Gunnery Chief: This, recruits, is a 20-kilo ferrous slug. Feel the weight! Every five seconds, the main gun of an Everest-class dreadnought accelerates one to 1.3 percent of light speed. It impacts with the force of a 38-kiloton bomb. That is three times the yield of the city buster dropped on Hiroshima back on Earth. That means Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest son-of-a-bitch in space. Now! Serviceman Burnside! What is Newton's First Law?
Serviceman Burnside: Sir! An object in motion stays in motion, sir!
Gunnery Chief: No credit for partial answers, maggot!
Serviceman Burnside: Sir! Unless acted upon by an outside force, sir!
Gunnery Chief: Damn straight! I dare to assume you ignorant jackasses know that space is empty. Once you fire this hunk of metal, it keeps going till it hits something. That can be a ship, or the planet behind that ship. It might go off into deep space and hit somebody else in ten thousand years. If you pull the trigger on this, you are ruining someone's day, somewhere and sometime. That is why you check your damn targets! That is why you wait for the computer to give you a damn firing solution! That is why, Serviceman Chung, we do not "eyeball it!" This is a weapon of mass destruction! You are not a cowboy shooting from the hip!
Serviceman Burnside: Sir! An object in motion stays in motion, sir!
Gunnery Chief: No credit for partial answers, maggot!
Serviceman Burnside: Sir! Unless acted upon by an outside force, sir!
Gunnery Chief: Damn straight! I dare to assume you ignorant jackasses know that space is empty. Once you fire this hunk of metal, it keeps going till it hits something. That can be a ship, or the planet behind that ship. It might go off into deep space and hit somebody else in ten thousand years. If you pull the trigger on this, you are ruining someone's day, somewhere and sometime. That is why you check your damn targets! That is why you wait for the computer to give you a damn firing solution! That is why, Serviceman Chung, we do not "eyeball it!" This is a weapon of mass destruction! You are not a cowboy shooting from the hip!
— The Gunnery Chief
from Mass Effect 2
from Mass Effect 2Oh, sure. It'll go a long, long way before dispersing, but the galaxy is made up of countless long, long ways, most of which are stacked end-to-end with very little actual matter thrown into the mix. Even then, the proportional amount of that matter that could be classified by entropy-resisting civilizations as 'point A,' or 'home,' or 'ground-zero' by virtue of something being there that matters to them is so close to zero that it makes next to no difference.
