...but they're not detailed. The description matches a magnetic field combined (implicitly) with an ionizing laser/microwave/plasma projector. Good against "small stuff", but not sufficient against weaponry. The real protection is the ship's radar and maneuver drive.
General Weapons of the future.
- Thread starter Rigel Stardin
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mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
Go look up plasma window, they are real and can do what the m-drive generated field does. In addition if you pumped enough energy into the plasma it would act as armour against projectile weapons - not sure if you could get a plasma that could also absorb all the likely laser weapon wavelengths.
It is well on the way to explaining how a black globe works or better yet the Langston field that inspired it.
It is well on the way to explaining how a black globe works or better yet the Langston field that inspired it.
It has been a long day for me, so maybe I am not thinking this through clearly. But are you sure about this?
At a radius of ~ 500,000 km (the sun's "surface"), Sol has a gravity of ~28g. If you were to compress the mass of the sun into a volume of only 1.0 mm in radius, the gravity at 500,000 km distance from this tiny volume would still be ~28g, but a Schwarzschild Radius would be formed at 1.5 km radius with a gravitational field (using a Classical approximation) of about 3.0x10^13 g.
A mm-radius gravity source producing ~30g at its mm-radius surface would be significant for its dimensions, but I do not believe it would create an event horizon.
IIRC that is similar to how the basis of the Black/White Globe was explained in TNE/FF&S.
Technically, to be a heat (radiation) sink, the gravity field would need to be greater than a black hole's. It doesn't have to be a really big black hole (it can be sub-Solar mass)...but tiny black holes won't work: they become a heat source emitting at gamma-ray frequencies on up & down. Or, I guess, it might be a kind of manifold or lense (like an x-ray or gamma-ray 'lense') for 'focusing', which might have such a 'transient' field (an emergent micro Higgs field, anyone?) . But I'd think that would be much bigger (at lease in earliest use) than any ship.
Quantum mechanics is less a theory than a set of painstakingly-acquired and very tiny observations that have led to a reasonable set of assumptions and models that can be described as a 'theory'. The Higgs field defines/describes the behavior of what we call 'mass' in such tiny ranges and provides a means of investigating its interactions with other such 'fields'. The 'fields' are descriptions that are handy mathematical models of observations...but not necessarily what is really going on.
The starter question is: what is the mechanism by which these things instantiate? Can it be manipulated? Is it 'real' or 'emergent' (the same question applies to space-time).
Yes, it will take at least one genius to answer such questions.
And it will take at lease one engineer to turn the answers into jump drives and/or other useful tools.
I figure the real use of the Evade program is to allow for auto avoidance of rock and debris without the pilot being on duty.
I'm sketching in from a couple of google searches:
The formula for the Schwarzchild Radius is:
A short, rough (and classical) lisp program to calculate this, plugging in values for G, M(Sol) and c returns a Schwarzchild Radius for Sol at:
(/ (* 2 6.67e-11 1.989e30 2) (* 3.33564e9 3.33564e9)) = 23.846918 meters
This is not quite a 1mm point source. You definitely have an event horizon. And the gravity is definitely greater than 28G at that radius. At 1mm you're probably in a completely separate universe...as an expanding wave of hard radiation.
Do I have my math right?
mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
If the sun was compressed to a radius of around 3km it would become a black hole, so reducing it to only a few mm across is more than necessary.
I'll look into that.
Spinward Flow
SOC-14 5K
Hands up who thinks that gravity focusing inside a laser turret is going to involve compressing a solar mass into a volume of a few mm ...? 
mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
How else do you generate curved spacetime?
You can increase the mass, energy, momentum or pressure until you warp it.
There may be some negative energy solutions to general relativity that could do it 9have to go check that one), but if Traveller tech can generate negative energy then the warp drive becomes possible.
Which all leads to the conclusion that artificial gravity is not 'real' gravity at all, hence it is very contained. But then the question of other applications come up and we are back to the beginning of the discussion - round and round it goes.
You can increase the mass, energy, momentum or pressure until you warp it.
There may be some negative energy solutions to general relativity that could do it 9have to go check that one), but if Traveller tech can generate negative energy then the warp drive becomes possible.
Which all leads to the conclusion that artificial gravity is not 'real' gravity at all, hence it is very contained. But then the question of other applications come up and we are back to the beginning of the discussion - round and round it goes.
Thanks, I had my Solar Mass wrong. It is compression to within a 3 km radius for the formation of an event horizon.
But the question I am raising above has to do with the amount of gravitational deflection necessary in order to cause "focusing" of the laser. I gather the suggestion is being made that about a 30g-field in a localized several-mm radius volume would be sufficient to cause the necessary deflection (the bending of starlight around the edge of Sol at 28g being the precedent).
But the point I am making is that for an approximately solar mass object, 30g is the field-strength due to curvature at a radius of approximately 500,000 km from the center of gravitation. If you were to compress the sun to within its own Schwarzschild radius of 3km, the field (using a Classical Newtonian approximation) at just above the event horizon would be about 1.5 x 10^12 g, NOT 30g.
Given the following:
- Classical Gravitation: [ g = GM/r^2 ]
- Schwarzschild Radius: [ r = 2GM/c^2 ]
The Schwarzschild Radius of a 4.5 x 10^6 kg mass is ~ 6.67 x 10^(-21) meters, or ~ 6.67 x 10^(-18) mm. So unless my Newtonian approximations above are significantly divergent from Einsteinian reality, we should still be well above the Schwarzschild Radius. So no black hole necessary.
So the question is whether or not it is possible to artificially generate such an intense field as specified above for the split second that is contemporaneous with the laser-pulse.
ADDENDUM: But all of this is really moot for the OTU, as it is a long established presupposition of the game-universe that artificial "pseudo-gravity" is "a thing" that can produce a force that acts upon mass-energy (which will include the mass-energy of the photon) as evidenced by the effect of artificial gravity plating in spacecraft. Such fields do not require either the production or compression of any mass whatsoever *. Since artificial pseudo-gravity can produce fields up to at least 6g (or 9g if you are using T5 assumptions), then the question is simply whether or not you can briefly project a highly localized version of this field that is 3-5 times the aforementioned magnitude (perhaps from two projectors producing an overlapping "node" of enhanced magnitude similar to nuclear damper tech).
* Consider that a 1g field would normally require the mass-equivalent (i.e. "gravitational charge") of the entire Earth at about 6300 km distance from the center of gravitation to produce thru normal gravity, but pseudo-gravity can produce a similar effect over short distances without any "mass-charge" at all as a field-source.
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BackworldTraveller
SOC-13
The question I would have is how much the kit needed to generate this field will mass. If a low value (which I think it has to be to allow the ships to accelerate as they do) then what else can these light-weight "gravity" generators be used for?
Are they small enough to fit in a warhead...Gravity compressed plutonium or uranium anyone?
Just having a 30G localised field for a short period isn't necessarily going to just destroy stuff. Many materials in the body are quite happy at those sort of accelerations for short periods - try rapping you knuckles on a desk.
Coming late to the discussion, but my small contribution was grav-drone air-dropped mortars, and that BD users all have a small (probably two) grav floating sensor units that provide a safe scouting and third eye (and can deploy a low powered laser to direct fire as a remote FO).
D.
D.
I added an addendum to the post you quoted above that relates to the question you asked.
The formula for the Schwarzchild Radius is:
A short, rough (and classical) lisp program to calculate this, plugging in values for G, M(Sol) and c returns a Schwarzchild Radius for Sol at:
(/ (* 2 6.67e-11 1.989e30 2) (* 3.33564e9 3.33564e9)) = 23.846918 meters
... .
Do I have my math right?
If I am reading your syntax above correctly, you seem to be using 3.336 x 10^9 m/s for your value of lightspeed. Lightspeed is 3.0 x 10^8 m/s. I believe there is also an additional factor of 2 in your numerator.
This I think is the key takeaway. Traveller's artificial (pseudo-) gravity is NOT gravity, per se, but is some currently unknown derivative force-effect that reacts to and with mass-energy. It is therefore not even necessarily spacetime curvature, and might not even directly produce space or time dilation effects with sufficient magnitude, any more than electromagnetism or the nuclear forces do.
Condottiere
SOC-14 5K
The Dean drive was a device created and promoted by inventor Norman Lorimer Dean (1902–1972) that he claimed to be a reactionless drive.[1] Dean claimed that his device was able to generate a uni-directional force in free space, in violation of Newton's third law of motion from classical physics. His claims generated notoriety because, if true, such a device would have had enormous applications, completely changing human transport, engineering, space travel and more.[2] Dean made several controlled private demonstrations of a number of different devices; however, no working models were ever demonstrated publicly or subjected to independent analysis and Dean never presented any rigorous theoretical basis for their operation. Analysts conclude that the motion seen in Dean's device demonstrations was likely reliant on asymmetrical frictional resistance between the device and the surface on which the device was set ("stick and slip"), resulting in the device moving in one direction when in operation, driven by the vibrations of the apparatus.[3][4][5][6]
Artificial friction creating a pseudo gravitic short range field effect, unidirectional to the floor tile.
Artificial friction creating a pseudo gravitic short range field effect, unidirectional to the floor tile.
Note that what we're calling 'grav' in 'grav tech' doesn't necessarily have to be 'gravity' in the traditional/Newtonian/Einsteinian sense. It just has to behave in a fashion that looks like gravity (or contra-gravity).Hands up who thinks that gravity focusing inside a laser turret is going to involve compressing a solar mass into a volume of a few mm ...?
It really makes little sense to focus lasers with gravity anyway, when it can be done so much easier in other ways. The only time it might make sense would be for x-ray/gamma-ray lasers, and even then there are better ways (although the wave guides might be large).
Google says the Sun (1 Solar mass) is 1.989 × 10^30 kg. At 4.5 x 10^6kg you might get away with it, but (again, according to google...FWTW) that isn't a Solar mass. I hope I'm not repeating someone else's nitpick.
