Sand Caster Weapons

> At 12:49 PM 8/19/98 -0700, you wrote:

Argh!

I was afraid someone would ask that...okay, here are some rough numbers:

Let's assume a theoretical substance called "sand" with uniform 1 mm
cubical crystals and a density of 2.5 g/cm^3 (silicon dioxide is 2.27; I
like round numbers).

A one centimeter cube would have 1000 grains of "sand" in it.

A one meter cube would have 1 million cubic centimeters and 1 billion grains
of "sand" and would have a mass of 2500 kilos or 2.5 metric tonnes.

One standard unit of mass in the "official" FT background is 100 metric tonnes
or the equivalent of 40 cubic meters of "sand".

A cubical cargo hold 10 meters on a side would hold 1000 cubic meters of
"sand" which would have a mass of 2500 metric tonnes or 25 mass units.

If dispersed uniformly throughout a 1" volume of space (assuming that the
most commonly accepted scale is ~1000 km per inch) then your 10-meter
wide
cube of sand would expand into a 1 million-meter wide cube.  This is a
dispersion ratio of 1:100,000.

Therefore you would have an average separation of 100 meters between each 1 mm
grain of "sand". A cubic kilometer of space would have a cubic
centimeter of "sand" (1000 one-mm grains) dispersed uniformly throughout
it.

Obviously, higher densities would require proportionally higher mass.