The Ancient installation in the Pocket automatically determines energy levels at the site of each portal and alters the energy of all objects passing through a Portal to match that of the receiving Portal...
Velocity reduction effects slow everything traveling at greater than 100 meters per second to that speed. As a result, no electromagnetic energy, including visible light, can pass through a Portal...
Electronics connections are also severed by a Portal. Wire connections simply cease to function.
Ugh. Remind me not to go through one. That's gonna do some serious stuff to the fastest bits of your nervous system....
If a photon can't go through the portal, it would have to be reflected away (the portal would have a mirrored surface) or else shunted by the portal itself into the energy sink as heat.
I don't have the original, so can't say how it was described, but there must be some way of absorbing 'rogue' energy, because the kinetic energy associated with something entering the portal at 200m/s has to go somewhere.
Assuming the object leaves at the proper speed it's clearly not going out as kinetic energy unless the object loses some mass somewhere.
If it was absorbed it would have to go somewhere. The only "somewhere" is the other side of the portal.
Not necessarily. It could be absorbed in the act of passing through the portal - there's no in between but there is an instantaneous discontinuity, which must be the point at which you spontaneously lose velocity relative to the portal. If it can absorb that and shunt it to a planetary heat sink, why not an IR photon?
That said, if you've got access to ancient technology, I don't think this is a terribly relevant conversation - this sort of technology essentially allows you to tell the laws of physics to sit down and shut the hell up.
1) The no-energy-passing-through is a feature of trying to match the entrance and exit velocities to 100m/s. Take away that requirement (if you're not bothered about what happens to the stuff you dump, unlike a transport system) and you can dump heat, light and used coke cans somewhere in interstellar space with impunity.
2) As noted, stay on the other side of the portal and peek through with a densitometer or a sensor with attached recorder that you 'hoist' through every so often, record a few seconds, then withdraw and read. The sensor doesn't need to manouvre or radiate itself as such (one would assume that as described the portal wouldn't)
3) The jump capability of ancient tech is (at least as demonstrated in the secrets of the ancients so far) good enough that you can be as accurate as you like, and the 100D limit is only relevant in that it's the point where everyone
else is going to be. Skipping directly into a planetary shadow is probably going to be very easy.
4) It's ridiculously difficult, but you could take the comment about a 'hot' side to its logical extreme - if the narrower the radiating arc, the more intense the radiated power, so you end up with a narrow arc of intense IR radiation.
At its ultimate level (i.e. with ancient technology...) it's feasible that your heat sink starts to resemble a continuously firing, exceptionally high powered IR frequency laser, with an arc narrow enough that you can hide it by pointing it....well....anywhere, really. The odds of a randomly aimed laser beam intersecting with another important object in a system are as near to zero as makes no odds.
One thing wonders me. The shockwave missle. After the text in the rules it makes a magnetic pulse. or for real world termeni an EMP. and it does only to glue the sand from the sandcaster? And provit to use it for one round?
Never made entirely clear, but it's possible that 'sand' is magnetic in and off itself (i.e. not actually what we'd think of as sand), since sandcutter rounds (flung magnets) do pretty much the same thing by the same means.
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