Energy Portals

[Spacescifi]

 

It dawned on me that scifi portals that could transmit energy via radiation and or beams would be very useful while not being overly cheaty either.

It would limit how much propellant you could use, but when your energy limit is literally the biggest power plant back home that means:

1. Fusion pellet Orion propulsion should be viable. Since you don't need onboard laser power from your ship as you are transmitting it from home. You are dropping pellets and zapping them behind you to make them go boom.

2. You could also make a kind of Laser Thermal Rocket, using the overpowered lase as good as or better than a NTR without having to generate the waste heat yourself.

3. Nearly run out of propellant? No problem in space! So long you find a low gravity moon or asteroid you could lase a chunk off and use it as propellant via pulse aser ablation.

 

Granted, it won't let you run indefinitely, but is versatile.

 

Any other uses I you can think of I may have missed?

 

By the way, if we ever do make portals, I reckon EM portals may be more likely easier to do then mass transfer portals.

Why? We already transmit EM across vast distances, so I don't think it would be totally implausible to do direct energy portals one day. I may be wrong, but it would be awesome. For space travel. And many other things.

Want a scifi laser pistol that creates wasteful but awesome visible glowing beams in the airl? Now you can have one! Just don't overheat the gun barrel from firing too many times LOL.

 

[kerbiloid]

Who needs Orion when you can teleport the solar wind.

***

I guess, the space-time magic required for EM and mass types of portals will see no difference between various types of matter.

[cubinator]

That is an interesting idea! I never thought about portals that would only transmit energy instead of matter, but it sounds a lot more plausible than a portal you can just walk through (though it probably violates some laws of quantum dynamics as we know it anyway).

[kerbiloid]

But first of all, what is "energy" without "matter"?

If it's EM, then it's photons.

[Terwin]

If the portal structure is pushed by the energy going through it, then just point it backwards for laser propulsion.

If the portal structure is not pushed by the energy pushing through it, then point the laser at a mirror for laser propulsion.

Might be low-thrust, but ideal for tiny probes to other stars.

A return portal also allows real-time communication for controlling and receiving data from said probe from lightyears away...

 

[Spacescifi]

59 minutes ago, Terwin said:

If the portal structure is pushed by the energy going through it, then just point it backwards for laser propulsion.

If the portal structure is not pushed by the energy pushing through it, then point the laser at a mirror for laser propulsion.

Might be low-thrust, but ideal for tiny probes to other stars.

A return portal also allows real-time communication for controlling and receiving data from said probe from lightyears away...

 

 

True...kind of mundane, but possible.

 

Other uses:

Real-time viewscreens: More than that really, since if a person on the other side shines a death ray laser on you, it WILL hurt.

Military Defense: Laser cannons amped via power station ready to appear off any portal you want. You don't even need your own laser cannons when you can 'borrow' them via portal.

Cashing in: Someone is going to make buckets of cash charging people for portal time usage 

Conclusion: I like the idea of being less limited by physics and more limited by how much cash you are willing or able to pay.

Do lots of impossible stuff, but not too much because you will go broke if you do.

 

Probably inspired by space sims...where lack of credits/money is literally the greatest restraint on you can or cannot do.

Edited April 21, 2021 by Spacescifi

[kerbiloid]

Smartphones can be charged via a portable portal.

[JcoolTheShipbuilder]

34 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

Smartphones can be charged via a portable portal.

And the portable portal can be wirelessly recharged by the Death Star!

[kerbiloid]

2 minutes ago, JcoolTheShipbuilder said:

And the portable portal can be wirelessly recharged by the Death Star!

You're joking, but in Ph.J.Farmer's The Maker of Universes they were using portals for dish delivery and as a restroom sink to prevent the prisoners from escaping.

[SOXBLOX]

Didn't read the previous posts, but just put a pure-energy portal at the center of a star. Next, funnel super-dense, rapidly expanding core material out the back of your rocket. Free energy? No. Close? Yes.

[KSK]

It’s not my own idea but... stealth in space. Dump your waste heat into a portal. Somewhere, a very hot spot appears in space - just far enough away from your stealthed ship that it doesn’t matter.

[monophonic]

9 hours ago, KSK said:

It’s not my own idea but... stealth in space. Dump your waste heat into a portal. Somewhere, a very hot spot appears in space - just far enough away from your stealthed ship that it doesn’t matter.

It's not just stealth - it is also a decoy free of charge!

But wait, there's more! Drop the outlet inside the enemy ship and now it is a weapon! Can you believe it?

Call in the next 15 minutes and receive two for the price of one!

Sorry... I'll show myself out.

[kerbiloid]

An energetic channel from Sun to a planetary core can provide you with gold, platinum, any many other rare metals, when the core explodes.

[KSK]

A variation on @kerbiloid’s last post springs to mind.

As I understand it, thermonuclear weapons use radiation pressure from an exploding fission primary to trigger fusion of the secondary.

I wonder if a similar effect could be achieved on a grand scale using a very large number of energy portals and a gas giant or brown dwarf.

The idea isn’t  to cause the gas giant/brown dwarf to explode but rather to ignite and/or sustain a fusion reaction. A bit like the ending to 2010 but without the Monolith construct.

Space-Scifi Corporation - building better stars.

Edited April 22, 2021 by KSK

[kerbiloid]

And pulsars. We can make a pulsar and mine antimatter and various strange things.

[radonek]

On 4/21/2021 at 11:51 PM, SOXBLOX said:

Didn't read the previous posts, but just put a pure-energy portal at the center of a star. Next, funnel super-dense, rapidly expanding core material out the back of your rocket. Free energy? No. Close? Yes.

23 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

An energetic channel from Sun to a planetary core can provide you with gold, platinum, any many other rare metals, when the core explodes.

https://eldraeverse.com/2018/12/23/things-to-see-places-not-to-go-11/

[KerikBalm]

On 4/21/2021 at 6:43 AM, Spacescifi said:

It dawned on me that scifi portals that could transmit energy via radiation and or beams would be very useful while not being overly cheaty either.

I don't know what you mean by pirtals if you are talking about energy beams, but I am a big proponent of beamed power propulsion, and I hope that it makes it into ksp2.

If you mean some kind of ftl wormhole power/mass transfer, then you gain thhe ability to send messages back in time, and barring certain limitations on hoow it works, also a free energy machine.

[kerbiloid]

Can anybody explain to the stupid me, wut is "transmit energy without matter"?

A light beam is a form of matter, it's photons.

The only form of the matterless transmission  which I can see, is the sympathetic magic of quantum physics, kinda entaglement-emschmanglement, but it doesn't transfer energy as well.

[Spacescifi]

5 hours ago, KerikBalm said:

I don't know what you mean by pirtals if you are talking about energy beams, but I am a big proponent of beamed power propulsion, and I hope that it makes it into ksp2.

If you mean some kind of ftl wormhole power/mass transfer, then you gain thhe ability to send messages back in time, and barring certain limitations on hoow it works, also a free energy machine.

 

You have structural ring device called a portal.

The only thing you can portal through the aperture is electromagnetic radiation.

Be it optical light, gammas, UV, beams of radiation etc.

 

Also dawned on that with enough powerful lasers firing into your propellant, you could get torchdrive rocket efficiencies.

No need for fusion or nuclear reactor drives, as you could pump enough laser power from home base into your rocket propellant that you could match that efficiency.

 

You're not power limited so long you don't destroy your engine with too many lasers via portal.

[cubinator]

4 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Can anybody explain to the stupid me, wut is "transmit energy without matter"?

A light beam is a form of matter, it's photons.

I think the general idea of 'matter' in this sense would be stuff like atoms, molecules. If you tried to put an object through, it would be destroyed and turned to all kinds of radiation, but you can shine a radiation beam through the portal and it will come out the other side.

Edited April 23, 2021 by cubinator

[Spacescifi]

56 minutes ago, cubinator said:

I think the general idea of 'matter' in this sense would be stuff like atoms, molecules. If you tried to put an object through, it would be destroyed and turned to all kinds of radiation, but you can shine a radiation beam through the portal and it will come out the other side.

 

Ummm...not really.

If you tried to put mass through it would act as if the portal is not there and pass to the other side of the gate...like if you threw a rock through a hoop. Did not go anywhere weird, stayed in same location.

 Also, if you saw someone on the other side of portal (you would because they reflect light), you could literally walk through their image screen as if it was not there.

Kind of like a screen in an aperture, a screen of light if you will.

 

EDIT: That said, your mass direct to energy version would make AM and fusion obsolete. You could have a photon drive anywhere you go long you had mass to chuck into the portal. Your version is more powerful and versatile than mine.

 

 

Edited April 24, 2021 by Spacescifi

[cubinator]

1 hour ago, Spacescifi said:

EDIT: That said, your mass direct to energy version would make AM and fusion obsolete. You could have a photon drive anywhere you go long you had mass to chuck into the portal. Your version is more powerful and versatile than mine.

It just feels wrong to me that something you tried to toss into a gateway like that would simply bounce off harmlessly, rather than explode with a tremendous burst of energy and destroy everything nearby.

[Spacescifi]

19 minutes ago, cubinator said:

It just feels wrong to me that something you tried to toss into a gateway like that would simply bounce off harmlessly, rather than explode with a tremendous burst of energy and destroy everything nearby.

 

Nothing bounces off, stuff just ignores it in my version.

Yet your version would require vacuum use only. 

It would be difficult to use, since even a stray bit of matter will deathray anything networked on the other side.

 

I could akways use both LOL.

Your version would be Mark I portal type, lesss safe and basically weapons grade and not for sale except on black market.

 

Mark II portals are my type, that ignore stuff passing through that is not radiation, letting it pass on through...but not to the next portal. Just through.

 

[cubinator]

5 minutes ago, Spacescifi said:

Nothing bounces off, stuff just ignores it in my version.

Oh, ok, that makes sense. You'd just go through, and you'll still be in the same part of the universe.

[Terwin]

1 hour ago, cubinator said:

Oh, ok, that makes sense. You'd just go through, and you'll still be in the same part of the universe.

You just lose the photons carrying internal black body radiation between the component atoms of the physical object, causing a very slight amount of cooling with each pass through the portal.

 

(the Mk1 also transmits gluons and W/Z bosons, thus causing the strong and weak nuclear forces to break down at the threshold, but the Mk2 only transmits photons which is much safer)

Edited April 24, 2021 by Terwin