The Archangel Syndrome v1/v2 (Page 12 of 25)

Alloy never seen before. Almost works for metal never seen before, but alloy is ideal. It says ya we know what's in it, but have no idea how to mix it up. kinda like KFC's secret recipe. Though supposedly that secret's out.

The heat could be leaking into the wormhole. You basically needn't enforce the principles of a closed system

The portals are connected in pairs. They'd each be leaking out the paired portal in the other star system. I think the paragraph above is sufficiently vague in details for it to work. If I think of a way to bleed all that energy elsewhere, I'll add the bit about portals absorbing virtually all radiation back into the description. One way is to simply say no one knows where all that energy is going, which I may do. The alien tech is sufficiently far advanced that I don't have to explain all of it. After all, 2010 had monoliths that turned Jupiter into a sun.

What I really would like to do is turn each pair of connected portals into a single portal simultaneously located in both star systems. I think that would be cool. I need to think about it some more to decide if it's doable and worth doing. I still have a growing pile of reviews to process first. Mostly small stuff, so act one is nearly done. The biggest changes may hit act three. Plus a potential visit to Catholika in act two, where someone may assassinate the pope.

Thanks for your help.
Dirk

That's very similar to how I wrote the latest version. Professor Hinkley theorized that machines capable of autonomous portal construction replicated exponentially to build the network, travelling from system to system at slowish sublight speeds. No evidence of such machines is found, although humans have only charted 145,000 systems by the year 4017.

Unfortunately, I don't know yet if I can make it work. If ships enter the portal from the front, they would teleport to the other star system. But if ships approach a portal from the rear, where do they go? Do they simply crash into the portal? Or should I make the portal so that ships can enter it from the front or the rear and teleport in both cases? It's kind of screwy to picture that.

Technically, though, I have that problem now too since the portal looks like an upright ring, so it's not possible to tell which is the front and which is the rear. But at least it's clearer. If you enter a portal, you're going to teleport to the other star system. I suppose I should just not worry about trying to picture how it sews together the two star systems. Or perhaps I should add a well-defined front and back to each portal. You can only enter from the front, and you exit the other portal at the back.

It's not a wormhole, though. It's just an instantaneous portal to the other system. The portal is about a meter thick and, when inactive, looks like a big ring. But when you approach it with a stardrive engaged, the rings expand outward (in two dimensions) to make room for the ships that are trying to pass through. It's like entering a gate at the mouth of a wormhole, but right after you pass the gate, you're already in the other system.

hmm that's complicated. It's a non-space (sub-dimension? pocket-dimension?) seeded by the various worlds that join it. iirc B5 the ancient races just made their own gates to wherever they wanted to do and could generally find their way around in there, which is cool.

Does anyone have any suggestions for what "kind" of substance I could use to power stardrives? It needs to be naturally occurring and rare, with the Imperium running short of it and New Bethlehem having the largest known supply of it, making them an appealing target for conquest. It's tentatively called atradium (after Atreides). There doesn't seem to be any room on the periodic table for any more naturally occurring elements, so perhaps atradium is an alloy, possibly the same one originally used to create the star portals.

Suggestions?
Dirk

Why not cold fusion?  For more fun, make it supercold fusion.  A high-entropy alloy of Osmium and a dozen other metals in a 3.5 dimension metallo-cage quasicrystal is chilled to some absurd temperature and fed a hydrogen fuel stream, then energized with teraHerz radiation from a set of intersecting beams with pseudorandom phase shifts controlled by a de Bruijn sequence generator.  The energy release is locked in a quantum state until the particles escape the assembly, whereupon it is released and can be captured in an electromagnetic trap as the 'ordinary' temperature of the stream rises at a rate of billions of Kelvins per second.

Nobody technobabbles like a former engineering student.