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Up to 4 times the Newtonian value

Nehz_XZX

He/Him
VS Battles
Content Moderator
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Why is the standard for the kinetic energy value to only be accepted up to 4 times the Newtonian value? I'm not questioning why there is such a standard, what I want to know is why it is specifically 4 times.
 
Last edited:
I recall DontTalkDT actually mentioned a while back issues with the formula or Relativistic calculators.
 
Arbitrary cut off. There is no reason it is in particular 4 times. That's simply the border that was decided in a debate about the topic.
Why we wanted to have some upper border has a good reason, though. Relativistic Kinetic Energy grows towards infinity as it approaches the speed of light. As a consequence small changes in the speed value that is used start making giant differences.
The problem with that is that measurement errors exist, both in our calcs as in reality. So the question was: Do we really want to rely on that measured speed value not being a few percent, or even less, different from the actual value if it makes a gigantic difference? We decided no.
Hence we decided to make the 4 times newtonian value limit. That way you can still do KE for all less than lightspeed feats, but at the same time there is a limit for how much small changes in the speed value can inflate the result.
 
Arbitrary cut off. There is no reason it is in particular 4 times. That's simply the border that was decided in a debate about the topic.
Why we wanted to have some upper border has a good reason, though. Relativistic Kinetic Energy grows towards infinity as it approaches the speed of light. As a consequence small changes in the speed value that is used start making giant differences.
The problem with that is that measurement errors exist, both in our calcs as in reality. So the question was: Do we really want to rely on that measured speed value not being a few percent, or even less, different from the actual value if it makes a gigantic difference? We decided no.
Hence we decided to make the 4 times newtonian value limit. That way you can still do KE for all less than lightspeed feats, but at the same time there is a limit for how much small changes in the speed value can inflate the result.
Okay.
 
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