Originally posted by Meson
pendal, I said that the tachyons cause damage by taking energy (kinetic, electric, etc.) way from the targets in an attempt to reaccelerate back to speeds above the speed of light. Simply nature trying to acheive an equilibrium.
Don't think so. Newton's First Law: An object at rest
tends to remain at rest. An object in motion tends to
remain in motion.
Thus, a Tachyon decelerated to .99C should continue to
move at .99C until and unless some force acted on it to
accelerate back to it's C+ speed. Thus, the tachyon,
being a dumb particle, can't impart acceleration to itself.
It'll continue moving in a
straight path at C- until it hits something. It will then
perform an inelastic collision and travel off at some
angle at C- - v, where v is the speed it lost due to the
collision.
I would expect it to inflict damage by transferring
kinetic energy to the target, at a rate of 1/2MV**2.
Also: Somebody said WC doesn't have physics. Not so; it
has a certain fictional physics which makes it more
interesting to nerds like me. It's part of the reason why
I like WC more than certain other universes because WC at
least *tries* to provide a decent physical explanation for
what happens, as opposed to, say, SW which simply handwaves
away things like what a turbolaser is, how things travel
FTL, and how you can blow up a small moon in low orbit
around a planet and not have the debris render the planet
uninhabitable.
Respectfully,
Brian P.