Commentary on Spock v. Thanatos

[Jedi Master Spock]

Nobody yet? Well, I'll start by explaining a few things. I have the debate organized by category, and folks not reading carefully might be surprised at how many topics Thanatos let me have the final word on.

So the bit that attracted so much attention?

Weakest point would be the failing to realize that force times length is the very definition of energy. Following up with a remark that's supposed to belittle the intelligence of the other debater just makes the failing that much worse.

No, work is force times displacement (aka change in position). The gun itself only moves the total of its recoil path not its entire length.

Besides which, its utterly incorrect to use it even if it wasn't done wrong.

I will say that I think most of that particular thread of discussion within that debate suffered from some misunderstandings between the two of us.

Now, what precisely happened?

Modern guns are well below the level of 40K guns. The Conquerers gun had a recoil force of 190 tonnes while a modern 120mm has a recoil force of 56 tonnes. Shell effectiveness and ammunition type play a part.

Keep in mind this is the light cannon version of the Leman Russ and that's just the recoil force. Also remember that tank guns are far more powerful than arty guns.

Thanatos first mentions recoil, claiming that the higher recoil force of the Conqueror means it is a more powerful gun.

Depends on how we choose to measure recoil force. The Conqueror has a very short barrel proportionate to its diameter, meaning a light gun relative to the shell, meaning more kinetic energy applied to the recoiling barrel.

It also means the force on the bullet and the barrel itself are being applied over a shorter distance; the Conqueror barrel is 2.49m (Imperial Armour) while the Abrams barrel, a sample modern tank barrel, is 9.77m. 190T*2.49m=473T*m; 56T*9.77m=548.8T*m - that's 16% more energy.

Furthermore, the above citations make it clear that the Earthshaker operates at close to the maximum recoil of the Chimera chassis, which also constrains the force of WH40K tank guns.

Assuming the Conqueror manages to apply a peak 190 tonne force for the whole 2.49m length of its barrel, it has a muzzle energy of 4.6 megajoules. The Earthshaker, as described above, has a muzzle energy of 12.6 megajoules.

Emphasis added. I note first that there are a "couple different ways" to measure recoil, something you fail to take note of. This will lead to future confusion.

I also bring up the recoil energy of the Earthshaker.

Also incredibly wrong, its the weight of the gun not the length of the barrel that determines recoil velocity and force.

Barrel length effects the dyamics of the round and adds additional weight as a side effect, reducing recoil. While we know the total weight of the M256, we don't know the weight of the

No your quote says that

Considering that the Earthshaker weighs almost as much as the chassis its on, its not exactly surprising.

Again, wrong. Its weight not length that determines recoil force.

Here Thanatos clarifies what definition of recoil force he's working with - force used to stop the gun barrel.

The mass of the recoiling assembly determines the recoil velocity of the assembly, which determines the energy required to stop it (force over distance).

The recoil force backwards on the recoiling assembly is the same as the forward force on the bullet, as is the total change in momentum. The muzzle energy of the gun is the force (dot) the distance traveled by the bullet.

Now, what you're talking about is the force of the gun on the tank, but these are generally proportionate, because gun mass is linearly proportionate to gun length in much the same manner.

True; however, we do know that the Earthshaker, with its massive 9m barrel, is bigger than the tank guns; thus, it will have a better ratio of recoil energy to muzzle energy, and will have less recoil force for the same shell.

So if any of the tank guns fires an equivalent shell, it will have more recoil.

Recoil restriction of the fighting compartment, meaning that if it were more powerful, it would require more recoil distance than is available or more force than the chassis can handle. Any more recoil energy would be a problem.

Length times force gives muzzle energy. I was talking about the force between the gun and bullet; you have been talking about the force between the gun and the tank. The case I described was basically the case where the entire tank is one large rigid recoiling assembly.

In this post, I clarified what the other of the "couple ways" to talk about recoil force there is: We could talk about the force between the gun and bullet (which also determines muzzle energy, and is independent of gun mass) or the force between the gun and the tank (which is dependent on gun mass).

I also go into some details on the relationship between the two, and how it is that barrel length, recoil energy, and muzzle energy are related, and break it down into small pieces - most especially that the Earthshaker gun having recoil problems limits the momentum of other WH40k guns.

No, the recoil impulse is the same.

No, it doesn't. The Muzzle energy is the kinetic energy of the round being fired and is calculated the exact same way you calculate any other kinetic energy.

And you run an analysis site?

Here Thanatos says the impulse (change in momentum) of the two is the same - something I've already used in JMS #2 and JMS #3. He appears to fail to grasp the relationships I spent my time trying to explain to him - quite probably because he simply didn't grasp that I was talking about two different pairs of forces.

Clarify. Are you agreeing or disagreeing?

Yes, it does. Force (dot) distance is the work done on the round, which is the energy applied to the round, which is the final energy of the shell. Basic physics.

And you missed the point earlier that the Earthshaker is a larger gun, and therefore can be expected to have a better ratio of recoil to muzzle energy than the Conqueror, Vanqusher, or Battle Cannon.

We also know that the Earthshaker cannon is substantially more massive (1.5+ times) than the Vanquisher, and thus handles recoil better. If the Vanquisher round has two thirds of the total momentum of an Earthshaker round, meaning if anything more recoil force, and is 13 kg as you have just suggested, then it would have a muzzle velocity of 1586 m/s, and a muzzle energy of 16 megajoules, barely any more than my initial suggestion.

However, we still face the issue of momentum, and the Conqueror's rounds - and Vanquisher's rounds - still should have substantially less momentum than the Earthshaker, whose muzzle velocity is established and repeated in a very consistent fashion from 2003 onward in IA books, and will probably continue to be repeated in similar fashion as long Warwick Kinrade and/or Tony Cottrell continue to write for Games Workshop.

If the Vanquisher has the same recoil energy as the Earthshaker, is (6.5/9.0)^3 = 38% of the mass of the much larger gun based on barrel length ratios, and fires a subcaliber sabot ten times as fast as the Earthshaker round (> mach 20 - very high velocity), we're talking 2.3 kg exiting the barrel.

In my fourth post, I made extensive use of recoil energy. My curious comment asking Thanatos if he agreed or disagreed was an attempt to resolve whether he understood that what he stated as an objection was precisely what I'd been using.

You don't know what impulse is?

*facepalms*

Its always funny when someone utterly flubs something and tells you how basic it is.

Here Thanatos looks very bad, because he makes it crystal clear he never took note of my caution in JMS#2: "Depends on how we choose to measure recoil force."

I do. So make up your mind whether you're trying to agree or disagree with me on this point. Your statement was ambiguous on that count.

Thanatos, I've not flubbed a thing. If you don't care to take my word for the fact that force dot distance gives the work done on an object, you might try Hyperphysics,, Wikipedia, Yahoo Answers, various other instructional websites, or you could go ask on the physics forums.

What I'm describing is a basic law of kinematics, taught in just about every introductory physics course.

At this point it just becomes badgering.

Actually, your "word" was that it was force times length of barrel rather than force times displacement. You tried to use barrel length as the displacement, when the recoil distance is what you would use if you were stupid enough to think you used Work to determine recoil.

Sadly, you utterly fucked it up. The question is whether it was honest stupidity, or an attempt at dishonesty. More likely the latter given what we have seen.

There's nothing to suggest that at all. So we can safely ignore this.

Especially since you don't know how recoil works.

Unsurprisingly, Thanatos had nothing worthwhile to say on the topic in his final post.

So - is it now clear what happened in that argument? I think miscommunication did happen. Whether you blame me for not sufficiently emphasizing that there are a couple different things to talk about regarding recoil, or Thanatos for not understanding that I was discussing both force between the gun and tank and force between the gun and bullet when I spoke of recoil, is up to you.

[l33telboi]

Well, that was far too short. You didn't really progress anywhere from the opening statements. It should've been more structured, IMO. Something like several topics, with a limited amount of debating per each topic. As well as opening and closing statements for each topic. Noise to signal ratio became a bit to large in the last posts, as well.

This just didn't really go anywhere.

On a separate note, JMS, if you're up for it, I would perhaps be interested in challenging you in some sort of debate, because it looked like quite fun. Or could've been, at least. Not sure what the debate would be about though, or when I'd have time. Still, you up for it? It’d be a whole lot less antagonistic then the last one, I’d think. I realize you probably don't want to do it straight away (neither would I). But y'know, someday, perhaps?

As for the mention on length and force bit I mentioned, I responded a bit out of context there. It was just very clumsily said given there was no context:

Length times force gives muzzle energy

No, it doesn't. The Muzzle energy is the kinetic energy of the round being fired and is calculated the exact same way you calculate any other kinetic energy.

The quoted to part is 100% correct. And yet the replied to part was "No, it doesn't". Which is... very badly put. My fault as well though, I should've looked into context instead of just those two lines.

Unlike Spock, I would not use the commentary threads to plumb for evidence.

What parts did he use exactly?

EDIT: And what's with my English today? Bah!

[Mike DiCenso]

I'am kind of puzzled, too. At what point ever did JMS appeal to anyone here on this forum for help in his debate against Thanatos? In fact, it seems to almost quite the opposite way around.
-Mike

[Jedi Master Spock]

I'am kind of puzzled, too. At what point ever did JMS appeal to anyone here on this forum for help in his debate against Thanatos? In fact, it seems to almost quite the opposite way around.
-Mike

One of my lines of argument regarding the lascannon (of the eight presented in my final post) made use of a Leman Russ Demolisher spread from the Inferno! magazine that was scanned and posted up on SDN in the commentary thread there.

The person who posted it had thought he had a piece of evidence showing a fast Leman Russ in contradiction of the specifications that I was citing, but it turned out he was thinking of the Chimera Inferno! spread when he checked.

You didn't really progress anywhere from the opening statements.

Actually, we did come to an apparent conclusion on a number of topics, where Thanatos either stopped objecting or agreed. For example, he ceded my asserted lasgun yields as accurate in the first post. He also appeared to cede everything I stated about gauss rifles.

He also didn't ever explicitly challenge any of the seven items under my "basic principles" heading. This was actually a poor move on his part, since he objected strenuously to arguments founded on several of those principles. Off the top of my head, he objected very emotionally to arguments based on scaling, the franchises' relationships with modern weaponry, and parity of offensive and defensive systems, and certainly the other four on my list related quite directly to my arguments.

On a separate note, JMS, if you're up for it, I would perhaps be interested in challenging you in some sort of debate, because it looked like quite fun.

Perfectly willing to.

[Jedi Master Spock]

A couple comments from off-site regarding a point that Thanatos chose not to argue:

Hell, I'd love to hear how he arrived at the conclusion that a heat point equals a gigajoule of waste heat, but only for energy weapons.

The "for energy weapons" clause is strictly the result of the limitations I placed on my own use of game mechanical evidence.

The standards I set required consistency to within the resolution of the game system of all the mechanics; that non-energy weapons produce no waste heat on tanks, but do produce waste heat on BattleMechs, means the treatment is inconsistent across the two mechanics.

You could extend the argument to non-energy weapons; however, I preferred to remain within more epistemologically sound territory for a more formal debate.

The argument I offered Thanatos is very simple (see JMS #2) and uses estimated heat capacity combined with extreme temperature rules to derive a relationship measurable in joules per heat point. It is very simple, if neither strong nor precise, and reasonably thermodynamically accurate, as we usually have a straight-up delta-T term when cooling is involved.

Prior to introducing that argument in formal debate with Thanatos, I roughly sketched out a similar quantification from an incident in Star Lord where the temperature of a Warhammer cockpit spikes high enough to cause one of the characters to pass out and a console to explode.

In addition to this, there are numerous references to sauna-like temperatures and potentially lethal temperatures in the cockpit, the game mechanics relating to BattleMech pilots passing out due to heat.

Also, combined with information about energy weapon yields, the game mechanics relating heat damage to actual damage, as well as a reference in the latest rulebooks to a few of the highest-heat energy weapons actually producing more waste heat than they deliver on target, require similar figures.

There's a bit of a problem with the game mechanical arguments, in that BattleMechs vary in mass by a factor of five; if you squint your eyes and chant "surface area to mass ratio" very loudly, you can try to assume that smaller BattleMechs are simply that much better at dumping weapons heat straight into the environment.

Unfortunately, the concept of being a gentleman and letting Thanatos have the time to fully answer seems to be completely lost on him, so we may never know.

I did not press Thanatos on time, and if you may recall, I was the one who pressed for a longer, rather than shorter, response time. Thanatos had initially asked for a one day response window.

He chose not to dispute me on most BattleTech-related matters. Such was his decision.

Especially since during a previous debate I found out that they were able to ambush and destroy mechs by dumping a vat of fat out and setting it on fire, causing the mech to overheat and go critical.

FYI? Depends on the kind of fat, but about 40 kilojoules per gram of fat burned is the right ballpark. So 25 kilograms of fat burning over the course of ten seconds will release one gigajoule in the same timeframe as the BattleTech turn scale - leaving aside the ability of a clingy substance to block the flow of air to the parts of the BattleMech that are dumping heat into the environment.

[l33telboi]

One of my lines of argument regarding the lascannon (of the eight presented in my final post) made use of a Leman Russ Demolisher spread from the Inferno! magazine that was scanned and posted up on SDN in the commentary thread there.

Sure, but Thanatos made use of the same scan when giving the specs on the tank. So it's not really an example of something you used and he didn't.

[Thanatos]

I note first that there are a "couple different ways" to measure recoil, something you fail to take note of. This will lead to future confusion.

Actually no, the basic problem was that you declared that Work was length times force, which is clearly wrong as its the displacement (change in position) of the gun which in this case would be the recoil distance inside the tank. This is ignoring the fact that nobody uses Work for recoil.

This whole "misunderstanding" thing is just you trying to distract away either your extremely lax knowledge of basic physics or rank dishonesty. I'll be nice, and just assume you're stupid, not duplicitous.

Put on the man pants and admit you made a mistake.

Sure, but Thanatos made use of the same scan when giving the specs on the tank.

Only in response to him bringing it up multiple times.

He chose not to dispute me on most BattleTech-related matters.

I didn't have any time to grab them and read them.

So 25 kilograms of fat burning over the course of ten seconds will release one gigajoule in the same timeframe as the BattleTech turn scale

The energy density of fat is 37MJ per kilogram, so it can only release a total of 925MJ. And the fat in the event (Which I lost and therefore could not use when the heat issue came up) was spilled across the floor.

[consequences]

A couple comments from off-site regarding a point that Thanatos chose not to argue:

Hell, I'd love to hear how he arrived at the conclusion that a heat point equals a gigajoule of waste heat, but only for energy weapons.

The "for energy weapons" clause is strictly the result of the limitations I placed on my own use of game mechanical evidence.

The standards I set required consistency to within the resolution of the game system of all the mechanics; that non-energy weapons produce no waste heat on tanks, but do produce waste heat on BattleMechs, means the treatment is inconsistent across the two mechanics.

You could extend the argument to non-energy weapons; however, I preferred to remain within more epistemologically sound territory for a more formal debate.

The argument I offered Thanatos is very simple (see JMS #2) and uses estimated heat capacity combined with extreme temperature rules to derive a relationship measurable in joules per heat point. It is very simple, if neither strong nor precise, and reasonably thermodynamically accurate, as we usually have a straight-up delta-T term when cooling is involved.

Prior to introducing that argument in formal debate with Thanatos, I roughly sketched out a similar quantification from an incident in Star Lord where the temperature of a Warhammer cockpit spikes high enough to cause one of the characters to pass out and a console to explode.

In addition to this, there are numerous references to sauna-like temperatures and potentially lethal temperatures in the cockpit, the game mechanics relating to BattleMech pilots passing out due to heat.

Also, combined with information about energy weapon yields, the game mechanics relating heat damage to actual damage, as well as a reference in the latest rulebooks to a few of the highest-heat energy weapons actually producing more waste heat than they deliver on target, require similar figures.

There's a bit of a problem with the game mechanical arguments, in that BattleMechs vary in mass by a factor of five; if you squint your eyes and chant "surface area to mass ratio" very loudly, you can try to assume that smaller BattleMechs are simply that much better at dumping weapons heat straight into the environment.

So you try to create a model, knowing it doesn't account for ballistic weaponry, reactor damage, or mech movement, and you expect it to be taken seriously? Instead of simply not using blatantly inconsistent game mechanics that bear no relation to the described events or the limits of physical reality?

Unfortunately, the concept of being a gentleman and letting Thanatos have the time to fully answer seems to be completely lost on him, so we may never know.

I did not press Thanatos on time, and if you may recall, I was the one who pressed for a longer, rather than shorter, response time. Thanatos had initially asked for a one day response window.

He chose not to dispute me on most BattleTech-related matters. Such was his decision.

I suppose that your jumping the gun, and his statement in his first post about it being "all he had time for right now", along with RL difficulties completely slipped your mind then? Being a gentleman means not pressing an advantage that you haven't legitimately gained.

[Roondar]

A couple comments from off-site regarding a point that Thanatos chose not to argue:

Hell, I'd love to hear how he arrived at the conclusion that a heat point equals a gigajoule of waste heat, but only for energy weapons.

The "for energy weapons" clause is strictly the result of the limitations I placed on my own use of game mechanical evidence.

The standards I set required consistency to within the resolution of the game system of all the mechanics; that non-energy weapons produce no waste heat on tanks, but do produce waste heat on BattleMechs, means the treatment is inconsistent across the two mechanics.

You could extend the argument to non-energy weapons; however, I preferred to remain within more epistemologically sound territory for a more formal debate.

The argument I offered Thanatos is very simple (see JMS #2) and uses estimated heat capacity combined with extreme temperature rules to derive a relationship measurable in joules per heat point. It is very simple, if neither strong nor precise, and reasonably thermodynamically accurate, as we usually have a straight-up delta-T term when cooling is involved.

Prior to introducing that argument in formal debate with Thanatos, I roughly sketched out a similar quantification from an incident in Star Lord where the temperature of a Warhammer cockpit spikes high enough to cause one of the characters to pass out and a console to explode.

In addition to this, there are numerous references to sauna-like temperatures and potentially lethal temperatures in the cockpit, the game mechanics relating to BattleMech pilots passing out due to heat.

Also, combined with information about energy weapon yields, the game mechanics relating heat damage to actual damage, as well as a reference in the latest rulebooks to a few of the highest-heat energy weapons actually producing more waste heat than they deliver on target, require similar figures.

There's a bit of a problem with the game mechanical arguments, in that BattleMechs vary in mass by a factor of five; if you squint your eyes and chant "surface area to mass ratio" very loudly, you can try to assume that smaller BattleMechs are simply that much better at dumping weapons heat straight into the environment.

So you try to create a model, knowing it doesn't account for ballistic weaponry, reactor damage, or mech movement, and you expect it to be taken seriously? Instead of simply not using blatantly inconsistent game mechanics that bear no relation to the described events or the limits of physical reality?

Unfortunately, the concept of being a gentleman and letting Thanatos have the time to fully answer seems to be completely lost on him, so we may never know.

I did not press Thanatos on time, and if you may recall, I was the one who pressed for a longer, rather than shorter, response time. Thanatos had initially asked for a one day response window.

He chose not to dispute me on most BattleTech-related matters. Such was his decision.

I suppose that your jumping the gun, and his statement in his first post about it being "all he had time for right now", along with RL difficulties completely slipped your mind then? Being a gentleman means not pressing an advantage that you haven't legitimately gained.

Except of course that Thanatos chose to reply at that time. He could've just, you know, asked for more time instead of replying at such an inconvenient moment. But no, he decided - on his own without outside pressure, to reply anyway.

I'm 100% sure he'd have gotten an extension to the time limit if he'd asked for one.

[l33telboi]

I suppose that your jumping the gun, and his statement in his first post about it being "all he had time for right now", along with RL difficulties completely slipped your mind then? Being a gentleman means not pressing an advantage that you haven't legitimately gained.

If he'd chosen to disqualify Thanatos from the debate, or somehow use the late posting in his advantage, you'd have a point. But he didn't. He did what a "gentleman" should've done. He showed consideration and did not press Thanatos on time.

As it is, the whole gentleman thing is fairly laughable. Since when has debating been anything gentleman like? Hell, you're from SDN, a place that prides itself on not being gentlemen when it comes to debate. Neither would anyone in their right mind consider cursing and personal attacks in a debate being anything even remotely gentleman like.

What? You really thought you had some form of moral high-ground on this point?

[Jedi Master Spock]

Actually no, the basic problem was that you declared that Work was length times force, which is clearly wrong as its the displacement (change in position) of the gun which in this case would be the recoil distance inside the tank. This is ignoring the fact that nobody uses Work for recoil.

There you go again. I explained it at great length, and you still miss it when I switch from talking to one coupled force-pair to another.

It's as if you're willfully misunderstanding the difference between the gun and the bullet. The bullet goes the length of the barrel; thus, when comparing probable muzzle energies, as I was you take the length of the barrel, and multiply by the force on the bullet - which is precisely the same force that accelerates the barrel (and everything attached to it) backwards.

The recoil energy is a critical issue. If you search Google, by the way, you'll get 72,000 hits for "recoil energy" as an exact phrase, so cut the floundering about nobody talking about recoil and work. It's physics - basic kinematics, on the level we're discussing things, and work is relevant to just about everything.

It's good to know the energies on both ends of things, because the recoiling distance multiplied by the braking force (that's the other coupled pair of forces - force between the gun and the tank) is the maximum energy you can stick on the gun, which dictates the maximum momentum of a round that can be fired from it.

Got that? Good. Because the Earthshaker gun is much more massive than the other guns used in Warhammer 40,000, that means it has a higher efficiency than the Conqueror, the Demolisher, and the Vanquisher. The ratio of muzzle energy to recoil energy is precisely equal to the ratio of the recoiling mass to the projectile mass (provided you aren't dealing with something like a recoilless rifle, where stuff is being vented backwards as well as forwards.)

We have every reason to consider the Earthshaker as the probable highest momentum gun of the lot... and there's plenty more.

Peak barrel pressure on a given techbase is generally constant (see, for example, all the ~20 t/"^2 guns fielded by the RN in WWII); pressure, over the cross sectional area, along the barrel length, will give you the work done by the gun. So we could guesstimate relative energy by the internal volumes of the barrels, making use of the scaling principle I cited.

It's not precise, but if we had no other quantitative information, that would be a good method of estimation.

I didn't have any time to grab them and read them.

You issued your challenge seven weeks ago. You entered the fray in the Battle of Tukayyid 40,000 thread nine weeks ago.

The energy density of fat is 37MJ per kilogram, so it can only release a total of 925MJ. And the fat in the event (Which I lost and therefore could not use when the heat issue came up) was spilled across the floor.

As I said... depends on the kind of fat and how pure hydrocarbon it is. Several MJ per kilogram variation is not particularly significant when we're being as general as "fat." I'm not talking about particularly precise figures when I say a heat point seems to be about a gigajoule.

And for the record? A number of BattleMech designs sink heat through their feet in order to take advantage of additional cooling when parked in shallow water, such as the Scorpion (fluff there in the "Overview" and "Battle History" section is a verbatim reprint from the original, although the "variant" section is rewritten to accomodate yet another fan-constructed BattleMech variant.)

I can quote you the optional rules for magma as "extreme terrain." Not actually too bad. I did read up on both universes for this; there's a wealth of information readily available if you look for it.

[Jedi Master Spock]

So you try to create a model, knowing it doesn't account for ballistic weaponry, reactor damage, or mech movement, and you expect it to be taken seriously?

As I said, you can easily extrapolate to other kinds of waste heat through game mechanics. I simply chose to limit my statement in order to meet fairly rigorous epistemological standards re: game mechanics.

Instead of simply not using blatantly inconsistent game mechanics that bear no relation to the described events or the limits of physical reality?

Points on which game mechanics were inconsistent I avoided in my argument, as noted previously. The extreme temperature rules were simple and fairly consistent.

Also as I pointed out previously, those environmental figures agree perfectly with cockpit temperatures that get hot enough to kill a MechWarrior who doesn't have a cooling vest on; the mechanics agree with the fluff and fiction in describing heat. Also as noted previously, I first ballparked heat as being somewhere in the GJ/HP range based on a passage in the novel Star Lord (see prior threads).

Please read up on human endurance vs extreme heat. When I talk about a heat point corresponding to a ~10 C average jump in the temperature of the BattleMech, the cockpit is the most heavily cooled part of it, and usually quite far from the weapons being fired; nevertheless, you do need very high temperatures in that cockpit to cause people to pass out or die in no more than tens of seconds of exposure.

I suppose that your jumping the gun, and his statement in his first post about it being "all he had time for right now", along with RL difficulties completely slipped your mind then? Being a gentleman means not pressing an advantage that you haven't legitimately gained.

At the point that I started the debate, we had been negotiating for a solid week, and had more or less come to terms. I did not assume that he would be able to reply to all points immediately.

As I mentioned earlier, I think Thanatos would have been able to do better had he had more time. However, with what time he had, he clearly chose to concentrate on the WH40k side of things - probably because he knew more about WH40k than BT.

[Mike DiCenso]

I suppose that your jumping the gun, and his statement in his first post about it being "all he had time for right now", along with RL difficulties completely slipped your mind then? Being a gentleman means not pressing an advantage that you haven't legitimately gained.

Speaking of "jumping the gun", don't you think it rather rash of Thanatos for getting himself into this in the first place when was suffering from all these problems, rather than waiting long enough to sort things out for himself before he got into the debate with JMS? It's not like JMS would not have waited. This is not Wong or SDN, you know, and it would not have been held against him had he cited that. In fact, it was not held against him during most of the debate, and JMS did extend to him every reasonable courtesy, allowing him time to post when he (Thanatos) felt he was able to.

So playing the Sympathy Card isn't going to get you very far here.
-Mike

[Thanatos]

The bullet goes the length of the barrel

Yeah, and it just stops at the end.

Oh no wait it doesn't. The displacement of the round is the distance between the chamber when it is fired and where it comes to rest.

Nobody who knows even remotely what they are talking about calculates recoil this way. Nobody!

The recoil energy is a critical issue. If you search Google, by the way, you'll get 72,000 hits for "recoil energy" as an exact phrase, so cut the floundering about nobody talking about recoil and work.

Except for the tiny little facts that energy does not mean Work alone and one of the ways that recoil is described is the kinetic energy of the recoiling mechanisms. That's ignoring how generically "energy" is used. I'll admit that even I sometimes use it wrong in conversation.

However, this is like saying that you use kinetic energy to calculate how bright a light bulb is because you get 36k hits on Google for "light bulb energy". If someone says "you don't calculate recoil like that!", you find a reputable source that says you do. You do not do a Google search and proclaim the number of hits as proof of something.

Unless you think that Barack Obama has a vagina, because "Barack Obama's vagina" got ~946k results. ;)

A number of BattleMech designs sink heat through their feet

Well thats just stupid then. Among other problems, ground contact surfaces heat up rather quickly.

Speaking of "jumping the gun", don't you think it rather rash of Thanatos for getting himself into this in the first place when was suffering from all these problems, rather than waiting long enough to sort things out for himself before he got into the debate with JMS?

Real life issues cropped up after I made the challenge (and the biggest ones during the debate), and I'm not one to back out when I make a dare. I'd rather lose horribly (hypothetically in case this gets misquoted) than quit something.

So playing the Sympathy Card isn't going to get you very far here.

Who's playing the Sympathy Card? I'm saying that I didn't do as well as I should have.
Who the hell is

[Jedi Master Spock]

The bullet goes the length of the barrel

Yeah, and it just stops at the end.

Oh no wait it doesn't. The displacement of the round is the distance between the chamber when it is fired and where it comes to rest.

Nobody who knows even remotely what they are talking about calculates recoil this way. Nobody!

And now you're sounding like you don't know the physics again.

Once it leaves the barrel, the forward force on the bullet goes the way of the wind (literally; remaining hot gases dissipate in all directions) and we have our final muzzle energy. From there on out, it goes down due to drag.

We're concerned with force along a displacement; so, when there's no longer force on the object, work is not being done, regardless of current motion. In this particular situation, drag and gravity will be getting busy (hence why the energy at impact is lower than the energy out of the muzzle).

Except for the tiny little facts that energy does not mean Work alone and one of the ways that recoil is described is the kinetic energy of the recoiling mechanisms. That's ignoring how generically "energy" is used. I'll admit that even I sometimes use it wrong in conversation.

However, this is like saying that you use kinetic energy to calculate how bright a light bulb is because you get 36k hits on Google for "light bulb energy". If someone says "you don't calculate recoil like that!", you find a reputable source that says you do. You do not do a Google search and proclaim the number of hits as proof of something.

Actually, you said people don't talk about work regarding recoil. Welcome to the world of physics. People do talk about recoil energy, the work required to stop the recoiling barrel, and the work done on the bullet by the explosive charge. The Google search is adequate evidence for claiming that people do indeed talk about (or generally not talk about) something in a particular way.

Well thats just stupid then. Among other problems, ground contact surfaces heat up rather quickly.

If you could quote the example in more detail, I could look up whether or not those particular mechs had foot-mounted cooling systems or not, but it is pretty common in some sources.