- Location
- Spain
Well, for one, matter has infinite energy. So let's hope nobody will tries to make a nuke.
Lieutenant Fusilier 2 (Abandoned, do not read)
- Thread starter open_sketch
- Start date
- Original Mature Sci-Fi
Well, for one, matter has infinite energy. So let's hope nobody will tries to make a nuke.
- Location
- Ottawa
- Pronouns
- She/Her/Whatever
They exist in a world where if you go too far away from the galactic core the stars get cold and it snows in space. i pay more lip service to physics than treasure planet… but only just a little.
NotInventedHere
MSV, Desert Class
- Location
- UK
- Pronouns
- He/Him
E=mc^2 may not even be true at all here. This is a wildly, *wildly* different set of laws of physics.
EDIT: and ninja'd by sketch
- Location
- Ottawa
- Pronouns
- She/Her/Whatever
atoms have protons, neutrons, and electrons, sure, but also this is a universe where the atom turned out to run on, of all things, the nagaota model where all the electrons occupy a single orderly ring and orbit with perfect regularity and precision because physics here is clockwork, not probability.
radioactive isotopes are so because they have rings out of step.
- Pronouns
- She/Her
It rather raises the question about how Lucy's counterpart managed to get Concord tech working in a universe whose physics seemed closer to our own.
Oh, I wonder if Lucy's Curio could be duplicated and used as a communication hub for the ships in play here.
- Location
- Yes
Isekai protagonists work along different sets of rules to the rest of the setting they are in, so long as it is convenient for them to do so. If Lucy tried to build something advanced from our world, she would find that it works with relativistic physics, or she would were she not distracted before completing it.
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- She/Her
My inner min-maxer is downright chuffed at the idea.
Alas, you're very much right about Lucy's attention span.
@open_sketch So I just realized that this whole invitation to dinner thing was a very clever authorial ploy to get Dora onto a ship so we could see an awesome naval battle in this universe. Well done, it's spectacular! Definite Hornblower and Bolitho vibes. I want more of this.
Also, I love everything about the Scottish robot marines.
Also, I love everything about the Scottish robot marines.
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I hadn't thought about isekai protags as techno wizards*, but it makes sense.
*If your stuff works because you have very carefully sliced between two laws of physics, you're a wizard. There are other ways to be one, but this counts.
*If your stuff works because you have very carefully sliced between two laws of physics, you're a wizard. There are other ways to be one, but this counts.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
[puts on the top hat of a Concert physicist]
No it doesn't. Matter and energy aren't interconvertible, why would you think that?
[Picks up slim volume titled Relativity, by A. Einstein]
Ah. I see. An excessively complex scheme with a truly eyewatering amount of tensor calculus, for describing gravitation in terms of non-Euclidean geometry, positing time as a true fourth dimension rather than the conceit of speculative fiction writers... Hmmm. Yes, yes, I suppose that energy-momentum interconvertibility would fall out of that as a logical consequence.
[nods thoughtfully]
A brave little theory, and actually quite coherent in a universe with no fixed inertial frame of reference and a finite speed of light... if only we lived in one.
What's a "nuke?"
[takes Concord physicist top hat off]
Hypothesis: Of course there's transmutatives, nasty fountains of unstable isotopes that continue to emit energy for a protracted period, something like a hunk of corium, but any isotope so unstable as to undergo fission would do so before you could set off the bomb. It'd just be a fancy way of blowing up your own munitions factory, with unusual alacrity and vigor.
...Bolitho?
- Location
- Yes
An alternative thought on what Transmutatives might be: Some sort of weapon which works not by fission but by splitting bonds exothermically into their fundamental components. Hitting a tree with a transmutative produces carbon dust, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, some other assorted elements and an absolute shitload of heat. It therefore transmutes the surrounding area into other materials and deals appalling damage to its surroundings, as well as occasionally liberating or allowing the formation of some fairly nasty chemicals (for example, the above reaction involves extreme temperatures, hydrogen, nitrogen and carbon, so there's fair odds that one of the thing that's going to fall out is hydrogen cyanide gas). Someone check my chemistry on this, A Levels was a long time ago.
samdamandias
Apprentice Plane Wizard
If things follow the Nagaoka Saturnian model with a single ring, rather than the Bhor model with all orbitals coplanar, this implies that transmutatives and radioactives are natural dipoles, and will do some very interesting things under strong magnetic fields, assuming that they are not naturally occurring magnets.
Dora has the best seat in the house, doesn't she?
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I wonder how cannons work in space. Obviously they do, because the ship is using them, but for any range at all I would figure either missiles or infinite speed lasers would be more useful then an unguided shell. Unless that shell has fairly absurd velocity.
Of course, we haven't seen naval cannonry in action yet.
The 'coordination with no signals' the opposition ships are displaying and the chapter title makes me think some kind of hive-mind. Maybe a race that's individual, but so deeply rooted in the same manner of thought they can predict eachother's movements with near certainty.
Of course, we haven't seen naval cannonry in action yet.
The 'coordination with no signals' the opposition ships are displaying and the chapter title makes me think some kind of hive-mind. Maybe a race that's individual, but so deeply rooted in the same manner of thought they can predict eachother's movements with near certainty.
Dora gets up but never gets her hat back. She readies herself to charge into space, sans headwear. Did she forget the hat? Did she simply not want to risk it in the starfield of battle? Will this be the end of this hat? Will the hat get vented into space and lost?
10ebbor10
DON'T PANIC
- Location
- Present
The most likely explanation is that this universe operates almost entirely on Newtonian physics. For example, note how we have very fast spaceships but no calculations whatsoever on the impact of relativity.
So, there's no trouble with infinite energies and all that, because the whole of relativity is irrelevant.
On the other hand, black holes were mentioned, so those clearly exist, which doesn't really work if relativity doesn't exist. There's also no path towards a black hole, given how stars don't explode in this universe, they turn into popsicles..
The transmutatives are some kind of reaction in any case, given that they're absolutely safe to handle until they are fired. It goes from a stable material to a critical, before eventually burning itself out.
A few hypothetical possibilities :
1) The transmutatives operate on the same principle as the stars. This makes them exceedingly dangerous. Years, decades after your bomb has burned itself out, the star stuff is still doing whatever stuff stars do, and will eventually turn from the heat generating star stuff into cold generating star stuff, causing climatic effects.
2) Given the Saturnian model mentioned above, the key trick to getting a transmutative grenade would be to make something that deliberatly introduces "out of step-ness" on a large amount of atoms in a controlled manner. Thus I posit that, following the clockwork atom model, atomic bonds can operate in one of two directions. Clockwise or counterclockwise. Like clockwerk, clockwise connects to counterclockwise and so on. A transmutative grenade sets up a massive network of atomatic bonds all deeply and securely bound to one another (similar to ionic bonds in metals, and thus much harder to break than the weaker bonds used in organic creatures where molecules are constantly remade) all bound in the same direction. This mega molecule forms a ring that lines the entire shell or grenade.
When the trigger is pulled, an as of yet unspecified mechanism makes one final, forbidden bond, connecting two clockwise or two counterclockwise connections, bringing the entire molecular mechanism to a halt, and unleashing a terrible amount of energy as atomic mechanisms are leveraged to pull themselves apart piece by piece. It's less clockwork than it is an atomic Rube Goldberg mechanism.
Missiles don't work because magnetic oars and solar sails are so much more powerful than chemical propulsion, so you'd catch up with your own rockets in short order.
As such, I suspect that the rockets are short range, mass barrage weaponry, like this.
Edit : Well, except for the enemy, who does seem to be using real long range rockets, which are probably guided if they manage to hit at that range..
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JennyDracos
Eccentric Hugging Lady
- Location
- Chicago
Now I have SMAC quotes running through my head. So, thanks. I guess.
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- He/Him
I hasten to add, Lucy *is* currently getting laid in the hold
10ebbor10
DON'T PANIC
- Location
- Present
That's a pretty smart idea.
If the gravity fails under bombardement it's a much better idea to be laying down than standing up.
- Location
- Ottawa
- Pronouns
- She/Her/Whatever
i think black holes here superficially resemble our own but for much weirder reasons. also, i like the idea that a consequence of their immeasurable density is that they do not orbit galaxies but instead follow their own paths through the stars. perhaps a black hole is an immature galaxy forge.
huge stars do sometimes collapse into black holes or go nova when they burn out from gravity before they freeze from time.
huge stars do sometimes collapse into black holes or go nova when they burn out from gravity before they freeze from time.
ThatGazzer
Minds Eye Bind
- Location
- PNW
- Pronouns
- They/Them
I also recall you mentioning White Holes, at some point? could it be that a black hole is just the ingress and the white hole is the egress, for a like...matter smoosher or something?
- Location
- Ottawa
- Pronouns
- She/Her/Whatever
ehhehehe smoosh
10ebbor10
DON'T PANIC
- Location
- Present
What if a Black hole happens when a star is so massive, that as it cools down, it drops the temperature of it's area below the zero point and the fabric of space ceases to exist the way it's supposed to? The very clockwork mechanisms that make up the atoms of the universe seize up and stop.
It'd be interesting because instead of a Schwarzschild radius, you'd have a literal barrier or ice surrounding the black hole, and instead of just being black it would be black with a brilliant corona caused by graviational lensing and the refraction of the ice.
- Location
- Ottawa
- Pronouns
- She/Her/Whatever
shit that's rad
- Location
- Washington DC
I was wondering why the main means of intership (and interplanetary) commo was signal lamps, of all things, but in a wild world with light speed being *actually infinite*, it makes perfect sense. This was a whole lot of neat worldbuilding with a minimum of obnoxious 'as you know'. Well done, open_sketch!
I'd been guessing that light speed was infinite here for a while, though having it explicitly confirmed is... nice, yet also very, very strange.
Universes like this that have a sort of physics-equivalent of convergent evolution are always hard to get an intuitive grasp on. The way everything works is completely different at a fundamental level... and yet, somehow, we still wind up with an Earth that was indisinguishable from our own up until the 1800s.
Futurama said:
Universes like this that have a sort of physics-equivalent of convergent evolution are always hard to get an intuitive grasp on. The way everything works is completely different at a fundamental level... and yet, somehow, we still wind up with an Earth that was indisinguishable from our own up until the 1800s.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Hm.
Under Newtonian physics it's possible to posit stars with an escape velocity greater than that of light (what this even means if light is a wave and not a stream of corpuscules remains to be determined), but in a setting where the speed of light is infinite, that's not a thing.
On the other hand, a star that cooled off WOULD still undergo gravitational collapse. If degenerate matter states exist, "black hole" could plausibly be a term for a star that has (for whatever reason) undergone atypically fast gravitational collapse and is now a very dense cinder in thermal equilibrium with the ambient cosmic background temperature. As such, it is "black" (it emits little or no thermal radiation that distinguishes it from the background), and a "hole" (its gravity is so strong that it radically alters ship trajectories, exerts extreme tidal forces at close range, and is virtually impossible to escape from close range).
It's a metaphorical hole in space rather than a literal one, is all.
That might work.
Oooh that works too.