In Portal, using the portal gun to get to the moon is the obvious space travel usage, but I think people are overlooking how it’d let you trivially break the rocket equation.
Hell, you could build a >1g torchship using nothing but the ocean.
In Portal, using the portal gun to get to the moon is the obvious space travel usage, but I think people are overlooking how it’d let you trivially break the rocket equation.
Hell, you could build a >1g torchship using nothing but the ocean.
Anyway the lazy, boring way to use a portal and pretend you aren’t violating a bunch of physical laws is to just use it for fuel transport.
You have a bunch of fuel on the ground, a tiny tank on your rocket, and you keep topping off the rocket’s tank by piping in the fuel.
BTW, as a variant on the kzinti lesson, the portals are extremely dangerous as a weapon, because of how good they are as a weapon.
Ignoring the obvious ways to fight with them like opening a portal on the enemy’s hull, shoving out a nuke and then closing the portal…
You could also just have a rock that you’re letting accelerate to arbitrary speeds in a vacuum. That’s free unbounded kinetic energy, the only limitation being the “charge” time.
This isn’t a ship-destroying weapon, this is a civilization-ender if not planet-killer.
You’ve got a projectile moving at a significant fraction of the speed of light. This is a relativistic weapon: it’s going to hit harder than if it was a nuke.
@[email protected] honestly, a baseball at a significant fraction of c is sufficient - you don’t need a tungsten crowbar
You can also make it bigger by not using a roughly round rock and instead using a long rod of the densest material you can get your hand on.
But mass you pay for, speed you don’t.
Like, the worked example from Atomic Rockets has 7 kilograms of cat litter moving at 90% of lightspeed hitting a stationary target with 195 megatons of kinetic energy.
https://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacegunexotic.php
@[email protected] So with something 4 times bigger than the Tsar Bomba we could get a bag of cat litter to 90% the speed of light?
But yeah this is the ultimate doomsday weapon. You can accelerate indefinitely for free, you just have to wait.
(and if you can put your portals in orbit of a more massive object, you get faster acceleration than 1g)
So you don’t need more than a portal gun, a tungsten rod, and some time to blow the atmosphere off a planet.
@[email protected] how do you make sure it’s aligned right? It’s no good if it drifts to the side and hits the edge of the portal, maybe already at a dangerous speed, at your weapon site rather than your target
Sir Isaac Newton may be the deadliest son of a bitch in space, but the deadliest son of a bitch in the Half Life universe is Cave Johnson.
The Nihilanth could teleport an entire army to earth, the combine can conquer a planet in hours, the g-man has control over time and space, but Cave Johnson’s invention could put a hole in a planet
@[email protected] boring “explanation” that the energy which can cross a portal is limited by the power of the portal generator - so you can only accelerate to c if your generator can output that much juice - it’s not free just super efficient
Alternate ending to Half Life Alyx where it turns out the scary thing the Combine has locked up in the vault is Chell.
@[email protected]
I think this is predicated on the assumption that a portal acts as if it’s anchored the same way a bell is to a rocket engine.
I don’t think it is. Does anything in the games show a portal imparting thrust onto the wall/object it’s mounted on? I don’t think so. I think portals can’t be used for thrust.
It’s also pretty clear to me that transfer through a portal is instantaneous, not limited to lightspeed. You can hang out/change direction halfway through a portal as much as you want.
@[email protected] That passage out of The Killing Star when the Relativistic projectiles hit Earth…
@[email protected] yup. Doc Smith level planet busters are near trivial with portals
@[email protected] there are no unarmed spaceships
@[email protected] k’chee u’riit maraai, indeed.
@[email protected] I love this, just for the “Variant of the Kzinti lesson” reference.
@[email protected] I recall Peter F. Hamilton doing just that in one of his books. The nuke part at least. Not sure about the space rock yeeting.
@[email protected] The Pierson’s Puppeteers did this to fuel probes in Ringworld. The only difference was their technology required a physical teleportation device to be placed at the destination instead of just opening a portal anywhere, & transmission was limited to the speed of light.