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.