[TML] Possible Contragravity Technobabble, was Re: White Dwarfs, Black Holes & 100 Diameters

[Richard Aiken]

On Nov 10, 2007 8:45 PM,  <shadow at shadowgard.com> wrote:

Hi, Leonard!

> My "best guess" is that CG would sort of "latch on" to the local
> spacetime in some way. Probably to the "slope" of the gravity well.
> That'd explain why it's mostly (or only depending on rules set)
> useful for going up and down.

So CG works to preserve the near-flat slope (of orbital space) for the
volume of the vessel, while the vessel itself is in the
very-steep-slope (on the planet's surface) part of the well.  Right?
I see a big problem with crossing the boundary, if the field is left
active.  Big as in "shear someone in half without breaking a sweat."
This would probably be an *excellent* reason for Star Wars type
landing pits.  If the CG ship coming in has a field that's a little
out-of-tune with its outer hull, you wouldn't want to get close to it
until it's safely down!

Hmmm.  But that would make air/rafts and such just as dangerous to get
into or out of, unless they were "off."  Maybe the passenger/cargo
compartments of "regular" (non-spacecraft) grav vehicles aren't in the
CG fields?  Would their CG units run at "negative gravity" output
levels to compensate, essentially providing positive lift?

> BTW, a problem with both your version and this one is that the
> decrease in potential energy as the vehicle gets closer to the planet
> has to get dumped into the CG unit, and has to be gotten rid of
> somehow. We are talking about *significant* amounts of energy hear.
> As in "melt the heatsink" type stuff.

Maybe the extra energy can be fed into the fusion air-ram somehow?
Dial back what you're getting from the fusion power plant while you
descend the grav slope?  Note that when you've actually set down, the
CG would get turned "off" - and the ship would get it's full weight
back - so you wouldn't an energy sink any longer.  This would also
neatly explain why the ship has a "weight" limit on the amount of
cargo it can take aboard (at least on a planet's surface).  It's CG
unit is only able to negate X amount of weight to at lift-off (because
of power-generation or power-management limits or both).

NOTE: I'm putting "off" in qoutes because I'm keeping a feature of the
Serenity CG to explain why grav tech can't move planets around.  You
need a whole lot of energy to set up the initial field, but to keep it
running doesn't take anywhere near as much.  So an air/raft's field
can be re-energized by a ship's fusion plant (it's enough bigger to do
that).  But if a ship's own CG field completely loses power, it can
only be re-energized by a station plant.  And initially energizing the
field required for a *planet* is beyond any conceivable power
availability.  [Which - oddly enough - means that the too-small but
still-terraformed moons of Firefly/Serenity are impossible . . .]

> The "bending space" version of artifical gravity has the advantage
> that it can explain why the field stays inside the ship

Well, I'm already supposing that AG only works within an energized CG
field, so that fits well.  But how would "bending space" create AG
inside a CG field?

Hmmm.  <thinking . . .>  As far as the volume of the ship is
concerned, what the CG/AG does is impose the space-time conditions
found at the top of the gravity well, but with the angles inverted.
Right?  Got any useful technobabble for that?

-- 
Richard Aiken

"Never insult anyone by accident."  Robert A. Heinlein