Hyperspace

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discord
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Re: Hyperspace

Post by discord »

mjolnir: we already have the technology for it, since we know how a star works, different elements and the chains....don't remember what it was that you would use as accelerator in the process, but i think it was simple iron, so dump a few million tons of iron into a star and you have nova in process, that will happen in a few years or so....or maybe a few thousand years....hmm, or was it dumping a few million tons of nuclear reactor waste....whatever, something like that anyway...

and the star would become unstable and go 'boom' in rather short order, making it not viable as system to jump to.

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Ktrain
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Re: Hyperspace

Post by Ktrain »

That would a) require an already unstable star and b) a neutron star (which is not a star) c) a star fusing Oxygen (I think the Sun might stop at carbon but don't quote me on this) and a BUNCH OF MASS. Maybe a planetload, which Arioch state was beyond the logistical capacities of the current war participants (though it would be cool to see one of them go BOOYA and if Earth could do it, that might be a double BOOYA).

Element and Burn duration in years.
H- 8.1 million
He- 1.2 million
C -976
Ne -0.6
O -1.25
S/Si-0.0315[146]
From das Wikipedia
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Mjolnir
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Re: Hyperspace

Post by Mjolnir »

discord wrote:mjolnir: we already have the technology for it, since we know how a star works, different elements and the chains....don't remember what it was that you would use as accelerator in the process, but i think it was simple iron, so dump a few million tons of iron into a star and you have nova in process, that will happen in a few years or so....or maybe a few thousand years....hmm, or was it dumping a few million tons of nuclear reactor waste....whatever, something like that anyway...

and the star would become unstable and go 'boom' in rather short order, making it not viable as system to jump to.
A star's just not going to notice a few million tons of anything. Adding a million tons of iron, carbon, or anything else would add 0.5 parts per 10e21 to the sun...0.5 parts per sextillion. And given that large stars accumulate cores composed largely of iron, it's clearly not something that's going to make a star explode.

Stars a bit larger than the sun already use a catalytic reaction to convert hydrogen to helium (the CNO cycle), those less than ~1.3 solar masses are too small for anything but proton-proton fusion. Deterium would be quickly burned up, briefly increasing the local rate of fusion in a tiny part of the star, but no practical amount would have any effect on the star as a whole...our own sun is already converting 4.26 million tonnes of mass to energy per second, and has plenty more mass to absorb a brief increase. Even a few million tonnes of antimatter are unlikely to really destabilize a star. Stars are big.

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Razor One
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Re: Hyperspace

Post by Razor One »

The only way you're going to truly destabilise a star in any significant fashion would be to throw the following at them:

A: A stellar black hole.

No, not the tiny one's that you could artificially produce. A black hole. A fully fledged black hole. One that has significant mass, say roughly 3 - 4 times the mass of the sun.

That is not an insignificant figure.

B: Another star.

And no guarantee that it'll make the star go boom either. They'll likely just merge, pump out more energy and destabilise the planetary system.

The only way you can do this is if you can find a way to fling black holes and stars through hyperspace. That alone would be a technological and logistical wonder of godlike proportions.

What we have now and presumably in the Outsider 'verse is the knowledge of how stars work. Knowing how something works and having the capability of breaking it in any significant fashion are two vastly different things. It's like trying to break an aircraft carrier with a brick and a brick alone.

The only workable way I can imagine that would be easier, in comparison, would be to upscale a gravity generator to stellar-mass proportions, reverse the field, then fling it into the heart of the star. The few seconds before it melts and explodes from the temperature and pressure should be all it needs to negate the gravitational binding energy of the star and cause its own internal pressure to blow it apart.

And again, this requires a technological and logistical capability that would be beyond godlike.

Stars are tough stuff. They tend to last for billions of years on average depending on the type of star. The only thing blowing them up is themselves once they run out of fuel. They're their own best friend and their own mortal enemy at the same time. Planets are significant only to the tiny infinitesimal life forms that dwell on them.
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Aygar
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Re: Hyperspace

Post by Aygar »

osmium wrote:
Arioch wrote:Since all the nearby mass is in realspace, and apparently none of it (except the crazy people in their starships) in hyperspace, there is always going to be net gravitational pull in the direction of -hyperspace toward realspace.
So what if you're in -hyperspace does gravity pull you back to realspace in that direction too?
IMO, yes
osmium wrote:(this to me seems to be the more "logical" setup, but it doesn't lead to the more interesting you miss the jump and you're stuck in hyperspace effect; this (gravity pulling back to realspace) means that eventually all ships in hyperspace will eventually come back in, except in the case that they somehow pass the edge of the universe before passing be enough mass to be pulled back into realspace or somehow falling into a stable oscillating equilibrium whereby they simply increase amplitude...).
In my theory the strength of the gravitational field is attenuated with hyperspace distance. So if you are in hyperspace over a realspace location with 0 strength gravity field there will be no net force attempting to pull you towards the ground brane. So it is possible to achieve a hyperspace velocity vector component that is greater then the hyperspace escape velocity of the ships forward hyperspace path. In which case (if the universe is topologically flat) the transiting mass will never return to realspace. Through extraordinary bad luck you could put your self in an orbit around a gravity well with a stably oscillating hyperspace velocity component, or you could perform a gravitational slingshot.

For clarification, In my mind the 'real space time' does not pass for the transiting mass. Some other time does pass but all realspace events are constrained by 'realspace time'. So to the crew of a ship, you jump and then immediately emerge, if the transiting mass never returns to realspace then the crew experiences no additional time. (Basically, if you are stuck in hyperspace you will never know it.) My guess is that most bad jumps end up in one of the super-massive black holes at the center of most galaxies. Either way none of the possibilities are interesting to a plot.

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dex drako
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Re: Hyperspace

Post by dex drako »

Mjolnir wrote:And given that large stars accumulate cores composed largely of iron, it's clearly not something that's going to make a star explode.
where did you get this fact?

as I understand it no sun has a core composed of iron at least for more then short period before it goes super nova (reads hours to days). iron is the last element made in a star (all other heavier element are formed in the resulting nova) because iron absorbs energy when fused stopping the suns fusion and alowing gravity to crush the star in on itself.

I agree no reasonable amount iron thrown into a sun would do much, a star is 99% of all matter in a solar system after all. you would have to rip about countless systems just to take out one sun. but I never read or seen anything that says a stars core is made of iron.

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Mjolnir
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Re: Hyperspace

Post by Mjolnir »

dex drako wrote:as I understand it no sun has a core composed of iron at least for more then short period before it goes super nova (reads hours to days). iron is the last element made in a star (all other heavier element are formed in the resulting nova) because iron absorbs energy when fused stopping the suns fusion and alowing gravity to crush the star in on itself.
Alright, they don't accumulate actual cores of iron until they start burning silicon, and it's only a matter of days until the end at that point...due to exhaustion of fuels that produce net energy when fused, though, not the presence of iron. I don't think iron-producing processes are absent before that point, and the amounts of iron produced would almost certainly be greater than anything you could import...but even if I'm wrong about that, any star with planets around it would almost certainly have accreted many times the amount of iron that formed into solid objects outside the star. Same goes for everything else you could throw at it. (with the technical exception of antimatter, but the quantities required to make a star take notice are still ridiculous).

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Arioch
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Re: Hyperspace

Post by Arioch »

icekatze wrote:I suppose you could use "probe golf" to try to attack someone through FTL, if you knew they were about to jump into your system, you could launch a ton of unmanned kamikaze probes into the jump corridor. Though that would probably require a level of precision that nobody has at the moment.

I don't see how this would be any more effective than flooding an inbound jump zone with debris. The odds of collisions are very low even in realspace, and in hyperspace the transiting ship is only there for a fraction of a second.
icekatze wrote:Hold on a second... If someone took a star into hyperspace, it could pull objects in realspace into hyperspace with it? (theoretical energy requirements aside)
A mass in hyperspace should gravitationally affect ojects in realspace, but only along the plane of real space-time; the mass would exert a +hyperspace pull on a realspace object, but it's not clear that this would immediately draw the object into hyperspace. I don't think objects pop out of realspace that easily (or it would probably happen more often). So there is probably some kind of inertia inherent in the boundary between realspace and hyperspace, which jibes with the mechanics of hyperspace jumps as we know it: the successful entry into hyperspace requires a lot of energy and imparts a significant initial +hyperspace momentum. If the hyperspace mass was large enough and close enough, it might exert a strong enough pull to break this inertia.

Even if you had enough energy to cover a star in a mass-appropriate jump field (and the instrumentality to generate it) I'm not sure how you'd arrange the proper spactime gravity gradient needed to ski-jump the star into hyperspace. It would probably have to be near an even larger star.
discord wrote:a curious thought though... could you make a hyper jump that WILL drop out inside the target sun? not just that it can, but WILL, since that could create a rather nasty weapon of stellar destruction.

It's not hard to fly something into a star, but I don't believe the major combatants possess anything to significantly affect a star (on any kind of meaningful time scale). It takes a LOT more than a few million tons of iron to shut down a star, and it wouldn't cause the star to explode (unless it was already supernova-sized). But even if you had some magic trigger to stop fusion in the core of a star, remember that it takes millions of years for the energy produced in the core of a star like our Sun to migrate to the surface; I'm not sure anyone on the outside would even notice something had been done for a very long time. And finally, again here we're talking about exotic ways to kill civilian populations in systems that your superweapons have no access to.
Riess wrote:So, sorry if I missed that but does the area below the realspace 'plane' have a name? Besides "unending terror", that is?
Subspace?
I suppose it could be called "negative hyperspace" (or perhaps "antihyperspace"). "Subspace" might do, but it's more or less a synonym for hyperspace, and in SF literature is pretty firmly associated with FTL communications.

Although I must admit I do like "unending terror."
osmium wrote:So what if you're in -hyperspace does gravity pull you back to realspace in that direction too?
It seems logical to infer that gravity still affects objects in negative hyperspace, but it's not clear that this effect would be the same as in positive hyperspace... there must be something different about the two, as breaking the boundaries of realspace always propels you into positive hyperspace, and never negative hyperspace. For all we know, gravity acts like "dark energy" in negative hyperspace, pushing you farther away from realspace (that's a "forinstance", not an actual theory).

I think it's true that most hyperspace misses will eventually lead to the transiting object eventually embedding itself back into realspace at the center of a star somewhere. But, for story purposes at least, it's like asking what happens to you inside a black hole's event horizon: it really doesn't matter, because no one in the rest of the universe will ever find out.

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Re: Hyperspace

Post by Karst45 »

discord wrote:majincarne: assuming a casing for the C4 to shield it from the explosion, should work just fine, add a detonator and you have a small explosive round....but why not do it properly and use a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M32_MGL
Frag-12a fin stabilized HE shotgun shell
discord wrote:a curious thought though... could you make a hyper jump that WILL drop out inside the target sun? not just that it can, but WILL, since that could create a rather nasty weapon of stellar destruction.
Well that what i implied with the "nova bomb"
Razor One wrote: The only way you can do this is if you can find a way to fling black holes and stars through hyperspace. That alone would be a technological and logistical wonder of godlike proportions.
but they did it in stargate! ;)


all that conversation about black hole kind of triggered my curiosity. Could you send a mission with the component to create a strong enough Gravity field for a ship to make a short jump outside a system. Like beacon for an alternate path/secret sector?

You could use that to make a safe jump to a sector farther than 10LY by traveling with a ship in normal space until you reach a distance at which your artificial gravity field could still be useful then repeat until you have build your relay bridge.

[sun]---------------15LY---------------[Sun]
|------|------|------|------|------|
3ly 3ly 3ly 3ly 3ly

That could be used to have a secret path toward enemy line and/or an "safe zone" in case the enemy overwhelm you

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Trantor
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Re: Hyperspace

Post by Trantor »

Arioch wrote:
discord wrote:a curious thought though... could you make a hyper jump that WILL drop out inside the target sun? not just that it can, but WILL, since that could create a rather nasty weapon of stellar destruction.

It's not hard to fly something into a star, but I don't believe the major combatants possess anything to significantly affect a star (on any kind of meaningful time scale). It takes a LOT more than a few million tons of iron to shut down a star, and it wouldn't cause the star to explode (unless it was already supernova-sized).
And, as i understand it, you exit hyperspace with a remarkable amount of speed. Inside a star or a gas giant his would inflict the same damage like crashing into something on a realspace vector. I doubt you can make any doomsdaymachine that accident-proof.
sapere aude.

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Mjolnir
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Re: Hyperspace

Post by Mjolnir »

Trantor wrote:And, as i understand it, you exit hyperspace with a remarkable amount of speed. Inside a star or a gas giant his would inflict the same damage like crashing into something on a realspace vector. I doubt you can make any doomsdaymachine that accident-proof.
Forget about accidents, you're talking about intentionally popping out into an environment that's likely less survivable than a continuous Wave Loom barrage.

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Trantor
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Re: Hyperspace

Post by Trantor »

Mjolnir wrote:
Trantor wrote:And, as i understand it, you exit hyperspace with a remarkable amount of speed. Inside a star or a gas giant his would inflict the same damage like crashing into something on a realspace vector. I doubt you can make any doomsdaymachine that accident-proof.
Forget about accidents, you're talking about intentionally popping out into an environment that's likely less survivable than a continuous Wave Loom barrage.
That´s what i meant: Directly crashing into dense (and hot and irradiated and what the heck else...) matter.
sapere aude.

Voitan
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Re: Hyperspace

Post by Voitan »

dfacto wrote:I'm telling ya: warp torpedoes.

A nuke isn't going to take care of those pesky ultraheavies in one shot, so just boot them into hyperspace and make your troubles disappear.
I finally see what you mean here.

Hit a target with a "torpedo" that envelops it in a jump field, and set it to purposely go into either deep space (thus stranded potentially forever) or the inside of a star.

The next question comes, do you need enough energy to jump both objects? Or is a lack of energy good enough to cause a catastrophe similar to a or exactly like bad jump, like going into a star, or being stranded in space?

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Re: Hyperspace

Post by icekatze »

hi hi

Since the hyperspace generator opens up a rift in space time, I wonder if someone could use that as a defense mechanism. If you are invading a system, you could open up a rift in-between you and the opposing fleet, but rather than fly through it, you let their beam and torpedo attacks go through it instead.

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Mjolnir
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Re: Hyperspace

Post by Mjolnir »

icekatze wrote:Since the hyperspace generator opens up a rift in space time, I wonder if someone could use that as a defense mechanism. If you are invading a system, you could open up a rift in-between you and the opposing fleet, but rather than fly through it, you let their beam and torpedo attacks go through it instead.
I think it specifically doesn't open up a "rift" that objects then pass through, but instead forces the ship along a direction that matter is not normally free to move in, into hyperspace. Doing this to incoming fire is an interesting idea, but I suspect it would be easier to deflect it in a normal-space direction. Unless shot traps are a particular issue...

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Arioch
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Re: Hyperspace

Post by Arioch »

A "warp torpedo" must get essentially to within point-blank range of its target to be able to envelop it within a jump field. And let's remember that a starship (which has much greater power generation than a torpedo) requires several minutes to generate a jump field powerful enough to warp itself. So the enemy would have to let this warp torpedo approach, latch on, and charge for at least several minutes while doing nothing about it.

Given that much cheaper conventional torpedoes, which are pretty much a one-shot-one-kill weapon, rarely survive to engagement range and do direct damage, does this warp torpedo really sound like a practical weapon?

elizibar
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Re: Hyperspace

Post by elizibar »

Too bad we can't do something like stick a warp generator inside of a gas giant and accurately stream the hydrogen and helium to a place of our choosing. It would probably take more energy than the fusing of those materials would release to do that. :(

Still, that'd make an amusing weapon. Smuggle a warp generator into a 'safe' planet's ocean and spray the water out into space, resulting in an environmental catastrophe. (Or strip most of a planet's atmosphere.)

If you can't drop an asteroid on a planet, it'd be the next best (and infinitely more expensive) thing.

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Re: Hyperspace

Post by fredgiblet »

Arioch wrote:Although I must admit I do like "unending terror."
Then speak it into existence and it will forever be canon.

osmium
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Re: Hyperspace

Post by osmium »

I forget back from the old space tug conversation, can you use one ship to throw another into hyperspace without needing to actually follow?

I could see some interesting usage of such an effect.

1) you could have a torpedo platform one system away and if you're accurate enough you could sling torpedoes into the system. You would already have to warp the torpedoes into the system on a ship, so unless there is some weird efficiency thing whereby it's better to get your mass all in one big package I think it looks like this would generally be more efficient, provided of course you could get the torpedoes close enough/ accurately enough to the engagement area. You would have to have some sort of railgun/jump engine device to send back small probes with the coordinates...

2)Truthfully though, it seems like this sort of capability would significantly dent the whole transmission speed through systems problem as it would mean it would only take the time it takes to charge a railgun/jumpdrive/comm-probe to launch it into the next system at which point probe passes along the message to the next "horse" which launches another into the next system. Of course such a system would be complex and easily attacked so for systems that might actually see combat they should rely on ships rather than "fixed" installations that need to be protected.

So back to 1) a bit. You could sling torpedoes into the system and try to do things like "launch" torpedoes from all directions (by trying to "hit" your fleet with said torpedoes the error in arrival should put said torpedoes all over between the Loroi fleet, Umiak fleet behind,above,below,left and right of said positions.) Now if the error is too great to hit an area that encompasses the region that would take 2 minutes for a torpedo to accelerate into said combat (i.e. the longish edge of torpedo range). Occasionally you'd get lucky and some would land like right in the middle of the Loroi fleet, even if said torpedoes were shot down fast they would likely cause some problems with targeting and sensors providing much the same effect as cover fire (rather than the same effect as peasant infantry did (read fodder) in medieval combat that a volley of torpedoes coming from the fleet would provide). You might even save energy and would certainly save money on the torpedo craft by not requiring said craft to be capable of performing combat maneuvers nor being capable of actual combat, as it would essentially be artillery, but sorta more like paratroopers.

3) you *might* be able to use very large craft (like the supersuper heavies) to "throw" disabled ships back a system to waiting support craft that can scavenge them.

Obviously any non-combat craft that came with the mainfleet would stay back and jump after given the all clear into the same system as the combat craft they were convoying with (to limit the probability of the Loroi jumping into the system with the soft targets, although they would still be somewhat vulnerable in an ambush while both parts of the fleet were in the same system).

4)You could use the comm-probe catapult to send information to other systems, in defensive situations without a farseer you could call for reinforcements, or warn of attack and get relatively quick responses. Even if you can't "throw" stuff without a jump drive of it's own, in this case it wouldn't matter, you could just have a jump drive / big capacitor to power it for a single jump and accelerate it on a rail / coil gun and throw the whole pseudo ship into a system you control (where it can be retrieved). The use of being able to call for reinforcements and have them arrive basically the moment trouble starts means they could possibly send reinforcements before the battle ended.
Of course this doesn't get rid of the feint where you then attack the system the reinforcements would come from, but still having the capability might be nice... Especially if you were the Orgus or something, they attack you first relatively undefended system and within like say an hour (the time it takes to actually start to attack said first system) all of your systems have been warned and people can flee.


-O

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Mjolnir
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Re: Hyperspace

Post by Mjolnir »

Arioch wrote:A "warp torpedo" must get essentially to within point-blank range of its target to be able to envelop it within a jump field. And let's remember that a starship (which has much greater power generation than a torpedo) requires several minutes to generate a jump field powerful enough to warp itself. So the enemy would have to let this warp torpedo approach, latch on, and charge for at least several minutes while doing nothing about it.
Since the ship doesn't have to survive in this case, how hard would it be to just take a chunk out of it? A special weapon intended for use in capturing (most of) an already-damaged ship, removing its fuel stores to prevent scuttling...

Or perhaps not an anti-ship weapon, but a tactical weapon for use against ground targets in areas where just blowing the target up would cause too much damage...the expense might actually be worthwhile in that case.

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