Luciola

Well Rocket man, It's been a while but I've finally gotten my internet back. I really liked your last statements, they're all well thought out and I think I'll use some of them. Good news is I started writing, I'm up to about 10 pages in my word processor, so that's probably more like 20-25 in paperback. It's still in intro, but the more I will write the more I'll know what I'm looking for and the clearer the ideas will be, at least that's from previous experience. THe intro was fun because it has to do with a ship comming out of warp (using the alcubierre drive) and travelling at 15 million km/h, while plowing through a proximity mine field (mind you the mines are very far appart.) Once I've finished writing a bit more, and I'm sure of what I'll be keeping, I could send you the rough over e-mail or something. Anyway, just wanted to let you know I"m back up and running, hopefully I'll talk to you soon.

Thanks again Rocket Man for the ideas, I'll have to dedicate a character after you (maybe an engineer? LOL) This is an interesting idea. If there is a device capable of compressing one particular part of the spacetime to create the micro singularity needed for the compression that WOULD fix alot of the problems that are occuring with the microsingularities actually BEING near the compression interaction. What kind of device would be capable of choosing one part of space time and acting upon it? What (in relatively realistic science) would be able to do something like that? Would that be possible with aspects of String Theory? I like that too! I was actually thinking of that, using singularities as bombs, droping a pod that has a singularity inside it (Being contained of course) and at a certain altitude above a planets surface (or the hull of a ship) the containment field is removed and the pod is eaten by the singularity which then decompresses. The only problem with this is that this would be stating that the civilization we're working with is capable of making singularities rather simply, and don't consider them as being dificult or time/resource consuming to make. The problem with that being said is that this would take away from the "grunge" idea of the story. This is also why making the knots in spacetime by way of some fictional transmitter would also make it too easy for spin off technolgies to form. I think that the singularity being physically kept and maintained inside the ship and created somewhere on a factory with great difficulty is a much more "grunge" idea. Not to mention that in this case, using the singularity device as a weapon would be a last ditch effort, a cripling product of clever on-the-spot improvised weaponry. And yes I meant nano tubes. and yes the cold fusion would be possible because of the singularities, however you have to understand that the singularities are somewhat like batteries. The singularities would be produced at great energy expense in factories on planets. They would be contained and shipped to shipyards that would place them into the reactors of the ship where the fusion reaction is then started and wont stop unless: A) one or more singularities lose containement and are jettisoned and not enough power is availalbe to maintain the remaining singularities that are the driving force of the fusion reaction. B) There is no more fuel remaining to be fused. C) The micro-singularities lifespan (Problably something like 15-20 years) is at an end and regardless of any compression aids, its natural containment is jeopardized and fails. D) Damage to either systems creates an instability that necessitates the termination of the fusion reaction. thanks again for the ideas. I'm moving to a different city on Saturday morning and so I've spent all day packing and will be packing up the PC tomorrow at some point. If I don't respond to any of your posts for a while it's because I don't have the internet capability to do so . I'll be on as soon as possible though. Talk to you then.

The reactors will not be centrifuge systems. They won't be using plasma like the ones we use today. With microsingularities you wouldn't need plasma to accelerate the atoms to "crunch" velocity. The microsingularities fuse the atoms with a series of overlaping magnetic fields (same idea as the gravity knot). The byproduct is scooped up (oxygen) and filtered through the life support system while a slew of other systems harvest the energy (heat, light, other radiations) from the fusion reaction. There has to be a series (six in total ) of microsingularities to substantiate a dense enough gravitational field to fuse the atoms, the singularities are not as dense as you're probably thinking. They're not anywhere near the power of a real black hole, and because there are many of them working together to create the pressure needed, if one of them were to lose containement the damage wouldn't be as cataclysmic as most people think. There would be failsafes to eject the singularities if they were losing containment. Also, I'm most likely going to be creating the possibility of cold fusion which will make higher order reactions useful and not too energy consuming. Grunge tech from my perspective is simply any kind of science fiction that doesn't have household laser beams, blasters or deathrays and ultra fancy super high tech societies that can travel across the galaxy in the blink of an eye without any drawbacks and can destroy planets with the push of a buton. I consider the Halo universe grunge tech, and starshiptroopers (the book, the movie is .... yeah, self explanitory). Grunge tech is also (imo) any rendition of future where there are alot of poor people and everything is old and barely working. (which I don't expect to get that grunge.) Planetside there will be large fusion reactors that are used not only to produce energy for the inhabitants but also to produce large quantities of Berilium, which is the fuel for the fleet. They also use fusion reactions to mass produce large quantities of (true)carbon fibre, which is used for a slew of different things such as personel armor and ship armors. gotta jet, the wife is calling

I like the fungus Idea, that makes alot of sense for the larger ships, However on the smaller ships (corvettes, small 5 to 10 man crew) they'll need the extra oxygen. I like fusioin because it makes alot of other things possible, if cold fusion is discovered, then you can pretty much mix and match everything, turn hydrogen into helium, helium into nitrogen, nitrogen into the next step and just keep going until you have whatever chemical you want and mass produce it WHILE making tones of useful and relatively safe energy. My tech will be grunge in some senses, caseless ammunition (still projectiles because Particle Beam Weaponry is too large and too difficult to use in atmosphere) I'll design a slew of grenades and none-lethal weaponry. I have to redesign most of my ships because I made quite the mistake in not taking into account that forward acceleration at 1g would create the need for the ships to be built with the floors perpendicular to the direction of movement. (that's a big mistake on my part LOL.) It turns out that at a constant acceleration it would take two and a half weeks to get outside of our solar system in order to activate the warp drive. I like that timeframe, it's long enough to still be grunge tech, and not too long as to hamper the storytelling. Gotta go. talk to you later

Considering the fact that I wanted to create a grunge tech society I'll have to re-think the hinge maneuver. I can't have ships that can generate huge gravitational fields that are capable of bending light, I would like to, but that's not really "grunge tech", although I was re-thinking my power source as berilium fusion (because the result would be oxygen molecules, that are useful for life support) and I guess I can go ahead and stipulate that the microsingularities that are used to create the fusion would be capable of redirecting a beam, although they'd have to be reconfigured, think of gravitational lensing. So the idea would now have to spawn from someone deciding to rip out the fusion engines of several ships in order to construct this lense, and place it in space where the ship could fire the laser into the rings and have it alter in direction slightly for each ring (and being refocused as well). I'll have to do something like that, nerf the technology so that it's more "grunge". I also have to redesign ALL my ships, because I was really idiotic in my design ideas, but I'll get into that later, I have to go (the wife is calling.)

Thanks alot for the ideas! I like them. I like the idea of tracking movement by using the field, I didn't think of that. As for projectiles, I think that they'll be the bane of the fighter pilots. Although particle beam weaponry will be powerful, there are defenses against them, where as using projectiles will still be as deadly as they were a hundred years past, I like that. I thought of a tactical maneuver today. If you have a large ship outside scanner range, and a scout team (like a covert ops team) on an enemy ship that can "paint" internal targets, you would be capable of firing a beam or particle weapon to that location without actually seeying the target, from a long distance, with some accuracy (I want to use laser\maser beams for this but I don't know enough about the technology). The tactical maneuver is this; if you're just sitting outside scanner range and fire once your team paints an internal target, the enemy ship will just triangulate your position from the weapon and fire back, blindly but most likely still effectively. HOWEVER, the maneuver would be to have a "hinge" for the beam weapon, where one of the smaller ships, like a bomber or fighter, places themselves at a distance from the main ship and generates a strong gravitational field using the micro singularities (still outside of scan range) and so when the main ship fires the maser, it does so in calculation of the curvature of space caused by the "hinge" ship and therefore the beam enters scanner range and hits the target from a different vector that the ship is firing from. I think I'll dedicate that maneuver to one of my collegues, "The Dionne maneuver", lol.

So just for the sake of orientation: You're basically saying, if the Big Bang theory isn't Wrong, but also isn't Right, we shouldn't be granting it Righteousness. As in, if something is both unfounded and mainly speculative, there should be no reason that (within the scientific method) it should be accepted as the answer to a yet unsolved problem. Like saying that if that chair looks like there's an invisible cat in it, there is indeed an invisible cat in it, which sounds completely absurd, but is a good way to describe what the scientific community is doing in regards to singularities and the big bang theory. Am I close to what you're proposing?

Haha, Have no worries mooey, I'm not a tight sphincter burocrat, the wink at the end of that post was meant to ward off any true scolding. If I could mulit-task any better I'd have jumped into the movie/science debate myself like F13 did, but unfortunately I lack that kind of initiative at the moment and felt more comfortable sticking with the topic I had originally conjured up. I think I did so mostly because the questions I had were really bothering me and I was hoping for answers and therefore postponed any other topics until I got some kind of feedback on the original topic, which has happened. Back on track. If it were to be possible to focus the gravitational field of two microsingularites at one point in front of a ship and somehow cancel out the rest of the gravitational field so that the only gravity acting on the ship was the intercecting gravitational fields in front of it, the ship WOULD gravitate toward that point, and say that after said gravitation, the field would re-allign, not move, so that the computer systems that are generating the field would nullify all gravity, and reset the intersecting fields at a location further from the ships current location. Kind of like kicking your way on a skateboard. Would that work? (if the technology existed... I'd probably have to find some way of explaining how the rest of the gravitational field is incapacitated, and this would also mean that the shields that I designed for the ships would be offline at this time.) Speaking of shields, the way I designed them is as such. The gravitational field of the singularities are at rest in a combat situation (where propultion is transfered to propelant like hydrogen), this means the fields are reminescent to that of earths gravitational field in design, some of the plasma that's rotating on the outside of the containment field of the micro singularity ** is vented into the layers of the gravitational fields. This means that at the moment that a particle beam weapon fires onto the shields, if the layers of the field peel back (like they do with solar winds) the plasma inside the layers will be released, causing more resistance for the particles from the beam weapon. This would also cause resistance against projectile weaponry as well. What do you think? **I wanted to make the singularities catalysts for some kind of fusion reaction which would aid in powering the ship (that's what I meant by the singularites being the source of all power, and yes, kind of like free energy or a perpetual motion machine, but not quite, the singularities are not REAL singularities, they're artificially constructed and much weaker than a true black hole, they eventually evaporate which results in a depressurization of the matter, which means quite a large explosion I could probably use this as a plot device or even as a type of weaponry; singularity torpedo? LOL.) You'll have to start helping me pull the base science to these ideas or my topic will be moved to the speculations thread . [EDIT: Or the general discussions thread apparently.... ]

Thank you for your ideas Rocket Man, and for redeeming the thread from being highjacked by movie critics I'll reply in detail to your post in the morning, I need sleep.

Yes, you're right that the ship does obey SR but it still can travel at speeds faster than light if I invent negative force matter like exotic matter or if I invent a method of creating a powerful casimir effect. The wiki page I took the quote from would have been posted but I was in a rush, and that's why I didn't get to say the things I'm about to say now, and also why I didn't notice that you had posted the link to the same page. [EDIT: On closer inspection, you didn't post the same page, not the one I got that quote from, it's here] Another mistake in my post due to my tardiness was that I said I wanted the ships to have constant velocity, I meant to say that I need them to have constant acceleration. Constant acceleration at 10 m/s would take about 2 days to travel 1 AU, which is about the timeframe I want for the travel of the vessels at sub-luminer speeds. First off, I like the idea of static singularities used to slingshot, I think I'll use that in certain situations, it's an adequate spin off technology for microsingularity techs. The technology used to contain the microsingularites will be fed by the microsingularity itself and will be birthed by the same technology that assists FTL in the Alcubierre drive, since it has to be negative force technology. A black hole theoretically generates a very large amount of electricity and also dumps massive amounts of different radiations that can potentially be harvested, so you can see how it's possible to use that as the generator for the ship and for whatever other systems are dependant on the singularties maintenance. I'll probably have to invent some kind of pseudo-mathimatical equation to explain the theory of containement, something like a particular ammount of negative force in a specific pattern of dispertion causes a reverberation of certain properties in the singularity making it possible to contain said singularity without having to produce negative force equal to or in addition to that of the singularities forces. What do you think about the negative force technology? Should it be by way of an exploitation of the casimir effect? Or should I go the way most other science fiction authors go and create exotic matter? That being said I think I like the idea of something based off of the casimir effect. Oh, and like I said before, most of these explanation are for myself, and won't be detailed in the novel, or if they are it'll be in very small quantities throughout the novel, and not in large places that would potentially kill the suspense. And thanks for continuing this topic, I'm glad I've got someone to work my theories with.

I wouldn't like to use this because I need a means for the vessels to travel at low but constant velocities without using a source of depleting fuel, this way it makes sense that they can go from the heliosphere of a star system to one of it's planets within a reasonable amount of time (a few months in large systems), slingshotting wouldn't be enough for that. The space inside alcubierre's warp field is not moving. here "For those familiar with the effects of special relativity, such as Lorentz contraction, mass increase and time dilation, the Alcubierre metric has some apparently peculiar aspects. Since a ship at the center of the moving volume of the metric is at rest with respect to locally flat space, there are no relativistic mass increase or time dilation effects. The on-board spaceship clock runs at the same speed as the clock of an external observer, and that observer will detect no increase in the mass of the moving ship, even when it travels at FTL speeds. Moreover, Alcubierre has shown that even when the ship is accelerating, it travels on a free-fall geodesic. In other words, a ship using the warp to accelerate and decelerate is always in free fall, and the crew would experience no accelerational g-forces. Enormous tidal forces would be present near the edges of the flat-space volume because of the large space curvature there, but by suitable specification of the metric, these would be made very small within the volume occupied by the ship." I'll write more later, gtg.

HAHAHahahah!!!! Poetic justice? However, I do think that the person who wrote that site is a little bit on the biased side when it comes to Psychiatry, yes, there were horific things done in the past, and heck, there are probably horific things going on now, but there are a slew of different aspects to psychiatry that have nothing to do with sticking icepicks into peoples eyesockets and scrambling their brains. Psychiatry is a very important science that's helping us understand human and animal behaviour and how to deal with it in a way that esteems to be much better than all previous methods of "treatment". Anyone who believes that needs a psychiatrist LOL.

Hello ladies and gentlemen. I'd like to introduce myself; my screen name is Luciola, I'm 21 living in Canada and I like long walks on the beach.... just kidding. I'm an amateur novelist and my reason to coming to the forum was to get some insight on certain theoretical physics theories that I'm attempting to use in my science fiction, so you'll be seeying me around there more than anywhere else. I don't know very much about physics, as a matter of fact I was attempting to figure out how long it would take for a craft moving at 1g acceleration to get to the heliosphere the other day and couldn't even remember how to incorporate constant acceleration into the equation along with time over distance calculations. I did however figure that it would only take about two and three quarters of a day to travel one AU (distance from the earth to the sun) at 1g acceleration. Luckily, although I'm majoring in English at the University of Laurentian, I'm also taking some refresher physics courses, so that'll hopefully be worth the money. So far I like the forum alot, some real smart people on here, good to know the genepool isn't ALL spiraling into idiocy

I think Atheist was right about crystals as memory being out of date, I haven't heard much of it in the past few years but I did read a few articles about it about four or five years ago. Now that we've been able to quantum teleport atoms and photons we'll be seeying more research going into quantum computers where the availability for storage will be greatly improved over current binary systems, not to mention the amount of computing power that quantum computers should be capable of. Although we're in great need of actually making a working quantum repeater for quantum computing technology to really be worth it.

Well, I'm glad to see that I've had responses to my post, however it pains me to notice that there was no forward momentum transfered to the point I had originally set out with... I fully understand that science fiction is not supposed to be based one hundred percent on science, and that if I were to attempt to explain alcubierre's warp theory verbatum in my novel I'd lose alot of readers. I'm not doing this research so that I can explain exactly how everything works at the text level of my novel, I'm doing all of this for myself, and so that if someone asks me what or how something works in my novel I can actually answer the question with something that makes relative sense in terms of realistic physics and science. Also, you can't describe something if you don't know how it works, or don't understand how it works fully. If I'm going to use the alcubierre drive, I'm going to have to describe how it looks, what it does and also what can happen if it doesn't work or malfunctions or fails. All these things, which would be explained in details only as an observer, and not as a warp specialist, need to have realistic sources. If a part of my novel happens to describe a ship being hit by a particle beam weapon, I want to be able to describe the visual effects that would insue as the gravitational field of the ships shielding peels back to reveal the layers of plasma that are designed to neutralize the ions of the particle beam weapon. If I just say that it looks like a shimmering light, it would be somewhat void of real visual stimulation. What WOULD happen if a highly charged particle smashed into a gravitational field? Well, we see it all the time here in Canada, it's called the Aurora Borealis, or the northern lights. The ions from the sun get trapped in the layers of the magnetic field that the solar winds don't peel away, and they bounce to the poles where there's less space inside the layers of the field, at which point they smash into eachother creating a reaction of light heat and sound that, at certain altitudes, you can actually hear. These are the things I'm looking to find realistic theories to, things that would make the story more sound, more solid and believalbe to the eyes of the general public, and to the eyes of a physicist. I was in the military for a while, as an infantryman, and everytime I watch a movie where the director decided that he didn't need to pay much attention to the way firearms actually function, I get disgusted and hardly feel like watching the rest of it if there are people firing seven hundred bullets from a fifteen round clip or jumping in mid air and firing accurately at long distances with a pistol. Sure it makes good action scenes, but it's ridiculous and unrealistic. The reason I bring this up is because I understand a certain amount of things about science, and when I watch a movie or read a book that attempts to use science in a way that is unrealistic or just plain idiotic, it really puts the rest of the novel or movie into question because it puts the integrity of the writer or director at stake. I don't want my integrity to be compromised by an unexplainable happening that just doesn't make any sense in the way of science. The light saber, hyperspace, blasters, teleportation and so many other things are far from possible and even if they are they're either not well explained or don't make sense in a grunge-tech story. Gravitational matrix propulsion (using gravity to pull the ship) is not too advanced, it isn't very safe and not extremely efficient because of limitations I'll put on the form of it I'm using in the novel (basically they haven't mastered it), alcubierre drives are also not very efficient, once the field is produced the people inside can no longer control the ship, you have to plot your course perfectly before entering warp. The fictional addition to my version of the alcubierre drive is that they can't use it inside a heliosphere, they have to be outside the magnetic field of a star to use it, for reasons that are still unknown to the scientists. (some mystery is always good). This is also one of the two ways they get out of warp, if the warp field interacts with a heliosphere, it "crashes" because the inner sphere is not moving, the ship simply bumps out of warp and coasts at a very slow speed caused by the bit of turbulence that is transfered to the inside of the warp field as it collapses. (About 4g turbulence, not enough to kill anyone but it's a bumpy exit let me tell you, if you're not strapped in, you might be thrown around a bit.) The second method is due to the field collapsing at a maximum acceleration. For again, unkown reasons, the warp field can accelerate past the speed of light with the help of negative force, however regardless of this there is still a speed limit to the warp system. At some point, the turbulence in the warp membrane becomes too large and the warp field collapses bumping the ship into normal space with a turbulence gforce of about 5 or 6 depending, this is VERY bumpy, but it's common and smaller ships that are more prone to the exit turbulence have countermeasures in the way of innertial dampners (also thanks to negative force technology) that reduce the gforces to about 4, it can take many jumps to get between stars that are considerably far appart, bumping out of warp every now and then due to maximum turbulence. This is also a good plot device for combat strategy. If you know that an enemy ship is on it's way to such and such a planet, you can calculate the odds of the 20% variance in travel time and place their exit point of warp somewhere in a particular area of space, dropping mines in that area or setting up warp field inhibitors or other such devices may lend you the great chance at an ambush. I want these things to exist as plot devices and as means of putting limitations on the science they're using. Other things that I'm adding is inconsistency in flight times. The acceleration of the ships differ from the size of the warp field and the mass inside it. A small ship can make it from point A to point B much quicker than a large ship, they also are more susceptible to the turublence, and drop out more often than large ships but the smaller ships also have greater chances of comming out of warp further inside the heliosphere, which means the slight possibility of collision, and more radiation factors if it's a neutron star or even cataclysmic issues if your warp bumps you out too close to a singularity. Even in same sized vessels time is inconsistent, there's about a 20% variance in the travel time of two ships of the same type, the stories scientists believe this is caused by different levels of interference in the interstellar medium or the random distortion that occurs in the warp membrane as it reaches maximum turbulence. Let me know if any of this doesn't make sense or needs specific re-working, and let me also know if you have any other ideas as to put limitations on the technology that would be good plot devices.

Hello ladies and gentelmen, I'm new to the forum, and very unskilled in the ways of physics (at least in relation to someone who's well schooled in it.) I'm currently writing a science fiction novel that I'm attempting to base as realistically as possible on actual physics. Lately I've found in my research that this is more difficult than anticipated. I've discovered that currently, the world of physics (and science in general) is in quite a mess with differentiations between the theories at its core. Quantum mechanics, string theory and relativity to name a few are intrinsic to todays understanding of what and how everything works, and although Quantum mechanics and special relativity have both been very successful in describing and helping physicists understand certain aspects and states of matter and energy, I've come to realize that they're also "competing" in some sense of the word. I'd suggest that the friction is more so caused by the attempts to merge both theories into one concise and elegant theory for "everything", but nevertheless, the community is somewhat at odds as to what's what. The reason I bring these particular theories into the mix is because I'm currently attempting to define what types of propultion the spacecraft of my story will use, and I was hoping that some of you might be able to shed some light (at least a little bit) on some of the things I've had difficulty understanding during my research. Let's start with the ideas I've got planned out for sub-luminar travel. I'm aiming for a grunge-tech society, so I'm not looking to see technology that is immensly efficient, however I do need a way for my fictional characters to get from point A to point B without immense ammounts of time in between. The sub luminar travel that I've decided to incorporate for inter planetary travel in the novel is based on gravitational distortion by using micro singularities to focus a point of gravity in the direction the vessel wishes to travel that will pull the ship forward. Now, the idea here is that as the ship moves forward (it being the emitter of the field) the gravitational field exerting the force will also move forward and still continue pulling the ship (and the source of the gravity field). The problem that I see here is this. If you're sitting in a sail boat and blow in the sail, you're not going anywhere. I understand that if we use Einsteins relativity of curved space, it's possible to assume that this system would function because it would be like pushing down on a mattress in front of a marble, and as the marble moves toward your finger, you move your finger further away, making it so that the marble continues to move in the direction of your finger (ergo the gravitational field). Now, I want anyone who knows enough about this to A: Punch holes in my theory as best you can, and B: Help me patch the holes up by also expressing any kind of countermeasure to the problems you can see in this idea. For FTL travel I'm using a slightly fictional version of the Alcubierre drive. The idea behind this would be that the necessary warp field could potentially be generated by the micro singularities, the thing that attracts me to the Alcubierre drive is that the ship doesn't suffer from innertia as it's in a freefall geodesic within the warp field; not to mention that the ship doesn't have to obey special relativity either considering it technically isnt moving faster than light, the space around it is. ( I'll need exotic matter or some form of amplifying the Casimir effect*this method would be more desireable* for this drive to work, or perhaps I can fictionally alter string theory to compensate for the need of negative force, however that's moving too far away from "real" phsyics than I want to go.) Again, poke as many holes through my theory as you can, but make sure to also provide some attempt at patching them up. I'd also like for any of you to think of adequat spin off technologies that could be based on either the Alcubierre drive or microsingularities in general. (Consider the existence of negative force, exotic matter or ways to amplify the casimir effect as well) I think that's enough for one post, I'll also be introducing my concepts on particle beam weaponry, superconductors and crystal energy conservation in later posts

The only type of zombie like state a person is likely to realistically be caught in is some fast developing yet slow terminating form of encephalitis, like a mutated form of rabies. This could potentially put a victim into a delirious state that could alter randomly during the course of the disease into various moments of rage or agitation. The problem with this is that the persons would not be dead, nor would they exibit any kind of modifications to physical anatomy other than the outcome of sloth, and therefore the person would not specifically fall under the state of "zombie", but it's the closest I could see possible within real medical science.