Planet busters

[DangerousThing]

How powerful a bomb can be made at TL 15?

As long as time isn't a problem, would it be possible to put an Orion drive on a really large rock (moon or even planet sized) and smack it into another planet?

Just because the Imperium hasn't done it doesn't make it impossible. Creating asteroid belts isn't something that the 3I seems to make a priority. Now imagine that the 3I *makes* it a priority for some reason. How long would it take to come up with a way to do this.

I agree with the poster who stated that it is only an engineering problem for a TL 15 civilization.

It might be difficult, and it might be a long research problem, but I don't think it would be that long. I also don't think it requires anti-matter. How about *really* powerful shaped nukes? Or rather the bombs that are the remote descendents of today's nukes?

Traveller's Tech Level system is broken, partly because Marc wanted TL 15 humans to be understandable to today's humans.

Is nanotech available at TL 15?

I'm sure that factories that build robots are available. The robots then build powerful bombs from what is available, follow a careful pattern of diggings, and then explode. The factories create more robots as needed. Keep exploding until planet falls apart.

How about a rather large mirror to reflect the sun's energy onto the planet. Arrange the orbit of the mirror to add energy where it would do the most damage.

One of the big problems in this sort of discussion is that TL 15 is so far ahead of our science that we can't see what is *possible* in the extreme.

 

[far-trader]

This is quickly dissolving into one of "those" threads where no consensus is possible because everyone is arguing past everyone else talking nano-oranges to antimater-apples. As long as it doesn't devolve into name calling or such* carry on. As pointless as it may be, it can often be interesting nonetheless.

* and that line has been toed if not stepped over already, consider yourself warned

 

[Gray Pennell]

Ok this is space based civilization and implies they are asteroid miners if not Kepler belt size worlds to be as large and as rich as you say. That means the people know how to break up space rocks. They are thinking time to scale up to planets.

So why dont they just treat the world the same way. Drill large holes, along fault lines explode something powerful and repeat. Would this take a long time and require a lot of energy and effort sure. It is no less practical than moving a world. Since they are not being environmentally concerned so earth quakes and volcanic eruptions would be a plus.

 

[Omnivore]

No longer a contributor to this board.

 

[McPerth]

So why dont they just treat the world the same way. Drill large holes, along fault lines explode something powerful and repeat. Would this take a long time and require a lot of energy and effort sure. It is no less practical than moving a world. Since they are not being environmentally concerned so earth quakes and volcanic eruptions would be a plus.

I'm not sure what will happen when those bombs are droped in the hole done along the fault (from where magma is emerging, by the way) and they enter in contact with the magma and its high temperature...

Of course, this is assuming we talk about a molten core planet, but if so, I guess it wouldn't be easy to cope with the magma that will pour at every so deep a hole you tried to dig, and I'm neither sure the volcanic eruptions and earthquakes will help in any way to break the planet into small parts (the goal of the project, If I undertood it well), while I agree they can create quite a havoc.

 

[Omnivore]

No longer a contributor to this board.

 

[Gray Pennell]

It would be a strip mining but on a large scale. You dont care what happens to the surface etc. As for molton rock I am sure tech 15 worlds could come up with shielding that lets it survive if we can drop things on to Venus and Titan at tech 7/8.

I guess the real question is could the process be improved to the point that your blowing off 10s or 100s kms of surface at a time.

 

[Carlobrand]

Of course, a lot depends on which world you're choosing to smash - smaller is easier than larger. I'd say that given adequate time and resources, it's not impossible at TL 15.

However, "adequate time and resources" may amount to a fantasmariffic lot: we're talking lifetimes and the wealth of galactic empires here, drives equivalent to the engines and plants of a couple hundred billion dreadnoughts if you're planning to do it in a reasonable time by collision - or maybe just a million or so if you planned the maneuver to take a few centuries.

There's a wee bit of difference between rendering it an uninhabitable mass and smashing it into asteroidal rubble: you've got to put enough force in there that the bulk of the thing can escape its own gravity. I'm looking at a site that calculates the energy required to do in Terra at 2.24 x 10^32 joules - and then goes further to mention that it takes good ol' Sol a week to put out that much energy. Same site suggests using 2.5 trillion tons of antimatter. (I think their math is off, or I made a mistake somewhere - I get half that.)

http://www.livescience.com/17875-destroy-earth-doomsday.html

Now, maybe they're off a bit, but even if we find some argument that slashes an order of magnitude or two off of that, it's still an improbably huge undertaking.

My guess is the cost-benefit analysis works against that kind of big deconstruction project. I don't think 6 x 10^21 tons of iron and a wee bit of assorted other elements would quite pay the cost of the 2.24 x 10^32 joules invested in the effort - much less the equipment needed to bring that energy to bear. At least, not at the current market rates. Grandfather might have some tricks up his sleeve, but for Strephon it would be a ridiculously long and expensive undertaking with very little to show for it afterward.

 

[Omnivore]

No longer a contributor to this board.

 

[Carlobrand]

That one was mentioned too: the slow disassembly method. I'm figuring if you could haul off about 16 billion metric tons of mass daily, you could accomplish the job - in a billion years. That only requires you to apply about 7 x 10^15 joules every second. That's about 20 thousand dreadnoughts - assuming they could keep that spinal mount firing continuously and that the energy input is 100% efficient. Figure instead by the rate of fire in MT (once per minute in "personal combat" - which I gather means the dreadnought is parked on the ground and taking pot-shots at you while you dodge:devil and factor in a bit of energy loss in powering the spinal, maybe 1.5 million dreadnoughts. That's a very rough estimate, of course.

Or, you could hit that billion-year mark by applying about 10 thousand 200,000-dTon freighters each day to haulage - but that still requires you to come up with the energy to carve out the necessary rock to fill their holds. How many freighters all told depends on how quickly they can load their cargo, how far off they go before dumping cargo, and how long it takes to dump the cargo. And, of course, if you want it done faster than a billion years, you need more freighters.

I'm thinking the Imperium might want to invite the Zhodani, Solomani, Aslan, and so forth to come and help out. I think they're short on ships.

 

[BytePro]

Hmmm... what could a TL 15 civilization, with 1,000's of years to spend, have used to blow'd up a planet into itty bits?

Gravity.

They honeycombed the upper mantle and 'extracted' the iron core of a small, cool world, strategically redepositing the heavy metal on the surface (using an electroplating type of siphoning via autonomous micro von neuman drills and the solar wind along with artificially induced magnetic field fluctuations controlled by the crystal aligned iron super-bore holes)...

 

[rancke]

Note that although the OP talks about a culture with and extremely long range perspective where a project taking millennia is no big deal, that doesn't mean that a project that would take tens or hundreds of millenia would be acceptable. Carlobrando has expressed my own opinions admirably. I believe that at TL 15 these various theoretical possibilities that Omnivore talks of are beyond the scope of any plausibly sized society.


Hans

 

[Gray Pennell]

Here is a solution with 1000 years to work with you invite tech level 17. This project would be the driving force behind such technological achievements. Geologist "Well its going to take 200,000 dreadnaughts a 1000 years to do this." Governator "Scientistes can we do better?" First Scientist "I guess we could improve our antimatter processing plants and make big bombs" Second Scientist "Or use them to drive another planet into it" Governator "Ok get to work on it meanwhile start mining the planet for what we need. Take the atmospher take everything. "

 

[Omnivore]

Seems to be a bit of a misconception with the forces required. If you're working with two planets of roughly similar mass in adjacent orbits like say earth and mars, in order to bring them closely enough together for their own gravity to do the work for you, you only need to apply about 2km/s of delta-V to each planet over the period in question - 1000 years according to the author of this thread would be acceptable.

Now to apply 2km/s of delta-V to the earth over a 1000 year period, using the earth as a pusher plate for a 20% efficient Orion drive, you'd need to explode 500MT of bombs per second over the period. This would work out to oh say 25x 20MT warheads. Currently 20MT fusion (actually tri-t) warheads have a production cost of around 1.5 million dollars, call it MCr 2 @TL8, should be less than 1MCr per warhead at TL15. That gives us a base cost of 25MCr per second. (Yeah I know Striker, FF&S, and SS3 - and likely other Traveller published sources - have far more expensive warheads - they're full of ****)

This works out to a cost per year (remember two planets involved) of about 1600 TCr. We need to have a population of at least 1.6 trillion for this to be conceivable. OMG, that's way too much money, surely it can't be economical! Well... consider the end result: each credit has bought you about 7500 metric tons of easily available material.

 

[Carlobrand]

An unstated issue is this: the culture in question will probably be advancing technologically. That would be factored in to their thinking about what projects to pursue.

It becomes like the interstellar trip problem: you want to go to another star, so you spend a massive fortune and a major effort on building a colony ship that can traverse the distance in a few decades - only to find when you arrive that your culture back home has since mastered FTL travel, has colonized the system and a few others to boot, and your grand effort is in their history books as a quaint and heroic but ultimately pointless venture.

Planets are really incredibly big, on our scale of things. If a Dreadnought were an ant, a planet would be a hill towering 120 feet above it. You could probably take every single ship in the Imperium, and they wouldn't approach one billionth of the mass of a single planet. On that scale of things, Imperial ships trying to draw away the mass of a planet is like tens of thousands of ants trying to level that 12-story hill, each ant proudly able to carry away ten times its weight, by having each draw away one grain of dirt at a time.

The question then is, why should they use TL-15 science and apply a fantastic amount of wealth in a millions-of-years-long effort to destroy a single planet when they could conceivably master methods that could do the job more easily with a couple of millenia of intensive research: "Oh, look, I've discovered a way to manipulate space at the string level to convert protons directly into anti-protons on a large scale. We could just convert the core of the planet directly into antimatter now!"

After all, a couple of millenia on Earth took us from picks and shovels to undreamed of bombs capable of levelling cities in an instant. A few thousand years more, maybe we'll be able to project a field that can manipulate fundamental constants - well, they'll be constant until we get there - like nuclear or gravitational forces on a planetary scale, causing whole planets to blow up.

 

[rancke]

Now to apply 2km/s of delta-V to the earth over a 1000 year period, using the earth as a pusher plate for a 20% efficient Orion drive, you'd need to explode 500MT of bombs per second over the period. This would work out to oh say 25x 20MT warheads.

I trust that if your calculations are incorrect, someone else will catch it. For the moment I'll use them.

This works out to a cost per year (remember two planets involved) of about 1600 TCr. We need to have a population of at least 1.6 trillion for this to be conceivable. OMG, that's way too much money, surely it can't be economical! Well... consider the end result: each credit has bought you about 7500 metric tons of easily available material.

Leaving aside how foreign to the Traveller universe a system with 1.6 trillion inhabitants is, the eventual rate of return is largely irrelevant to the people who has to start such a project. They only get to pay the cost, not to enjoy the benefits. So essentially anything they pay into the project is a gift to their great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren. I don't care how long range a perspective a culture has, the individual members are not going to accept substantial reductions in their own standards of living in order to benefit their great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren.

Then, of course, whoever may be contemplating starting such a project has to take into consideration the likelihood that their children will decide to keep up the project to benefit their great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren and that their grandchildren will decide to keep up the project to benefit their great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren, etc. etc.

I submit that any culture that is confident enough that every one of 33 subsequent generations will be both able and willing to pay TCr1600 per year to keep up such a project to start such a project would not be composed of human beings as we know them.

Finally, the project not only has to give a good rate of return. It has to give a better rate of return than any alternate use of the same resources.


Hans

 

[Omnivore]

This is the question I was addressing. Whether or not it fits into the OTU (imo it doesn't) wasn't part of the question.

 

[rancke]

This is the question I was addressing. Whether or not it fits into the OTU (imo it doesn't) wasn't part of the question.

I suppose that if anything goes, you can imagine beings that will be able to perform such projects given TL15. Just as you can imagine a culture that would be able to level Mount Everest with TL1 technology. After all, it's just a matter of having the patience to move enough chunks of rock.

However, there is one objection that will apply to any culture at all:

"Finally, the project not only has to give a good rate of return. It has to give a better rate of return than any alternate use of the same resources."​

Hans

 

[Carlobrand]

Seems to be a bit of a misconception with the forces required. If you're working with two planets of roughly similar mass in adjacent orbits like say earth and mars, in order to bring them closely enough together for their own gravity to do the work for you, you only need to apply about 2km/s of delta-V to each planet over the period in question - 1000 years according to the author of this thread would be acceptable.

Now to apply 2km/s of delta-V to the earth over a 1000 year period, using the earth as a pusher plate for a 20% efficient Orion drive, you'd need to explode 500MT of bombs per second over the period. This would work out to oh say 25x 20MT warheads. Currently 20MT fusion (actually tri-t) warheads have a production cost of around 1.5 million dollars, call it MCr 2 @TL8, should be less than 1MCr per warhead at TL15. That gives us a base cost of 25MCr per second. (Yeah I know Striker, FF&S, and SS3 - and likely other Traveller published sources - have far more expensive warheads - they're full of ****)

This works out to a cost per year (remember two planets involved) of about 1600 TCr. We need to have a population of at least 1.6 trillion for this to be conceivable. OMG, that's way too much money, surely it can't be economical! Well... consider the end result: each credit has bought you about 7500 metric tons of easily available material.

I'm not sure you've achieved what you want. You've moved two planets over a period of a thousand years at a cost of 1600 teracredits annually - x1000 years is MCr 1600 billion for the overall effort. As near as I can figure, you've delivered 20% of 6x10^28 joules to each planet - but the target to render one into an asteroid belt is something in the neighborhood of 2x10^32 joules. Even if that's high, you're four orders of magnitude below the mark. Your planets approach, rip each other apart, - and then gradually collapse into one or two entities with a quantity of surrounding debris. The region close to the nuclei will likely be too energetic and dangerous for ships to dare; only the debris that escapes or manages to orbit at a safe distance will be accessible. You've only delivered a small fraction of what the people were expecting.

More to the point, if you had invested all that money wisely - with returns at as low as 3% - instead of spending it destroying worlds, it would be worth 3.77 x 10^29 credits after 1000 years, or roughly 30 million credits for every ton of iron you'd have otherwise liberated by planet-crunching if the process had been completely successful. A thousand years is a long time to compound interest. You'd have done far better loaning those funds out to your people to stimulate the economy than prying free a few zettatons of iron.

 

[far-trader]

... a devil's advocate steps up on the stump.

...if you had invested all that money wisely - with returns at as low as 3% - instead of spending it destroying worlds, it would be worth 3.77 x 10^29 credits after 1000 years...

Money? What is that in the grand scheme? Nothing...

I suppose that if anything goes, you can imagine beings that will be able to perform such projects given TL15. Just as you can imagine a culture that would be able to level Mount Everest with TL1 technology. After all, it's just a matter of having the patience to move enough chunks of rock.

However, there is one objection that will apply to any culture at all:

"Finally, the project not only has to give a good rate of return. It has to give a better rate of return than any alternate use of the same resources."​

Hans

Precisely, though we may have different ideas of what and how to measure the return

What could a King or Queen of ancient Egypt, a Pharaoh, have done with all that comes of TL15 and a homogenous culture of 10s of billions or more? With practical immortality for the Pharaoh and those worthy?

"Wipe that planet from my sky, it is a blot on the heavens. Then build from the rocks and dust and ashes a pyramid worthy of your Pharaoh. Let it be done."

...and so it was in the year of the undertaking 1137 that the great pyramid of the heavens was completed and all the living gods and their servants took up residence there.

First scribe of the Pharaoh

Enerii