This reminds me of that quote from Mass Effect:
“This, recruits, is a 20-kilo ferrous slug. Feel the weight! Every five seconds, the main gun of an Everest-class Dreadnought accelerates one to 1.3 percent of light speed. It impacts with the force of a 38-kiloton bomb. That is three times the yield of the city buster dropped on Hiroshima back on Earth. That means: Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest son-of-a-bitch in space! (…) I dare to assume you ignorant jackasses know that space is empty! Once you fire this hunk of metal, it keeps going 'till it hits something! That can be a ship, or the planet behind that ship. It might go off into deep space and hit somebody else in ten thousand years. If you pull the trigger on this, you are ruining someone’s day, somewhere and sometime!”
That first mass effect can’t be beat for setting the stage and immersing you in the world.
I can hear the VA in my head lmao
Edit: I like mass effect I don’t have a good memory
That quote is not from the first one though, it’s from the second one
Sadly, the cover likely did burn up in the atmosphere at those speeds, like a meteorite in reverse.
I’m not so sure… At those speeds, it would’ve taken under 10 seconds to completely clear the atmosphere. Even with intense compressional heating, I don’t think it would’ve been in contact with the atmosphere long enough to completely vaporize — although it probably didn’t look much like a manhole cover anymore by the time it escaped.
I don’t think melting is the issue here. I think it literally disintegrates at those speeds. Like, this is Mass Effect mass driver level of impact with the atmosphere.
For reference, RICK ROBINSON’S FIRST LAW OF SPACE COMBAT: “An object impacting at 3 km/sec delivers kinetic energy equal to its mass in TNT.”
Assuming the lid is travelling 55km/s, it’s well beyond that point. The atmosphere it’s travelling through is basically a solid at that speed. Even if it isn’t heating due to the friction (and waiting for heat flow), it is heating due to the compressive force of being slammed into the atmosphere. It’s very likely the whole thing vaporized.
But I could be wrong, and some alien SOB is going to have a bad day when the manhole cover slams into their ship in interstellar space.
deleted by creator
