Trope-a-Day: No Warping Zone

No Warping Zone: You could, in theory, put a wormhole pair anywhere you liked – high mass notwithstanding.  The traditional location out on the edge of star systems has more to do with size, ease of construction and transport, accessibility and defensibility, and minimizing the consequences of their extremely explosive, if mostly theoretical, failure mode if something should go Horribly Wrong than any sort of physics-derived limitation.

Recall, for example, the Ulijen Disaster.

2 thoughts on “Trope-a-Day: No Warping Zone

  1. Do stargates conserve kinetic and/or gravitational potential energy? If I put half a pair on a planetary surface and the other a few lightsecs away, do I get to jump into steller orbit without paying for the climb out of the gravity well? If the other half is in orbit around said planet, do I get to jump into planetary orbit without having both pay for the climb out of the well and paying for accelerating to orbital velocity.

    The numbers get even bigger, if not as immediately apparent, if one half is orbiting insystem 1 AU from the star, and the other half is outsystem in the inner oort of that same star.

    And even bigger when one half is a few hundred ly coreward of the other. The gravity well of a galaxy is surprisingly steep, even this far out, when measured over ly distances.

    And then there is conservation of the momentum vectors. Depending on what is conserved and how, putting a hole pair in opposite or right angle orbits around something could do… interesting things. Or else demonstrating some conservation laws between momentum and/or energy and/or hidden variables that we dont have or know in the current real world.

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