Ontopic Mission to Uranus

As someone who is just now recovering from some food poisoning on Sunday, that shit cheered me up! Diarrhea in zero gravity would the worst if it got loose. :egads: I liked the floating turd scenario. "Not mine, mine was sticky!" :fly:
 
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I tried to see the northern lights a couple nights ago but I don't think I have a clear enough horizon. Maybe if I stood on my roof of my house.
I did see three meteors including one bolide which changed colors from blue to green and split apart at the end, much like fireworks do.
 
pseudo sci/scifi question

So say you have a space battle going on
Ships all flying around pew pew pew-in at each other
When the pews hit a ship, they explode or are damaged
What happens when one of those pews misses?
You have a large bolt of energy lobbed from a flying space craft. Does it just keep going forever?
Would it be affected by gravity? Like pulled into permanent orbit around a moon or planet?
Or does it just dissipate over time?

Please speculate wildly
 
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pseudo sci/scifi question

So say you have a space battle going on
Ships all flying around pew pew pew-in at each other
When the pews hit a ship, they explode or are damaged
What happens when one of those pews misses?
You have a large bolt of energy lobbed from a flying space craft. Does it just keep going forever?
Would it be affected by gravity? Like pulled into permanent orbit around a moon or planet?
Or does it just dissipate over time?

Please speculate wildly
I would expect it to eventually lose coherence and spread out.

Kinda like how the beams coming out of quasars don't end life on Earth every few seconds despite putting out more than 10^36 times our sun's power.
 
pseudo sci/scifi question

So say you have a space battle going on
Ships all flying around pew pew pew-in at each other
When the pews hit a ship, they explode or are damaged
What happens when one of those pews misses?
You have a large bolt of energy lobbed from a flying space craft. Does it just keep going forever?
Would it be affected by gravity? Like pulled into permanent orbit around a moon or planet?
Or does it just dissipate over time?

Please speculate wildly

depends what the pews are made of. Are they lasers? If so, they have a diffraction constant and will spread out into a cone so big it doesnt matter pretty soon. What if they pews are something more physical though, like plasma. Even in a poor thermo environment like space, plasma is going to cool over time.

Everything is affected by gravity, so yes.
 
I enjoy The Expanse's space munitions logic, where everything is still kinetic, whether its miniguns, or a bigass keel-mounted railgun.

Well. At least up until the magnetic pulse guns later in the books from the alien shit.
 
I read a short story once about how the US had a moon base, and the russians had one like 10 miles from it, and they got into a gun fight for some reason, and from then on they all had to duck once every couple hours or so because the bullets were orbiting the moon.
 
In Starblazers the shock cannons had a limited range. Any shot that missed looked to dissipate.
They never explained and I never asked.
Torpedoes that missed started to zig zag and then explode.