Technical questions

So then the ship vibrates because?

It’s the Star Trek ‘bridge crew all get thrown out of their chair’s’ silliness. Don’t analyze it to find out what is really going on

So where does the energy go then?
While the Honorverse is a favourite series of mine, and I'm in awe of RFC's genius, I do wonder about the physics.
Easiest explanation is that it is an alternative universe, another is to compare the time gap to that between us and Ancient Greece, and consider how our technology would appear to them.
Essentially free energy, and perpetual motion. Perhaps the energy goes back to where it came from?

Joat42 wrote:

ThinksMarkedly wrote:However, we're still several orders of magnitude from the energy you calculated. To make matters worse, you'd be dissipating that energy in a very, very short period of time: if you decelerated that missile from 0.9c to zero in the span of 1 km, it would take only 7.5 µs. That means the power dissipation would be 10^27 W. That's a number so large I have to look up the SI prefix (and it looks like it was standardised only last year!). It's also nearly 3 times the energy output of the Sun.

That depends on how the missile is decelerated. If it is decelerated because it runs into another mass there will be a release of energy. If it on the other hand runs into a gravity field that decelerates it there wont be any energy dissipation assuming the object is uniformly affected by the field.

Joat42 wrote:That depends on how the missile is decelerated. If it is decelerated because it runs into another mass there will be a release of energy. If it on the other hand runs into a gravity field that decelerates it there wont be any energy dissipation assuming the object is uniformly affected by the field.

Lavoisier rolls in his tomb after reading this...

So would Newton, because his third law says something react to that force being applied.

Just for fun, I tried to calculate where we could find a gravitational field that could produce 36.45 billion km/s². My first reaction were neutron stars and blackholes, so I used Newton's Law of Gravitation with 1.44 solar masses (the Chandrasekhar Limit) and 3 solar masses (definitely above the Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkov Limit; and yes, that Oppenheimer). For the 3 solar mass calculation, that yields a distance of a mere 3.3 km, increasing with the square root of the mass. But the event horizon (Schwarzschild radius) of a 3-solar-mass black hole is 8.9 km, so you'd have to have already crossed the event horizon to see this high a gravitational field. Increasing the mass of the BH won't help because the Schwarzschild radius increases directly proportional to mass. Decreasing the mass does help, so I used this blackhole calculator, to calculate and ended up with a black hole of 0.413 solar masses. There is no known process by which such such a BH could be produced, aside from direct collapse around the time of the Big Bang (a primordial black hole).

Daryl wrote:So where does the energy go then?
While the Honorverse is a favourite series of mine, and I'm in awe of RFC's genius, I do wonder about the physics.
Easiest explanation is that it is an alternative universe, another is to compare the time gap to that between us and Ancient Greece, and consider how our technology would appear to them.
Essentially free energy, and perpetual motion. Perhaps the energy goes back to where it came from?

Well, David is not a physicist. There are a couple of physicists who write fiction or publish papers -- Catherine Asaro comes to mind, she published a paper explaining her FTL mechanism -- but David is not one of them. So some things do go out of the window.

The wedges are not the most egregious problem of his Physics. It's when he decided to forego wedges in the Battle of Cerberus and stuck to rocket science that for me it really went wrong.

But yes, the ability to extract energy from the Alpha band via wedges means we have unlimited energy or energy so abundant to make no practical difference. The energies being thrown about are just too large and too easy to obtain. I'm not sure the wedges themselves would do constitute perpetual motion.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Lavoisier rolls in his tomb after reading this...

I thought that he would have already done that at the description of a wedge.

Honorverse is rife with handwavium in regards to physics, why suspend disbelief in this particular instance? Just consider the difference in gravitational gradient of a wedge with that of a block hole. The former goes from negligible to "impenetrable" and totally destructive to any object within meters, the latter has a destructive gradient measured in millions of kilometers.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:So would Newton, because his third law says something react to that force being applied.

Now tell me about how you apply that to grav-plates and accelerating a ship with a wedge.

It's fine to say "that's not how it works in the real world", that's just an observation pointing out that a piece of fiction is just that - fiction, if it's not followed by a relevant discussion why the observation is interesting it's entirely a redundant statement with no actual relevance. Using real world examples to disprove fictional physics seems to me to be a futile exercise. The only worthwhile exercise here is trying to explain how the fictional physics may work by using and modifying actual physics furthering our understanding of a fictional universe we find interesting.

Plasma Magneto Hydrodynamics.

We have seen numerous times where a ship is destroyed (very thoroughly) though containment of A fusion reactor....never says multiple just "containment failure". Of course that probably almost instantly leads to any other fusion reactors onboard to lose containment though "collateral damage".

So what happens when the power/plasma conduits suffer a loss of power to the fields that contain the plasma in them? I suspect more than scorching the insulation...big smile. Is is possible that there are automatic (electronic/gravitational/physical) gate valves that cut the flow if a section of conduit is breached, such that plasma doesn't continue flowing out of the breach?

So many questions

It’s just a few megatons, nothing big.

Joat42 wrote:Now tell me about how you apply that to grav-plates and accelerating a ship with a wedge.

It's fine to say "that's not how it works in the real world", that's just an observation pointing out that a piece of fiction is just that - fiction, if it's not followed by a relevant discussion why the observation is interesting it's entirely a redundant statement with no actual relevance. Using real world examples to disprove fictional physics seems to me to be a futile exercise. The only worthwhile exercise here is trying to explain how the fictional physics may work by using and modifying actual physics furthering our understanding of a fictional universe we find interesting.

I have a picture from the 1954 Popular Mechanics showing a mockup of supposed "home computer" from the 2000s. The image bares more in common with a nuclear reactor's control room than an IBM PC - the computer being the size of a large living room, with the walls covered in banks of dials.



And the article mentioned that many breakthroughs in miniaturization would be required for the concept to be practical.

And Yet many more happened, as we know and continued to happen - now virtually everyone holds hundreds of thousands of times the computing power of an 80s PC in our pocket. I don't think the PM writer could have considered that.

In one of the First Star Trek the Next Generation Episodes, it was mentioned that the entire ship had 4 Teraquads of computer storage - assuming a "quad" is 2 binary bits, that's 8 terabit. I just built a gaming machine with 20 Terabytes of storage (4 x 2TB NVME drives, and a 12TB HDD data drive.). I know that it was just writers on a show saying that in the fall of 1987, but that was an insane number to a PC geek whose PC had a hideously expensive 40MB HD.

Technology has made those #s and designs seem pathetic. In another 50 years, hat will be made possible due to unforeseen breakthroughs?

Theemile wrote:I have a picture from the 1954 Popular Mechanics showing a mockup of supposed "home computer" from the 2000s. The image bares more in common with a nuclear reactor's control room than an IBM PC - the computer being the size of a large living room, with the walls covered in banks of dials.

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Why does it have a wheel? I seriously doubt the writer would have considered the possibility of driving similators. Especially since the screen is to the right, not in front of that wheel.

In one of the First Star Trek the Next Generation Episodes, it was mentioned that the entire ship had 4 Teraquads of computer storage - assuming a "quad" is 2 binary bits, that's 8 terabit. I just built a gaming machine with 20 Terabytes of storage (4 x 2TB NVME drives, and a 12TB HDD data drive.). I know that it was just writers on a show saying that in the fall of 1987, but that was an insane number to a PC geek whose PC had a hideously expensive 40MB HD.

They invented the term "quad" because it sounded like an improvement over "bit" but wasn't it. They specifically said they hadn't come up with a formula to convert from one to the other and didn't want to make one, because technology was progressing far too rapidly to make that estimation.

There are some other mentions of technology in later episodes that are more concerning. I think there's at some point a discussion of Data's processing speed measured in bits per nanosecond (or a multiple of bits) that is far closer to being surpassed.

Technology has made those #s and designs seem pathetic. In another 50 years, hat will be made possible due to unforeseen breakthroughs?

Maybe carbon nanotubes. They can apparently do everything... except leave the lab.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:
Why does it have a wheel? I seriously doubt the writer would have considered the possibility of driving similators. Especially since the screen is to the right, not in front of that wheel.

I always assumed it was a primitive mouse, but the article never said. Yeah, ergonomics was not a consideration in this design. Obviously it was just a "Wow" design for a "World of Tomorrow" display - with them throwing every random item in the room that seemed "futuristic" with no major concept of how it would actually be used. Heck, We're luck they didn't include a treadmill so the computer could "walk the dog".

Of course comparing the capabilities and uses for a PC from 1954 with what they became by 2000 is night and day. In 1954, a computer was little more than a glorified calculator.

I have a quote somewhere from 1948 I believe, stating that the author could see the use of maybe 4 or 5 computers around the world, not more. Sometimes, a person's horizons appear much closer than they actually are.