21 September 2010

The Science of Starcraft: Supernovae and Gauss Rifles

Posted by Ryan Anderson

I’ve got two new posts up at The Science of Starcraft! The first tackles the difference between supernovae and novae. The words are often used interchangeably in sci-fi, but they are (usually) very different phenomena. Plus, I love telling the story of nucleosynthesis and stellar evolution, and this was a good excuse.

The second post is sort of a sequel to my previous post about railguns. This time I look at gauss rifles, another electromagnetic futuristic weapon that pops up in sci-fi pretty often, but is incorrectly depicted in Starcraft: