The Associated Worlds - technicalities

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For digging deep into minutiae.

First

05:03

Ha

Second or third depending on whether you go by user or message!

[STATEMENT OF ENTROPY CONTENT OF WASTE FLUID]

So, have charged particle pushed magsail been considered in Eldraeverse as some kind of weapon system? One that can achieve several percent of cee and be constructed essentially out of a bunch of fusion shaped charges lying in a track. And we've reached staggering five messages on here.

Eight Now

NTS talk should have happened here

@Enderminion Seven, nine.

Ten! And you should talk about your Casaba-driven Magsail Kinetic-Kill shots here, @Kerr. they sound like great AKV weapons.

Alright. The concept on itself is relatively simple, a casaba howitzer or similiar nuclear shaped charge would emit charged particles in form of a high velocity plasma. A magnetic sail or a magnetic mirror would deflect the incomming particles by 180°. If the sail has a similiar mass to the plasma it will reach a final velocity similiar to the plasma beam in the first place.

A 1 MT casaba howitzer massing 1000 kg and emitting a x thousand km/s plasma beam with an efficiency of 5%. When taking Matterbeams futuristic megaton lance estimate we have a 20.92 kg plasma beam travelling at 10,000 km/s from an device massing maybe 400-500 kg. By placing a magnetic sail massing about 20 kg in front of the shaped charge it will be accelerated. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elastic_collision gives us an formula to estimate the final velocity it will reach from an elastic collision. v = 0m/s ( 20 kg - 20.92 kg) + 2* 20.92 kg* 1e7 m/s / 20.92kg + 20 kg. = 10,220 km/s. Because the beam only moves at 10,000 km/s and is a collection of particles it will cut off at 10,000 km/s.

Elastic collision

An elastic collision is an encounter between two bodies in which the total kinetic energy of the two bodies after the encounter is equal to their total kinetic energy before the encounter. Perfectly elastic collisions occur only if there is no net conversion of kinetic energ...

12:42

The efficiency of converting the beam energy into kinetic energy is about 95.6% here. (divide the sail mass by the plasma mass when the velocity is the same). The shaped charge unit had a yield of 1,000 kT and now we have to a high velocity projectile with no dispersion and a kinetic yield of 191.2 kT. In this case the sail works as a range extension and also helps with maximizing the crater depth. ' (edited)

12:45

The second tier of this concept, that I've came up with yesterday morning, uses DHe3 fusion instead. Some months ago I've done some research and calculated the velocities of each fusion product for several fusion reactions, in order to estimate their isp. DHe3 creates two products: a helium ion/ alpha particle and a free proton. Because momemtum is conserved we have a proton with 50% of the momentum and of the 80% kinetic energy of the reaction flying away at staggering 19.8% c. ' (edited)

12:51

To further increase the effectiveness of the sail concept, I've increased the amount of terminal projectiles you have. I added submunitions. For this reason I needed to extend the acceleration distance dramatically and use a relatively large sail to minimize the required relative mass of the superconducting ring. A track made out of DHe3 shaped charges is placed along a path, placed there by either some missile or some smaller ship nearby. When activated the deuterium and helium-3 ions fuse and produce the necessary protons, those are "filtered" out and focused into a relatively short range plasma beam. Each unit accelerates the sail until it has reached its final velocity of 0.2c. The amount of required fusion fuel to accelerate a 10 ton sail to 0.2c is atleast 50 tons of DHe3, fused completly and with the protons efficiently extracted and focused. But even with a total efficiency of 10% for both fusion and extraction we are talking about using 500 tons of DHe3 to create a 4.3 GT projectile, which is moving at a fifth of the speed of light. (edited)

12:57

The track would be only necessary if you worry about acceleration gradients and forces destroying your smart payload. You could probably do a lot better with antimatter velocity wise, even use the exhaust of your ships to accelerate those sails but it will get rather challenging with time.

13:02

Yeah no, antimatter shouldn't be really useful at this. If you were somehow able to create near perfect gamma-ray mirrors however, then we might start speculating on using antimatter driven projectiles with near perfect mass-energy to kinetic conversion efficiency.

So. Any physicsy folks out there can talk about what happens to a Kerr-Newman black hole in the limit when you keep pumping more momentum into it?

(When it hits the spin limit, that is.)

Oi @Kerr Late night physics shift for you!

@Unknown And I thought I could peacefully get done with my altered carbon list. But when it comes to Kerr-Newmann blackholes..

15:23

@Overmind If you mean the spin limit I think you mean, then it's relatively simple. Because that spin limit is defined by what would happen next.

The one where the event horizon suddenly develops an imaginary radius, I'm thinking of.

Well, a kerr black hole has really two event horizons.

Ah, yeah, the second one that defines the ergosphere.

The cauchy horizon and the event horizon, the faster they spin the closer they get. Beyond the spin limit the singularity will be exposed.

wait, I thought the twin horizon thing was for charged holes?

The charged ones can apparently go über-weird.

That far I got.

What I'm wondering is what we know about the consequences of attempts to push one beyond that limit. Most sources I've dug up just go with "naked singularities can't happen, so this is impossible; the laws of physics won't let it spin any faster", but it's the detail of how that works out in practice I'm curious about. (edited)

Well, for one there is that fact that you could observe an infinitely dense material.

15:32

And I am not sure if it's "caused" by the event horizon or the spacetime curvature. But inside a black hole space and time switch places.

I just realized that I hadn't thought about what the gravity would be for a naked singularity

intense

Context: one of the convenient uses for non-local momentum transfer, if you have such a thing and a very large momentum sink, is as tremendously effective armor ("singularity-locking"). In the 'verse, that's what makes stargates very, very hard to kill; your weapon touches it and stops dead in its reference frame, and the gate kernel spins a little bit faster.

1

sure from a distance you get standard stuff, but close up...... I think we are in territory where normal black holes are "simple"

15:35

and no event horizon....... escape velocity is...... what?

So what I'm looking to figure out is what happens when you throw a small moon at it, or otherwise manage to push the system beyond the limit with a giant infusion of momentum.

1

I mean, general relativitiy doesn't seem to say much about a naked singulraity on itself.

15:35

Just more intense.

15:36

Things bet messy as soon you consider quantum mechanics, quantum field theory and semiclassical gravity.

@Overmind I think we are in the realm of "The universe gives you an error message in the form of large amounts of inconveinient energy"

"An problem has occoured" "Man, I should have installed that damn quantum gravity driver."

Well, I figured there'd be a strong likelihood of a failure mode along the lines of "the kernel liberates all of its mass-energy in one go; kiss your star system goodbye and warn the neighbors". :D But, y'know, if there are more interesting options around, I'd like to have 'em to play with.

1

Failure modes for stargates/wormholes or? (edited)

Well, of kernels/Kerr-Newman holes used in this way in general. That's just the major application of them that got me to the question-asking point.

What's the function of these kernels?

Twofold: one is being a massive momentum-sink and energy store, and the other is - since they're made in entangled pairs - to use the postulated relationship between entanglement and quantum-foam-level wormholes to let the gate connect reliably to its twin.

1

Huh?

15:46

So you create them as Quantum black holes and feed them? Or do they interact ?

15:46

Option 1 seems like the simpler one.

The Susskind-Maldacena hypothesis, that is. ( https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/wormholes-quantum-entanglement-link/ , since I don't have the original paper any more.) It fits well with the underlying 'verse assumption that the correct QM interpretation is NLHV.

Physicists Find a Link between Wormholes and Spooky Action at a Di...

The new theory connects quantum entanglement with Einstein’s general relativity

1

Sounds like ER=EPR?

Basically @Kerr a gate kernel is an entangled black hole the stargate draws a T-variable wormhole from to shunt one volume of space-time with a spaceship in it to its pair, without a need for a continous wormhole connection.

1

15:51

Thus allowing a wormhole web because each stargate transfer is T-flexible.

1

Sure, you just make it temporarily traversable then.

@Kerr Yeah, it is. (I try not to get too specific about the engineering details, but the weylforge handwavium is loosely described as involving a couple of small-moon-mass Bose-Einstein condensates undergoing a controlled implosion. At this point, space magic happens.)

(ER=EPR is used in my work Apeiron Terminus for modern wormhole engineering and their spin of a sci-fi quantum entanglement comm.)

As said, you just create a pair of quantum black and inflate them. You could in theory also use existing ones.

So the short and inaccurate version: the entanglement creates the wormholes from A to A'; the gate just inflates/deflates them on demand when transit is required.

The interactions with the gravitational force should also be capable of entangling two black holes.

15:55

I thought you had entangled black holes A and B, and for use the mouth are made traversable and are inflated by the gate.

Doing some Physics Idiot™ reading, apparently the best failure mode for a Kerr-Newman hole reaching spin limit is it going kraboom spectacularly.

15:56

Or at least, radiating enough energy so that it is below the spin limit again, rather.

Probably just CCS.

15:56

Above the spin rate the singulraity is naked and cosmic censorships comes to your help.

As a side note: they do have what we would probably call regular wormhole tech. (Had that first, in fact; I figure it's easier to get to.) It's just that given how difficult it is to get anything but a single-rooted tree that channels all long-distance traffic right past your capital, Ring Dynamics noped right out of the thought of using that for interstellar transit until every other possibility had been explored.

1

Then a lady linked up with an ASI and cooked up some Mad Science that lead to them engineering supermassive QEC collapsators for fun. And profit. (edited)

15:58

And general awesomeness along the lines of "we‘d like to ship something moon-massed to 13 star systems nearby."

Dynamic wormholes are still complicated.

That reminds me @Overmind did they manufacture the Kernels outside their home system from the start?

So we're gonna need some real big fusion drives.

Eh. Light sail!

15:59

Light sails all the way!

The configuration shouldn't allow a CTC by any mean.

Just way out in the Oort. Where there are now some notable holes.

Prefix - laser (edited)

Ah, I was just wondering about the power infrastructure given that the Eldrae home systems Whose Name I Don‘t Recall IIRC doesn‘t have a Dyson swarm.

Yeah, I have some notes on how deeply entwined the time-synchronization system is with the stargate control systems, to prevent any accidental forming of CCLs.

Yeah.

Plus that T-flexibility that leds conflicts slide past each other, apparently.

16:02

Though, how does the reference frame trap gizmo work?

Not sure if my brain is already in total shutdown mode for sleep, but I am thinking of potential delays between gate openings.

(Aboard a spacecraft using a stargate)

Well, there ain't no rule that says you couldn't accidentally form a CCL due to drift if you just went around opening wormholes randomly. Hence the need for sync.

Closed causality loop?

Yep.

Eh, should still be problematic.

16:04

I mean, any CMB photon will get infinitely amplified by any closed causal loop.

16:05

Which is the most physicial CPC argument.

@Unknown Very well, thank you.

That message popping up on your blue box (i.e., the widget that talks to the gate) just means that the gate's got a lock on a wormhole that will get you your destination at the right t, in the empire-time reference frame. (Fiddling with that step - skew-framing - is what lets you try to do Stupid Time Travel Tricks, which might even not kill you. Omitting that step... well, that'll kill you pretty definitely. Urban legends about starships which screwed this up and met dinosaurs/were eaten by the Cold Ones/fell right out of the universe/made bank on next year's stock prices aside.) (edited)

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16:09

@Kerr Definitely problematic. Ring Dynamics is all kinds of paranoid about the potential for a CCL appearing in their network and blowing up all kinds of stuff.

Wasn't there something about causal loops being allowed?

16:10

Even students doing that as part of some trip, IIRC.

Sorry, my misspoke. There's nothing that would prevent you from forming one; it's just that the consequences would be catastrophic for the system.

Pretty sure the trick about doing local causality violations in the Eldraeverse is avoiding a causality warfare dogpile.

16:11

You need to be the first on the draw and hope not too many other people shoot or the universe will throw a ThatsEnough.reset and smack all parties concerned silly.

Well, leaving aside for a moment the particular case of wormholes forming CCLs, the causality rules for the 'verse are that you can't ever violate global causality. You can, however, violate local causality and get away with it. Which mostly means that you're allowed predestination paradoxes, but not grandfather paradoxes. Or that while every cause has an effect and vice versa, they don't necessarily have to be in that order from any particular observer's viewpoint (which is already the case in standard relativity).

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16:17

And you can't change the past: it's already happened, and if you were there, you were there, and will be there along your personal timeline, but you are guaranteed to do whatever it was you already did. (As the enforcement mechanism for this, I invoke the mechanism proposed by.... shit, someone who's name I can't remember right now, but they proposed destructive interference of wavefunctions as the enforcer of consistency protection. Basically, anything that would create an inconsistency gets a forced probability of zero.)

1

Hmmm. That mechanism is primarily responsible for Zero Engages and causality protection in AT.

16:19

Hence the term "Zero Engage“. It‘s actually shortened from "Zero Probability (Warp Propulsion) Engage Attempt" (edited)

It's going to be responsible for the equivalent of a Zero Engage when people in the 'verse get around to inventing the frameslip drive in about another 700 years.

It‘s also sort of how they can see causality conflict coming - if you check carefully, you can see a Zero Engage waveform probability collapse coming. That‘s what usualy allows a drive to safe-fail into an abort state. (edited)

16:21

If the safe-fail fails, then... well, the rules only state that the probability of interference is zero. How that happens is a variable.

@Unknown Variations on which theme is how the 'verse got the probability kiln and UNMOVED MONAD.

Maybe you blow up. Maybe you get swallowed whole into a black hole collapse. Maybe you shoot off into a parallel universe. Maybe you just get burped out 500 years later.

Predestination paradox is still problematic.

16:24

If one photon can get back itself to stimulate emission we now got two photons, then tree and so forth. Instantly from our perpsective.

Given that AT is an RPG, of course, a good warp drive failover makes for nice fish out of waters experiences if the campaign director so desires.

I assume wormholes in this setting also conserve mass? Getting lighter when object leave it.

In theory, you can even stage "time travel" with a bad drive engage (though it‘s a parallel universe given ATs strict chronological protection laws.)

Yep. Although from the point of view of the stargate user, the gate's designed to compensate for those fiddly details, so it's only the people using "conventional" wormholes who have to worry about it personally.

Would be interesting krasnikov tubes sometime in a setting.

Regarding predestination paradoxes: yeah, that's why you can't set up one using a loop of wormholes, or other continuously connected method; you get the whole virtual particle loop with the endlessly redoubling intensity and catastrophic collapse somewhere along the line.

1

Not sure how non continous methods help? You need sync all up so this can't ever happen.

16:30

As soon as anything can double exponentially, it will.

With a discontinuous path, you don't get the automatic catastrophic collapse from looping virtual particles. It's still possible to induce one if you put something in a position to double exponentially, etc., but since that creates an inconsistency, consistency protection censors that out for you and leaves behind only the worldlines where you didn't do that.

1

So, just on the off-chance we have some around, I repost — Any physical chemists around feel like speculating on the properties of partially muonated atoms? Specifically, if you take, say, a lead nucleus, drop enough muons onto it that the electrons needed to make up the remaining charge should give it the chemical properties of iron - how does the presence of the muons affect the electron orbitals, and how does the resulting material differ in physical properties? My physics ain’t quite up to this one, sad to say.

18:17

(And then there’s the really fascinating question of whether you could, hypothetically, load up an Hg nucleus with 40 muons and 40 electrons, and have it form bonds with both muonic and electronic matter as if it were Zr, using it as a form of exotic matter solder. But that’s for next week.)

as in muons replacing protons, or electrons?

18:23

I'm more organic than phy chem, tbh. My first instinct is that the muons would end up shielding the electrons in such a way that they'd be attached by a hope and a prayer, and you'd end up with something prefering unnaturally high transition states or possibly acting a touch like an eisens-boson condensate

Replacing electrons.

18:27

- argh, and now I have dinner. Back in a bit.

Uuuuuh hmmmm. Hmmmm. 'Dis a tricky one. I could ask one of my physical chemistry professors, but a.) I have to look at which of those to ask and b.) that‘ll be a bit of a longer-term process. And obviously c.) no garuantee you‘ll get an answer, nessecarily.

23:09

Generally however, there‘s one simple rule - only Valenz electron orbitals matter for chemical properties, and any orbitals below that are filled, thus energetically stable, and unable to form molecule orbitals. That rule should AFAIK principally uphold no matter your muon-to-electron ratio.

Yeah. It makes the chemical properties weird, since Pauli exclusion gives it basically two different sets of orbitals, as I understand it. So you end up with elements that behave chemically like the element with a matching number of electrons, not counting the muons.

Well basically, there‘s a bunch of different rules.

23:13

The number of electron orbitals possible is first of all just defined by electro-dynamics. Negative orbit charges to positice core charges.

So you make half-muonic iron, it acts like aluminum, with aluminum's shells and valence electrons -- or so i'm told.

After that you get the electron orbitals, 1s, 2s, 2p, 3s, 3p, 4s....

23:15

Those are defined by a main quantum number that basically describes the electrons frequency around the core; a higher frequency means a higher energy state.

Which is pretty cool on its own, but having all that charge buried down there in the (much closer but parallel) muon orbitals seems to me unlikely to leave the energy states of the electron orbitals unaffected. At which point my knowledge of chemistry/physics runs into a wall.

Then there‘s two quantum numbers that decsribe orbital geometry, lastly there‘s a spin state - one spin and one anti-spin may share the same orbital.

23:18

Anyway, to cometh to the point- orbitals get energetically stable as they fill up. Only the outermost shell is involced in any chemical reactions. That‘s the valenz electron orbitals. I.e. 2s, 2p, for the second period. The orbitals below don‘t matter.

23:19

So even assuming you do muonate below-valenz, it won‘t do much. The orbitals are energetically stable and won‘t be involved.

Can muons and electrons interact in parallel, or do only the outer of the two do interactions at any given time?

Now, about the muons in the valenz electron shell. The biggest problem I see is that VSEPR doesn‘t work out, and that electron orbitals and muon orbitals will not interact properly - due to a muons higher De-Brogile-frequency, its electron orbital will be shrunk compared to the electron orbitals.

I think having muons in the inner shells will super-shield the outer ones

If the answer comes back that the muon orbitals have basically no effect on the electron orbitals other than screening the relevant amount of the charge on the nucleus, I'd be happy with that answer. I just want to know, belike.

That suggests electron orbitals have bond priority and an uggly tendency to "squeeze" muon orbitals out of the way.

It'd be more behaving like first row elements

A muon orbital just can‘t have that large of an envelope. That‘s the point. But it also means that in the Valenz Shell Electron Pair Repulsion theory, they‘ll have a problem being... well, established.

23:23

Smaller orbital means all other orbitals will come closer.

When it comes to muon matter, it's a decent approximation to treat it as denser electron matter when interacting with itself, but hybrid matter... gets weird. When I ran the first part past a physicist, the understanding I came away with is that in pure muon matter, the orbitals are very similar, just much closer in. Muonic helium has what looks like a tiny 1s orbital with the muons in it.

Yep, that‘s the basics, really.

From that same conversation, my understanding - which is looser because I wasn't really thinking about hybrid matter at the time - was that if you take a helium nucleus and award it one muon and one electron, you have the tiny 1s with the muon in it, something more like a regular 1s with the electron in it, and an atom that acts kinda like hydrogen when interacting with regular matter.

23:28

With the caveat that this ignores interactions between the muon and the electron.

The other problem is: We have an electron and a muon sharing the same orbital.

23:29

That does... awkward stuff to the 1s orbital geometry.

23:30

Also, a chemical bond across the electrons and muons both may be unstable.

23:30

You‘d definitely accumulate superflous electric charge if your description is what happens, because you‘d get two molecular orbitals with one electron pair each.

Well, they were suggesting that given the differences in mass and Pauli exclusion, you'd have, essentially, two distinct 1s orbitals - call 'em 1sm and 1se.

That would be quite the polarized molecule.

Wait, what? Where would the extra electrons come from?

Valenz kovalent bonds.

23:32

Basically, the way the "classical" chemical bonds work is that atoms "share" electrons in the valenz shell across the molecule orbitals.

23:33

That‘s why natural Hydrogen is an H2.

23:33

A 1s1 atom orbital and a 1s1 atom orbital make a 1s2 molecule orbital.

23:34

That makes the electron shell of Hydrogen like Helium and thus very energetically stable.

So what I'm getting from this is that, in a simple sense, muonation would effectively reduce the number of valence electrons.

23:34

If you add one muon to a noble gas, for instance, it would behave like a halogen.

So if a partially muonated helium would form two bonds, it would have 1sm2 and 1se2 molecule orbitals... but only two protons in its core.

23:35

That molecule orbital is at least seriously polarized if not unstable.

Would the electron bonds be short enough for muon bonds to form?

Yeah, I get that. (I did take chemistry

) But looking at first at just the one atom of hybrid helium, right, we've got two protons in the nucleus, one muon in the 1sm, and one electron in the 1se. If what I've been told is correct, that behaves like hydrogen - so we get a hHe2 molecule in which there are two electrons in the 1se2, and the 1sm orbitals don't get close enough to participate in the bonding.

Ah okay, you refer to only the electron orbital...

23:36

It be hella polarized.

23:36

But may just work out.

23:36

Urgh, really what you have to do is plug this all into some orbital formulas and calculate.

Yep. Sadly, that's the point at which it starts breaking my brain. :( Which is a shame, because depending on how the numbers work out, there could be all sorts of fascinating applications for this stuff that you can't do with pure muon matter.

I get that muon matter gives you stronger bonds, and more dense bulk matter, and therefore greater mechanical strength, but what does hybrid matter get you except denser versions of electronic matter?

(The most obvious and the I'm-almost-certain-doesn't-work one would be finding a way to build exotic matter that could form bonds with both electronic matter and muon matter, at which point you have struck gold.)

And, I suppose interface layers between muon and electron matter.

Yeah @Overmind but I‘m sceptical that actually works out well.

@0111narwhalz The trouble is that muon matter and electron matter don't interact, because while muons Pauli exclude muons and electrons electrons, they don't exclude each other.

1

Molecular bond geometry is rules by Valenz electron pair repulsion.

23:41

And a muon pair can‘t "stand its ground" in such a state because it's "too shy".

23:42

Any muon orbital would be tiny compared to an electron orbital, so it‘s going to get "squeezed" by the electron orbitals.

So in the 'verse, for example, muon metal makes great blade shields and magnetic nozzle structures for torch drives because it's ludicrously refractory and can stand the heat, but you have to attach it to the rest of the drive with a magnetic couple, because it will pass through normal matter as if it wasn't there. Which also makes it useless for, say, armor. You could stick a giant wake shield of super-strong, super-dense muon iron on the front of your lighthugger and it would be completely useless, since the space-junk you want to armor against will just fly right through it.

1

Though actually - okay wait, you said Pauli exclusion prinziple doesn‘t separate electrons and muons?

Yep, per a conversation I had with Luke Campbell a while back, muons and electrons don't exclude each other. Hence, muons and electrons not sharing the same orbitals, and so forth.

Because if so, okay forget the main part about VSEPR, that one is heavily Pauli exclusion prinziple.

23:45

A bit better news then. Charge disparity is still an issue.

23:47

I‘d suggest something like hybrid-muonized... Berylium.

23:47

Or really, any element of the second group.

23:47

Probably the heavier the better.

Yeah. Given how hugely the exclusion principle's involved in building the orbital structure that chemistry relies on, it sounded at least somewhat possible that you could get two entirely separate sets of bonding going on. So you've got -- I'm gonna stick with hHe for now, because it's simple, but imagine a molecule that goes eH-hHe-mH . The hHe atom has its two protons in the nucleus, shares an electron with the eH in the 1se2, and shares a muon with the mH in the 1sm2. Hm.

The big problem I can‘t quite crack yet is the molecule polarity.

...so the 1se2 has two electrons, and there's a matching proton at either end of that bond, and the 1sm2 has two muons, and there's a matching proton at either end of that bond. So far, that feels like it ought to be workable, and yet, y'know?

Yeah well, the problem‘s the damn overcharge of the bonds.

23:51

At least, with helium.

Ah, I see the problem.

23:52

The helium will now have a shared muon and a shared electron.

I think with Berylium it works out now.

I'm not sure I'm getting it. Looking at it, the 1sm2 and 1se2 both are both sitting on -2, with a balancing +1 at each end. That looks no more unbalanced to me that, say, a regular H-H bond which is also -2 with 2 x +1.

Aaaand actually no it doesn‘t. Berylium is 2s2. This would be 1se1, 1sm1.

23:53

In a molecular bond then, 2se2, 2sm2.

23:55

Though... okay yeah, it works. This is similiar to a bond where other partners donate their electron pairs to Berylium.

23:55

It won‘t be the most stable per se....

23:56

Muonated oxygen seems ideal. Two charges to noble gas configuration.

Yeah. It's sort of sitting for me in that awkward realm of "seems plausible, but I want a pro glance over it before I use it in canon".

Actually ah okay no no no now I have it figured out how to approach this.

23:58

First, decide how many electron bonds you want.

23:58

Based on that, select from the right side to the left, your element.

23:58

Then you replace some of the valenz electrons with valenz muons.

I mean, if it's possible to do this, you've got something you can use to solder muon matter to regular matter, at which point the Potential Applications all come rushing back in, winking at you and demanding you rush to the patent office.

noone expects the Spanish Potential Applications

Banjo cord riff

00:01

Carbon still seems ideal as solder. It‘s got a nice SP hybrid orbital.

00:01

Very easy to steal two electrons, replace them with muons.

Yeah, I'm starting to think final crystal shape will dictate stability in a big way

and the carbon supremacy gains another application

Carbon is fun stuff.

(one begins to wonder why the universe even bothered implementing other elements at this point)

Because if you're effectively doubling your shells once bonding to neighbours is complete, that's a hell of a strain on the protons

00:03

"polarised" might be an understatement. "do not approach without rubber underwear" is a likely outcome

*muonated rubber underwear

00:04

:V

Nah, we're talking pure charge balance, any old insulation will do

Heh.

ooh I bet muonated dielectrics would make hellishly efficient capacitors

Could stop it being a run away setting changer, though, if it can cause aurora cruising at car speeds thru atmo

Muonated explosives.

00:06

For that exotic chemical bang, accept no substitutes.

00:06

And yeah @Morgrim Moon That‘s why I suggest SP-hybridized moleculed like carbon.

I'm not sure shaped charges would be easy tho

Now if you want high-energy-density storage applications with potential explosive uses, I'm playing around with one that might just fit the bill. Nowhere near ready for serious #technicalities, though.

00:08

How do you one-up a nuclear isomer battery?

1

00:08

A baryon isomer battery.

1

[concerns]

Because nothing says Inadvisably Applied Femtotechnology than storing energy in overstressed quark-quark bonds.

1

Image attachment

00:19

But belike, I can still try to querry my professors in physical chemistry, @Overmind. I suspect they know a lot more than any of us here to quantify how muons influence the entire problem. As I said, it‘ll just take some time (and I mostly have thermochemistry with them, so I‘ll need to do some digging at whom‘s best asked about orbitals.)

@Unknown I'd appreciate it, if you wouldn't mind. And no particular hurry so far as I'm concerned - I'd just like to know.

00:21

Thanks muchly.

I have some concern on how thats even supposed to work. Seems like you might aswell apply the anti-decay magic of muonic matter on tetra or pentaquarks. Or mesons. (edited)

14:36

Or maybe you've found an efficient way of using the zeno effect to manipulate the decay of unstable quantum systems.

Doing without is somewhat problematic, protons and neutrons seem a bit useless, as they are fairly stable. And higher level hadrons decay into smaller pieces. What about mesons then? Well, as a rule of thumb for hadrons to exist they need to be color neutral. How do you get for example white by mixing either red with blue or green? Easy! Use anti-red. And by the virtue of having an anti-quark in your meson you get something rather unstanble with decay times ranging from 1e-21 seconds to 1e-8 seconds.

Question: How do the muons not decay in muonic matter?

08:44

Another magic use for muonic matter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon-catalyzed_fusion

Muon-catalyzed fusion

Muon-catalyzed fusion (μCF) is a process allowing nuclear fusion to take place at temperatures significantly lower than the temperatures required for thermonuclear fusion, even at room temperature or lower. It is one of the few known ways of catalyzing nuclear fusion reactio...

@KAL_9000 Applied Magic™

09:09

Eldrae muon metals are actively ontologically stabilized exotic matter with other words.

Ah

Hey, I have a stupid awesome idea: Muon metal radiators.

14:06

The pecular orbital properties of muons seems rather disposed to building some really hot-running solid-phase radiator arrays.

OK, then, my issues with the armor (based on https://eldraeverse.com/2015/02/11/the-emperors-sword-heavy-cavalry/ and previous discussions: 1) the drivetrain. It's basically balls of concentrated nanomemes, so it's not like there's any huge issues left open beyond the general issues I have with nanomemes. 2) There's no effort being put into signature reduction. I'm of the opinion that every little bit of that counts, and while going all the way might not be worth the money, going most of the way still makes deception a lot easier 3) Your crew should be wearing helmets in the tank, and I get the impression they don't. The Royal Army of WWII was the only one whose armor branch didn't, and they took more than twice the casualties (injured) than others. Not because the helmets helped so much when the armor is penetrated, but because soldiers kept banging their heads when on rough terrain

07:40

4) Armament. This is where I have the biggest/the most issues: 4.1) Ortillery (god I hate that word) designation should be integrated into the commanders sight - having them on the turret cheeks restricts their arc, and the commander is going to be the one designating 4.2) The tons of micromissile launchers/slugguns spreado ut over the surface. They appear to be fixed in elevation and traverse, or at least rather limited, which makes their utility about as high as the fixed hull machine guns of yore (it is perhaps telling that noone has them anymore) 4.3) Armored prow. This makes me think of the pike nose of the IS series, because the frontal edge of a tank is already sturdy enough that driing into a house isn't a big problem. Also, it adds a lot of weight when you want to ge the same protection as with a flat front 4.4) your choice of RWS: based on a previous discussion, your system of choice is an automatic greande launcher, launching either AHEAD munitions or the old style of shrapnel shells with a small charge pushing balls (flechettes for you) out the front. This is especially confusing as you already have perfectly good autocannons and lasers on your tank that are part of the APS - they can be used for this too I got more but I already needed to split this. Please stand by

5) the jump system. To me, this is just not useful at all - you have no control over the tank when it's in the air, its a massive load on the reactor, landing is a massive shock on the structure and the crew. It would be in my opinion faar wiser to have the tank wait for a pioneer troop when it reaches an obstacle it trulyl cannot cross instead of building this into every tank 6) we're on the modules, which means more armament choices: 6.1) apparently, your standard tank comes with quadbarrel (gatling?) machine guns, which are also in their own turrets. These extra turrets have the tendency of complicating the construction of a tank while being poorly armored or massively increasing weight, while also potentially blocking the traverse or elevation of the main gun. The Basher apparently swaps this out for a single quadbarrel, but in my opinion all tanks should carry a single barrel machine gun or light autocannon in a coaxial mount 6.2) I can't believe I missed the rear-mounted medium caliber guns. Which are also apparently cheeck-mounted (the turret cheeks are commonly understood to be the two usually angled faces to the side of the mantlet, while this implies you are referring to the flank of the turret)

07:48

OK done

Okay. I'll get started, then, and I'm gonna take it one by one just so we don't end up with a dozen different threads tripping over each other: On the drivetrain: well, it's not like they're balls of nanites; it's just a shape-changing smart material, based on an extrapolation of some smart materials we already have. It's also a variation on what is, at that time, a common civilian drivetrain for ground vehicles.

Smart materials, nanomemes, the point is the same: I think you're applying fancy tech because you want fancy tech. But it's commonly used fancy tech, so eh

It pretty much boils down to the fancy tech of today being the boring baseline of tomorrow, yeah.

~~I'm off for lunch, be back in 30 or so~~ returned (edited)

Righto. Then I shall carry on through and we can one-by-one it then.

Signature reduction: this cuts right to some of the assumptions I'm making regarding the battlefields of the time, right up the top of the list of which is that pretty much any heavy unit has the sort of signature that you can't baffle worth a damn: you're dumping a ton of heat, for a start, your power systems can probably be picked up on neutrino detectors., and firing a weapon puts out a big, recognizable EM pulse. As for visible/audible stealth, it's pretty much a giant rolling bunker. (This is where I had something of an argument with myself about nomenclature, because they are that to much more of an extent than 21st century tanks are, because an awful lot of their role is subsumed by the guys in the heavy armor suits. So it might have been better not to have called them tanks, but evolution of nomenclature, so. Ergh.) Now, saying this, I don't mean to say that there's not effort put into confusing the signature as much as they can versus terminal guidance of incoming weapons, or that it's a complete waste of time trying to masquerade as something else, if there's a plausible option available. Just that - like the space-warfare equivalent - it can't pretend to not be there with any kind of effectiveness, not without stripping off all manner of capabilities. And by the time you do that sufficiently, you'd probably have been better off building a dedicated stealth platform in the first place. I haven't canonicalized this yet, so I may well rethink this if I come up or someone suggests a good means of signature-baffling this sort of unit, but as of now, I haven't got one.

So basically "there's no way we can do stealth, so let's do shock and awe instead"?

See, to me as well as the rest of the ToughSF armchair general crowd, Maskirovka and other deception counts as stealth, while you seem to count it separately

Pretty much. Or "we can't find a practical way to stealth our (gross) position, so we're just going to have to build something that can stand there and take it".

08:24

Well, even that can be difficult. I think I said somewhere on a discussion on recon starships that their main tactic is to make a high-speed pass through a system on a course that can't be successfully intercepted on time, because it's really hard to make a recon destroyer look like anything but a recon destroyer. You can do the whole pack-sensors-into-a-merchie-hull trick, Russian spy trawler style, but you can't do that with the full top-line sensor array you can put on the recon ship.

Clearly you are insufficiently Russian

What I'm really trying to say, I suppose, is that their maskirovka is going to take the form of assorted external cleverness rather than technical support from the platform, 'cause there isn't much of the latter to help with it. Not denying the value, just the implementation possibilities.

Whatever platform it is, some thermal netting will probably help you a lot

at those outputs? Not really

It'll help with obscuring the signature details, sure, but at the sort of power levels the reactors in these things are designed to put out, that's just taking you from big sharp blob on IR to big fuzzy blob.

Yes, and you can make another big fuzzy blob elsewhere with some off-the-shelf generator

08:32

Now your enemy might attack that instead of your tank

that's only effective if the off the shelf generator (and getting it there) is at least an order of magnitude cheaper than the tank. Otherwise it's far more effective to just get a second tank

Given all the other stuff that's in the tank, I would imagine a reactor of similar power is significantly cheaper

Yeah, that's true. When I write the results of this up for a post, I'll try and make it clear that that sort of thing is not something I meant to exclude; only technical capabilities of the platform itself.

08:35

You certainly can use decoys and other such techniques. I did not mean to imply that that was off the table.

08:42

So. 3. I may have given the wrong impression with that "shirt-sleeve environment". To clarify, that and related comments cover two things: One, the crews don't need to sit around in the same hardshell armor the regular troops wear, because anything that can penetrate the crew compartment will kill you anyway, so you might as well stick to regular field uniform; and Two, it's rather more comfortable than "tank" suggests to most readers, in terms of both spaciousness and having a firmer division between crew compartment and machinery space. Some of that is tech change; the rest is that the people who built it like their comforts and don't mind blowing some budget on that. But, sure, while I hadn't thought of that particular requirement for them, helmets are in.

Just pointing out that fixed micro-missle launchers shouldn't be a problem. Not when they can arc around where they need to go.

(Oh, and, to clarify, it also helps that by and large the crew are not expected to need to leave, or even stick their heads out of, the vehicle unless something has gone Very Wrong with the Plan. Especially since in many cases, they can't breathe out there , and may not even be able to survive without a hefty exosuit anyway.)

That makes sense, though being able to stick your head out is an important ability at times - with tacnukes being thrown around, you are going to be losing cameras and periscopes

True, but if you are throwing tacnukes around your head won't last long enough for your eyes to even adjust to the light

08:50

(also helps when you have tightbeams to all the drone escorts that are your extended eyes, plus all the other parts of your group)

I'm going to say that it's likely possible, but it's what you resort to after you exhaust the possibilities of high redundancy, the autorepair systems, and borrowing someone else's eyeballs over the tactical mesh. Although if you've come up negative on all of those, the situation has gone so far south that it probably won't help you much.

Admittedly now I'm imagining the crew of that One Tank who discovers the local equivalent of a well disguised sucking bog or tar trap, and getting out of the tank is something that happens after the fight when everyone is standing around trying to figure out how to extract them (and laugh)

2

oh, they are going to have hell when they get back to barracks

I mean in some enviroments that can be solved with a breathing mask, but there are tohers were you would need a full suit

Armaments: I may have been a little misleading with "cheek-mounted", because there I'm talking about the base platform; i.e., before you put a module (which bears the turret) in it. In this case, what I'm meaning is mounted on the slightly-angled side faces at front and back of the main body. I also wasn't clear about the mountings, for which I apologize: they're mounted via something akin to a semi-recessed ball turret, so the intent is that they can traverse and elevate until they run into physical constraints: which is to say, the front cheeks can hit target anything from front to flank-and-rear, just not behind the vehicle, and the rear cheeks can target anything from rear to flank-and-front, just not directly in front of the vehicle.

08:59

...altazimuth mount! That's the word I was searching for.

09:01

So for the "rear-facing" guns, what I meant to imply is that that's where they're mounted, and that's their default "rest position", but they certainly aren't intended to fire only at targets behind you. It just doesn't hurt to have the capability when you're adding more flank-guarding weapons.

I mean, that's slightly better than what I was imagining, but they're still rear-facing weapons in a tank

09:04

There's a tank with direct line of sight on either side of you, if not more, as well as other vehicles and infantry. Targets being behind you to such a degree that it makes dedicated rear guns worthwhile over just turning the turret or the RWS is a major fuckup

To answer that, I'm going to have to a bit about the whole combat environment and how it differs from today's. Give me a minute or two to gather my thoughts.

Okay. So. There are two main relevant characteristics here, I think. One is dispersal, and the other one is porosity. On the former, you're spread out across a lot of space because concentrations of force make the guys with the orbital artillery have warm fuzzy thoughts, followed by hot shooty thoughts. Your neighboring tank in the formation may not be actually over the horizon, but they're probably most of the way there. Near you, you have a bunch of combat drones slaved to your tank, and some heavy infantry (the guys in the power suits). Which all do help a lot with local defense, but -- On the latter, your line is more of a zone, and it's porous as hell, because we're up to n-th generation drone warfare at this point, and you've got everything from carbon-eater swarms to whole packs of micro-AKVs zipping around at high speed, opposed by your own equivalents of these. If you're unlucky, the other side's infowar guys have suborned a bunch of people's kitchen fabbers and household automation behind you and have them churning out improvised suicide weapons with all their mechanical hearts. You might have automated stealth platforms left in concealment popping up after you pass, and so forth.

Also the Imperial doctrine of ground warfare as raiding isn't really condusive to having a solid wall for a front line

So you really can't count on, even if everything goes well, being clear to the rear, short of retreating your way through the whole battle. Somethings are going to get back there on a fairly regular basis.

For the spreading out: while your nukes are higher yield, current day armor formations are formed around the Cold War and thus were adequately spaced for those tacnukes. Yours are stronger, but your tanks are also stronger. The porous frontline goes back even further, it was existant in the first World War and the maneuver oriented warfare afterwards pushed it even higher. There were a whole bunch of theories with nice names about how ot organize in an age where combat goes deeper than the first few rows of an infantry block, the most significant being the Deep Battle of the USSR

09:33

So, you cannot count on being clear - but the best way to deal with enemies in the back is not to put in a bunch of large, heavy guns with all their ammo, it's to swing the turret around (if it's vehicles) or the RWS if it's just a bunch of dudes

it's more a question of "do we have secondary turrets at all?". If you don't have those, yes of course you are swinging around the main

Yeah, it's not so much a solid wall as a fifty-to-hundred mile-wide zone at the back end of which, statistically, everyone on the other side ought to be dead. (edited)

but if not then if some of those secondaries cover the rear that is a nice bonus

Secondary turrets are a huge mess and generally not worth it for carrying guns

09:35

Though technically the RWS is a turret too - it replaces the commanders MG with a remote controlled one so he can stay down

09:36

The Israelis also managed to integrate a 60mm mortar into the Merkava rather well

Well, they're not heavy guns. The rear mounts are lighter fittings (I said "medium mass driver", but that's a light gun by vehicular standards) which, really, you might categorize as similar in role to the RWS. They're to give you something to pop the drone lining up to shoot you in the ass with so you don't have to stop engaging your main target while you do it.

09:41

In this scenario, battlefield micro-AKVs are cheap and plentiful, so this happens a lot. If you had to slew the main gun around every time, you'd be taking your eye off the ball way too much - even, it occurs to me, if you get it to reliably track something that small and fast-moving.

which also explains why guns are used instead of the missles: good way to run your missles dry and lose the economic side of the battle

09:42

(given drones this cheap)

A medium gun is something I place into a different realm than an RWS -a medium gun is something in the 50mm to 90mm range for current day, an RWS would be between GPMG and 30mm autocannon

(Also to help keep the drones off the accompanying infantry, whose point defense is more limited by virtue of, well, not being a tank.)

Can you not give this job over to an IFV or a BPMT equivalent?

09:45

It would be able to bring its guns ot bear all-around, making them vastly more useful than fixed rear-mounted guns

those are the tanks with the PD modules (unless I'm scrambling memories)

In this case, we're probably talking 36 mm APSC or APEX spikes, at velocities which [Pay No Attention To The Mathematical Error Behind The Curtain].

I see fixed rear guns as a massive cost on internal volume, weight, money and crew attention when you already got your main gun, your RWS with an autocannon or AGL, rear APS lasers and IFVs to take care of these threats - if you still frequently find yourself with lots of enemies in your back, then either move slower to get them on the fist round, or slower so they cannot get you

@Ian Bruene Don't think there's a dedicated PD version. @Unknown Hmm. Let me think about that one. Although these ones do have something like a 160 degree traverse each, which might be stretching "fixed" just a bit.

Below 180° is fixed for me

Fair enough. And, yeah, you've got some good points there. I'm not necessarily going to go all-in with them, but I'm going to take a a couple of days, mull it over, and definitely make some revisions.

09:56

(Regarding crew attention: that at least isn't too much of a problem. There's a lot of automation stuffed into... well, everything, for assorted cultural reasons, which carries over to the military equipment. Its ability to solve problems once designated and even DWIM is very good indeed.)

09:59

Okay, moving on: Armored prow. Toss the whole phrase on account of being misleading. All it's supposed to indicate is that as a big freakin' armored vehicle, it was assumed that it would have to spend a lot of time driving through things, not around them, and was designed with that assumption in mind.

RWS and the "backscratcher": It's not supposed to be the main RWS or even close to it: it's intended as a last-ditch system for when a relatively soft target gets inside the effective envelope of both the weapons and APS. (The "there are monkeys climbing on my hull!" problem.) So they give you a quick way to throw some shrapnel at yourself and wash 'em off. I'm increasingly inclined to toss it as too specialized and unlikely to be necessary under most circumstances, but it might be useful as a bolt-on option for urban warfare against people likely to try and pop out at close range and stick explosives on you.

Maybe just note that the tank‘s bow is designed with ramming through things?

If that's it's use case, I would toss it in favor of having the nearest available vehicle throw some proximity fuzed shrapnel on you

Also, to be honest, the Backscratter should really be rather unrequired between all the drones, the point-defense network, and the tanks kinetic barrier system.

10:10

Jumping on a vehicle equipped with combat vectorics designed to deflect hypersonic kinetic-kill sabots out of the way sounds like the epidome of "yeah I didn‘t think this through"

Yeah, I think I'm coming to agree with y'all there.

If nothing else...

@Unknown Hey, I talked about making revisions right up there, look.

2

Hmmm, really a anti-tank missile PD network designed to work in urban conditions will have no issue with suicide sophonts.

10:12

They‘re just too slow compared to everything else the network has to content with.

The trouble is with squishies that get inside your inner engagement envelope. But anyway.

10:14

Jump system: Well, it's going to have to exist, because the supreme usefulness of the thing is in low-gravity environments, when you need something to keep you against the ground in order to get useful traction, and for that matter really low gravity environments, where you're fighting on a Ceres-like dwarf planet and would prefer that firing the main gun didn't send you floating off into orbit.

...Doesn‘t that pose issues of remass storage?

Yes.

10:15

Use carefully and with discretion. Protect your remass-replenishment drones.

Maybe use spider tanks instead? Low-gravity conditions is where I like spider tanks.

10:15

Because they can jump and anchor themselves against the ground and such stuff.

10:16

Also just for the "Tankers! On the bounce!".

10:16

Tachikoma jumping noises

That is actually something I've had in mind for spider tanks in the canon, but y'know, army you have, army you want, etc.

10:18

But it shall be considered and possibly reconsidered. As for its other uses... on reflection, I suspect the easiest way to deal with obstacles you might consider skimming over is just to level the freakin' obstacle. That's why the good gods gave us explosives, after all.

4

10:20

And on those occasions where you want to airdrop your tanks, you can always stick a disposable drop-frame on them.

10:25

Quadbarrels, tribarrels, etc.: Not exactly gatling in the strictest sense, but the same principle and intent. The biggest constraint on firing rate of their coilguns is how quickly you can sink the heat generated (slightly beating out accumulator recharge time and switching minimums); so for a n-barrel, you're just strapping n of them together such that one barrel fires while the other three flash-cool and recharge, and repeat. (edited)

The issue with that is that you get massively diminishing returns on fire rate - shooting modern day infantry from ground, you don't really need more than 600RPM, and often fire bursts to get the fire rate even lower make the ammunition last long. A tank might carry a ton of ammunition (possibly literally), but it's expected that in long battles, it will fire the machine guns a lot

10:30

The case for higher rate of fire weapons than that is mostly for when your time on target gets lower- if, in a plane, you only get less than a second of your gun being on target, that second has to count and you want to put as much mass downrange as you can

You get some of those issues with the micro-AKVs. Part of the reason I'm looking at high fire rates as useful is the PD/APS that pretty much everything on the battlefield, down to individual light infantrymen, is equipped with. There's been an in-'verse arms race between smarter/faster PD systems and guns that can deliver enough downrange to overwhelm them.

10:36

Ammunition is not so much of a problem, because the standard (which is to say, whatever I don't call a sluggun) gun is firing small projectiles at high speeds, a la Mass Effect , so it lasts pretty well. ((And yes, I know why they won't work in actuality

- I screwed up my calculations the same way the Bioware writers did, but since that is published canon now, I'm kinda stuck with it. Please pay no attention to the frantic handwaving behind the curtain.)) (edited)

Ah yes, the good old super-high velocity micro-bullet

Handcrafted from pure credulium.

10:39

But, yeah, this is a case where I'd rather 'fess up in the FAQ and be kinda vague about exactly how small and fast they are than inflict an ugly retcon on everyone.

Dart gun might be fitting, if its anywhere above 3 km/s you are better off with an longer and thinner shape (edited)

So, turrets. What I should also have been more clear about is that those should really just be called "weapon mounts", because we expect turrets on tanks to house the crew. Since they don't need people to service the weapons, the IL of this period prefer to bury the crew compartment inside the hull, and put a much smaller turret(s) on top to house the weapon mechanisms only.

I expected that, it's been the Not New Thing in sci-fi tanks since the Armata

Yeah, it's fairly common.

10:47

Since I am reconsidering anyway, how do we feel about stacking mounts?

Quite often a terrible idea, but sometimes it works out

10:49

The RWS for example is on top of the turret, the Patton also had a turret on top of the turret

10:49

But the second turret was always a very light weapon compared to the main gun

Compared to a heavy mass driver (72 mm spikes and/or micromissiles), I figure the quadbarrel qualifies in that category.

It's on the upper end, but it doesn't send me cringing like some of the derpnoughts

Yeah. I'll fiddle with that while I'm reconsidering, too.

10:56

Anyway: thanks for that. I appreciate the food for thought.

Also, for all your fixed missile launchers: consider reloadable pop-up launchers in the turret

10:57

Some IFVs got those now for ATGM

Will do.

For the small projectile-high speed: at relativistic speeds, it won’t matter.

Small thing, go fast enough, feel like big thing.

stepping away from weapons, what sort of data throughput is actually going through the wormhole network and what does it take to perform a denial of service ?

It varies widely between worlds, but an average populated planet’s contributing about an exabyte a day to the ‘weave. Internal traffic’s a lot bigger thanks to all the layered caching, and most of the IoT traffic only needs to be local.

1

00:22

Denial of service? Bring a interplanetary-sized botnet to the party?

Would you classify that as "requires a nation-state level effort" or is it something for a well written virus and a few months of prep time by organized crime? (edited)

To DoS the backbone? You’re going to want some serious Power, Vinge-style, backing you up, ‘cause that’s what’s doing the virus scanning.

You know, I'm not entirely clear on what the Transcend actually does on a day- to- day basis.

It’s probably possible for a powerful nation-state to have a go, but it’s attracting the attention of a lot of people who will deliver some serious hurt.

Seems like it'd attract the same kind of ire as big R-bombs.

00:30

Considering that it's a threat to everyone connected to the wormhole network

[nature of the Transcend] @xandeross Well, it’s everyone. In the sense of - if you’ve read A Miracle of Science , you know Mars? That. (edited)

1

00:32

It’s got a whole lot of minds and subminds and so forth within it, but that’s the essence of the thing. As for its main job: it’s the impossible circle-squarer that lets you have perfect liberty and perfect coordination at the same time.

1

I like to think of it as a more productive version of someone’s overly nosey grandma

But it's got a lot of parts. Unification, for example, is the archai whose entire business is mediating between sophonts. It's the giant oversoul that whispers quiet suggestions and orchestrates chance happenings and generally fiddles behind the scenes to ensure that irreconcilable conflicts are avoided and good things always happen, with a side order of making the pathetic fallacy true and pronoia a perfectly accurate assessment of how the universe works.

1

00:41

But then you get all the other parts, like the Geosynergic Minds, which exist to manage geophysics, meteorology and ecology to keep things globally optimal, rather than locally optimal; you've got the Immunities, which are exactly what it says on the tin; you've got Transfinity, the Teleic Mind, which is working on the very long-term problem of turning the Transcend's imperatives into hard-coded natural law and thereby desucking the universe, and so on and so forth.

1

Is the Transcend basically the country’s subconscious

00:47

Except given an actual slightly tangible form

Don’t forget they built their gods, too

00:48

Because they got tired of the waiting time when praying and installed a hardline connection (edited)

More like their superego.

00:50

Literarily, of course, openly intending to rewrite the universe and usurp God usually makes you a villain. Here, it makes you the hero. (edited)

What if your universe-rewriting goal is Wrong?

C o l l e c t i v e, though? As in everyone who has enough contact? All who are born in Imperial space?

Oops?

Everyone who has a specific hard-ware bit installed in thier brain?

But on the other hand, it's kind of hard to fail harder than the present incumbent, if any. Or so they would be inclined to say.

00:52

Everyone who is running the soul-shard software as part of their mind.

1

00:53

(And can connect to the network reasonably often, I suppose.)

1

Anyone saying it would be harder to fail more is an idiot. Accidentally nudge one of the levers setting the universal constants and all the matter in the universe explodes and everyone dies.

Well, okay, it would be harder to fail more without being an idiot.

God's trying the best he can, don't be mean to him. Do you know how hard it is to get a stable universe up and running at all? I don't but I bet it's super difficult.

On the other hand, if there is anyone in charge of the universe, they're the sort of mentality that thinks entropy, death, and the ichneumon wasp are all Really Good Ideas. (edited)

I assume that's one of the parasitic wasps?

Yep.

Eh, there’s always the standard abrahamic argument of “its all part of God’s plan”

"ill means spoil all good ends," no?

They thought of that argument, and immediately dismissed it with "Well, then, who let this asshole make the plan? Fuck the plan!"

Have you heard the "Gods Garden" arguement for theodicy?

Entropy kinda strikes me as "oh fuck it I can't seem to get rid of this remainder and I'm sick of rewriting this equation" more than a desired result

The one Scott Alexander made?

There's a quotation from one of the Discworld books:

01:00

“I have told this to few people, gentlemen, and I suspect never will again, but one day when I was a young boy on holiday in Uberwald I was walking along the bank of a stream when I saw a mother otter with her cubs. A very endearing sight, I’m sure you will agree, and even as I watched, the mother otter dived into the water and came up with a plump salmon, which she subdued and dragged on to a half-submerged log. “As she ate it, while of course it was still alive, the body split and I remember to this day the sweet pinkness of its roes as they spilled out, much to the delight of the baby otters who scrambled over themselves to feed on the delicacy. One of nature’s wonders, gentlemen: mother and children dining upon mother and children. “And that’s when I first learned about evil. It is built into the very nature of the universe. Every world spins in pain. If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior.”

1

01:01

As I said a couple of years back, this, of course, is peculiarly applicable to the Eldraeverse in explaining both their identification of entropy and evil, and in quite why so many people and organizations in the Empire are quite so comfortable “playing God”. Someone has to, they might very well say, on the grounds that if anyone does hold that post already, the prevalence of this sort of thing in the universe demonstrates clearly – even before we bring up minor issues like the inescapable cosmic force of decay, belike – that the present incumbent is incompetent, insane, or quite simply monstrous.

1

01:03

Their version of the problem of evil isn't "how do we justify this, assuming an omnibenevolent god", it's "Since evil exists, how do we kill it? (Note: not just the individual instances, but the entire class that defines them.)" (edited)

1

10:35

Magic Muon Matter™ is matter where the electrons have been replaced with muons, right?

With artificially stabilized muons, yeah.

Question 1) How do you stop the muons from decaying? Ontotech?

10:36

Question 2) How do you avoid the problem of spontaneous muon-catalyzed fusion?

1. Space magic, yes. 2. By not using elements likely to undergo spontaneous muon-catalyzed fusion in the environments in which they're going to be used. Muonic deuterium is... problematic at room temperature. Heavier elements, less so, because your valence muons aren't sitting in the innermost orbital.

Okay. I still don't understand, but sure.

Do the Eldræ use muon-catalyzed fusion for power generation in some cases?

Side note: there's a rather nasty failure mode of muonic-deuterium "warm fusion" reactors. If the EM containment fails on a regular fusion reactor, the plasma expands, hits the reactor vessel, and immediately quenches with the only casualty being the lining. If you're using muonic deuterium, since electrons and muons don't Pauli-exclude each other, the uncontained muonic plasma passes right through the reactor vessel as if it wasn't there, and the surrounding environment may regret it. (edited)

1

In other words, it basically becomes a hydrogen bomb

OoOoF.

It's been done experimentally, but the more conventional D/3He reactors were up and running nicely before practical muon-fu was a thing. There are probably people considering it as a way to get 4xH fusion over the ignition hump, but it's not a huge priority since no-one's running out of D/3He any time soon.

1

There are two "possibilities", the first is the zeno effect. For this you constantly observer a quantum state and collapse its waveform, therefore you can hinder the time evolution of that state and its decay. Two, an weakless universe or vacuum state where the weak force is massively weaker or doesn't exist at all.

1

Well, probably not as bad as a hydrogen bomb, since for the same reasons as it can pass through the containment, you're not going to have the same pressure-wave effects - or rather, they'll be spread out according to whatever the decay curve of artificially stabilized muons is - and we're not talking about prompt criticality anyway. On the other hand, the muonic plasma will be right there radiating heat. It's not going to take any longer to quench than a regular fusion plasma in a frigid "normal" environment for the usual reasons, but you still really don't want to be in the reactor room when it's happening.

1

No sir, you do not.

10:53

Or Ma'am.

gentlesophont

I guess you won't see pure passing through of the matter. In this case the electronic states don't do anything and we are left with a charge paired nucleus. Acting somewhat like a cold neutron ball. And predicitons for cold neutron molecules don't show perfect passing through matter.

isn't gen-tle-so-phont a little long for, say, acknowledging something/someone?

it's polite

So, what I expect you would get is very similar to what happens if you blow a hole in the side of a regular fusion reactor: the air in the reactor room gets superheated, so you have a big ol' flashover that wrecks the immediate area and hopefully is contained by the nearest pressure bulkhead, leaving behind a lot of rusted mess.

1

10:55

You can shorten to gentlesoph , right, sophs?

10:56

It is lunchtime for me on the US East Coast!

10:57

ponders cellular biology of the organisms that my sandwich once was

Eh, I’m with family, it’s hour 2 of post breakfast snack time

Speaking of which, how does the whole green/blue/silverlife thing affect Eliéran biology at the cellular level, besides the whole weird blood color thing?

When I talked to a physicist on muonic-electronic matter interactions previously, I understood that while there might be some nuclear interactions, a muonic BB dropped on a desk - for example - is going to fall right through, given the screening of the nuclear charge by muons over a short length scale. Of course, that was talking about solid-phase muon matter at low energies, so.

I presume that greenlife cells in the Eldræ, for instance, are similar to Earthly animal cells, but beyond that, I've no clue

11:02

(Sorry for changing the subject, just going through my question list rn)

Greenlife and bluelife are fairly close cousins (both DNA-based, using proteins, lipids, and sugars, although with a different coding and somewhat different set of amino acids), which is what made it possible to integrate them. And enough that heterotrophs and saprotrophs of each could mostly-consume the other, although they'd both be missing out on some essential nutrients if they tried to survive off it. (Although it was a ridiculously huge sign to eldraeic biochemists saying YOU ARE NOT A NATURAL SPECIES.)

1

Problem: Each type of cell uses completely different organelles

11:09

You can't really integrate that in a single organism

Silverlife mostly does its own thing, because being evolved from Precursor nanites, it's not even close biologically to the others. Interactions there are limited to a few weird diseases like the silver plague, which is what happens when you're infected by nanites that start stripping the metals out of your blood and tissues.

1

I'm on a school bus going to a concert.

#general

11:10

or #random

#random

1

Oh. Right.

If you're a Precursor race that's been manipulating biology for longer than most civilizations manage to exist, it's surprising what you can get away with.

I'm imagining the Eldræ biologists taking notes from their own DNA (edited)

(I mean, the integration means rewriting both sides of the blend pretty damn hard to the point that the result isn't much more than "descended-from" any more, but that unlike-most-everything-else-ness is part of why it's such a giant NOT EVOLVED, OKAY? sign.)

11:16

Random notes: if we were ever to compare anatomies - well, there's that bit from Babylon 5 where it's lampshaded that despite looking like the Centauri, we're not actually related at all? In the 'verse, where it's generally a rule that anything that looks sufficiently like another species has to be related somehow, this would give exobiologists kittens.

Why did the Precursors make the Eldræ, exactly?

11:18

Seems like a lot of trouble to make an entire sentient species with two different biologies in one

Looking just at the gross internal differences: well, apart from the Precursors replacing our red cells with free-floating organic catalysts (taken from bluelife, because they were more efficient than hemoglobin), a quick MRI is going to point out the different bone and muscle structures (interwoven, and braided, respectively), the double-chambered stomach, the six-lobed liver, the peristaltic heart, and the whole paracardiac chain that doesn't even exist in humans.

1

paracardiac?

11:20

clarify plox

It's a bunch of folded layers along the venae cavae responsible for blood filtration and housing a bunch of subsidiary glands and ganglia; most of which are part of the sort of enhanced immune and self-repair systems you need in order to, well, not die.

1

ah

As for why - and leaving aside that it probably wasn't all that much trouble for the people who made a flat planet with tremendously intricate support systems for reasons which, if anyone knew them, amounted to "I want one" - ...

Is the Eldræic brain pretty close to the human brain (just reprogrammed for the new body and with a lot of the irrationality removed?)

11:30

After all, the greenlife baseline was Homo sapiens

...well, the common theory is that the Precursors in question (the trakelpanis trakóras amán ) on one hand were looking for servitors capable of managing highly complex industrial and other processes that they did not wish to concern themselves with for long periods of time. This would probably have bitten them right on the ass given time, but their civilization blew itself up shortly thereafter, leaving the unfinished proto-eldrae to make their own fate. The unknown and totally spoilery reason is (rot13 follows) --

:V

doesn't follow

-- fbzr bs gur genxrycnavf genxóenf nzáa jrer gelvat gb znxr n fcrpvrf gung jnf fhssvpvragyl yvxr gurz gb zrnavatshyyl vaurevg gurve pvivyvmngvba, ohg juvpu ynpxrq gurve sngny synj, ivm., orvat fb jvyyshy gung gurl pbhyq oneryl fgnaq rnpu bgure naq graqrq gb trg vagb yrguny, qrfgehpgvir pbasyvpgf ng gur qebc bs n ung. Juvpu vf n znwbe ceboyrz jura lbh'er tvnag ernyvgl-jnecvat qentbaf jvgu fhcrerzcbjrevat grpuabybtl. N funzr gubfr graqrapvrf qrfgeblrq gurve pvivyvmngvba orsber gurl pbhyq svavfu nal bs gurve rkcrevzragf, ohg fb vg tbrf.

Ah

I'm pretty sure that that was already mentioned in cleartext elsewhere.

11:45

Maybe in Friendship is Sufficiently Advanced, I think.

Guvf vf tbvat gb or zhpu pyrnere va gur Nqinaprqirefr, vanfzhpu nf va Rdhhf gurl'ir sbhaq bar bs gur genxrycnavf genxóenf nzáa'f bgure rkcrevzragf. Gur ernfba gung jubyr frggvat ybbxf fhfcvpvbhfyl yvxr vg'f frg hc gb cebzbgr Unezbal naq vgf nffbpvngrq inyhrf vf gung gur Cerphefbef frg gung rkcrevzrag hc gung jnl, naq vg'f orra serr-ehaavat sbe 300,000 lrnef be fb.

11:47

I think I spoiler-warninged it there, too, but anyway. There it is.

<I do not understand>

15:42

<does not compute>

15:42

<eldraeequivelanttodoesnotcompute>

Do you not get the cipher, or the deciphered message?

No? Do you?

It's securely encrypted with a stateless keyless cipher called 3rot13.

He said it’s rot13 in the message, it’s a simple Caesar cipher. There’s plenty of online translators (edited)

https://rot13.com/ because 3rot13 is basically the same as rot13 but fancier-sounding.

Okay, wasn't what I hoped for but still interesting.

It’s been posted in here before, though I think the body plan detail is new

The encrypted message

What about it?

Is it in Eldrae?

No, it’s just rot13. It’s a simple substitution cipher

not secure in the slightest

it is spoiler security, obfustication is sufficient

It’s meant for situations like these, where you want spoiler tags SB style but can only use plain text

How would the current mass driver weapon fare against an unarmoured humanoid?

over pen

That's what I thought.

Same with a lot of high end AP rounds nowadays

Depending on its geometry and velocity a lot of things could happen. But probably just overpenetration.

@MarcusAurelius oof that universe must be a pain to live in

15:19

215k G acceleration is considered slow (edited)

15:19

Uranus-sized dreadnoughts

Nah, dreads top out at 170 km long (working out exact mass and proportions). Those things are battleworlds. Let me put it this way: the previous batch of interuniversal civilization managed to seed 60 trillion big bangs so precisely that they all developed almost identical universes. While fighting a losing war against a hegemonizing swarm

oh eikones

"dreadnought the size of ~~your anus~~ Uranus"

The dreadnoughts could remove Uranus relatively easily

interesting, what about Jupiter?

Are we talking "removal" by conventional or ontotech means?

The largest maneuverable thing in my universe that's not a Shkadov Thruster or giant boosters strapped to a planet/moon is only 300km

15:27

The largest ship that started out as a ship, is what I mean

Kerbae ad Astra's Union of Created Intelligences has some BHIR sessiles, but they're called "sessiles" for a reason.

This being the Jaian Har'Tikdal, or "Emergency Ark"

15:29

BHIR?

Black hole infall reactor

Ah

i.e. baryon flipper

The Har'Tikdal's job is thus: If galactic civilization falls, it will carry a complete copy of the knowledge of the Jaians and the genetic code/blueprints for as many organic/machine sophonts as possible out to Andromeda or somewhere to restart civilization.

They're relatively small black holes—they need to be, else they won't make net power—but that's "relatively small" for a black hole.

A.K.A. several solar masses (edited)

nah, not that high

15:31

I think Hawking radiation reaches net outwards somewhere around Lunar mass?

Oh, not a natural black hole?

pff, of course not

15:31

:V

Any Penrose spheres around normal holes?

This is the resident weakly godlike civ, remember?

15:32

Some, but I have to go AFK now :V

okie

15:32

I GTG too, actually

Short answer: both. These things are big, low end guess is that their mass is 3.5 petatons (edited)

15:56

And their ontobays tend to be full of fun toys

15:58

Also, as to “universe”: Kéró proper has been in a state of large-scale war for most of its 60+ billion years of history, and it tends to bubble over to the many, many others within its sphere of influence

Even a proton sized BH is rather low power.

16:11

Something in the gigawatts? My internet won't load. And your antimatter production is also somewhat dissapointing.

@KAL_9000 is the apostrophe for syllable demarcation or is it a phoneme?

@Kerr There're however many black holes involved as are necessary.

18:09

BHIRs are interesting, because you have to scram them to shut them down, and to scram them you need a fairly large mass.

18:09

Like another black hole.

18:09

So full BHIR units are probably two- or three-hole units.

18:12

Wikipedia tells me that a black hole of 10⁵kg would have a radiative power of roughly 10²¹W.

18:13

You'd have to feed it its entire mass every second.

18:15

Gives you an upper bound of 5×10⁴ kg/s of antimatter, assuming perfect conversion.

18:16

The other 5×10⁴kg/s of regular matter can be recycled, of course.

18:16

If you need less power, you recycle more antimatter.

18:17

If you need more power, you turn down the feed rate until the hole gets small enough.

18:18

For safety reasons, you probably don't want to let the hole get too small, or else you'll have problems with feeding it fast enough to keep it in a steady state.

An 100 t black hole is around 1e-22 m.

Sudden sidethought: in Railguns, same force that accelerates projectile out pushes rails away. You can't have rails without structural elements to prevent deformation, break in current or whole rail ripping in two.

isn't that way railguns are currently a "one or two shots, 4 at most" weapon?

No, they're that because of rail ablation.

ah, thanks

As I understand it, for similar performance as conventional cannons, the stresses aren't that much more extreme.

I'm assuming you mean like big ship's guns for conventional cannons? Because actual cannons tend to need cycling after a surprisingly low number of shots too, or the barrels warp

Navy Railguns are up to several hundred shots now

21:26

which is about the same as the Big Guns

whats the species population distribution in the Empire of the Star? I notice a lot of comments seem to 'assume' everyone is an eldrae, since a lot of given nanofics don't happen to specify a species at any point.

Gah. Can’t find my numbers right now.

17:12

[species pop distribution/how many eldrae] Okay, to toss out a proctonumerological approximation, you can assume that they’re maybe 30-35% of the population. Another 60% or so is made up of the other homeworld-included species and uplifts. The rest are immigrants from elsewhere. (edited)

1

17:16

(The not-mentioning-species - although it is often determinable from the names - is of course deliberate. In a culture like theirs, people think of the individual first, the chosen-groups second, and the demographic third and last.)

1

AIs have to be a lot of that, right?

Yeah, they're a big tranche.

I am wondering what Eldrae think about the simulation hypothesis? Not so much in a philosophical sense, but rather in a scientific sense? Is there any consensus?

The implications of it being unfalsifiable make the hypothesis a bit unattractive in their eyes. Albeit thinking about the implications what is ontotechnology it seems like there is some form of "substrate" that can be manipulated at their will, while seemingly adhering to some basic laws. But those precursors (dragon or human-like) with major reality hacking qualities sounds almost like their respective "ontotech" isn't as bound. Potentially not of technological nature. And replace simulation of reality with a transformation into a more flexible universal set of laws.

Something along the lines of “that’s interesting, but irrelevant for our pursuit of saving the universe from itself”

[simulation hypothesis] There's not a solid consensus. It is one of the interpretations which information physics - the "it is bit" version of ontoscience - leads to, but in the absence of falsifiability, the majority prefers to invoke the local equivalent of Occam's Razor and go with the interpretation which suggests that the informational universe isn't software running on hardware; it's an algorithm which can compute itself without need for substrate, as if the cells of a cellular automaton were also its hardware. (edited)

1

Sounds similar the concept of the Trinity in wording.

This, of course, hasn't stopped the Epistemological Threats chaps (EPOCH SHATTER) from running a number of projects designed to try to hack their way out of the simulation, timing channel attacks on particle interactions and suchlike.

1

01:40

You may need to expand that one; I'm not seeing the concept/similarity, but that's also not really my field. (edited)

01:46

(In context, if you recall https://eldraeverse.com/2015/10/01/beyond-this-horizon/ for a dose of speculative what's-in-between-universes handwavium, the information physics people would say that those long-term stable agglomerations of entities that we call universes? What makes them long-term stable agglomerations is that they're shaped like algorithms that compute themselves. To use a bunch of metaphor to gloss over the underlying processes, they continually define themselves as what they Are, so unlike the rest of the churning all-set, they're resistant to being told they Are Not.)

Beyond This Horizon

The cacoastrum of the embedding empyrean, in information physics, can best be defined as the all-set. As the all-set it contains in potentia all entities, including all rules by which all entities …

1

Ah. The wording reminded me of the interesting concept of a single god who is three people who are all one entity

((This is of course all wildly speculative even in-universe, where there are three major theories governing the realms of fundamentals where ontotechnologists get to play, all of which have been partially verified. The situation on the ground is like trying to reconcile QM and general relativity with only a modest understanding of either, only it's a three-way with extra headache sauce.)

1

(What are the other two again?)

01:59

(Apart from information physics?)

Is it resolved within the scope of the current timeline?

Only insofar as the timeline has a final entry to the effect of “Estimated Date of Omnipotence, (per consensus of late night futurist drunken bullshitting sessions)”.

1

02:09

@Archon https://eldraeverse.com/2012/07/11/fundamentally-its-stuff/

Fundamentally, It’s Stuff

“‘What is reality?’, you ask. Beneath all the photons and leptons and baryons and gluons, underlying space-time and quantum fields, out there in the realm of fundamentals where t…

“Estimated date of Omnipotence” sounds likes an IN dreadnought

3

So a six dimensional continuum? With two compactified dimensions or having a 4D brane to which we are locked onto, residing in an hyperdimensional space. (edited)

1

In the former case you might unfold and fold back into a different "shape", thereby altering the ontology (?) of the local spacetime.

1

That's the sort of thing I had in mind from that perspective, indeed.

Well, not sure if you can explain all ontotechnology that way. The folding would mainly impact the many virtual free parameters of a theory. But you also get new forces and particles.

1

@Kerr Quick laser question, if you'll indulge me -- Is there a hard number on the theoretical shortest wavelength that a FEL can produce? Given that the electrons already need to hit multiple-nines-of-c in an XFEL, I'd suspect pushing much further is unlikely, but I'm curious as to the actual hard limit.

There is none. It really depends on how your linear accelerator works and how long you want to make it.

17:42

There is also no upper electron speed limit for linacs besides your patience and wallet depth.

So, in theory, you could push the tech far enough to have a free-electron graser?

Something you might be capable of doing is virtual magnetic boosting. By manipulating the inertia of the electrons you can increase their output power and also increase efficiency thereby.

17:44

With existing tech it should be possible. My dusty draft for a toughsf on laser design has two method by which you could easily generate them.

17:45

The trick usually is it to make your undulator wavelength really short, ergo, the distance at which magnetic field switch directions.

17:47

One possibility is a laser undulator that achieves an undulator wavelength of 50µm.

17:48

uw / 2* lorentz factor^2 ( 1+ K^2/2 = wavelength.

17:49

While a lorentz factor of 1000 sounds like a lot, it isn't. It's only 511 MeV for an electron.

Shiny. That'll make the Eschatofer -class design a lot more practical. And a lot less handwavy.

And the wiggler strength K is 0.707. This means 228 GeV electrons could generate one femtometer photons.

17:52

For dielectric laser accelerator that makes a accelerator length of 228 m. Or 4560 m for SRF accelerators, which are common tech today.

17:53

Maybe you want to discuss the damage profiles of such a weapon at some point.

Definitely will. I'll need to get a bit further in the design-sketching process first, I think, but yes.

“Apocalypse-bringer”, nice

we now have liquid metal irl

19:29

http://www.scienceinsanity.com/2019/01/scientists-have-created-programmable.html?fbclid=IwAR3w6y9X6UzTqbCbQYd1Rre4v7WRJXi0v5uzw6lEdQpgE6x3RRO58SWDtac&m=1

Scientists Have Created Programmable Shape-Shifting Liquid Metal

Researchers at the University of Sussex and Swansea University have applied electrical charges to manipulate liquid metal into 2D shapes such as letters and a heart. The team says the findings represent an “extremely promising” new class of materials that can be programme...

Technically, we've had liquid metal for thousands of years.

mercury intensifies

Or just, you know, metal but melted.

that too

@Overmind How is/was the design-sketching going?

Okay. I'm going to take a moment here to throw out some rough thoughts about the Eschatofer-class, or its civilian variant, the Lancet-class. (The main difference between them is that the Lancet-class doesn't come with the forward armor, the fleet software package, or the snazzy indigo paint job.) (edited)

14:41

Why is there a civilian variant? Well, you know how we've been using FELs to perform surgery? The Lancet-class is intended to perform surgery on planets . Lance protosupervolcano magma chambers from orbit, that sort of thing.

I can see that coming in handy for terraformers and disaster relief

There's that xkcd what-if about moving the moon with giant lasers... you might be able to do that, too.

To hang out some visuals on this, it looks a little like a pair of scissors would if it was quadrilaterally symmetrical instead of bilaterally. You've got your slightly conical forward hull tapering towards the emitter arrays at the bow, leading back to the point at which four big-ass loops, 90 degrees apart, stick out of it. Those are housing for the electron preaccelerator/storage rings and the control moment gyros. Aft of that, truss-mounted accumulators, fusion reactors, and fuel bunkerage, and finally the thrust frame. The Eschatofer-class adds an armored foreshield in front of the preaccelerator loops, which the Lancet-class doesn't bother with.

14:54

The preaccelerator rings aren't a conventional choice for a FEL, I know, since you lose energy to synchrotron radiation. They're there to simplify power management; when powered up to hot standby, you've already got a bunch of fast electrons circulating in the preacc/storage rings; to fire, you divert a bolus of them down the associated linac for final acceleration, through the undulator, and out the emitter array. (edited)

There are four of these systems, obviously; while partly that's for redundancy, the firing software can treat them as a four-element phased array to provide minor aim correction on the fly. (More elements would be better, but I don't think I have a good way to split and phase gamma/X-rays once generated. The more so if I want a tunable splitter to go with my tunable FEL.) (edited)

15:04

The rest of the systems, meanwhile, are tucked in around the linacs whereever they'll fit. This design is straight from the "big-ass gun with a ship built around it" school of thought.

Why would you need to perform surgery on a planet?

Supervolcanos were specifically mentioned

03:01

A supervolcano blowing is a potential extinction level event. Trigger it earlier via massive crust disruption and its a "demolish the state it's in" event; much better in the long term

Also some terraforming applications, potentially. Low-power shots to break aquifers free, or high-power pulse trains to prebore moholes.

04:05

Maybe even carving passes through inconvenient mountain ranges?

probably want to do that very early on before you start the terraforming proper, but making mountain passes could be REALLY useful

Wide shots because you would like that water to not be trapped in an ice cap

eh, if you're terraforming you're probably smacking a few dozen comets worth of water into the planet anyway

04:55

(Do you smooth the craters over later? Or direct the comets to a designated 'place of craters'?)

(Might as well use the impacts to help with your future-ocean carving. Going to need some dents to keep the water in, and waste not, want not.)

that's fair. And I suppose if you already have convenient future-ocean dents then still aim there, because the water is good for covering up the craters later

Any self-respecting planet probably has elevation differences that make oceans nayway

Yes, but you can get planets like Mars, where all the ocean is in one half and the land in the other, and that's not great

so you put some dents on the land side to generate some minor seas to act as a hydration buffer

@Morgrim Moon Mars has Argyre and Hellas

10:09

They would make good Southern Hemisphere seas

@Kerr Quick question - would you happen to have/know of a good in-one-place source of FEL design information/equations, before I go scouring the Internets?

Nah, the internet is quite diffuse in that regard. I'll look into my ToughSF laser draft though, there should be some things in it, maybe some are helpful.

Shiny, thanks.

15:04

So - when molecules collide and bounce off each other, that's down to the mutual repulsion of their electron clouds, right?

15:05

(For macroscopic objects colliding, it's just that happening a lot .)

https://misportal.jlab.org/ul/publications/downloadFile.cfm?hyperlink=JLAB-CIO-05-02.pdf General design example, has a neat short and simple strucutre to it. https://calhoun.nps.edu/bitstream/handle/10945/1045/01Dec_Ng.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y Rather detailed and general 1.http://photon-science.desy.de/sites/site_photonscience/content/e62/e189219/e187240/e187241/e187242/infoboxContent187244/f2_eng.pdf 2.http://photon-science.desy.de/sites/site_photonscience/content/e62/e189219/e187240/e187241/e187242/infoboxContent187245/f3_eng.pdf 3.http://photon-science.desy.de/sites/site_photonscience/content/e62/e189219/e187240/e187241/e187242/infoboxContent187246/f4_eng.pdf 4. http://photon-science.desy.de/sites/site_photonscience/content/e62/e189219/e187240/e187241/e187242/infoboxContent187247/f5_eng.pdf ^ has all the formulas.

15:05

Essentially, yes.

The vector-control widget transfers momentum by effectively putting non-local molecules next to each other and letting that interaction happen.

oh, I thought this was going to get muonic

Collision at a distance.

Non-local molecules?

In the sense that they weren't next to each other before the VCW bent space to put them there.

15:09

It puts them in position to collide, they interact and exchange momentum, and then they're separated again.

Uh, so just denser matter then? Kept in a degenerate state by their inter-particle and converging geodesics.

...not following you, sorry.

You are mentioning bent space, as in curved space?

15:11

Your descriptions sounds a bit like teleportating matter next to your matter, and then teleporting it away again.

Sort of, only without teleporting the matter. The notion's using a tiny wormhole to let the two (distant) molecules interact as if they were close-up at just the right time for long enough to let the momentum exchange happen.

15:15

So what you end up with is exactly the same as physically pushing on the thing, say, as if the intervening distance wasn't there.

I mean, you need a massive amount of micro wormholes for that. And also, how exactly are you exchanging momentum that way? Can't just spawn directly in there.

15:19

The wormhole foam can't make you instantly be in a "compressed spring" like scenario with the molecules, otherwise you violate conservation of energy. If you care about that,.

For the purposes of not violating conservation laws, I'm assuming that the extra energy comes out of the energy needed to use the microwormhole thus.

15:23

(I haven't worked out the exact mechanism by which it gets from there to where it needs to be, but this is already deep in the theoretical weeds.)

Sure, I mean, thinking about this. Using permanent wormholes for say normal photonic thrusting won't work either. You can still amplify the beam infinitely, but at any point the momentum isn't directly trasnfered through the wormhole, moreso it would be like you pushing off of the wormhole itself. (edited)

15:29

So it seems like you would still need reaction mass. Imagine a ball going through a wormhole, momentum isn't just conserved globally, but more importantly it is conserved locally. Say the ball had 100 Ns of impulse and the wormhole weights 10kg, after the ball flew through the wormhole will now have those 100 Ns along that direction of travel of the ball. Meanwhile the other wormhole emits that ball and flies off with 100 Ns in the opposite direction. The ship can now absorb that ball for getting the 100 Ns itself. From a momentum standpoint you might as well just had used a 10kg iron ball instead of a wormhole. (edited)

I think I can work with that.

Interestingly, in that case it doesn't even help with momentum, but with energy. You could have a nicoll-dyson miniature souvenir on the other side providing you with one gee of photon thrust. The wormhole losses mass in accordance to E = pc, p being the momentum, but you can refill it using any mass whatsoever. The perfect bussard ramjet. There are no speed limits on how you fill it, although you might want to watch out how much momentum gets transfered, then again, it makes for the perfect nigh indestructable brake for your ship. (edited)

(...argh, sorry to disappear on you, but client actually wants me to do some work now...)

Bye

15:41

Anyways, just ping me if you want something about the FELs, or maybe this topic. Spend some of the last time on topology changes in QG and casimir effects in curved spacetime as well, with regards to wormholes.

Anyways, how has the FEL research gone @Overmind?

Also, what exactly did you mean with "I think I can work with that" ? Work with a vector control based on local momentum conservation?

How would cybernetic limits be managed in the tabletop rules? I assume that power and volume budget will be limiting factors

Most games do 'slots', and only so much goes in a slot. Slot is probably a representation of available volume and resources, but also of incompatibilities; if you want two things in the same 'place' then forget shoving both in, you'll have to intergrate them together first

Alternately

07:29

You limit things by a single resource

07:29

Generally expense

07:30

You can have as many non-mutually-exclusive open-source mods as you like

Yeah, you can basically either have a detailed system (locations, etc) or just an abstract point pool

But the cool shit all needs licenses to be payed to the dev. (edited)

07:30

It matters a lot how much resolution you want

07:31

If I were running, e.g. Blades in the Dark for it

07:31

Then Cybernetics would basically be flavor-text for your charecter

07:31

And a justification for some of your powers

07:31

It's the kind of game which assumes you're making goof choices about that stuff IC

I think less resolution would be better, since a ‘verse RPG ought to allow a variety of body plans without needing a pile of splatbooks

Or are skilled enough to comprensate and still be at the top of your game

A simplification would be "If you have x amount of internal volume, you can only have y amount of bionics of z size. (edited)

Given how easily modern eldrae change bodies, or "shells", I might make slots a feature of the shell with shells that have more slots more expensive.

Eclipse Phase has no limit on the number of implants you can get but makes PCs keep paying for their replacement when they die again and again.

Yeah, a limit based on the shell makes semse

I think that you need to think about your game design here

19:23

Do you want to incentivise obese players? No. Stop harping about this and give everyone the same cybernetics allotment. Again, money and access are more interesting limiting factors.

obesity wouldn't help, fat can't support cybernetics,

Be more a case of bone structure and circulation if anything

Structural and thermal constraints, as far as running them go.

19:30

(you can solve power production with more augments, but they just make more heat)

Fat would actually be a detriment to heat dispersion, it insulates

Absolutely valid, but misses my point

Bigger characters would be at a severe mobility disadvantage.

19:37

(potentially)

Which is that the game gets weird when a specific body type is optimal, and there are lots of limiting factors which aren't volume

19:37

No

19:37

Don't do this

okay

It won't make it more fun, will make it less balanced

Surface area is close enough to constant that thermal constraints will probably be the same for everyone.

Give everyone a finite amount of tech room however you like and then add a talent or feat or whatever you call spending xp on new rules text to get more (edited)

Also, depending on setting, you might not want to make your mods too obvious.

Yeah, I’m suggesting giving each shell a hard number of aug slots

So something that tracks how visible your modifications are may or may not be useful.

19:41

(even for the trivial reason of "you have to get armor specially tailored")

Teasy enough to give mods external/internal tags

19:42

I think hard slots can work, but I think keying it to finite resources also works well

19:42

Depends if you want to make buying the limit of cybernetics mechanically compulsory or not

19:43

Hint: you don't, many people don't like three hours of shopping in chargen

Shadowrun has the Essence system but you’d think that some implants would cost less essence for trolls if it was based on body mass.

It's not, though

Instead it’s a “dehumanizing effect of tech” meter

That'd about the local magic system

19:44

It's just magic

19:44

To force you to only enter one splat or the other

Imo, you should have something like the following: Your basic +1 eyeballs cost x, have an appearance mod of y, and an encumbrance of z. You can then have a slate of options that do various tradeoffs on these values as per the goals of your system

19:47

So some laForrge brand eyefilter scanners are awesome (+5,) but spendy and have potentially an appearance mod (its awkward for some to talk to an air filter) and a penalty to encumbrance (cause damn they cause headaches)

I think the majority of implants shouldn't encumber you

Agreed. But sometimes players are cheap

Cataclysm has "itchy metal things" for if you're too cheap.

And your being many times over unimaginative with bonuses - avoid numerical bonuses for qualititive ones

Or the back of nowhere you're in has only last century's models in stock. And it's broken

In general, though, don't make it common or the default

19:50

The eldrae have more pride than that

(or if you try to install a mod yourself and it goes wrong)

And you don't need to actively feed the minimaxers

D20 Future has CON as the implant limit.

And yes, I know my suggestion is unimaginative. But it's also easily adjustable to a Fate style thing where instead you write out what the disadvantage is instead of simply qualifying it is a number

Hc Svnt Dracones 1st edition had an implant limit based on Body: Resilience, with some surgeries having their own limitations on repeats. 2nd edition simplified it to one major operation and three augments per head, core, or dermis. With some operations adding aug slots.

Even if you are fat, adipose tissue cannot viably support cybernetic implants due to it's consistency and tendency to insulate, and fat just makes you heavier. (edited)

02:48

As I previously foretold: Fat Borg Cube Syndrome (edited)

02:51

It deincentivises grotesque characters, making it a munchkin-resistant system if you ask me (edited)

I feel like we rarely do.

?

02:54

Characters with armour for skin or brain in robot suits also lack the ability to heal or be administered medicine, although components can be replaced. Armoured skin would be more expensive to repair or replace if it's made of dedicated, heavy duty material (edited)

Rarely ask you, I mean. :V

About what?

You said "if you ask me"

A volumetric character is more shoot-able than a smaller, more mobile one (edited)

@Unknown oh my god I get it you need a plausible limiter to augments

03:27

The answer I read long ago in a forgotten rpg article: Conspicuousness

03:28

Any kind of extensive body modification is going to make you stick out like a sore thumb and doubly so if it’s distinctive

You guys are still missing the context

03:57

This is a high-tech setting

03:58

Any specific technical limitation can and has been overcome - people are routinely telekinetic

03:58

And there are random citizens who are ballons of undifferentiated psuedo-organ

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