Drunkard's Walk Forums

From a comment on the IRC that triggered a flash of inspiration. An unnamed and thus far unknown Fen scientist working on some random project, notices a rather strange side-effect. Tagged Infinities because of what that effect is.

Quote:She was tired… so very tired. She reached for a cup of coffee and took a mouthful before she recalled that it’d been made at least two hours ago.

“ugh, cold,” she groaned, forcing it down. She’d have to make up a new pot.

It could wait until this job was done. Just finish the magneto-compression coil, test it, and with any luck be in bed just in time to get up again the next morning. Goddammit was this frustrating. With no ceremony at all, she pushed the little white button on the keypad. Somewhere under the device… itself little more than a tangle of shielded cables and copper tubing around some sort of toroidal core… a relay clicked on.

And that was it.

“Well, at least it didn’t fail with prejudice,” she said with ill humour. That was always a relief. She’d be around projects that had done that before. That was why her right arm was now made of metal. She’d been half asleep for the last three hours herself, and didn’t trust her own wiring to be up to scratch.

She checked it to be sure. None of the cables seemed to be heating up or unduly smoking. There were no leaks. Everything seemed to be running just tickety-boo. Next, she checked the output from the coil.

“Eureka.” She smiled. Not quite on the money, but the benefits of the alternating field on output collimation were already being shown. It was just a matter of adjusting it that little bit, and bingo, a twenty-percent efficiency increase, all for the simple addition of a few electronic controls. A yawn reminded her that all the fine adjustments could wait until the morning. It was working, and at 5am local time, that was the main thing.

She moved her hand to turn the coil off. Not thinking, she moved her hand over the top of the device and felt something. She was quite sure what. It was enough to make her thing twice about turning it off. She swept her natural hand over the top of the device once more…

There it was again… a sensation of some sort. From the magnetic fields? She tried it with her mechanical arm. Same effect. A piece of software noted that the effort on one of her actuators decreased by a noticeable amount, right when it was over the coil. Not a lot, but still something measurable. It might be magnetic, but it’d take one hell of a field to affect even her arm… and that lessening of effort. It almost reminded her of what happened when she went swimming.

Was the coil quirked?

That was her first bitter thought. A quirked coil was a failed coil, was all that work thrown in the goddam bin. But unless somebody’d sneaked in while her back was turned and liberally slathered it with goop, the coil was entirely 100% all natural hardtech. It can’t have quirked.

She grabbed a piece of paper… just an ordinary A4 sheet. This one had a few scribbles on it, a doodle of giant robot, and some quick scratch calculations that had stopped making sense without their individual context.

She held up by one of the long edges, and watched it droop. If there was some there above the coil, then it had to affect the paper. Just to be certain, she double checked that the ventilation in the room was off. Moving it slowly towards the still running compression coil, she observed the end closest to the coil seem to lift… ever… so… slightly.

What the?

Again, from a different direction. Same effect. Magnetic fields don’t affect paper, do they? So what else could it be? On a spark of inspiration, she grabbed a weighing scales she’d normally use to weigh out her coffee grounds before brewing up a pot. She loaded it with her favourite blend, measuring out about 50 grams of it sitting on the bench furthest from the coil.

Noting the mass down in her mind, she then set up a simple platform over the top of the coil. Somewhere she could rest the scale, and take the shaking of her arms out of the equation. She placed the loaded scale on top of the coil.

It read 35.53

A drop of about 15 grams.

It was then that she said the famous phrase which accompanies all great scientific achievements.

“Hmmm…. That’s funny.”

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--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?

... wait... what? Antigravity? (O_o)

Yeah, I know. I boggled too as 'goop' loves to do that. Yet reading this again it's hardtech, no waveium present! Room temp version of that floating frog on a chilled superconductor?

Well... yeah... a hardtech Anti-grav generator... by accident. Partly because it's an easy one to show in a few words, and partly because it was born out of a comment on the IRC about certain tech 'kept secret'. Maybe somebody would stumble upon it independently, and probably by accident.

I didn't give too much thought to what the 'compression coil' actually is made or what it was originally supposed to do mind outside of the story, it's really just a sort of McGuffin with mysterious magnets. It could be room-temperature superconductor based.
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--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?

I like. Don't forget, though, that through the transitive principle this can also lead to BGC-style gravity guns. After all, if Doug can modify a gun into a drive, it can go the other way, too. Is that a technology we want to let loose in Fenspace?
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

Bob Schroeck Wrote:I like. Don't forget, though, that through the transitive principle this can also lead to BGC-style gravity guns. After all, if Doug can modify a gun into a drive, it can go the other way, too. Is that a technology we want to let loose in Fenspace?

Why do you think Noah has all the grav-tech from the Visitors' database locked up in Muppet Stellvia Labs? (Okay, it's really so he can use it as a trade advantage. There's a reason nobody else gets to play with the Epsilon Blade's engines...)

Anyway, I suspect that, as soon as this particular Mad makes an announcement about this, she'll be headhunted by both Stellvia and the TSAB...
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

My first thought is that over the distances that matter in space, the power requirements for a gravity cannon might be a little prohibitive for all but the largest installation, and making one man-portable would be a bit of a pain. Recoil might be an issue for one thing. Throw someone back at 1g, and the gun's going to throw the firer back at 1g too. It could be useful for a non-lethal stunning effect, especially firing at accelerations capable of knocking someone down or stumbling them.

Who they're headhunted by, also depends on who they're already working for. There're other research groups out in Fenspace aside from Stellvia and TSAB, some of which we haven't heard much from yet. On a meta-level, I mean, there're no stories about them but they're on the wiki. There're also plenty of nastier people who might well be interested in grabbing the Mad for whatever secrets she holds.

That might actually make for an interesting thriller story, come to think of it.
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--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?

Don't forget about the HARDES - while about half the stuff they do may be in the military shade of things, they (and thus, the Roughriders) take a very dim view on enslaved scientists.

But don't forget that hardtech gravity stuff has some serious limits. Most Fen ships for example have an inertial compensator, which should work as a defense for most hardtech gravity attacks easily.

Gravity is a weak force compared to electromagnetism on a small distance, so its unlikely that gravity "slugthrowers" will be better than a nice electromagnetic coilgun in the near future.

The only thing that would need retcon in my oppinion is the hardtech implosion/micro-blackhole weapon from "We don't need that hammer..."

The energy need for doing this by pure hardtech should be insane. And the effect sounded more like one of these Dahakverse hyper-warheads... "make things go away with gravity side effects".

HRogge Wrote:The only thing that would need retcon in my oppinion is the hardtech implosion/micro-blackhole weapon from "We don't need that hammer..."

And that's already been retconned - see the prologue to "Legend of Galactic Girls," where Noah orders Sora and Kohran to keep hardtech gravtech even more secret than kaboomite. If they never tell anyone about the existence of the Anson GravMaster, someone else is free to discover it again.

(And, yes, Noah is certain that eventually someone else will discover hardtech gravtech. In the long run, he wants an advantage in the field, not a monopoly.)
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

robkelk Wrote:

HRogge Wrote:The only thing that would need retcon in my oppinion is the hardtech implosion/micro-blackhole weapon from "We don't need that hammer..."

And that's already been retconned - see the prologue to "Legend of Galactic Girls," where Noah orders Sora and Kohran to keep hardtech gravtech even more secret than kaboomite. If they never tell anyone about the existence of the Anson GravMaster, someone else is free to discover it again.

(And, yes, Noah is certain that eventually someone else will discover hardtech gravtech. In the long run, he wants an advantage in the field, not a monopoly.)

What I mean is that creating a microsingularity with hardtech should be out of reach of anything any Fen could build, including Noah. It's just a little bit too far over the top for hardtech.

Or maybe it could be that THIS warhead was partly constructed by some gifts from the visitors, so its not easy to replicate with the hardtech available to Fenspace up to ~2030/40/50 ?

http://www.fenspace.net/index.php5?title=Fenspace_Rules]"Don't step on anyone else's toes - don't consume too much Cool at once, don't try to be better than the already-established "best in Fenspace" at something, and talk with people before you do things that No One Else Can Do."

I think you're trying to be better than the already-established "best in Fenspace" at gravtech. I've been nice about it so far - Kohran and Sora have other Cool Stuff, after all - but I don't plan to give up any more than I already have.
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

Just for the record, I had the idea of a singularity weapon a while back... Pros: no collateral damage beyond the event horizon. Cons: Pure wavetech. One-in-five is a 'dud'.

robkelk Wrote:I think you're trying to be better than the already-established "best in Fenspace" at gravtech. I've been nice about it so far - Kohran and Sora have other Cool Stuff, after all - but I don't plan to give up any more than I already have.

Okay, maybe I have worded it wrongly...

I like the idea of 'newly discovered hardtech anti-gravity',

but I fear it to be as powerful as the "gravity implosion black hole" thing of Noah (people might say "now that anyone have gravity tech, everyone can build blackhole bombs")...

so I think it would be nice to make sure that the new (anti-)gravity tech is useful and interesting to explore, but have a limit quite below Noahs device (maybe max out at a couple of hundred g?)

Either because Noah used some special components not easily be built by Fentech or just because the "Implosion warheads" are more than just a hardtech gravity generator. The second one sounds reasonable because the weapon did lack the effects of a hardtech black hole as we know it... especially without tidal forces and "explode in gigatons of energy because of Hawkins radiation".

Does that make sense ?

I'm staying out of this. But that said, who's to say the compression coil doesn't work on a completely different principal to a Stellvian Grav-drive? Like a Harrier and a Helicopter... both can hover, both go about it in different ways, and both have their advantages and disadvantages over the other.
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--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?