Energy Manipulation Pdf

[Lane Stefano]

Isee that similar questions have been asked before, but I have yet to find a sufficient answer. I'll try to keep it short. I'm currently working on a story involving a soldier who discovered he's capable of manipulating kinetic energy. As he advances through the story, he learns more about what he can and cannot do with his new abilities. For example, he's capable of absorbing the kinetic energy fired from bullets or thrown from punches before storing it in his body. This pool of absorbed kinetic energy can then be imparted into other objects to "charge" them.

Outside of his hand-waved ability to store and impart kinetic energy, I'm trying to keep the actual applications of his abilities grounded in reality, at least somewhat. What are some applications an archetypal soldier would use this power for?

-If this character were to be shot directly by a tanks main gun, he could absorb the shells energy (assuming its solid-shot AP or sabot) and walk away unscathed. The shell would then harmlessly fall to the ground, deprived of all of its speed. If he were to then take that same energy and charge a 7.62mm bullet with it, how would that bullet respond to the increase in energy? Would it shoot faster? Weigh more? Immediately melt from extreme amounts of heat? If shot back at the tank, would it penetrate or just shatter? Does this question make no sense because he wouldn't be charging it with kinetic energy, but something else?

Edit: It's clear now that he wouldn't be "charging" the bullet with kinetic energy, but something entirely fictitious. If, due to this fictional energy, the 7.62mm round had somehow added the force of the tank shell to its net force, would it penetrate the tank or just fragment on the armor?

Thanks for the quick replies guys. After reading some of the comments and cross-checking with my own research, obviously my character would need more hand-waving than I had originally thought. Much of what he could and could not do would lie with me, the writer.

-The capacity of his storage is not limitless. At the uppermost limits, he could absorb the equivalent of maybe one-half to one kiloton worth of explosives before dying from an overcharge. This is an arbitrary value I slapped on for the moment, however.

-He needs to be awake and conscious for his ability to work. He's capable of continuously absorbing energy during combat to defend against bullets and explosions but it is an entirely conscious effort to manage his defense. If he becomes too weary or distracted it's entirely possible a bullet could sneak through.

Power (unit of Watts) is the engineering term for the amount of energy (unit of Joules) per second transferred between two objects. Does your hero have a maximum amount of energy per second he or she can absorb?

At what range does absorbing or adding kinetic energy work? Must your character be in physical contact with whatever is adding energy to him/her, or whatever he/she is adding energy to? Or is it a ranged effect?

In the low-speed armor-is-effective regime, penetration scales approximately linearly with energy. So, if your hero can cut a round's energy by half or two thirds, he or she is also doubling or tripling the effective thickness of his/her armor.

The inverse of absorbing the energy of projectiles. The hero would need to be careful not to add too much energy (past a few hundred meters per second, energy is much less relevant than the length and density of the bullet - this is why .50 cal rounds can be stopped by a few feet of water, per Mythbusters).

If your hero has a certain amount of control, he or she could impart that kinetic energy to spin certain weapons that don't have the benefit of muzzle rifling (rocks, javelins, spears) to give them gyroscopic stability and improve accuracy.

kinetic energy. As he advances through the story, he learns more about what he can and cannot do with his new abilities. For example, he's capable of absorbing the kinetic energy fired from bullets or thrown from punches before storing it in his body. This pool of absorbed kinetic energy can then be imparted into other objects to "charge" them.

Depending on how long your hero can store energy, he or she could redirect excess into himself for some amount of flight. When out of the stored energy, he or she could glide down by absorbing and canceling his/her falling kinetic energy.Outside of his hand-waved ability to store and impart kinetic energy, I'm trying to keep the actual applications of his abilities grounded in reality, at least somewhat. What are some applications an archetypal soldier would use this power for?

Up until now, I've assumed your hero could only influence one thing at a time. However, if your character can absorb kinetic energy from everything in a specific volume of space, your character could effectively control temperature (temperature is mean kinetic energy of molecules).

There is a property of the atmosphere called blooming that limit the effectiveness of laser weapons. What this is is the atmosphere heating sufficiently under the laser energy that the atmosphere's optical characteristics change, dispersing the energy. If the hero can cool things down, he or she could make use of modern laser weapons much more effectively.

If you can superheat things, your character could cause them to explode. The overpressure is the equal to the energy provided to the material divided by the volume of the material. Something like a steel casing would require a few giga Pascals of pressure to rupture.

60 Watts of power is sufficient to light a light bulb. Similarly, if the ability works at range, the hero could create darkness by absorbing the energy from the lights. Wouldn't work with moonlight or sunlight because the origin is extremely far away.

Sound is kinetic energy in air. So, it would be possible for your character to silence an area. Or to create a noise (like a flash-bang to disorient opponents). Or, with fine control, throw his/her voice, or create understandable sounds (music) at will.

The equivalence principle proposes that acceleration and gravity (both buildups of kinetic energy) are effectively the same. Further, that energy bends space. This opens up a lot of venues not always taken advantage of in fiction.

You could bend light (and laser energy) away from a point (only takes a peta Joules, or one thousand tera Joules). Not quite black holes (that would take a few dozen hepta Joules), but you could make small changes. You could also slow down time.

If he shoots himself, he gets a quick bit of juice. Not too much. If he or she sticks his fingers in an outlet to absorb the kinetic energy from frying him/herself, that's still about 3.3kWatts (not too much).

In most cases, the hero is stopped because there's just not that much energy being directed at him. If you do allow the hero to absorb and send thermal kinetic energy, you might allow the hero only to absorb thermal kinetic energy above standard temperature and pressure, which is trickle (80 Watts for a candle).

If we're being completely logical, this soldier would be much more useful off the battlefield where he can turn any sort of motion into electrical energy by turning a turbine - wind, waves, enemy airplanes overhead, anything that moves gets turned into free electricity. Or he could use the energy to transport things. He could probably get things to orbit much more cheaply than is currently possible - just store enough energy to get up there and then ride the rocket all the way up. He doesn't even need a return capsule, he can just jump off the rocket and manipulate his own kinetic energy to fall back to Earth nice and slowly. Who cares about radiation? He can just recharge his powers by absorbing the energy of the charged particles around him.

But seeing as you want this to be an interesting story, and not one about battlefield logistics, he could make an incredibly good air-defense system. Depending on the range of this ability he could literally stop aircraft and missiles in their tracks, letting them fall harmlessly wherever he wishes.

Although your stipulation that he stores the kinetic energy as some kind of internal energy before releasing it conserves energy, there's no way for it to conserve momentum without severely restricting his abilities. The basic reason for this is that energy is not direction dependent, while momentum is.

So, imagine our hero is floating in space and has a basketball with him, as one is wont to do in space. He can push the basketball away from him, and Newton's third law would kick in to propel him in the opposite direction. Now, for normal humans, you couldn't do much with this; once you push the basketball away from yourself, you can't retrieve it without undoing all the delta v you just accrued and so how fast you can ultimately go depends entirely on how hard you can push the basketball. To really overdo this analogy, normal rockets essentially get around this by carrying, in scientific terms, a lot of basketballs to push off the end of the ship.

Now, this is a problem because each basketball has some mass, so the more basketballs you have, the more massive your spaceship is, which requires more basketballs to accelerate it, which leaves it more massive, etc. When the dust clears, you're left with the Tsiolkovsky Rocket Equation, which is a major downer for interstellar travel and basically means that it's really hard to get a rocket moving very quickly.

However, our superhero can conveniently circumvent this painful dose of reality. For, after he throws the basketball away from him, he can use his powers to stop it relative to himself, use arbitrarily little energy to reel it back to himself, and then release his stored energy back into the ball to accelerate it away from himself again. By continuing this process ad infinitum (and perhaps using more efficient methods than a basketball), he has essentially created a reactionless drive and can achieve delta v's that NASA could only dream of. Every space agency in the world would be chasing this guy. Granted, this isn't directly a military use, but it's not hard to see how to make one from it (ie make the ships fire targeted, relativistic projectiles towards earth).

An interesting thing about energy is that although it is conserved in every frame of reference, the total amount of energy can vary from frame to frame. For instance, if our hero is falling towards Earth at terminal velocity, people on Earth will see him as having about $10^5 J$, so if he used his power and stopped himself from falling, they would reason that he could unleash $10^5J$ in whatever way he wanted. However, from our hero's perspective, the entire Earth is falling towards him at terminal velocity, so if he stopped the Earth he could unleash a mind-boggling $9*10^27J$ of Energy!

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