A 50km rock would more or less sterilize a planet. The impactor that took out the dinosaurs (and a lot more) had a diameter of roughly 10km. Your rock masses more than 100 times as much, and thus would deliver more than 100 times more impact energy. Life might survive deep underground or underwater, but it's hard to imagine anything on or near the surface surviving.

On Sat, Jul 25, 2015 at 7:39 PM, Graham Donald <gndonald2001@yahoo.com.au> wrote:

On 7/25/2015 10:50 AM, Phil Pugliese (via tml list) wrote:

I agree. 

I believe that *since* it hasn't happened in all that time, it's pretty safe to assume that it effectively *can't* happen?

Or perhaps it's one of those things that the various Imperial alphabet agencies keep under wraps and spin plausible stories about what really happened?

There's at least one adventure where the PCs have to deal with a world killer asteroid bearing down on the planet and one of the potential twists is that it's being guided by another ship...

--
Kurt Feltenberger
kurt@thepaw.org/kfeltenberger@yahoo.com

“Before today, I was scared to live, after today, I'm scared I'm not living enough." - Me

I just checked the only asteroid impact scenario I could think of William H Keith Jrs' "Critical Vector" from JTAS 20 and the idea of the asteroid being guided by someone else does not appear in it, one wonders how many other 'Armageddon' like scenarios there are?

P.S. I used the impact effects calculator on the 50k diameter rock from Critical Vector and allowing for the usual caveats, well, it makes quite a mess (Even if you are 2000km away)...

http://impact.ese.ic.ac.uk/cgi-bin/crater.cgi?dist=3000&distanceUnits=1&diam=50&diameterUnits=2&pdens=&pdens_select=3000&vel=17&velocityUnits=1&theta=45&tdens=1000&wdepth=500&wdepthUnits=1

Graham

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