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Distance Learning for fun and profit...

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TypoNinja said:
I'd read it.

Who we kidding, I read everything.

But still, that sounds fun.
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I had an idea a long while ago, of the Shipgirl Normandy SR1 and EDI getting into a catfight over who gets to keep Joker. Who is highly amused, while Shepard referees. It was silly, but it was delightful. ^^

Cheetored20 said:
I'm on mobile so I can't see it, can I get a link please?
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Here you go! We're into the first Interval between ME1 and ME2 now, and expect....oddities. ^^ (also please don't judge the fic by its early chapters, I had no or intermittent beta readers at that point, and was still figuring out How To Author.)

EDIT: To weigh in on the "use sun as laser source", remember what the Death Star did to Alderaan?

That's the level of firepower you're talking about with a sun-fueled spotlight. it won't just destroy a ship, it would annihilate an entire fleet, just from being a planet-sized beam of extremely energetic fuck you. I think XKCD did a comic or What If or something about what happens if you concentrate all the sun's output into a laser hitting the earth. The energy densities involved are literally astronomical, so unless your proposed gravitic anti-laser field has A LITERAL SUN as a power source, you ain't deflecting that beam.

Remember, you're talking about deflecting light around a ship. that requires spatial warping you only find around something akin to neutron stars and black holes. those are astronomical objects, and the energies bound into those gravity fields are again, astronomical. You'll have to fuel your gravity-deflection field with, again, a literal star to feed the energy demand to hold that thing for any usable timeframe. You could theoretically get around it by using an excessively energy-dense fuel such as antimatter, which is what Star Trek does, but even so, when you're gulping down that much antimatter to generate your shields, imagine how much easier it would be to simply GET OUT OF THE WAY. Assuming you aren't caught in the beam to begin with, staying out of it would be preferential to being required to tank the shot.

Sidenote about Star Trek shields: they're yet another form of subspace tech. They don't just refract the incoming energy into a flat plane around the ship, they dissipate the incoming energy across the entire shield surface utilizing subspace in some ill-defined way. Whenever you have some sort of physics defying thingie in Star Trek, it's usually some sort of subspace interaction. the shields are MOST EMPHATICALLY NOT 'merely' gravity-based, otherwise the Federation would be using that sort of tech to move PLANETS around, which they clearly can't (as shown in that one TNG episode where Q is sent to live as a mortal).
 
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Jacen1 said:
Because that much energy at any focusable density would be hitting a larger surface area then an average planet, so unless you can warp an area larger then the size of Neptune around your ship, you will still be caught in the beam.
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For that to actually be an issue would require the ship to actually be of such great size in the first place. The idea is light in whatever area of the beam the ship happens to be in hits the bubble of warped space before it can reach the ship and the warping of space bends the light around it so that no light actually hits the ship.
The width of the beam does not matter as long as no light may come into contact with the ship.
The area of warped space could instead be a hemisphere which would lower power requirements, but require one to figure out which side of the ship is actually likely to be hit. Having this protection constantly would make for a constant massive power draw that would require large quantities of stored Eezo to achieve, and so could only be present for a carefully selected period of time.

Theoretically an extreme heat and thermal shock resistant multilayer vacuum insulated hull cooled using a reservoir of liquid helium could allow such a defense to have a more reactive role against such a weapon as the Dyson beam however this would require a rather short reaction time as the hull would almost instantly be heated to it's limit and the coolant depleted. The exhaust gases produced from the hot helium could be used to encourage beam diffraction in order to buy time though that is unlikely to be effective.
Aineko said:
If they could do that why don't they do the same thing to bend all projectiles around the ship? Gravetic effects that bend light paths also bend the paths of stuff slower than light at least as much.
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I have already acknowledged this in a later post where I specified most unguided projectiles specifically due to the ability of projectiles using the mass effect to counter this bubble of warped space depending on the number of projectiles, capabilities of the given projectiles, and strength of the shield of warped space. I suspect a sudden and acute warping of space could pierce through the shield like a metal spike through a metal plate. The ship has more room for energy storage, but also a much larger area to cover compared to the projectiles it needs to defend against.
 
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mp3.1415player said:
My military background says we should have weapons, my scientific background says we should avoid fights where we can.
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For what it is, a ship with "impossible" acceleration, speed and seeming invulnerability that is unarmed would be a very effective message.
"We do not feel the need to bring weapons." Is interpreted in two ways - you don't want to fight, and/or, you wouldn't even need a weapon to cause damage.
 
If you can effectively bend the output of the sun away from you, you don't have a shield so much as a white hole.
 
Prof.MoreRight said:
For that to actually be an issue would require the ship to actually be of such great size in the first place. The idea is light in whatever area of the beam the ship happens to be in hits the bubble of warped space before it can reach the ship and the warping of space bends the light around it so that no light actually hits the ship.
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Then your ship is flying blind, since letting ANY energy through for sensory data will result in the ship being roasted. Plus, the momentum of all that light at that density would itself warp space unraveling the defensive warp protecting it.

In other words, unless the ship has the energy output of a larger star, it will not survive such an attack regardless of the energetic defense. The only hope is evasion; the best defense, and in this case the ONLY defense, is to Not Be There.
 
Guyman said:
you don't want to fight, and/or, you wouldn't even need a weapon to cause damage
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Or your shields are so OP PLSE NERF that Planetary Raming is a perfectly viable strategy! Taylor should make these!

"Our civilization no longer needs guns. Now, our ships just flying into your homeworlds at 1/3 the speed of C. No more problems, right?"

All the Turians bowing to Taylor as their new Great Spirit.
All the Salarians kneeling in submission to Taylors great mind.
All the Asari scared their culture assimilation plot won't work no more.
All the Batarians fleeing to Andromeda to escape the crazy she-devil!
All the Geth knowing their Creators are safe, this quietly leave.
All the Quarians happily eating oranges and playing on the beach with no care at all.

.... Harbinger making angry space-cuttlefish noises as all the other Reapers flee to Andromeda.
 
Jacen1 said:
Then your ship is flying blind, since letting ANY energy through for sensory data will result in the ship being roasted. Plus, the momentum of all that light at that density would itself warp space unraveling the defensive warp protecting it.

In other words, unless the ship has the energy output of a larger star, it will not survive such an attack regardless of the energetic defense. The only hope is evasion; the best defense, and in this case the ONLY defense, is to Not Be There.
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I already mentioned potential methods to lower the energy requirement slightly that also could also help in preventing the ship from flying blind.
As for the notion that the ship must withstand all the stars energy, the beam can only be focused so much and will likely experience some measure of diffraction. Furthermore the action of such intense light on the shield while adverse is likely not perfectly efficient as its own warping of space is presumably not structured to be inverse to the gravitational manipulations of the shield. Detection of interference with the warp field could be used as method of detecting the beam in order to tell when the coast is clear and potentially to detect large moving masses both of which reduce issues with flying blind.

I imagine one would have a ship that is long and narrow with the primarily active warp shield at the 'front' of the ship and extendable sensor arms on the sides to aid in navigation. A narrow body facing towards a star presents a small target for the beam that is not only more difficult to get, but also has a smaller area that needs to be protected against the beam. Such a ship could also be equipped with disposable remote controlled drones to provide further navigational assistance and to with enough range and some manner of FTL communications even provide warning of the incoming beam which would also help in the effort to limit shield usage and strength to what is actually needed.
Of course if one needs to handle a Dyson beam then it would probably be reasonable to send many ships in order to ensure that either there are multiple weaker beams or one beam with many enemies far apart from each-other to choose to target.

The act of bending space around a ship in a hemisphere or bubble is similar to the function of many warp drives, this may indicate that some of the tricks used to reduce warp drive energy requirements in different warp field solutions can also be applied here which would certainly help.

Funny enough this reminds me of something interesting, what if someone combined the implementation of a normally non-FTL warp field solution with Mass Effect FTL? While the warp field wouldn't be able to achieve FTL alone it should be able to maintain it so if we start with Mass Effect FTL and turn on the warp drive before switching off the Mass Effect FTL one should continue moving at the same speed as before. With all that in mind if a non-FTL warp drive was constructed that didn't require Eezo in the Mass Effect universe then that would have an interesting impact.

Anyway I'm sleep deprived right now so I'll see you fine folks in the morning!
 
Vyrexuviel said:
I think XKCD did a comic or What If or something about what happens if you concentrate all the sun's output into a laser hitting the earth.
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I remember one along the lines of 'How powerful would a laser pointer have to be for you to see the dot on the Moon?' Then Randall asked, 'What if we add more power?' as he does in What Ifs.
sdwood said:
Given that it's Joker?

"Girls, girls, no need to fight. There's plenty of me to go around."
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That sounds like a bad idea. Given that his Vrolik's syndrome means he could break a hip just sitting in his chair wrong?
 
Memory Gem said:
Hrm, here's a thought I just had, a species with complete mastery over its solar system would include control over the light of it's star, right? How would a ME ship handle a beam of concentrated starlight? It would be pretty simple to redirect starlight from generating power to focus on a ship. It would be pretty short ranged, but it's the entire power output of a star on a relatively small area.
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Ahh SAPL! I love that idea! I'm not sure most franchises have sufficient shielding to deal with a beam of light that can melt tons of Nickle-Iron per second.. I don't have the figures available on phone, so someone with a copy of the books can post about the energy supposedly being thrown by an UNG array, but it's a nice high number from my recall.. Maybe an Exawatt...
 
Ame said:
Ahh SAPL! I love that idea! I'm not sure most franchises have sufficient shielding to deal with a beam of light that can melt tons of Nickle-Iron per second.. I don't have the figures available on phone, so someone with a copy of the books can post about the energy supposedly being thrown by an UNG array, but it's a nice high number from my recall.. Maybe an Exawatt...
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The sun puts out something like three hundred yottawatts of energy a second. Stars are fucking scary. Now, I'm unsure if you could harness all that energy and use it in a giant fuck off laser, but still.
 
deathofrats0808 said:
The sun puts out something like three hundred yottawatts of energy a second. Stars are fucking scary. Now, I'm unsure if you could harness all that energy and use it in a giant fuck off laser, but still.
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You just haven't let Taylor get ahold of your homeworlds star yet. Just give her three weeks, some duct tape, a can of tuna, five bananas, a sock, and eleven toasters. You'll see. She can do it.
 
Amdar210 said:
You just haven't let Taylor get ahold of your homeworlds star yet. Just give her three weeks, some duct tape, a can of tuna, five bananas, a sock, and eleven toasters. You'll see. She can do it.
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She's not a Tinker, so she needs a warehouse full of spare parts and a month. Then she launches her shiny new autonomous fabber to build a Dyson swarm, which will take a year. Now you have a Nicoll-Dyson Beam that can fire subspace energy blasts.
 
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The tech that Taylor's already identified and hinted at in this Canon is easily Type1 and more likely a Type 2. The tech she's showed, fixed/upgraded, and created in non-Canon is realistically applied correctly a Type3. Having her move our supermassive black hole at this point is not really an unreasonable event.
The fact that her knowledge set she's working on has no abstraction level and no limitation is just crazy.
 
bob_says_hi said:
The tech that Taylor's already identified and hinted at in this Canon is easily Type1 and more likely a Type 2. The tech she's showed, fixed/upgraded, and created in non-Canon is realistically applied correctly a Type3. Having her move our supermassive black hole at this point is not really an unreasonable event.
The fact that her knowledge set she's working on has no abstraction level and no limitation is just crazy.
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When you say Type, are you referring to the Kardashev scale? Because that doesn't really work on the scale of a single person. And tech doesn't actually relate to those types unless it's linked to the storage and control of energy. Further, the Kardashev scale is impossible to apply with such a small scale implementation as the fic has presented. Her inventions might lead to Earth becoming a Type II or III civilization, but her tech doesn't enter those categories on its own.
 
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