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Fundamental Force Control VS Mass Replication


Spacescifi

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The superhero post was a way of learning about fundamental force control.

In truth, I am far more interested in a having a scifi powerless race with tech that can alter fundamental forces.

 

Because as physics stands a lot of scifi tropes are dead on sight.

One example?

Spoiler

 

 

Any vessel that uses fusion engines would have a big flame coming out the back on an Earth world. Also the heat of the fusion would be so great that you would need unobtanium to contain it.

Which means if you coat the ship with it it should be immune to blaster fire which is historically weak based on footage alone.

Now assumming blaster fire is not weak, each hit or miss hitting the ship or ground should cause a massive explosion of energy.

Also the ship being an SSTO would require a tiny payload, we are talking a Millennium falcon that is far more full of propellant than a cargo ship.

 

Small vessel SSTO's are rather illogical from the standpoint of current physics, but they do scale up well.

Can't get off with a big payload ratio though, not without nuking yourself like project orion.

 

Edited by Spacescifi
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while (!me.isFine())
  me.adjustUniverse(&me);

// obsolete code.
//Why should I bother about that stupid universe?

// replaced with:

me.universe->setAutoAdjustment(&me);

// Still not good. Doesn't that stupid universe have an Owner object, pointing at me? It's assigned by default.

// So.

me.universe->restoreDefaults();

// Now it's ok. The universe autoadjusts to the default owner, i.e. me.

Edited by kerbiloid
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6 hours ago, K^2 said:

[W]hy should manipulation of the fundamental constants be any different? I mean, you CAN start with assumption that, "We can tweak fundamental constants without adding or removing energy," but then your claim is, "If we were given means of violating conservation of energy, we could use it to violate conservation of energy!"

That's the whole problem with the exercise. You have to assume that there is no unification of forces and that you can alter stuff arbitrarily.

6 hours ago, K^2 said:

Alternatively, we can look at what a self-consistent theory where fundamental constants are tunable can look like. And solid state physics is a good example of what might be. You are still dealing with a field theory of some sort. It might look weird and have bizarre emergent properties, but it's still a field theory with an action over the fields. And where there is action there is Hamiltonian. And then so long as the rules applying to universe as a whole don't change in time, the Hamiltonian is translationally invariant in time, and we have conservation of energy as consequence. The energy may not be conserved in sub-system we are manipulating, but it has to come from somewhere. If you are changing the constants to increase mass of matter in your fuel tanks, you will need to supply energy to make it happen. That's only fair. And mathematically self-consistent.

Sure, that's fair.

6 hours ago, K^2 said:

I'm not following this argument at all. Why should there be preferential movement?

If you change the strength of the electromagnetic fields (actually in this case you might have to screw around with QM and Pauli repulsion), then the kinetic diameter of the gas particles will change, and the mean free path of more energetic particles will be greater on one side than the other. This in turn breaks the ideal gas law, and at the interface (which actually can be quite large) you will have more energetic particles passing through to one side than in the other direction.

But there are any number of ways to build a daemon. Depending on how your manipulation of fundamental forces is designed, you can simply build a Brownian ratchet that really can only move in one direction.

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3 hours ago, Spacescifi said:

Any vessel that uses fusion engines would have a big flame coming out the back on an Earth world. Also the heat of the fusion would be so great that you would need unobtanium to contain it.

Actually, most Star Wars ships, which I think includes Millenium Falcon, use ion engines. Wrap your head around that one. :) Only the X-wing was mentioned to have "fusial" (whatever that means, but considering it has a separate reactor, it might be a VASIMR on steroids) engines. Really, with direct-impulse fusion engines, a fighter-sized SSTO actually sort of works, if you can figure out a way to get rid of the heat. 

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47 minutes ago, Dragon01 said:

Actually, most Star Wars ships, which I think includes Millenium Falcon, use ion engines. Wrap your head around that one. :) Only the X-wing was mentioned to have "fusial" (whatever that means, but considering it has a separate reactor, it might be a VASIMR on steroids) engines. Really, with direct-impulse fusion engines, a fighter-sized SSTO actually sort of works, if you can figure out a way to get rid of the heat. 

On the other hand I read that the bells at the rear on an star destroyer are not engines but funnels. Who kind of make some sense if you run an reactionless drive on fusion power. 
And yes even http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff3500/fc03426.htm drops the ball here. if you have good fusion as they have interplanetary travel get simple. 
No reason to make stuff complex the external tank would be enough. 

 

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Most sources I've seen put them down as engine bells, and they do look the part. Of course, nothing like a ion (or fusion, for that matter) engine would have, but whatever. Some books mentioned fighters using fuel, and there's of course TLJ, so the thrucsters clearly aren't reactionless. There are also numerous mentions of refueling stations. Going by Solo, Millenium Falcon's engines runs on coaxium, unless the reactor does and the engines are so massively overengineered they can not only withstand, but utilize a massive power spike (this being the Falcon, they might as well be).

The bigger thing SW "physics" are repulsors. They have gravity manipulation technology, so this could explain everything that's going on with fighters  in the movies, really. Of course, that doesn't explain why certain other things aren't happening, but we're never told much about this tech (not even the new trilogy, always up for using old tech in weird ways, did anything with them), so it probably has some limitations. 

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3 hours ago, Dragon01 said:

Actually, most Star Wars ships, which I think includes Millenium Falcon, use ion engines. Wrap your head around that one. :) Only the X-wing was mentioned to have "fusial" (whatever that means, but considering it has a separate reactor, it might be a VASIMR on steroids) engines. Really, with direct-impulse fusion engines, a fighter-sized SSTO actually sort of works, if you can figure out a way to get rid of the heat. 

All SW ships, even the very small ones, have repulsorlifts which act only along a gravitational gradient but consume very little energy. So the ion engines are only used for flying out of the atmosphere or flying back down into it. And there's no orbiting, either; you just fly out of the atmosphere and hover up there. Hyperspace drives are for moving large distances through space. 

Of course they sort of broke that in TROS when the Falcon was lightspeed skipping, but I suppose it did a lot of damage to the ship so there's that.

You can tell this is the way it's all conceptualized. In Revenge of the Sith, General Grievous sabotaged the Invisible Hand and hopped out in an escape pod, leaving the ship to plummet toward Coruscant. If it was in orbit, it would have remained in orbit. You can also see this in Rogue One during the Battle of Scarif, when three Y-wings disabled the engines on the Persecutor, causing it to suddenly begin dropping. Its backup generator reactivated the repulsorlifts, but the Lightmaker was able to push it into the Intimidator and all three ships subsequently dropped like stones directly into the Shield Gate, destroying it. Finally it's also visible at the beginning of The Last Jedi during the bombing runs; the bombers all attempt to fly over the Fulminatrix in order to simply drop their bombs but only the Cobalt Hammer manages to release the bombs before being destroyed. Once it does so, however, the Fulminatrix begins to explode and it immediately starts to plummet. If the ships were in orbit; dropping the bombs would do nothing.

This also means that there typically isn't actually antigravity being used. If you had a repulsorlift and could hover above the surface of a planet, you'd still be subject to gravity whether you were in the atmosphere or not.

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I actually mentioned repulsorlift stuff in a later post. :) It does explain a lot of things pretty nicely, and indeed, if you have that sort of tech, it does actually make sense not to enter orbit, because it takes a lot of speed to do so, and you can hover, anyway. They have hyperspace for anything long-distance (from interplanetary to interstellar), and only need powerful drives for maneuvering in space and high speed atmospheric flight (even Luke's landspeeder had turbine engines, repulsors evidently suck at moving things sideways). This also handily explains why SW ships never seem to go very fast - they can't, but thanks to repulsorlifts they don't need to, either. They always seem to hover over a specific point of a planet, so presumably they transition from orbital motion to repulsorborne flight at geostationary orbit altitude, not that most ships would have much reason to fly that far out on their sublight drives.

This is antigravity, BTW. People think of antigravity as some way of neutralizing the influence of gravity on an object, but this is not how forces typically work (not that any of that is within the realm of physical possibility). Antigravity is a force that acts opposite gravity, that is, causing two masses to repel themselves. Both the repulsor and everything on it still experience gravity, it's just balanced by antigravity generated by the repulsor. SW tech can also generate the regular kind of gravity, there aren't many other candidates for a tractor beam, for instance.

Edited by Guest
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21 hours ago, Dragon01 said:

I actually mentioned repulsorlift stuff in a later post. :) It does explain a lot of things pretty nicely, and indeed, if you have that sort of tech, it does actually make sense not to enter orbit, because it takes a lot of speed to do so, and you can hover, anyway. They have hyperspace for anything long-distance (from interplanetary to interstellar), and only need powerful drives for maneuvering in space and high speed atmospheric flight (even Luke's landspeeder had turbine engines, repulsors evidently suck at moving things sideways). This also handily explains why SW ships never seem to go very fast - they can't, but thanks to repulsorlifts they don't need to, either. They always seem to hover over a specific point of a planet, so presumably they transition from orbital motion to repulsorborne flight at geostationary orbit altitude, not that most ships would have much reason to fly that far out on their sublight drives.

This is antigravity, BTW. People think of antigravity as some way of neutralizing the influence of gravity on an object, but this is not how forces typically work (not that any of that is within the realm of physical possibility). Antigravity is a force that acts opposite gravity, that is, causing two masses to repel themselves. Both the repulsor and everything on it still experience gravity, it's just balanced by antigravity generated by the repulsor. SW tech can also generate the regular kind of gravity, there aren't many other candidates for a tractor beam, for instance.

 

Some but not all. Planets move.

If a spaceship flies into space and goes to hyperspace to visit another world, there is an automatic difference in speed that may be several kilometers of seconds off.

So trying to simply fly down would result in some seriously deadly reentry heating through the atmosphere.

 

The only thing one can presume that would allow for what is shown onscreen is a never mentioned ability to come out of hyperspace matching the target destination.

Which is apparently contradicted by the lightspeed ramming of the second of the newer sequels... but I digress.

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The less said about lightspeed ramming, the better. :) Though it actually doesn't contradict that specific part at all. Velocities and positions of planets are known, and all ships presumably have this information in the navigation database. Exploration of uncharted systems and lanes is often said to be dangerous, without such data it certainly would be. Hyperspace navigation is often stated to be a nontrival problem in SW universe, needing a lot of dedicated hardware, so I think this is a reasonable assumption. You could probably get it to exit at any speed, if you overrode those parameters (hyperdrives are likely too expensive to use on dedicated missiles, though I'm fully expecting a future movie to feature such weapons, anyway).

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1 hour ago, Dragon01 said:

The less said about lightspeed ramming, the better. :) Though it actually doesn't contradict that specific part at all. Velocities and positions of planets are known, and all ships presumably have this information in the navigation database. Exploration of uncharted systems and lanes is often said to be dangerous, without such data it certainly would be. Hyperspace navigation is often stated to be a nontrival problem in SW universe, needing a lot of dedicated hardware, so I think this is a reasonable assumption. You could probably get it to exit at any speed, if you overrode those parameters (hyperdrives are likely too expensive to use on dedicated missiles, though I'm fully expecting a future movie to feature such weapons, anyway).

The best explanation for light speed ramming, I think, is to suppose that the mass budget for missiles is better used for packing hypermatter warheads than anything else. All of the engines in Star Wars are supposed to run on hypermatter. So while it would be theoretically possible to build a missile that functions on light speed ramming, it should actually deliver much more energy by simply using the same mass budget for a hypermatter warhead.

The only reason that Holdo was able to cripple the Supremacy using light speed ramming was that the Raddus was an enormous ship. 

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Raddus was big, but so was Supremacy. That said, we never saw a proton bomb of comparable size. Kilogram for kilogram (or credit for credit), proton or thermal warheads are probably more efficient than hyperdrives, seeing how just one bomber full of those demolished a 8km long dreadnought. Plus, interdictor cruisers are canon. They presumably no longer work by emulating a planet, but either way, put one of those in the middle of the fleet and watch all hyperspace trickery end at the fields' edge (right in your turbolaser range, for added points). :) 

Well, that, and SW universe seems to be averse to missiles in general, presumably due to cost and logistics.

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On 9/18/2020 at 7:18 AM, sevenperforce said:

If you change the strength of the electromagnetic fields (actually in this case you might have to screw around with QM and Pauli repulsion), then the kinetic diameter of the gas particles will change, and the mean free path of more energetic particles will be greater on one side than the other. This in turn breaks the ideal gas law, and at the interface (which actually can be quite large) you will have more energetic particles passing through to one side than in the other direction.

You can get same effect by applying a magnetic field to one side of the chamber. Any orbitals with non-zero Lz will shrink a little, and that will propagate out to other orbitals because the repulsion will be a bit weaker. Granted, it'd take a formidable field for a very small change in radius, but you can actually create slightly different corrections to ideal gas law on both sides without having to invent new physics. So if your suggestion worked at all, you ought to be able to generate a small temperature difference with just a big magnet, which would already be a violation of thermodynamics principles even if the difference isn't large enough to be practical. Working out why it doesn't work this way might be an interesting exercise, but the main take away for me is that being able to have different atomic sizes in different sides of the box isn't sufficient to generate free energy.

In fact, I'm pretty sure it's flat out impossible by varying any parameters in space only. You need to be able to change parameters as function of time to either generate energy directly or have Maxwell's Demon. That's why in original thought experiment, the demon opens and closes the door. This is your time-dependence.

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6 hours ago, K^2 said:

You can get same effect by applying a magnetic field to one side of the chamber. Any orbitals with non-zero Lz will shrink a little, and that will propagate out to other orbitals because the repulsion will be a bit weaker. Granted, it'd take a formidable field for a very small change in radius, but you can actually create slightly different corrections to ideal gas law on both sides without having to invent new physics. So if your suggestion worked at all, you ought to be able to generate a small temperature difference with just a big magnet, which would already be a violation of thermodynamics principles even if the difference isn't large enough to be practical. Working out why it doesn't work this way might be an interesting exercise, but the main take away for me is that being able to have different atomic sizes in different sides of the box isn't sufficient to generate free energy.

In fact, I'm pretty sure it's flat out impossible by varying any parameters in space only. You need to be able to change parameters as function of time to either generate energy directly or have Maxwell's Demon. That's why in original thought experiment, the demon opens and closes the door. This is your time-dependence.

 

How about some low hanging fruit?

It would be very nice if we had CMG's that could spin at high thrust for hours on end before saturating, instead turning that potential into waste heat.

Could altering fundamental forces locally of the CMG's do this?

Is this a wannabe perpetual motion machine but not quite there?

As I know it would extend the life of propeller planes in atmosphere a great deal, as well as turbines and anything that spins with resistance .

Edited by Spacescifi
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12 hours ago, Spacescifi said:

How about some low hanging fruit?

It would be very nice if we had CMG's that could spin at high thrust for hours on end before saturating, instead turning that potential into waste heat.

Could altering fundamental forces locally of the CMG's do this?

I don't know! You'd have to break local rotational symmetry somehow. That tends to be way more flimsy than translational symmetries. So, maybe? But I can't think of a specific mechanism. My gut feeling would be to use the existing limitations of angular conservation laws. For example, if you have a system with zero net momentum, its center of mass cannot move without at least borrowing momentum from external source. But with rotation, you can have a system with zero net angular momentum, and it can still orient itself to any angle without ever gaining any angular momentum, ending in exactly the same configuration but oriented in different direction. Maybe if you manipulate constants, you can create the same kind of sink for angular momentum, effectively turning it into an angular quasimomentum.

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Still insisting that the managed physics is not a thing.
images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQ5VEjFntkhwJI3CCfZ_DC

The physics is basically an applied mathematics.

Why bother with the physical constants when we can change the math ones.

Why is "e" that ugly 2.718... ?
Who needs "pi" to be that odd 3.14159.. ?

Let's make both of them 3.

Just imagine the world where the exponent and the circle both are based on 3?

It's much more handy!

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On 9/20/2020 at 4:43 AM, K^2 said:

You can get same effect by applying a magnetic field to one side of the chamber. Any orbitals with non-zero Lz will shrink a little, and that will propagate out to other orbitals because the repulsion will be a bit weaker. Granted, it'd take a formidable field for a very small change in radius, but you can actually create slightly different corrections to ideal gas law on both sides without having to invent new physics. So if your suggestion worked at all, you ought to be able to generate a small temperature difference with just a big magnet, which would already be a violation of thermodynamics principles even if the difference isn't large enough to be practical.

Adding the magnet can alter the baseline state of the system but it cannot continuously maintain a temperature difference to function as an endless heat sink.

On 9/20/2020 at 4:43 AM, K^2 said:

Working out why it doesn't work this way might be an interesting exercise, but the main take away for me is that being able to have different atomic sizes in different sides of the box isn't sufficient to generate free energy.

The reason a magnet doesn't work is because of the same reason the Brownian ratchet doesn't work. A magnet will have a continuous field, and so even though the orbitals on one end will be strengthened and orbitals on the other end will be weakened, the continuity of the field means there is no actual point where the more energetic particles are induced to cluster more on one side than the other.

On the other hand, if you have a system where you have shifted the parameters in both boxes with an actual discontinuity at the center (and only at the center) then you will have the endless heat sink effect.

If it was possible to construct a magnet with a discontinuous field, then building an overbalanced wheel would be trivial.

 

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