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Topic: The new "planet" Sedna, and UQM (Read 19309 times)
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Chrispy
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A bomb here, a bomb there, and Sedna has lost orbit.
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FalconMWC
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Why would the Quan want to relocate it? Because there is a big base on it? I think a few fusion blasts would be easier....
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Chrispy
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Well I offered the three possibilies of what happened to it assuming that it isnt there and its the Ur-quans doing.
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Cronos
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"A nonluminous celestial body larger than an asteroid or comet, illuminated by light from a star, such as the sun, around which it revolves. In the solar system there are nine known planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto."
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Rib Rdb
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Anyway, when I heard this, I was wondering: How much work would it be to cram an extra planet into UQM´s version of the Solar System? Currently, I can think of three reasons NOT to do it:
# Insufficient data available. The data that´s important to UQM, that is. What kind of Tectonic rating would it have? Weather? And most important of all: What colour is it?
# Forced relocation of Fwiffo. Fwiffo, in true Spathi fashion, hid on the planet farthest from the sun. Now that Pluto no longer is the planet farthest from the sun, he would have to be relocated, I really doubt people would want that (though I´m pretty sure Fwiffo would).
From what I've read (and I admit it's not much), Sedna is red and icy, and it's more likely that Pluto will be declared a non-planet than Sedna being declared a planet.
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Death 999
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We did. You did. Yes we can. No.
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It is true that nukes don't "blow up" nukes generate a masive amount of heat fusion energy meaning it's like a giant napalm no explosive force just a curtain of fire.
Well, sort of. First, there is the radiation pressure. Second, the thermal energy is great enough to vaporize things. When the material vaporizes, it explodes conventionally, which will create recoil.
So there is explosive force, quite a bit of it.
However, in order for a nuke to have any effect on the orbital properties, it would need to provide a reaction mass with escape velocity from the planet's surface, and then the reaction you get is the mass of ejecta times this reduced velocity. The best bet is to greatly exceed the velocity, using a stream of ions, or light.
A nuclear explosion would be much less directed and efficient.
I suspect that if Sedna, if it ceased to exist, would probably have done so very gradually by means of mining, instead of suddenly, by bombardment.
Technically the defintion of a planet is pretty vauge Haleys comet shows up here every 75 years it "orbits around Sol" so technically it's a planet...
There are several definitions of 'planet'; one coherent one is that its gravity must be strong enough that it could not be any shape other than a sphere. Another definition could be that there must be a lessening of the debris in its area (due to its absorbing impactors or slingshotting them away).
As for the inclusion of Sedna in UQM --
why stop there? Why not include the other 30 moons of Saturn and Jupiter that we already knew about that were left out? (answer: because we shouldn't clutter the place up.)
Perhaps it exists but lies beyond the point at which hyperspace engines automatically kick in.
Who says it would be impossible to blow up a planet? It would be difficult, but quite doable. When a star goes super-nova, it vaporizes most of a solar system.
I do. The gravitational potential energy you would have to overcome is enormous.
When a star goes super-nova, it thoroughly bakes the planets, but they remain gravitationally bound to themselves. Meanwhile, the system fills with expelled gas, which creates drag and makes the planets fall into the star. So the planets are destroyed, but they are never blown up.
Even stars, when they blow up, leave a core behind which accounts for most of the mass of the star. And they have a fusion explosion the size of the Earth going on continuously for millions of years.
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« Last Edit: March 22, 2004, 06:31:23 pm by Death_999 »
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FalconMWC
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They should have put Fiffwo on it. It would suit him better.
D_999 Can you "mine a planet out of existence?"
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Death 999
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We did. You did. Yes we can. No.
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so many moons it's hard to count each being that we can't land there, last I checked it had 13+ moons.
Not being able to land there has very little to do with it. The main problem is that, much like the issue of planets, there is no sharp cutoff between moons and large hunks of rock.
As for mining a planet out of existence:
Well, you still have to use the same amount of energy to get the ore up out of its gravity well, but you have a lot longer to provide that energy. And the longer you do it the lighter the planet gets. I suspect that for a mine-to-oblivion effort to succeed on a planet, a space elevator would need to be set up.
Note, while a space elevator on Earth remains technically too hard, we could build one for a lighter planet, as long as it had a decent rotation rate and we had the manufacturing capability in its area (the hard part).
lastly, I agree, 'Sedna' is a horrible name. I would go for 'Janus'. The gatekeeper of the solar system.
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« Last Edit: March 22, 2004, 09:45:22 pm by Death_999 »
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