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Bill, you're in our thoughts and prayers! Please keep us informed as your surgery and recovery move forward.
Five tours in Vietnam? Wow! Now that's heroic!
Get well soon.

Having had Kdot's comment that my reactor is really just a neutrino-to-energy converter percolating at the back of my mind for a while, I finally decided there really is no good way to justify calling it a reactor (it certainly has nothing to do with fission or fusion). My original reason for choosing that term is that it suggests power generation and dangerous all in one word, and a neutrino-to-energy reactor is self-explanatory.

But, converter would be a boring term for it. Ditto for transformer, although I could live with it since it too suggests "something to do with power generation." Two other names currently percolating in my head are "juicer" and "milker". And if I really want to go nuts, I could call it a cow (something to be milked).

Neutrino juicer could work if I simply state it's fleet slang for "squeezing" energy out of neutrinos, assuming it needs to be explained (perhaps just once). And juice is, of course, a known synonym for energy.

The other options are milker and cow. Neutrino milker is very similar to juicer, though milker doesn't imply energy. Cow would be great if it's an acronym for an official name (e.g., Converter of W...? or Converter of O... W...?). "Scotty, I need you to milk the COW as hard as you can!"

Juicer is an informal name for the converter, just like boiler is informal for reactor. FYI, the reason fleet personnel call it a boiler is that it can pretty much cook almost anything in the universe if ruptured. That explanation was intended to further suggest that this thing is very dangerous.

Thoughts?

Thanks.
Dirk

Oops. That should've been obvious. Thanks.

What's your opinion as to whether a huge amount of light energy directed through a typical shield size (say 10 feet x 10 feet) against a target ship's hull might be destructive to that skip's hull, assuming no windows to blind the crew within.

Thanks
Dirk

That's a long list of non-classical states, including glass, which is kind of cool.

I tried coming up with a scene involving all the fired energy somehow quantum tunneling through the shield and quickly realized I don't know enough of the science to know if I'm writing crap or not. Can't have a dialogue (various questions and answers the reader might expect) without more knowledge.

My search today for forms of energy did give me an idea, though, which a lot of soft sci-fi folks ought to be able to understand. I can add an additional form of energy to the story (call it hokey energy for now), which is what the dreadnought fires through the superweapon, but it's very energy-intensive to convert energy output from the dreadnought's reactor into hokey form, which is why the superweapon drains the Hercules so severely of power.

Hokey energy can pass right through an EM energy barrier (shield) unhindered, but the shield causes hokey energy to transform into other forms of energy, 35% of which (an EM frequency?) continues on to strike/damage the ship behind the shield with an incredibly powerful punch, able to smash all the way through a destroyer's 10 or so decks. The remaining 65% would, ideally, transform into another form of energy (visible light?) that I can bleed off harmlessly into space. Assume the shields are projected about one foot out from the hull.

Anyone know if a massive release of visible light against the target hull from a one foot distance could ever cause any kind of damage to the hull, or is it just one big-ass flashlight?

Also, anyone care to suggest a part of the EM spectrum that I can hit the ship with using the remaining 35% of the converted energy. I couldn't find anything online about what part of the spectrum is fired by star destroyers.

Thanks

Quantum tunneling through the shield is perfect. Thanks for that.

Data_Babble=ON

Now what would cause the blast from the shield defier (the superweapon) to tunnel en masse through a defensive shield, rather than simply slamming into the shield like ordinary weapons fire would? For story purposes, the defier itself requires a huge quantity of energy to fire (e.g., perhaps 100 times as much as a heavy supernova cannon). That quantity of energy makes it dangerous for the firing ship to shoot since it takes every spare bit of energy a dreadnought dare redirect into the weapon, including most of the energy from the ship's neutrino reactor running at 15-20% beyond its safety limit.

However, hitting St. James's destroyers with that much tunneling energy passing unimpeded through their shields would most likely destroy the ships in one shot each. The other battles in the story require many supernova weapon strikes against a single location on the target to knock out that location's shield and breach the outer, gorillium-plated hull (say, 10 hits from a supernova). The superweapon I'm trying to replace (the mattergy cannons) can punch all the way through the hull of an unshielded ship and out the other side, but it requires 2-3 mattery shots to destroy a ship.

So, 10 supernova strikes to breach the the hull, maybe 15 strikes to punch through the inside of the fairly thin "blade-like" main hull, and at most 10 more to punch through the far side of the outer hull. So, for the mattergy cannons to do the same thing requires that weapon to fire the equivalent of 35 supernovas at one point on the hull, whereas the shield defier requires about 3 times that to fire. The question then is, what do I do with the rest of the energy that goes into firing the defier, where only 1/3 reaches the target (equivalent of 100 supernovas to fire the defier - 35 supernovas to punch completely through a ship's hull, which is the story requirement = 65 supernovas worth of energy that needs to go somewhere else.)

I could see the excess, focused energy causing the tunneling effect needed to pass through St. James's shields, but 65 supernovas worth? Seems like a lot, but I'll roll with it. After all, the defier is somehow causing the fabric of spacetime to change such that mass quantum tunneling of energy through energy occurs at that location. Convenient side effect of firing such a powerful weapon, huh? :-)

Data_Babble=OFF

So, does it pass the smell test? Or am I serving up garum sociorum, a Roman-era delicacy made from rotting fish?

Thanks, NJC. I'll look it up in the morning.

Better yet, remove Satan's comment to Romano at the end of book one that God's minions were forbidden from interfering. However, then I'd have to find a reason why Phanuel, the Archangel of Judgement, doesn't blow Connor's cover. Maybe Phanuel simply chose on his own not to interfere, knowing that God and Satan were in the middle of a final challenge. Moses and Elijah are both supernatural humans (they "could" be the Two Witnesses from Revelation), and they suspect something is up with Connor, but they're not entirely sure what until the end of book one. Eve is supernatural as well since the only way she could return to Earth is as a glorified human. Since I need them all to interfere to some extent, I can't allow Satan to prevent interference by humans. Maybe God insists "only angels" won't interfere, or he sneaks that detail past Satan by volunteering that angels will not interfere until Judgement Day.

One minor issue is that Revelation's Two Witnesses in Catholicism represent the Church's witness to the world of Christ's divinity. There are no supernatural beings involved, except in some Protestant denominations. I added them to the book to poke a little fun at the Left Behind series, which tries to interpret everything in Revelation literally, except when it's impossible to do so (e.g., the dragon sweeping stars from the heavens). So, Moses and Elijah are just a couple of human kooks who have special powers, not the real Moses and Elijah returned to Earth. I may use them to represent a common Protestant interpretation of Revelation throughout the books, although I'll have to hint more clearly that that's what they are. I'm thinking at some point in book one I should have them appear, sitting on a bench and reading either a Left Behind book or a Protestant Bible, or one of each.

That's why I said my target audience is space opera fans. Right now, I'm just looking for a place to slip in/bolt on property X to superweapons fire that allows it to pass through shields but not matter. It's a replacement for mattergy, which I always knew I would toss from the story once I came up with something better. It'll only be used in chapter one. I just need to be careful that my cacas doesn't outright contradict well-known facts about physics.

I definitely should have taken physics in high school and university, though. I could have done a minor in physics or even math, although I don't recall if I even knew about minors back then.

After way too many hours wasted on the opening battle's superweapon, I decided the weapon can alter the fired photons in some way (e.g., forcing them into some previously unknown state) which can pass around other electromagnetic particles unimpeded (e.g., shields), but are stopped by matter (e.g., a ship's hull), causing the latter to go boom! Am I done?

Of course, this assumes that sci-fi weapon blasts are simply a lot of photons.

Can anyone tell me if this impossible weapon is even remotely close to real physics? Naturally, this would cause hard sci-fi fans to vomit, but my target audience is space opera fans.

SPOILER ALERT: Just so I can stop dancing around this topic, Connor's soul is that of Adam, and his companion is the glorified form of Eve.

I'd love to place Eve into Connor's inner circle, there to watch over him and to simultaneously work against the Unholy Trinity while pretending to be part of the conspiracy all along. That would give her a great role. She could wear a Mission Impossible-style mask that looks like Dr. Lombardi for the decade+ that she's known De Rosa and been part of his conspiracy; she'd also have to disguise her voice, but she's had a few thousand years to practice that. The reason Satan doesn't recognize he's dealing with a glorified individual in a mask is because Eve/Lombardi is able to hide the glorified element of herself using limited powers Eve received when she was glorified. Sort of like Emperor Palpatine was able to stand before Jedi and hide his true nature.

Since Satan told Romano at the end of book one that God's minions were forbidden from interfering as part of the rules agreed to between God and Satan, I'll need to figure out an exception for her that doesn't break the rules.

That's what Tylenol is for.

I think the best solution is for Connor's former companion to come to Earth in her glorified body. While there is nothing in Scripture that says humans would ever do that, it would be less offensive than adding yet another reincarnated being.

If I were to make it Dr. Lombardi, then she's in the story from book one, and I can make her a more prominent character, dropping hints that she's more than she seems. Although it would be odd that she and Satan didn't recognize each other as supernatural beings, especially since she would look the same as she did when she lived millennia ago (except young again).

The other alternative is to introduce a new character from book two on. Although I wouldn't reveal her true identity until the end of book two or somewhere in book three, she could be there to assist Connor in some TBD way. He wouldn't fully recognize her from his former life because his soul doesn't fully awaken until the end of book two.

I also need to find a meaty role for Romano and Antonio. I may get rid of Antonio permanently after book one.