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Re: ?
Post by markusschaber   » Thu May 09, 2024 2:33 am

markusschaber
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penny wrote:Along with light. Grav waves do not escape the maws of a black hole. Nothing does! That fact makes it difficult to study black holes because they do not emit any information that can be studied. Light, and grav waves, would be information.

So, in shocking conclusion, an LD very well might be able to completely hide the emergency from hyper! No bleed of the sails or FTL ripples will occur!

tlb wrote:But there is gravity from a black hole outside of the event horizon.

penny wrote:Of course there is. The entire system contains gravity. But the gravity near the black hole is affecting the photons that are near it. One cannot venture too closely to the event horizon.

So during transition, an enormous concentration of gravity forms/appears in the normal space. Strong enough to form an event horizon. How can that gravity not be detected by grav sensors watching out for things like impellers?

So my point is: Even if a ship could cover itself with an event horizon during transition, it would not allow the ship to transition undetected, as the gravity needed to create the event horizon would be easily detectable itself.
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Re: ?
Post by penny   » Sun May 12, 2024 6:37 am

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penny wrote:The latest technology in photography is a good example. There is a new camera that can snap 10 trillion frames per second. That is faster than light.

Thinksmarkedly wrote:No, it isn't. There's nothing in that statement that implies movement, only time. And something can happen trillions of times per second.

penny wrote:Huh? The shutter!

markusschaber wrote:I'd bet a years supply of Pizza that they don't have a traditional mechanical shutter physically opening and closing trillions of times per second.

penny wrote:If you want free pizza just say so. LOL

Even if I didn't know for a fact that you are correct I wouldn't take that bet. If traditional shutters tried to accomplish that feat, it'd probably melt the mechanism.

I've been following the development of the tech for a while. The answer is lasers! The Holy Grail of today's technology. But! What's in a name? That which we capture an image by any other means is still a shutter. :D

https://www.wired.com/2009/05/worlds-fa ... 20problems.
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Re: ?
Post by penny   » Sun May 12, 2024 7:10 am

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penny wrote:Along with light. Grav waves do not escape the maws of a black hole. Nothing does! That fact makes it difficult to study black holes because they do not emit any information that can be studied. Light, and grav waves, would be information.

So, in shocking conclusion, an LD very well might be able to completely hide the emergency from hyper! No bleed of the sails or FTL ripples will occur!

tlb wrote:But there is gravity from a black hole outside of the event horizon.

penny wrote:Of course there is. The entire system contains gravity. But the gravity near the black hole is affecting the photons that are near it. One cannot venture too closely to the event horizon.

markusschaber wrote:So during transition, an enormous concentration of gravity forms/appears in the normal space. Strong enough to form an event horizon. How can that gravity not be detected by grav sensors watching out for things like impellers?

So my point is: Even if a ship could cover itself with an event horizon during transition, it would not allow the ship to transition undetected, as the gravity needed to create the event horizon would be easily detectable itself.


Because black holes are some greedy sons-o-witches. They don't part with information (like grav waves and light) that will be tripping off any alarms in the system. That is the point of the exercise.

But all in all, I certainly agree. But since powerful tractor beams cutting a hole into n-space in David's universe is not detectable, all bets are off. Hence, that quirk in his universe might be exploitable.

At any rate, I still agree that a black hole should be visible, or at least the effects of it. However, black holes don't generally scream at you. Like I said, they are some tight-lipped sons-o-witches and they are reluctant to part with information. Their effect, being right in the system, might be seen by an ordinary avid astronomer, if he is happening to be looking right at it. But it ain't gonna be detected by any FTL detector. It won't be tripping those alarms. And there won't be any brilliant fireworks display. There may be a question of the trapped energies within the black hole when tractors disengage, but even if so, those energies can be directed back to whence they came.

And do remember, the event horizon isn't going to be all that large, as black holes go, and the black hole isn't going to last very long in-system before the LD kills it.

Gone in a flash. Ah, well, perhaps that isn't a good choice of words.
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Re: ?
Post by penny   » Sun May 12, 2024 7:25 am

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Jonathan wrote:
penny wrote:Because black holes are some greedy sons-o-witches. They don't part with information (like grav waves and light) that will be tripping off any alarms in the system. That is the point of the exercise.

But all in all, I certainly agree. But since powerful tractor beams cutting a hole into n-space in David's universe is not detectable, all bets are off. Hence, that quirk in his universe might be exploitable.

At any rate, I still agree that a black hole should be visible, or at least the effects of it. However, black holes don't generally scream at you. Like I said, they are some tight-lipped sons-o-witches and reluctant to part with information. Their effect being right in the system might be seen by an ordinary avid astronomer, if he is happening to be looking right at it. But it ain't gonna be detected by any FTL detector. It won't be tripping those alarms. And there won't be any brilliant fireworks display. There may be a question of the trapped energies within the black hole when tractors disengage, but even if so, those energies can be directed back to whence they came.

And do remember, the event horizon isn't going to be all that large, as black holes go, and the black hole isn't going to last very long in-system before the LD kills it.

Gone in a flash. Ah, well, perhaps that isn't a good choice of words.


Let's say you can somehow make a black hole transition from hyperspace. Let's further, just for the sake of the rest of this argument, grant that its event horizon is somehow capable of preventing the escape of the 62c ripples along the Alpha wall (so not actually in our spacetime).

A black hole's gravity extends far, far, beyond its even horizon. It's obviously weaker past that point (the escape velocity has dropped to below the speed of light), but it isn't weak. This would be an almost inconceivably powerful artificially created gravity source; millions of times more powerful than any wedge.

(And it'd have to be a really weird "black hole" since if it was normal solid one, to get a Schwarzschild radius large enough to hide a Lenny Det within - say 1.5 km - it'd have about half the mass of our sun and about 3 trillion gravities. That you wouldn't need Warshaski detectors to notice; you'd see planetary orbits changing!! :O)

Its gravity effect beyond its event horizon should be creating its own massive "bend" in the Alpha wall and creating unmissable FTL signals originating from outside the event horizon. (Kind of like how we've observed black holes whose accretion disks emit x-rays due to the intense gravity affecting the gasses streaming around and towards the hole. You can't see the black hole itself, but its effects on the surrounding area can be noisy as hell)


Good questions!

First, let's agree on a few things. Whatever the case may be, there is going to be much to do about nothing as far as anything emanating away from the black hole. The greedy witch is going to try to suck everything into it. A massive black hole is responsible for a phenomena called “frame dragging,” whereby it sucks nearby space-time into it in a circular fashion. Much like the whirlpool created in your bathtub when you pull the plug. It is called the Lens-Thirring effect. Thus, for all intents and purposes, the normal information sensors count on is being gobbled up by the maws of this insatiable beast. Sure, there will be photons far enough to escape the maws, but at their rate of travel, also insignificant.

But I am uncertain your prediction of 3 trillion gravities would ring true. (Though it very well could.) You undoubtedly base those calculations on the ordinary Chandrasekhar limit of black holes, whereby a nominal massive object simply has to be at the center of imploding gravities. That will not be the case for an artificially created black hole. At its center is simply magical malignant creatures causing the effect contained in a VERY local spacetime. Think, the Lens-Thirring effect created in a bathtub, as opposed to the effect represented by the raging rapids that are oftentimes associated with the Bermuda Triangle. Hence, not subject to the traditional nominal size restraints necessary to create / cause a black hole. IOW, this black hole is specially tailored to go. Tailored to fit like a suit of armor. NPI.

But the point is moot I think. Because the anomaly will be gone in a flash. Perhaps less than a minute. Why would it need to even last that long? Personally, I would be surprised if it lasts beyond several seconds.
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Re: ?
Post by penny   » Sun May 12, 2024 7:46 am

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I am going to post something from a Physics site as reference.

https://physics.stackexchange.com/quest ... black-hole


A common mistake is often made thinking that a star has to be of a certain size before it can become a black hole. That is a misnomer. There is a required density, not size.

In layman's terms, essentially what is happening with a star is that the strong nuclear force is battling the weaker gravitational force. The strong nuclear force at the core is pushing out, against and counteracting the gravitational
force thus acting as a “counter-grav” and preventing implosion.

I may be mistaken, but I think the many sinkholes we are experiencing all over the planet is at least in part due to the drilling (fracking) through the earth and prematurely relieving pressures that are in harmony with the counter force that is keeping the planet from imploding from under its own weight.

There's no minimum size. There's a minimum density. Stars turn themselves into black holes when they exhaust their fuel and collapse. For that to yield a black hole, they need to start off with around 25 solar masses. If a star starts with enough mass, natural processes cause it to eventually suffer a core collapse which greatly compresses some of its mass. (The rest gets blasted outward into space by the resulting shockwave.) If that explosion's large enough, the mass that's falls inward can reach the critical density for a black hole. (Thus the black hole's mass is less than that of the progenitor star.)

Particle accelerators can (perhaps, according to some versions of theory) create microscopic black holes by manufacturing large subatomic particles. Since the particles are created with high nominal densities, they can be considered black holes. They also tend to be moving near the speed of light, and even though they're "large subatomic particles", they're still expected to have masses much less than, say, a Uranium atom. Since it's the total mass which sets a black hole's radius, this would yield (at worst) nucleus-scale black holes moving near the speed of light. Such black holes would drill through matter, disrupting anything encountered along the way in a nucleus-wide path. Since atoms are really small (and nuclei are even smaller), you could have a few of these going through you and not notice... but they'd technically be black holes. The "disruption" caused by them would basically be a narrow beam of ionizing radiation. Such black holes would also decay very rapidly.


All of the above is to stress that those conditions are only necessary for the formation of black holes to occur naturally. But physicists have known for quite some time that black holes might be created without all of the excess mass that is associated with a natural formation. As is witnessed in the above passage.

As I have, you might have witnessed that knowledge being demonstrated in various movies and TV shows where a local black hole had been created right inside a laboratory or other very confined area where it had little to no effect on its surroundings as a whole. Though I would not have wanted to breach its very local event horizon.

My point is that a very advanced society who are reaping the rewards of a Grand Unified Theory and a Theory of Everything can surely produce a very tame black hole by manipulating the very gravity that creates it, thus controlling the effect it has outside of its local frame of reference.

So, an artificially created black hole would not be at the mercy of the nominal mass that is associated with a natural formation. The effects of an artificially created black hole is being manipulated in a “one size fits all” fashion.

Moreover, I cannot stress enough that almost as soon as the LD enters n-space the black hole will begin to dissipate, certainly because the LD would want it that way, and also due to the fact that when it exits hyper, the LD has been severed from the enormous energies it takes to create and maintain it.

But all of you are correct in pointing out the dangers of the impact a black hole can make materializing in a system. And Thinksmarkedly’s notion of the speed of a black hole is serious. For instance, a huge bowling bowl impacting with our atmosphere carrying an enormous acceleration on reentry should be noticeable. So I am glad he brought that up because it had already occurred to me that an LD would want to tip toe in-system during its transition. An LD’s already paltry acceleration somewhat accommodates that anyway. An LD wouldn't want to carry any momentum across the hyper wall. Another area where the MA’s technology totally departs from traditional tactics.

In summary, I think it is in error to apply the mechanics of forces of a naturally created black hole with an artificially created one. I think that kind of one track mind would prevent Manticoran scientists from even considering the tech. Fresh eyes are needed.

A departure from all things Manticoran wouldn't hurt either. Enter the Mesan Alignment into the system. Pun intended.



PS

This is Mother's Day weekend and my lack of time prevents my post from being less convoluted. My apologies in advance.




Dunno what happened to the site. I replaced as many posts as I could.



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Last edited by penny on Sun May 12, 2024 8:42 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: ?
Post by tlb   » Sun May 12, 2024 10:29 am

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The author has made use of artificial black holes in the series The Path of the Fury to propel their starships (although it is questionable to call something a series that consists of an original book and a rewrite of that book to add history). The author does not seem to mix story elements across series. So is it significant that there does not seem to be any mention of black holes in the Honorverse (or is that a case of faulty memory again)??
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Re: ?
Post by Jonathan_S   » Sun May 12, 2024 10:50 am

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tlb wrote:The author has made use of artificial black holes in the series The Path of the Fury to propel their starships (although it is questionable to call something a series that consists of an original book and a rewrite of that book to add history). The author does not seem to mix story elements across series. So is it significant that there does not seem to be any mention of black holes in the Honorverse (or is that a case of faulty memory again)??

Eh, with the addition of the prequel Governor, and its sequel the forthcoming Rebel (this September) I think it's safe to call it a series.
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Re: ?
Post by tlb   » Sun May 12, 2024 11:01 am

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Jonathan_S wrote:Eh, with the addition of the prequel Governor, and its sequel the forthcoming Rebel (this September) I think it's safe to call it a series.

I missed that, having only read the original. I liked the concept of one of the Greek Furies melding with an aggrieved commando, but hated the use of an artificial black hole as a starship motor. The black hole has to pop into existence and pull the starship forward, then disappear before the ship is destroyed and reappear some distance ahead ad nauseam.
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Re: ?
Post by Brigade XO   » Fri May 17, 2024 6:31 pm

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So lets go back to what the LD's are designed to do?

Oyster Bay was launched to smash Manticore and Grayson's ability to build just about anything in their systems by eliminating the orbital stations which were the points of most fabrication in the systems including building (and repairing) all types of ships, their components, weapons systems and ammunition for said systems. Also included was the elimination of the majority to the workforces doing that manufacturing (and supporting staff/families/management) and the Naval personnel based or passing though. This also included almost ALL the dispersed shipyards which were building primarily naval units.
The dropping of the debris on the three inhabited planets was "just a bonus" in that it was going to cause massive damage wherever it landed plus -since much of the larger chunks of the shattered stations were going to de-orbit into the atmosphere it meant that it wasn't going to be scrap to be reprocessed by any of the serving recycling centers,

OB was a rush job using the Sharks and so the low numbers of the "test bed) ships meant that they were limited to what they could carry externally for G-Trops -not clear if the "ballistic" package weapons were also carried outside rather than tube deployed or dropped like pods. But the limitation in numbers and capacity of the Sharks meant that ONLY the 3 Manticore planet Stations and related infrastrure and the Grayson Blackbird Yard were hit.

The MA wanted to crush Manticore's ability to wage war and so open it to Haven being able to invade and conquer it (and Grayson at least) so Haven could move on to be the hammer to shatter the Solarian League. The Plan has been breaking down because the pawns aren't staying with the script.

What's missing here? The MA isn't even attempting to take and occupy Manticore and Grayson. It appears that they expect Haven to seize the moment and take both Manticore and Grayson. It also appears that the Solarian League is just expected to not get involved and for how long does the MA figure it will take Haven to 1) take Manticore and Grayson (at least of the Manticorian Alliance ), consolidate themselves and resume the growth needed to head over the Solarian Space and start to carve out systems into the Peoples Republic of Haven?

If the LD's are these almost undetectable massive warships that appear to be designed to stand well outside of systems and obliterate orbital capacity with weaponry which is just as undetectable until it actually starts cutting targets apart or are slamming in on ballistic courses like artillery shells, who is expected to show up at the various SL systems that get hammered?

How many LD's will it take to ravage enough systems to cause the SL to break down into Civil War with a generous helping of systems that will jump off with their own empire creation by taking over neighbors (devastated by attackers unknown or just not up to keeping themselves safe from greedy neighbors with warships)

Is Darius building any other warships than the LD's. You could wonder if the MA can think that it doesn't have to directly control hundreds (thousands) of systems to bring The Plan back on track and entirely harness the rest of humanity to the goals of the Alignment.

How does the Alignment figure it's going to eventually acquire all these systems even if the RF quickly grows to be a 50 system bastion of stability that only wants to help others recover from devastation?

So many questions, not enough information.
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Re: ?
Post by markusschaber   » Sat May 18, 2024 1:54 pm

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penny wrote:
penny wrote:Along with light. Grav waves do not escape the maws of a black hole. Nothing does! That fact makes it difficult to study black holes because they do not emit any information that can be studied. Light, and grav waves, would be information.

So, in shocking conclusion, an LD very well might be able to completely hide the emergency from hyper! No bleed of the sails or FTL ripples will occur!

tlb wrote:But there is gravity from a black hole outside of the event horizon.

penny wrote:Of course there is. The entire system contains gravity. But the gravity near the black hole is affecting the photons that are near it. One cannot venture too closely to the event horizon.

markusschaber wrote:So during transition, an enormous concentration of gravity forms/appears in the normal space. Strong enough to form an event horizon. How can that gravity not be detected by grav sensors watching out for things like impellers?

So my point is: Even if a ship could cover itself with an event horizon during transition, it would not allow the ship to transition undetected, as the gravity needed to create the event horizon would be easily detectable itself.


Because black holes are some greedy sons-o-witches. They don't part with information (like grav waves and light) that will be tripping off any alarms in the system. That is the point of the exercise.

But all in all, I certainly agree. But since powerful tractor beams cutting a hole into n-space in David's universe is not detectable, all bets are off. Hence, that quirk in his universe might be exploitable.

At any rate, I still agree that a black hole should be visible, or at least the effects of it. However, black holes don't generally scream at you. Like I said, they are some tight-lipped sons-o-witches and they are reluctant to part with information. Their effect, being right in the system, might be seen by an ordinary avid astronomer, if he is happening to be looking right at it. But it ain't gonna be detected by any FTL detector. It won't be tripping those alarms. And there won't be any brilliant fireworks display. There may be a question of the trapped energies within the black hole when tractors disengage, but even if so, those energies can be directed back to whence they came.

And do remember, the event horizon isn't going to be all that large, as black holes go, and the black hole isn't going to last very long in-system before the LD kills it.

Gone in a flash. Ah, well, perhaps that isn't a good choice of words.


I had to think a bit about this one, I could not get my mind around it.

Strong gravity is what defines a black hole. At and behind the event horizon, gravity is so strong that it prevents even light from getting out of it.

And black holes don't have a "sharp edge", there is a gravitational funnel arount the event horizon which pulls objects into the funnel, towards the event horizon, just not strong enough to catch light. The strength of the force reduces exponentially with the distance to the center of the gravitation.

And grav sensors detect gravity. Faster than light.

So I just have problems understanding how any black hole, even a very short lived artificial one, should be undetectable by grav sensors.
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