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.
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.
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] That passage out of The Killing Star when the Relativistic projectiles hit Earth…
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.
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.
There’s also the gravity interaction: an infinitely falling object that never reaches the bigger body is also accelerating the bigger body.
Your forever falling object is shoving the earth upward, very slowly. That could matter in the long enough term… But it seems kinda meaningless compared to the other ways you could use a portal.
Still, might be handy if you need to adjust the orbit of a planet and are willing to wait.
@[email protected] One wonders what kinds of electromagnetic interaction tricks you can do with portal technology as well. At the very least, you can build a computer that’s physically enormous while being linked together through portals as if it’s microscopically adjacent.
@[email protected]
This seems like a combination of https://what-if.xkcd.com/147/ and https://what-if.xkcd.com/12/
@[email protected] Now this is bugging me too. If you actually wanted to loop a falling object between two portals and forget about it, would it have to be at one of the Earth’s poles? I feel as though otherwise the object would start to drift out from between the two portals due to the Coriolis effect (ignoring the fact that an object left falling like this at the equator would constantly be cancelling out whatever effect it produced 12 hours previously).
It would be a very Cave Johnson thing to try to fix global warming by pushing the earth away from the sun.
@[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] 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
@[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?
@[email protected] yup. Doc Smith level planet busters are near trivial with portals
@[email protected] honestly, a baseball at a significant fraction of c is sufficient - you don’t need a tungsten crowbar