stargates

Trope-a-Day: Made of Phlebotinium

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Made of Phlebotinium: Well, while there are several kinds of phlebotinium around (see: Applied Phlebotinium) of one grade or another, the deprivation of most of which would certainly make the universe substantially less pretty and/or efficient, the two big ones from a “made of” point of view would be the Absolutely Ubiquitous Computing, which would have much the same “rocks fall, almost everyone dies” effects were it to suddenly go away as electricity suddenly stopping working in Real Life1, and the specific pieces of ontotechnology responsible for the creation of stargates and tangle channels, without which – and thus with all communications and transport restricted to sub-light speeds – the galactic community would look very different indeed.  Indeed, if you delete the tangle channels (which allow real-time communication once you lob them at each other subluminally) as well as the stargates, there’s unlikely to be much of a galactic community, or much in the way of a “star nation” except very loose federations of subluminally-established colonies, bound together by information updates and data trade.

(1. ObVious reference example here: A Fire Upon The Deep, and the Countermeasure.)

Trope-a-Day: Made of Indestructium

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Made of Indestructium: … alas, the universe is hard on indestructium.

About as close as nature gets is probably neutronium – and whatever even more degenerate forms of quark matter, etc., you can get beyond it. Sadly for engineers everywhere, neutronium is rather hard to work at the best of times, behaving essentially like a fluid, and having a really nasty habit of evaporating in a giant whuff of neutron radiation the moment you remove it from the deep, deep gravity well necessary to make the stuff. Metastable neutronium would be nice, and there are people working on that…

In somewhat more practical terms, muon metals, which is what you get when you strip all the electrons out of metal and replace them with muons, their leptonic cousins. Since muons have the same charge as the electron but greater mass, they have much smaller ground-state waveforms than electrons in the atoms thus formed, resulting in matter than has similar chemistry – albeit rather more endothermic – to the original, but whose density and physical properties in re energy-resistance are pushed way, way, way up as the atomic spacing shrinks way down. It would make good armor, if the mass penalty wasn’t, inevitably, quite so harsh. On the other hand, it’s one of the things that makes torch drives practical (being so incredibly refractory, and thus letting you push the drive output/waste heat/resulting radiation rather further than you otherwise could), and also is invaluable to coat lighthugger wake shields with, being able to easily shrug off the sort of dust-particle impacts you get when plowing through interstellar space at 0.9c.

But neither of these is actual indestructium, ’cause, well, antimatter. Neutronium and antineutronium will annihilate quite nicely, and while regular antimatter isn’t quite as corrosive to muon matter as it is to everything else – an antimuon is not a positron – the proton-antiproton annihilation will proceed as normal and will make the whole thing come apart just fine.

Alas, indestructium, we barely knew ye.

(There’s also singularity-locking, the handwavium I promised to explain last time. That’s actually a simple reuse of existing handwavium – vector control – in this case being used to grab and redirect, while conserving, the momentum of things that would otherwise impact the surface of the singularity-locked thing into a giant kinetic energy sink.

The reason it’s called singularity-locking is because the sort of giant kinetic energy sink you want for this is a modestly-sized black hole. This is why stargates use it, because they already have a modestly-sized entangled kernel sitting in there to make their primary function work, so you might as well get the extra use out of it. It’s also why nothing else does, because if you think muon metals have a harsh mass penalty, they’ve got nothing on dragging millions of tons of hole around with you to make your armor work. A mass ratio of what, again?

[Also, people – with fairly good reason – don’t exactly want one in their back yard anyway, on general principles.]

Sadly, this isn’t pure-quill indestructium either, technically – while it would require a ridiculous amount of energy, it is theoretically possible to overload either the singularity-locking systems or the K-sink itself, and boom. Fortunately, it would be so much boom that so far no-one’s seemed inclined to hit a stargate with a small moon and see what happens…)

Trope-a-Day: Made of Explodium

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Made of Explodium: No, not really. Many, many engineers work very, very hard to ensure that this thing? Does not happen.

Two main exceptions:

One, antimatter cryocels. Because, well, antimatter, and despite the aforementioned engineers’ best efforts there’s only so much you can do to stabilize stuff that will explode the moment it touches anything. This limitation is why lighthugger starships, which use megatons of the stuff, do not come into the inner system under any circumstances, or near any important planets/habitats in the outer system, either!

No-one wants to accidentally lose a continent, y’know?

Two, stargates. Which bend spacetime in really unnatural ways, and are powered by a large contained singularity.

Now, it’s very hard to get to their explodium, seeing as they come with a very complete set of automaintenance, self-repair, and self-stabilization systems, in addition to having outer shells Made of Indestructium such as fancy singularity-locking (handwaaaave! explained tomorrow) anti-energetic armor and some of the thickest regular composite armor plate anywhere, such that if you should scrape, bounce, or ram it with a regular starship you’ll just smear yourself out over its surface and the local Ring Dynamics rep will be very ironic at you.

On the other hand, if you do manage to get through said indestructium, you will rapidly learn that the reason they’re made of it is that when they go unstable, they explode on a world-shattering, star-system-sterilizing scale. (Which, of course, is what necessitates the indestructium in the first place. Without that, even as the only practical form of FTL travel anyone’s come up with, no-one’d allow them anywhere near their star systems.)

Trope-a-Day: Hyperspeed Escape

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Hyperspeed Escape: A theoretical tactic, beloved of armchair admirals: drag half of a stargate pair with you to the battle, and then – if you’re losing, or if you’re ambushed – escape through it and disable/collapse it behind you such that the enemy can’t follow.

This, of course, ignores that:

  1. Stargates are slow (subluminal-only) and can’t pass through each other; and
  2. Stargates have the maneuverability and acceleration-curve you might expect of things with freakin’ gravitational singularities at their cores; and
  3. If something did punch through the armoring on the gate, it and its counterpart tend to explode with system-wrecking force, which is a problem for everyone; and
  4. If you do spin the stargate down successfully and break the entanglement, you’re then abandoning an evaporating Schwarzschild hole in an unplanned orbit, which isn’t exactly environmentally friendly; and
  5. Leaving all that aside, you just threw away an asset worth an obscene amount of money, which you could have instead spent on bringing an entire second, maybe even a third, task force to the battle in question, thus obviating the need to make your quick escape in the first place.

This is why people rightly ignore armchair admirals.

(That said, one can manage the “my acceleration and delta-v are superior” kind, which isn’t really hyperspeed, but in general, space is big and accelerations are relatively low and as such it is a truth universally acknowledged that it’s a really spectacularly dumb idea to get yourself inside someone’s engagement envelope if you aren’t confident that you can take ’em.)

Trope-a-Day: Faster Than Light Travel

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Faster Than Light Travel: Means wormholes, which you have to drag to where you want them STL first.  (Or, for transmission only, tangle channels – which, for the physicists reading this, do not work by Quantum Entanglement As We Know It.)  For more details of which, see Cool Gate, Casual Interstellar Travel, and Corralled Cosmos.

And yes, faster than light travel, when combined with appropriate kinds of slower than light travel, absolutely does result in causality violations in the Eldraeverse.  (There are rules to govern which causality violations are possible – of which the short and mostly accurate version is “predestination paradoxes yes, grandfather paradoxes no” and various sophisticated computing techniques – “acausal logic” – make use of this fact.  It’s fun!)  Indeed, sometimes physics students are taken on (lengthy) field trips for the simple purpose of watching effects preceding causes.  It’s a fun day out for all the family!  (Even the ones who may not have been born yet.)

Trope-a-Day: Casual Interstellar Travel / Casual Interplanetary Travel

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Casual Interstellar Travel / Casual Interplanetary Travel: It’s a little complicated.  Technically, yes, you can travel interstellarly fairly casually, since while you have to drag one end of your wormhole at subluminal speed to wherever you want it, interstellar travel to places where you have one already is pretty damn casual.  Step through and you’re there.  Ping.

Of course, wormholes and their associated stargates are Really Damn Expensive, and so is interstellar travel to anywhere that isn’t on the stargate networks involving as it does the many years relativity demands of you even in lighthugger starships, the great expense of said lighthugger, and for that matter, the even greater expense of the thousands or tens of thousands or even, for the largest luggers, hundreds of thousands of tons of antimatter you need to fuel the thing.

Further, and to subvert this slightly, while there’s casual interstellar travel, what there isn’t is casual interplanetary travel (speed-wise; it’s much more casual cost-wise).  No-one’s invented a convenient magical gravity drive that lets you whip up nigh-instantaneous thousands of gravities of acceleration (while there are vector-control drives, neither acceleration nor delta-v are any better, and indeed usually worse, than equivalent reaction drives; blame conservation of mass-energy), so getting anywhere in-system, including out to the stargate, still takes days or weeks, and for interstellar travel, that means on both ends of the wormhole.

This is resubverted for those with the right metaphysical attitude, because if you don’t go into quivering neo-Luddite theofear at the thought of having your mind separated from your body and transmitted elsewhere to be reinstalled in a different one at the far end (and granted, that’s not exactly most people outside the rampaging postsophontist neophile civilizations), then you can just mindcast where you want to go (assuming of course they have the right receiving equipment, which is by no means guaranteed outside the aforementioned civilizations).  Which is substantially quicker and counts as fully casual interplanetary/interstellar travel, because photons and (especially) tangle move a lot faster than your own personal meat/rock can be transported.

Linelayer

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All is prepared.

The alignment is ready.  My bow spindle is perfectly aligned with the empty central apertures of the paired stargates, themselves aligned in matching orbits; in time, they will drift again out of alignment, but for now forced thrust keeps them together.

My accumulators seethe with energy bound into their superconducting coils, fusion reactors laboring to pump them with more energy still.

The final confirmations come in from external sources: traffic control confirms area clear.  Legal department confirms litigation threshold clear.  Kalcír Operations is ready to accept the new structure.  The new gatekeeper-pair has spun up its frame buffers and is ready to accept its duty.

I shift into my quantum-compiled submind, feeling my consciousness expand into a superposition of possible selves, and leak energy from the reactors – not touching the accumulators yet – into the spindle, feeling the shape of the manifold with its subtle field-manipulations.  Down at the quantum level, space is frothy, a tangled polydimensional labyrinth of impossible topology, twisted spatial constructs forming and collapsing in microtime, awash in a sea of virtual particles – existence and non-existence intertwined, causality itself impalpable at this – and among them all, a few possible wormhole candidates.

There.  My superposed selves reach consensus, and collapse back into my singular self.  The broad-spread radiators at the base of the spindle flare abruptly bright, as my accumulators discharge, exajoules of energy expended in a moment as I force inflation onto one knotted tube’s hypersurface —

And between the stargates, a space-black sphere – a distorted inside-out starfield, surface defined by the blue-purple glow as it struggles to radiate away its energy and collapse again – blossoms into reality.  My body feels the tug and shudder of the gravity-wave splash as space is bent far beyond its natural limits.  With a final thrust, I separate the wormhole’s overlapping ends – stretching the distortion into an ellipsoid, a barbell, and finally two separate spheres, pushed a little further, further, until they snap on to the exotic-matter frames held ready to accept them within the stargates.

A flood of information pours in from the gatekeepers, accepting responsibility for the new wormhole.  I let the spindle power down again – although the radiators will keep burning bright for hours yet – its work done.  The first and hardest part of the job is done; the wormhole is forged.

But now comes the longer part.  Vanlir 22-882 is nearly 20 light-years away, so I should have the gate in position in 22 years, or so.  At least I’ll only have to experience half-a-dozen of them.

Trope-a-Day: Big Dumb Object

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Big Dumb Object: Oh, plenty.  Leaving aside those belonging to elder races – and thus little known due to the ability to enforce the Do Not Taunt rule – the Empire has a partially completed Dyson Sphere in the works at Corícal Ailek (it’s where the Transcend keeps its brain; and it’s the swarm kind, not the shell kind) and another at Esilmúr (a primary antimatter production facility; the solar-wind-inflated-bubble kind), and the Photonic Network has at least one under construction somewhere in its interior.  Then there are assorted Stellar Husbandry Arrays floating over Imperial stars and keeping them running nice and smoothly and for rather longer, in theory, than they otherwise would.

Some spacedocks/construction slips probably qualify in the minor leagues due to the sheer size of a fleet carrier/grapeship megafreighter, as does the Conclave Drift drift-habitat that houses the Conclave of Galactic Polities, and I suspect that the manufacturer would strongly contend that the Ring Dynamics, ICC Interstellar Stargate (Mark III), a.k.a. the big framework/space station/support machine that wormhole ends get wrapped in, absolutely counts for these purposes.

And there’s more…

Meanwhile, In The Intergalactic Void

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Elsewhere Society Deep Probe One.
En route to Greater Ancíël Whirl.
Velocity: 0.9 light.
Mission Elapsed Time (empire-time frame): 1 kiloyear.

The stargate cruised onward through the empty void, its linelayer’s drive shut down after its last major vector change, leaving the galactic disk and acquiring its destination.  Against the stars, its motion was imperceptible, with only a few high-energy photons as particles impacted the bow shield to indicate its true speed, a far cry from the foreshock of a lighthugger within the galaxy out here in the dustless halo.

A few lights sporadically glimmered on the habitat modules clamped to the side of the linelayer, populated by occasional astronomers, physicists, a few tourists, and mystics mindcast in for the experience of the void and the view.

No one visited except by ‘casting; while the stargates did compensate for relative velocities, the near-luminal speeds and relativistic distortion this one had achieved while en route already were well beyond their capacity to cope with for transporting mass.

So for the most part, the stargate cruised on alone.

1,000 years elapsed. 200,000 years to run.