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Comment by bzbarsky

> it goes up quite a few orders of magnitude from that

Sorry to be pedantic, but modern rifle muzzle velocities are in the 1.2km/s range. Escape velocity in LEO is 11.2km/s, so your maximal closing speed is ~22.4kms. Which is maybe 1.3 orders of magnitude difference, not "quite a few". Orders of magnitude are big.

For the rest, you are right of course: we're talking closing speeds that can easily be one order of magnitude higher than rifle bullets (or armor-piercing tank projectiles, for that matter; those are at 1.7km/s or so).

parent bzbarsky 5 years ago

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