trillion tons.

  • 08.09.2011 8:39 AM PDT

Wait, was the MAC retconned or something? the SMAC was only to hit with the power of 58 gigatons. WTF happened?

  • 08.09.2011 8:52 AM PDT

Old school Bungie, born and raised,
In the Septagon is where I spend most of my days.
Relaxin', maxin', posting all cool,
Talking about Halo, life and some school.
Got in one little argument, and the mods got scared,
they said "You're gonna get banned and your member title'll be bare!"


Posted by: ROBERTO jh
Wait, was the MAC retconned or something? the SMAC was only to hit with the power of 58 gigatons. WTF happened?


No, the SMAC, or ODP, is what is being described above. Though standard ship-mounted MACs could deal about 1/10 the damage.

  • 08.09.2011 9:01 AM PDT


Posted by: prometheus25

Posted by: ROBERTO jh
Wait, was the MAC retconned or something? the SMAC was only to hit with the power of 58 gigatons. WTF happened?


No, the SMAC, or ODP, is what is being described above. Though standard ship-mounted MACs could deal about 1/10 the damage.


No, they can't. A standard frigate MAC dishes out 62 kilotons with the SMAC calculated at 51.2 gigatons. I don't know where he got this info from, but nobody has taken it seriously for years.

  • 08.09.2011 9:06 AM PDT

Old school Bungie, born and raised,
In the Septagon is where I spend most of my days.
Relaxin', maxin', posting all cool,
Talking about Halo, life and some school.
Got in one little argument, and the mods got scared,
they said "You're gonna get banned and your member title'll be bare!"


Posted by: ROBERTO jh

Posted by: prometheus25

Posted by: ROBERTO jh
Wait, was the MAC retconned or something? the SMAC was only to hit with the power of 58 gigatons. WTF happened?


No, the SMAC, or ODP, is what is being described above. Though standard ship-mounted MACs could deal about 1/10 the damage.


No, they can't. A standard frigate MAC dishes out 62 kilotons with the SMAC calculated at 51.2 gigatons. I don't know where he got this info from, but nobody has taken it seriously for years.


IDK, that's just what I read. You can calculate it out by hand, if you want.

E = 0.5mv^2

That will give you joules of energy. Just make sure you use kilograms and m/s

  • 08.09.2011 9:11 AM PDT


Posted by: ROBERTO jh

Posted by: prometheus25

Posted by: ROBERTO jh
Wait, was the MAC retconned or something? the SMAC was only to hit with the power of 58 gigatons. WTF happened?


No, the SMAC, or ODP, is what is being described above. Though standard ship-mounted MACs could deal about 1/10 the damage.


No, they can't. A standard frigate MAC dishes out 62 kilotons with the SMAC calculated at 51.2 gigatons. I don't know where he got this info from, but nobody has taken it seriously for years.


Sounds like it should be more powerful than that, a standard MAC fires a 600 ton ferric tungsten projectile at a certain speed (don't know right now offhand), and the Super MAC fires a 3000 ton ferric tungsten slug at 40% of the speed of light..

[Edited on 08.09.2011 9:20 AM PDT]

  • 08.09.2011 9:18 AM PDT

General of The Irish Punks


Posted by: prometheus25
You've heard of the term kiloton, right? They are attempting to express the amount of energy being delivered upon impact of a MAC round in comparison to tons of TNT.

In this case, a standard MAC round hits with the same force as 10,000,000,000,000 tons of TNT! That's an order of 10 magnitudes more than Czar Bomba, the most powerful nuclear device made, a billion times more powerful (if my math is right, which I think it is).

Really, it should be expressed in Joules, as TNT would be horribly outdated in the 26th century. In that case, a MAC round would deliver about 40 Zettajoules of energy! Most of you have never even heard of that prefix! That's 40 x 10^21!

Mind blowing!


Now it makes sense how a MAC round can go right through covenant ships.

  • 08.09.2011 9:39 AM PDT

Welcome to bungie, you have no rights. play nice!
CLICK!

I should ask vociferous!

  • 08.09.2011 9:40 AM PDT


Posted by: MisterBraz

Posted by: ROBERTO jh

Posted by: prometheus25

Posted by: ROBERTO jh
Wait, was the MAC retconned or something? the SMAC was only to hit with the power of 58 gigatons. WTF happened?


No, the SMAC, or ODP, is what is being described above. Though standard ship-mounted MACs could deal about 1/10 the damage.


No, they can't. A standard frigate MAC dishes out 62 kilotons with the SMAC calculated at 51.2 gigatons. I don't know where he got this info from, but nobody has taken it seriously for years.


Sounds like it should be more powerful than that, a standard MAC fires a 600 ton ferric tungsten projectile at a certain speed (don't know right now offhand), and the Super MAC fires a 3000 ton ferric tungsten slug at 40% of the speed of light..


Not 40%, .04%. Its a common misconception.

And a basic Frigate fires one at 30,000 meters per second.

  • 08.09.2011 9:51 AM PDT
  • gamertag: Fin
  • user homepage:

"but you already knew that, I mean, how couldn't you?

Only when no Human brick is left atop another, shall we be satisfied with your destruction.


These cannons fire a 3000-ton ferric-tungsten round at 120,000 kilometers per second,impacting with a massive amount of kinetic energy, equal to approximately 9.98 terratons of energy.

Assuming I've done my maths right, that should be 5.88 Teratons of TNT, not 9.98 TT.

Or more properly, it has a relativistic kinetic energy of around 2.4597x10^22 Joules.

Or around 24,597,000,000,000,000,000,000 J

Which is still absurdly high, to be fair.

  • 08.09.2011 9:56 AM PDT


Posted by: ROBERTO jh

Posted by: prometheus25

Posted by: ROBERTO jh
Wait, was the MAC retconned or something? the SMAC was only to hit with the power of 58 gigatons. WTF happened?


No, the SMAC, or ODP, is what is being described above. Though standard ship-mounted MACs could deal about 1/10 the damage.


No, they can't. A standard frigate MAC dishes out 62 kilotons with the SMAC calculated at 51.2 gigatons. I don't know where he got this info from, but nobody has taken it seriously for years.


Considering the SMAC can put a hole through ANY known convenant ship, up to and including a supercarrier, 51 gigatons is pathetically low.

Whether you like it or not this has yet to be overruled in canon and thus the 5.88 terratons is much more logical.

  • 08.09.2011 10:31 AM PDT


Posted by: RotaryCookie

Posted by: ROBERTO jh

Posted by: prometheus25

Posted by: ROBERTO jh
Wait, was the MAC retconned or something? the SMAC was only to hit with the power of 58 gigatons. WTF happened?


No, the SMAC, or ODP, is what is being described above. Though standard ship-mounted MACs could deal about 1/10 the damage.


No, they can't. A standard frigate MAC dishes out 62 kilotons with the SMAC calculated at 51.2 gigatons. I don't know where he got this info from, but nobody has taken it seriously for years.


Considering the SMAC can put a hole through ANY known convenant ship, up to and including a supercarrier, 51 gigatons is pathetically low.

Whether you like it or not this has yet to be overruled in canon and thus the 5.88 terratons is much more logical.


I honestly did not think that anyone truly believed that bull -blam!- anymore. The Halopedian I use says it is a maximum of 51.2 gigatons. How the hell is that pathetically low? It'd be sufficient to flatten an entire continent on Earth.

So do explain how a few rounds from 64 kiloton MAC shots can still cut through a Covenant ship. If that can happen, 5 1/2 terratons should vaporize the same ship.

Seriously, that calculation was considered bull -blam!- years ago.

  • 08.09.2011 10:38 AM PDT

Also known as Entropy91
Black Water Ops representative.
See you on the battlefield.

The prefix tera- is equal to 10^12 in the metric system. That would be 1,000,000,000,000 or 1 trillion.

Therefore, 9.98 teratons = 9.98 trillion tons of TNT. Overkill, much?


[Edited on 08.09.2011 1:55 PM PDT]

  • 08.09.2011 1:53 PM PDT

@accordingto343

Your one stop shop for all of 343's fabulous errors and ridiculous notions in the Halo lore.

Le's just say it would make a pretty big boom.

  • 08.09.2011 1:54 PM PDT

Im Canadian Eh!

I'll make it even easier. Boom.

  • 08.09.2011 2:03 PM PDT