[2300 AD] gravity laser

[Lemnoc]

Page 265 of the RAW suggests a stutterwarp drive can be flicked on and off as a crude communications device. These are described as gravitic pulses. Perhaps, then, these pulses can be lased.

An additional fact is presented that they can be uniquely and readily detected system-wide by special sensors, again hinting that gravity could be involved as the "radiative" source; "they are the most effective broadcast transmitter available," ergo somehow superior to normal E-M transmission.

If these pulses were sufficiently pumped and lased, you might be able to design what is essentially a black hole laser. At the very least you might have a weapon that might propagate a stutterwarp ship into normal space... or possibly detonate the drive. Plus: Not easily shielded. At any rate, a useful weapon.

While it could be centuries past 2300 before the technology can be suitably weaponized, I’ll bet there is a research station working on this somewhere in known space.

 

[Rikki Tikki Traveller]

Given the lack of gravitic technology in the setting, you are probably right.

Some PhD candidate probably wrote his/her dissertation on lasing these gravity pulses, but without some kind of gravity control, it would not be possible to actually do it. A research station somewhere might be possible, they are probably doing research into gravity control in general and this could be one side project.

Gotta control those Gravity waves first!

 

[Lemnoc]

Yes. If we call it instead a “coherent gravitics pulse,” that may actually be what a stutterwarp drive is producing in normal mode. A stutterwarp drive is “pointable,” after all, which suggests there is some vector bias in the drive. Just flicking it on and off without a vector may be how this communication mode application really works.

It’s not clear from the RAW that any ol’ stutterwarp drive in operation emits a signal that can be detected system-wide. I kinda assumed this was the case (makes for some interesting and useful security protocols [detecting Kaefers becomes a little easier]), and flickering just allowed for Morse-like signals to be sent; but perhaps I need to rethink that.

The question is the nature of the relationship of gravitics to actual gravity, how dependent one is upon the other, and to what degree the characteristics of the one model the other. Clearly there is a relationship, we just don’t know what it is.

 

[GJD]

Detecting an active stutterwarp drive is still limited by the laws of physics, though. The gravitic disturbance propogates at the speed of light, so if there is a stutterwarping ship out past the orbit of Pluto, your ship in orbit around Earth won't know about it until something like 4-6 hours later, by which time the FTL capapable ship coukld get up to all sorts of mischief.

The stutterwarp works through electron tunneling effect, so the gravitational disturbance is a side effect of that. It's been made clear that the gravitational scanners can detect that there is a stutterwarp running "out there" but it can't be used for targetting information, as you get no bearing or range information, just that there is "noise" on the grav scanners.

I'd suggest that the phrase "pulses" was used to describe the operation of the drive when trying to use it to send morse signals - you pulse the drive on and off - rather than any actual description of the phenomena.

G.

 

[lastbesthope]

Detecting an active stutterwarp drive is still limited by the laws of physics, though. The gravitic disturbance propogates at the speed of light,

Sorry to threadjack, but you made me wonder, in real life, what speed does gravity propagate at?

I'd say infinite, but then I'm an engineer, not a physicist

LBH

 

[Rick]

Detecting an active stutterwarp drive is still limited by the laws of physics, though. The gravitic disturbance propogates at the speed of light,

Sorry to threadjack, but you made me wonder, in real life, what speed does gravity propagate at?

I'd say infinite, but then I'm an engineer, not a physicist

LBH

Heh, if it's faster than the speed of light, you'd have some very strange effects going on! If it's some form of energy wave, then the speed of light seems reasonable.

 

[lastbesthope]

Detecting an active stutterwarp drive is still limited by the laws of physics, though. The gravitic disturbance propogates at the speed of light,

Sorry to threadjack, but you made me wonder, in real life, what speed does gravity propagate at?

I'd say infinite, but then I'm an engineer, not a physicist

LBH

Heh, if it's faster than the speed of light, you'd have some very strange effects going on! If it's some form of energy wave, then the speed of light seems reasonable.

We have theories about strange things that might happen, but we don't know. We know as much about superluminal physics now as we knew about supersonic physics 200 years ago. About nowt

LBH

 

[Rick]

Sorry, LBH, but are you really asking me to prove a theory posed on an rpg thread? :shock:

Yeah, it's all theory and speculation, lol! I was merely pointing out a different idea is all. Even some of the 'Laws' of physics are best guesses based on current knowledge, lol!

 

[GJD]

Detecting an active stutterwarp drive is still limited by the laws of physics, though. The gravitic disturbance propogates at the speed of light,

Sorry to threadjack, but you made me wonder, in real life, what speed does gravity propagate at?

I'd say infinite, but then I'm an engineer, not a physicist

LBH

The current theory is that it doesn't propogate as such. Gravity is one of the four fundamental forces of the universe nd manifests as a "curvature" of spacetime. It is this curvature which is observed as gravitational effects, the attraction of one body to another, effects on EM radiation and so on. We don't know HOW gravity interacts with matter or energy, but we do know what the effects are. There isn't a "graviton particle" that causes or carries gravity that we know of, and likewise gravity waves are a predicted effect of a detectable variation in spacetime, rather than a whooshy Praxis moon effect.

The other thing to remember is that although gravity is one of the four fundamental forces, it is by several orders of magnitudes weaker than the others. The electromagnetic force exerted between the atoms of your footthat make you a solid human being instead of a diffuse and rapidly expanding cloud of hadrons are stronger than the gravity generated by the entire bulk of the Earth beneath you.

G

However, it's a very active field study

 

[Lemnoc]

Gravity is one of the four fundamental forces of the universe and manifests as a "curvature" of spacetime. It is this curvature which is observed as gravitational effects, the attraction of one body to another, effects on EM radiation and so on. We don't know HOW gravity interacts with matter or energy, but we do know what the effects are. There isn't a "graviton particle" that causes or carries gravity that we know of, and likewise gravity waves are a predicted effect of a detectable variation in spacetime, rather than a whooshy Praxis moon effect.

Thanks for making this point. I took a stab at it a few days ago and gave up. And my stab was not as elegant as your riposte

In short, there is nothing about our current understanding of gravity that would place it outside our other models of spacetime and its curvatures. Even at the event horizon, where matter and energy are stressed to extremes, the effects there can be modeled entirely with our conventional understanding of these forces.

 

[GJD]

Gravity is one of the four fundamental forces of the universe and manifests as a "curvature" of spacetime. It is this curvature which is observed as gravitational effects, the attraction of one body to another, effects on EM radiation and so on. We don't know HOW gravity interacts with matter or energy, but we do know what the effects are. There isn't a "graviton particle" that causes or carries gravity that we know of, and likewise gravity waves are a predicted effect of a detectable variation in spacetime, rather than a whooshy Praxis moon effect.

Thanks for making this point. I took a stab at it a few days ago and gave up. And my stab was not as elegant as your riposte

In short, there is nothing about our current understanding of gravity that would place it outside our other models of spacetime and its curvatures. Even at the event horizon, where matter and energy are stressed to extremes, the effects there can be modeled entirely with our conventional understanding of these forces.

I've been studying physics, planetology and astronomy for 20 years on and off and it still amazes me how stuff fundamentaly works. We are mostly empty space - clouds of subatomic particles swirling around and held together by forces we don't entierly understand.

G.

 

[lastbesthope]

Thanks guys, sorry to sully this RPG thread with discussion of real physics

LBH

 

[Captain Jonah]

Thanks guys, sorry to sully this RPG thread with discussion of real physics

LBH

Be off with you and your real world physics, this is a handwavium only game :lol:

Anyway back to gravity. Something that we cannot at present monitor is how fast a gravitational flux propagates through the area of a gravity field. If I am sitting at the point where earths gravity is 0.001G and something acts to halve the gravity of Earth does the effect ripple out to me slowly or is the entire field generated constantly and instantly in a form of area Q entanglement.

A stutter warp blows past the speed of light and keeps going but without, I remember, any relativistic effects. So does the wake of a Stutter warp ship likewise propagate at the same rate.

Either way you have an instantaneous or several hundred times faster than light speed pulse of gravity. If you can detect that then you have just invented Digital FTL communications.

The range may be a bit limited due to all the interference from every single source of gravity around you but you can solve that with repeater stations floating in deep space. Unless using the stutter warp principle as a communications device builds up the same charge as a Drive does in which case you need a string of stations in orbit round worlds and finding loose planetoids in deep space becomes important.

 

[rust]

Hmmm... if the gravitational pulse propagates through a gravitational field,
it obviously needs a gravitational field to propagate through. This could ma-
ke it a rather short range communication method, limited to the gravitatio-
nal field of a specific star, because it would be rather difficult to measure the
gravitational field of another star several light years distant with enough pre-
cision to distinguish it from the general gravitational influences of the entire
galaxy. One could perhaps receive a digital gravitational message from Sol
System's Oort Cloud, but there would be no way to receive such a message
from Alpha Centauri, because what reaches Sol System of Alpha Centauri's
gravitational field is extremely weak and indistinguishable from all the other
extremely weak gravitational fields of all the other nearby stars out there.

 

[Rick]

Hmmm... if the gravitational pulse propagates through a gravitational field,
it obviously needs a gravitational field to propagate through. This could ma-
ke it a rather short range communication method, limited to the gravitatio-
nal field of a specific star, because it would be rather difficult to measure the
gravitational field of another star several light years distant with enough pre-
cision to distinguish it from the general gravitational influences of the entire
galaxy. One could perhaps receive a digital gravitational message from Sol
System's Oort Cloud, but there would be no way to receive such a message
from Alpha Centauri, because what reaches Sol System of Alpha Centauri's
gravitational field is extremely weak and indistinguishable from all the other
extremely weak gravitational fields of all the other nearby stars out there.

Agreed - and if it was strong enough to be detected at that range, the gravitational effects might well affect the Alpha Centauri system in some way.

 

[GJD]

There is no "gravitational field" like a magnetic field, since gravity is not a field effect, despite the name. A field effect is a convenient way of modeling and explaining the spacetime curvature. Anything that affects the gravity of the earth would result in a change in the curvature of spacetime, and that effect would propogate at the speed of the event that caused the change.

So, for instance, one of the classic examples of gravity waves is rotating binary star clusters. The gravity waves these stars give off is the effect of the increasing and decreasing curvature of the spacetime as the stars move. The waves propogate at the apparent speed that the stars rotate. The stars aren't actually emitting any waves of "gravitic radiation".

An extension of this is an assumption that since a gravity wave is an observable effect of a change, then the wave will propogate at the speed of the effect. Since nothing can exceed the speed of light, the maximum speed of a gravity wave will be the speed of light.

G.

 

[Lemnoc]

Well, again, returning to the mechanisms described in the game, one big question is the relationship between "gravitic pulses" and something like gravity waves.

There seems to be an implied relationship between matter, gravity and the FTL drive—it's a much stronger connection than that implied in CT, where the FTL limits are tied to volume (and from there we assume [perhaps in our terrible error] mass... and gravity). It's not at all as clear in CT that it is gravity that limits the drive.

The way the gravitics pulse is described (as some radiated effect traveling at C), it perhaps could be made coherent if you could work out the containment issues. Whether that final product would be a "gravity laser" or not is dependent on whether "gravitics radiations" are a true subset of the gravity phenomena... or just mysteriously related to it.

Hey: Can dark energy be lased? :lol:

 

[GJD]

Gravity can't be "lased" according to current understanding, as it's not a radiative/field effect. There is nothing there to amplify. What you are talking about is manipulating spacetime outsie of the mechanism of gravity. This, I would suggest, is in the realms of super-science beyond the ken of mere mortal man, so all bets are off.

Dark energy and by extension (since matter is just very organised and well behaved energy) it's partner in crime Dark matter, are not energy in the conventionaly understood term of energy, like heat, light, kinetic energy and so on. It's more a convenient solution to a vexing problem of the expansion of the universe seems to be driven by something, and our current model can't account for the rate of expansion (and in some cases the increase in the rate of expansion) without there being more energy and/or matter somewhere, or, in other words, where the hell is the rest of the universe? In order for the current models to work the gap between the observable universe and the calculated universe had to be filled, so the concepts of dark energy/matter were created to balance out the books. It's called dark energy/dark matter because we can't find or see it, so it's an idea of something rather than an actual detectable, measurable something.

G.

 

[Lemnoc]

It's more a convenient solution to a vexing problem of the expansion of the universe seems to be driven by something, and our current model can't account for the rate of expansion (and in some cases the increase in the rate of expansion) without there being more energy and/or matter somewhere, or, in other words, where the hell is the rest of the universe? In order for the current models to work the gap between the observable universe and the calculated universe had to be filled, so the concepts of dark energy/matter were created to balance out the books. It's called dark energy/dark matter because we can't find or see it, so it's an idea of something rather than an actual detectable, measurable something.

I agree with you about this. It's a placeholder, as was ether in the earlier centuries (with all similar problems), until a more elegant solution comes along. I suspect it will be as charmingly and disarmingly simple as all fundamental principles seem to be.

 

[GJD]

Well, again, returning to the mechanisms described in the game, one big question is the relationship between "gravitic pulses" and something like gravity waves.

Well, yes. If you pulse your drive on and off it creates an effect that can be detected. We know that an active drive can be detected using grav scanners, so turning it on and off (pulsing it) creates a way of using it as a crude communications device. I don't think i's anything as dramatic as the name suggests. I don't see the captain yelling "Quick, tune the warp core to emit a gravity pulse!" in a moment of Star Trek technobababble.

There seems to be an implied relationship between matter, gravity and the FTL drive—it's a much stronger connection than that implied in CT, where the FTL limits are tied to volume (and from there we assume [perhaps in our terrible error] mass... and gravity). It's not at all as clear in CT that it is gravity that limits the drive.

The relationship in 2300AD is very clear - the Stutterwarp and Jerome effect is inextricably linked to gravity. The stutterwrp is less effective as the spacetime curvature increases, and travel using stutterwarp builds up a gravistatic charge that has to be reset in a gravity well. The original 2300AD warp efficency was tied to the mass of the ship, but under MgT:2300AD it's tied to volume, as that's what the MgT system uses for ship design.

The way the gravitics pulse is described (as some radiated effect traveling at C), it perhaps could be made coherent if you could work out the containment issues. Whether that final product would be a "gravity laser" or not is dependent on whether "gravitics radiations" are a true subset of the gravity phenomena... or just mysteriously related to it.

The problem is that the effect as described in the book is not how we understand gravitational waves work. Of course, 2300AD scientists are 250 odd years ahead of us in studying gravity and superluminal physics...

G.