Theoretical Physics in Fiction.

[Luciola]

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.

[Rocket Man]

painting targets, this is fairly old tech.

troops on the ground have EM signature rifles, they essentially paint a target on the side of a building and wait for a sea-launched missile to spot it and home in.

if the scout ships give a position and velocity for a target via triangulation and send the data to the one with the guns, you can be pretty sure of a hit if you use the right maths.

 

targets out of scan range, childs play. modern artillery get relative positions radioed in, the operators do some math, and launch a shell. it's fairly common to never see the target, the explosion or even hear the shell go off, the only report is a radio call "target destroyed".

 

i like the idea of the hinge maneuver, it needs a bit of work though.

 

light doesnt particularly like being bent, it tends to go out of focus and doesnt respond well to gravity. if you had enough of a feild to bend light around a useful angle, you would probably have a red sticky mess for a pilot.

it would however make sense to use a relay system, the main ship with the big generators fires a lazer to another, smaller, more agile craft to power a weapon. it would also be possible to tune the wavelength so it can be picked up easier, safer and more efficiently.

you could gt it to work with gravity, you already have a projected singularity, project it near the path of the weapon, unfortunately, you'd need angstrom precision and a way of re-focussing the beam.

 

for particle weapons, the gravity system would work, you can also use the kinetic energy of the smaller craft to slingshot/accelerate the particles further.

[Luciola]

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.)

[Rocket Man]

to get the lensing to work, you wouldnt need to tear the fusion generators out, simply place the attractor for the drive in the right spot, and fire at the image you see through the feild, theres some research going into ground-to-orbit lazers that use this principle, as the lazer travels, it gets distorted by irregularities in air pressure, however, if you use a "rubber mirror" to pre-distort the lazer, you can have the atmosphere refocus it on the way.

 

have the singularity of another craft positioned where ever, locate the image of the target as seen by optic equipment using the same lense as the lazer, this image will be pre-bent and put out of focus by the feild.

use the lense on the weapon to put the target back into focus and fire the lazer through it, the lense on the weapon will defocus the lazer in such a way that the gravitational feild will refocus it.

 

the only problem is, the enemy can see you through the same gravitational feild and shoot you through it.

 

depending on what limitations you put on the singularities, you could have them shut down or move immediately after the lazer fires to discourage return fire.

 

using the gravitaional lenses, you can also place phantom images here and there. projectile and particle weapons will get throughly confused, matter gets deflected differently to light.

(make sure you can shut the gravity lense off, you can still demolish a craft in a phantom image if you fire a lazer.)

 

berillium fusion... nice idea, it's not as energetic as duterium or tritium, but spare oxygen can be useful.

i think it might be a little superfluous though, theres going to be enough oxygen in the carbon dioxide and waste water.

everything can be recycled, sugars burn into carbondioxide and water

carbon dioxide can be split into oxygen for life support, and carbon for food growth, (fungus?),

and the water can be used for hydroponics (the same fungus?)

fungus is probably the optimum food source for long-haul flights, simple genomes arent very suceptible to radiation, a wide range of possible climates and metabolic rates, and it will split almost all of the waste products crew members can generate. photosynthesis for oxygen and food.

it's the closest you can get to a closed system with low tech.

[Luciola]

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

[Rocket Man]

i like your fusion ideas, but i should warn you, trying to effecticely put a berillium reactor in a small craft, it may not fit.

modern attempts at fusion use duterium or tritium plasma under huge temperatures and pressures, these reactors are the size of very large multi-story ware houses,

it may work if you use a high rigidity sphere centered firmly around the singularity, all you'll need to do is release gas at it, it will fall under gravity and crush on each other down to the nucleus. unfortunately, the particles with larger nuclei will take the lower positions due to density, you'll need a way of tapping the fused atoms off the reactor.

also, a gravitational mass with the force of a small star is not something i would want close by. especially if the singularities are margially unstable. (explosive decompression comparible to a small nova may be likely)

you might like to run in-system craft on solar wind and solar elecrticity.

 

nasa has plans to build a satellite to run on the momentum of charged particles, it uses an artificial magneto shpere about 50km effective radius to deflect charged particles and essentially act as a solar sail.

old style satelite power was a non-critical lump of plutonium with a thermopile cell between it and space. the warm block of plutonium created electricity via heat transfer in thermocouples to radiation energy into space.

these have a working power of about 4 watts, just enough to run the circuits.

 

grunge tech in my mind sounds like what we would have trying to get to space with modern technology. ion rockets are pretty effective if given enough power, 1gm for solar power in lunar orbit. imagine what you could do with nuclear power. (fusion and fission inclusive)

 

 

just a suggestion, you can make different types of fusion using larger or smaller spheres, higher or lower compression rates. none of this complex variations ect, just replace the inner sphere.

higher compression for larger nuclei, lower compression for smaller nuclei.

you can also fuse two different types of atom, you can fuse your nitrogen with another duterium to make oxygen. admittedly, you will get a substantially higher concentration of byproduct helium, you can talk about different conditions favouring different product ratios.

note, fusion above iron is energy negative.

[Luciola]

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

[Rocket Man]

i wouldnt expect you to limit yourself to modern tech, my suggestions for fusion were for the gravity compression system.

i'd still be wary, the forces required to compress matter to that volume are likely to kill within about a kilometre. unless you are in free fall towards it.

 

if one singularity fails, there will be a substantial decompression, even if it's only a sixth of the overall force, if one fails it'll sound like a small bomb going off around the reactor, that might even disrupt the other singularities despite fail-safes. (this could turn out to be quite an interesting plot device)

 

arent the singularities controlled remotely? knots tied in space time by an external device? simply fade out one of the transmitters to repair the faulty section of the reactor, you wont need to eject anything from a high compression fusion reaction nor would it be a sudden decompression at all.

 

come to think of it, transmit a singularity into open space and feed it large amounts of compressed matter, you will then have something of a weapon, you could drive it close to the hull of a ship, turn the feild off suddenly and let the explosion do the rest.

 

i wouldnt expect the singularities to have mass or any other characteristic of matter, so you could potentially make them as powerful as you like, you can say that feilds over a certain strength take too much power / are unreliable / are inefficient, to add a touch of realism.

 

 

carbon fibre armour, do you mean carbon nano tubes?

a fine weave of long carbon nano tubes(difficult to manufacture with current tech) set in a layer of passive, motion dampening rubber(about to hit the market) would stop most types of bullets while being as light as a wetsuit.

 

it is also highly resistant to tearing, and any shock is absorbed all over the body. (a high velocity bullet would feel like a baseball bat, it'll hurt, maybe break ribs, but it wont penetrate/kill.)

 

duterium gas with an electric spark is fusion on a small scale, it's proven and repeated technology, unfortunately it's too small to ever break even.

fusion requires two isotopes to strike each other with enough force to over come repulsive nuclear forces, i dont think there will ever be such a thing as cold fusion (except with the singularities)

[Luciola]

Thanks again Rocket Man for the ideas, I'll have to dedicate a character after you (maybe an engineer? LOL)

 

arent the singularities controlled remotely? knots tied in space time by an external device? simply fade out one of the transmitters to repair the faulty section of the reactor, you wont need to eject anything from a high compression fusion reaction nor would it be a sudden decompression at all.

 

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?

 

come to think of it, transmit a singularity into open space and feed it large amounts of compressed matter, you will then have something of a weapon, you could drive it close to the hull of a ship, turn the feild off suddenly and let the explosion do the rest.

 

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.

[Rocket Man]

i see what your getting at with the irreplacable singularity idea, it would make the whole thing sound more believable.

 

perhaps the facotry could be used for the initiation of a singularity using vast amounts of energy and heavy machinery and smaller systems manipulate it remotley to keep it stable after initiation, like the singularity goes some way to keeping itself stable after it moves past a critical energy level.

try putting a factory in low solar orbit to get the energy, even have them harness energy over long periods of time, years, decades, you might even have the solar arrays eclipse the sun.

 

The factory ties a knot in space using large powerful machinery, and has low energy containment feilds to keep it stable once initiated, when a ship collects it, control of the singularity goes to the ship.

they could even have the reactor removed from the ship temporarily, and the new singularity is initiated within using precise coordinates as to the reactor core.

 

they should be fairly delicate items where containment is only possible under very strict energy levels, too much compression energy cant be maintained while too little brings it to the point where it gives up and ceases to exist (rather violently)

 

then you could have a system where the factories give control of the new singularity over to the ships transmitters and have the singularity controlled remotely. that way, it would require vast production capabilities to make one, a little energy to maintain it and no way of getting one back unless it's made at huge expense.

 

i like the limited life span idea, you can say that care can make it last longer, but energy is always lost through unknown causes in ways that it cant be replenished easily (repair and maintenence where is was made? trade an old one for a new one and have the old one repaired with a far lower but still substantial energy budget)

 

i dont know of any science to make the singulatities with, i dont know string theory.

[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.

[Rocket Man]

i would recommend alastair reynolds, he writes awesome books.

 

when you mentioned the mine feild and having the ship travelling at some vast velocity, i thought of time and inertia dialation. the ship doesnt experience it, but sling a low mass sheild out front, accelerate it close to the speed of light, the inertial dialation would cause it to be almost impenetrable no matter how panzy it is at low velocities.

 

i would love to read it.

and its good to see you back.