Relativistic Kill Vehicle
Commonly referred to by the abbreviation RKV, a weapon which obtains its destructive power by being accelerated up to a significant fraction of the speed of light relative to its target.
Individual RKVs usually resemble long cones or cylinders of dense material, small enough to fit inside an average living room but massing several tons. For deployment they are loaded aboard a ship with a propulsion system capable of reaching near-lightspeed velocities, or fired from an ouroboros accelerator through a tactical stargate brought into position by a ship.
Details
Perhaps the technological successor of the venerable atomic warheads from the Nuclear Dark Days, RKVs take advantage of the fact that as an object approaches the speed of light its kinetic energy asymptotically approaches infinity. For instance, a mere one kilogram mass traveling at 90% lightspeed carries more destructive energy than the largest thermonuclear weapon ever built by industrial humans (the Soviet Tsar Bomb, with a maximum yield of 100 megatons). When used against a planetary target an RKV can destroy anything from a city to most of a continent.Individual RKVs usually resemble long cones or cylinders of dense material, small enough to fit inside an average living room but massing several tons. For deployment they are loaded aboard a ship with a propulsion system capable of reaching near-lightspeed velocities, or fired from an ouroboros accelerator through a tactical stargate brought into position by a ship.
History
Relativistic arsenals were maintained as deterrence weapons in the Second Interstellar Period, a policy which perhaps inevitably led to their use in planet-devasting conflicts which escalated into the Great Patriotic Wars and its following centuries-long dark age. For this reason, the Stellar Compact enforces a strict ban against the construction or deployment of RKV weapon systems.
Item type
Weapon, Other
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