Photons have zero rest mass, but they travel at the speed of light and therefore have relativistic mass. That said, the amount of momentum even a death laser would have is minuscule; this was more likely a plasma beam.
Edit: I got bored and looked some things up. A beam of light, if perfectly converted to motion (i.e. reflecting off a perfect mirror) exerts about 3.33 newtons per gigawatt; some more fiddling shows that a gigawatt will push about 0.34 grams at an acceleration of 1 g. If Atago weighed about 100 pounds (45 kg), it would take 133 gigawatts to accelerate her at 1 g.
tl;dr I'm wrong - if that beam's about a terawatt it could do that from light pressure alone.
Edit again: Forgot to take the mass of the cannon into consideration. It probably masses about an order of magnitude more than she does, so that puts us up into the 10 terawatt range, which is serious death ray territory. And of course that's assuming a kanmusu weighs as much as a human; if Atago weighed as much as her namesake ship, we're getting into petawatt or even exawatt range.
Seriously dude, kudos to you, if you were my physics teacher when i was in school, i might be holding a phd title now.
but that last paragraph, so you mean 10 terrawatt to accelerate her (45kg) at 1g speed? man that's a waste of energy..
but i don't know that wave motion gun is based on photon...
then again, why atago instead of yamato?
Well, naturally the point of the exercise is to subject the enemy to a few terawatts of photons - tossing her into the wall is more of a comedy bonus.
I have no idea what form of energy was projected by the original Wave Motion Gun - for some reason, I want to say it's a form of energy unknown to terrestrial physics, though I'd have to look it up. This was more to make the point that photons can actually exert physical force.
(Incidentally, present day Earth's power generation is estimated at 16 terawatts. Firing a laser at that wattage long enough to actually accelerate Atago into the wall is well into the realm of sci-fi. Weaponized military lasers are more into the megawatt range.)
As for why Atago... for the breast joke, obviously. Having Yamato come up and say "here's how you fire the thing properly" wouldn't be a half-bad follow-up.
So if Yamato does this (asuming its to cross-over with the 2199 series), she has got to have some serious gravity anchors.
NO WAIT I WASN'T REFERRING TO YOUR WEIG- /splattered/
(Space Battleship)Yamato does do this. They also release their gravity anchor at one point and fly backwards at high speed to escape the destruction their Wave Motion Gun is about to cause to the local area.
(Space Battleship)Yamato does do this. They also release their gravity anchor at one point and fly backwards at high speed to escape the destruction their Wave Motion Gun is about to cause to the local area.
I love how even though the show is a space opera, all of the combat feels realistic. Hell, even the physics, for all the bullshit, don’t take me out of my immersion!
God, to watch that show again…
That's what you get for overdoing it and firing the wave-motion gun…Wave-motion gun battery izh aweshome…ZzzkZzzk
