h a l f b a k e r ySugar and spice and unfettered insensibility.
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I think you are badly underestimating how much energy it would take to stop a projectile I suspect by at least a power of ten likely a hundred. |
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just thinking air defenses are pretty good these days and this idea is not very efficient in air anyways. You could still use it under water as it's better at transferring sound energy.
As for underestimating power usage very likely but I was thinking this system could be mounted onto nuclear powered ships and subs and the entire output of the reactor coupled with a capacitor bank could provide the required power long enough to destroy the torpedo.
[UB] If you are going to post that something is bad why don't you also post why it is bad so that I at least know that you understand the concept of the idea. |
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Standing waves *are* used to trap or repel things, but mostly we're talking dust particles here, or things the size of dust particles. Larger things are a little more intractable. |
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Such a system would be huge Spiff. It would only work over very small distances making it a poor defence against explosives (power requirement more than squaring with distance). Furthermore in air even a massive standing wave would not be able to stop a missile. It might damage it or send it off coarse but at the distances we are talking about (less than 10 feet) that wouldn't help much. In water you cannot impart enough energy due to a property called cavitation the same property that limits prop speed. I'm not sure what purpose trying to muffle the system would serve in either medium. That sort of thing works in the lab and in headphones but not on the scale that you are imagining.
Systems like this are far better at putting people out of commision than weapons due to our tender inner bits. |
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Bullets penetrating something soft are stopped once they
push through their own mass of the soft material. |
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The area where the waves from your speakers
constructively interfere would be a region where the air
pressure goes from really high to really low over and
over. |
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Sonic booms break windows at ~100psi pressure. Let's
assume you've built this thing to have a 4000psi pressure
standing wave. This is a higher pressure than a scuba
tank, and would cause massive injuries to anything
absorbing a wave of this magnitude. |
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4000psi is about 275 atmospheres. Air density would thus
increase to 275x its density at STP, or about 0.013 lb per
in^3, or 0.2 oz per in^3. |
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A .223 rifle slug weighs about 0.4 oz and has a cross-
sectional area of about 0.05 in^2. |
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In other words, the bullet would need to pass through 4
inches of crazy-high-pressure air to be stopped. |
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But, a standing wave from speakers isn't constantly high
pressure; it's an area where the pressure goes from very
low to very high as the waves pass by. So the pressure
would average about half the above, and the bullet
would need to travel through 8 inches of this high-
pressure air to get there. |
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I'm envisioning a high-volume 10,000psi air source driving
a dozen whoopie-cushion-like devices arranged in a ring,
such that the volume adds in the center of the ring. Since
the blast from the brrrzt-ers would not be in phase, the
intensity at the center would increase with the square
root of the number of brrzt-ers, not linearly. Still, this
would be quite the cacophany. |
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It would sound like an ammunition depot being detonated
continuously, more or less. |
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Plus, it would need to be suspended in a hoop-like
structure that could be rapidly moved to place the region
of high-pressure air in front of the incoming bullet. |
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Unfortunately, even if the noise sources could be placed
appropriately, the cacophany would render it unusable
for security at public events (presidential speeches, etc.). |
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A better idea for political speeches might be to encode
the speaker's words into the standing-wave generators.
The speaker would need to speak continuously to
maintain protection. |
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//Bullets penetrating something soft are stopped
once they push through their own mass of the soft
material. // |
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Is that true? Only it would mean that a lead bullet
fired in air would stop after about 11,000 bullet-
lengths, which is maybe a few hundred metres. |
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If 11,000 bullet lengths isn't far enough, just shoot it out of a bigger gun. |
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So it only depends on the mass of the bullet, not how fast it is going? |
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[poc] - [sninc] is referring to Newton's impact depth theorem, which ignores silly things like velocity and kinetic energy. It's purely based on density ratio. |
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Funny thing is, it works, as far as approximations go. Clever dude, that Newton. |
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Wow. Well, I will now put on two hats, in order that I
may take one of them off to [sninc] and one to Ike. |
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I don't think this is a new idea. Bionicle had this in 2002 or
2003—ISTR one of the Bohrok or Bohrok-Kal, I think the ice
one, had this power. And I don't think that was the first
time I'd seen it. |
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// It would sound like an ammunition depot being detonated continuously, more or less. // |
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Back to the idea... I can't help wonder if standing wave nodes be produced to coincide with where a projectile 'will be' in-line with it's direction of travel, so that the projectile does not pass through a single screen of cohesive sound so much as it travels a gauntlet tunnel of cohesive interference? |
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Surely a bullet could at least be redirected from its path using this approach if it could be tracked in real-time. |
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