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Gravitational Waves

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Gravitational Waves
Post by iranuke   » Tue Nov 14, 2017 2:58 pm

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Now that they have found that gravitational waves travel at the speed of light, does that change any of the plot?
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Re: Gravitational Waves
Post by JohnRoth   » Tue Nov 14, 2017 3:14 pm

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iranuke wrote:Now that they have found that gravitational waves travel at the speed of light, does that change any of the plot?


This has been discussed before. Grav waves are a different phenomenon than gravity waves. They work by the Awesome Power of Setting.
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Re: Gravitational Waves
Post by kzt   » Tue Nov 14, 2017 3:24 pm

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There are certain elements of any SF or Fantasy story you just have to accept as true for the story to work.
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Re: Gravitational Waves
Post by drinksmuchcoffee   » Tue Nov 14, 2017 3:57 pm

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To further add to the confusion, in the Real World "gravity waves" and "gravitational waves" are two distinct phenomena.

Honorverse "grav waves" are neither "gravity waves" nor "gravitational waves".
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Re: Gravitational Waves
Post by zuluwiz   » Tue Nov 14, 2017 4:55 pm

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So when will we see the New, Improved Gravitational Lance Weapon?
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Re: Gravitational Waves
Post by Jonathan_S   » Tue Nov 14, 2017 5:15 pm

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zuluwiz wrote:So when will we see the New, Improved Gravitational Lance Weapon?

Not until powered armored treecats carrying microfusion carbines storm BuWeaps and force them to.
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Re: Gravitational Waves
Post by Theemile   » Tue Nov 14, 2017 5:44 pm

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Jonathan_S wrote:
zuluwiz wrote:So when will we see the New, Improved Gravitational Lance Weapon?

Not until powered armored treecats carrying microfusion carbines storm BuWeaps and force them to.


...While the Battle Armored Stilties fill Frigates which hold the orbitals above Landing and dream of taking over the captured SLN SDs and modifying them to take over the universe with super streak drives.
******
RFC said "refitting a Beowulfan SD to Manticoran standards would be just as difficult as refitting a standard SLN SD to those standards. In other words, it would be cheaper and faster to build new ships."
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Re: Gravitational Waves
Post by vovchara   » Thu Nov 16, 2017 2:47 pm

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As far as I remember, DW is writing about grav waves propagating along the alpha wall, not the just normal space, for the sake of of our sanity just assume it's not the same ;)
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Re: Gravitational Waves
Post by Jonathan_S   » Thu Nov 16, 2017 3:20 pm

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vovchara wrote:As far as I remember, DW is writing about grav waves propagating along the alpha wall, not the just normal space, for the sake of of our sanity just assume it's not the same ;)

Gravity signals (including the effects of a ship's wedge) propagate along the Alpha wall.
Gravity Waves are the hyperspace phenomenon that require Warshawski sails to enter or travel along; providing roughly 10 times the acceleration a ship can produce with it's own wedge.

Actually its only in normal space that grav signals move along the Alpha wall. The generalized case is that the move along the next higher hyper wall at the speed of light in that hyper band. So in normal space they move at 62x c. But from within the Beta bands (767:1 compression) they're moving along the Gamma wall at 1473x c relative to normal space but just 1.92 c relative to the ship within Beta. So your ability to see another ship's wedge in "real time", or to use FTL com links or fire control, gets less effective the higher the hyper bands you go. By the time you're in the Theta bands your FTL signal is only 1.16 times faster than radio or laser!

But despite calling them grav signals there's no mention I can recall in the books that a grav sensor can see the gravity caused by a planet. Wedges and Sails, while producing artificial gravity bands, do so while interacting (drawing power from) the hyper wall and its possible its that interaction, rather than the gravity itself, that causes the detectable ripples along the wall.


All of this is totally unrelated to the flexing of spacetime propagating at the speed of light, coincidentally also call gravity waves, detected by LIGO.
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