General > Discussion
Particle Beam Weapons: More Than Just Flashlights?
Darkpriest667:
--- Quote from: DanielOR on June 11, 2008, 06:11:02 pm ---DarkPriest,
suppose I might, but they, in return, will know everything about me, including what I had for breakfast two weeks prior. :)
--- End quote ---
no only the nsa would know that lol
Doctor J:
@DanielOR: The Ideal Gas Law breaks down when intermolecular interactions increase, namely 1) under high pressure and 2) under low temperatures. For our purposes, the high temperature of the plasma effectively cancels out the high pressure. Besides, we only need to use the van der Waals corrections when we need to know exactly what the pressure [volume/moles/whatever] is. The general principles of the Ideal Gas Law still guide us.
@SirMoric: The ETC concept was invented well after WWII [and the flak 88]. While modern formulations of gunpowder do indeed burn more slowly than the old black powder, it still doesn't last long enough to maintain barrel pressure as the bullet moves towards the muzzle. However, there is the U.S. Army project using separate sections of gunpowder progressively ignited by electric charge.
@Darkpriest667: Chemical reactions do not and can not create radiation, or indeed any changes in the nucleus. Sorry, but you must have mis-heard whatever it was you overheard. You could, of course, suffer from burns due to the plasma... And no, it doesn't need to be hot enough for fusion. It just needs to maintain enough pressure to keep the bullet accelerating the whole time it is traveling down the barrel. If you could master enough energy to get fusion, you wouldn't need the bullet anymore.
DanielOR:
DoctorJ: plasma is ionized gas, i.e. each nucleus is missing an electron. Since every molecule (nucleaus, actually, no?) has a charge "+e", they will be interacting via the Coulomb force (repulsion) which is long range. This has me worried that ideal gas law does not apply - or has to be modified. Either way, I am pretty sure that "plasma versions" of gas laws exist, since there is fair bit of plasma physics being done.
Please see the wikipedia article below. It states that
1. Equations describing plasma behavior MUST include electromagnetic fields, since everything is a charged soup (positively charge nuclei and negatively charged electrons floating about, all of this recombining and splitting again)
2. The fluid model treats plasma as a liquid, with density, flow, etc. - all described by Stokes equation. I know damn little about fluid dynamics and what I hear scares me.
So...I beleive I was one of the people earlier who tried to apply the ideal gas law to plasma. I am now ready to admit that it was a very rough approximation at best. I.e. it is likely I am full of sh@t.
Darkpriest667:
Doctor... ok i may have misheard you are correct however... what about the flash.. that much heat that fast must cause some sort of flash as i mentioned earlier
Doctor J:
Sure, i'll go along with that. I'd imagine that the flash would be bright enough to blind people even in full daylight. I'd expect the shooter would have to wear a face shield with 'active protection', i.e., a transparent material that can become instantly dark under electronic control. Our bomber crews wore something similar during the Cold War to protect them from nuclear flash blindness.
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