The Archangel Syndrome (Page 6 of 13)

Well, if the sun only puts out enough neutrinos every 176 years to equal the energy of a gallon of gasoline, then those cell phones and EVs better sip that gas very sparingly. :-) I think my problem is in the underlying numbers. I got some of them from Alexa, which didn't always quote sources I would necessarily trust if I was googling for the same info. This could be an example of the Alexa AI relying on crappy sources, which Open AI admits is a general problem. And of course, as companies all scramble to integrate AI and use it to answer questions based on shitty sources, googling will increasingly return crappy search results, which is already a known problem even without AI.

Curious how they arrived at this number

wait, what?

loop*

Isn't this an imposed variant on his research?

I decided to treat the article that speculated about neutrinos powering cell phones and EVs as a not-so-crazy idea, rather than waste another day trying to calculate if it's actually possible. As a result, my powertrons have become neutrino-to-energy reactors, usually referred to as neutrino boilers, or just boilers. The origin of "boilers" comes from the fact that when a neutrino reactor is breached, it implodes into a singularity and then explodes like a mini-bang, with plasma temperatures reaching 250M degrees (now that'll heat your water!). I don't intend to explain how a neutrino-to-energy reactor works, though. The name should make it pretty obvious what it does, which is all I need for a Lucas-ian space opera (the s--t just works; don't bore people by trying to invent hokey explanations for impossible tech).

I may, however, mention in the Galactipedia article on FTL travel that if a ship's atreidite-based reserves (batteries) are drained (e.g., in battle) and the ship is too far from a major source of neutrinos, then the vessel can become marooned in space, unable to power the boiler and recharge the atreidite. That adds a nice element of risk to space travel, although primarily for vessels forced to move away from a major neutrino source (e.g., a star). That could be military vessels engaged in combat, civilian ships fleeing pirates, etc. In those situations you better hope your atreidite-powered interstellar drones are fully charged to go for help. And since drones can't carry huge reactors, they can only make a limited number of jumps before they run out of power.

There would have to be some way to "refuel" the batteries from an external source, otherwise a call for help wouldn't be able to rescue a ship, just the people. I suppose towing is also a possibility to get a ship back to the local star, assuming there is one. Not things I'm likely to go into detail on, though.

True. I currently explain the term boilers late in act one, which may not be soon enough. I don't want to stop to explain the term mid-battle in act one, so a different name may be appropriate, although I like boiler. I currently use neutrino-to-energy reactor when I first introduce the concept, neutrino reactor for most of the narration and for Brain's dialogue, whereas most humans refer to it as boiler. I even considered calling engineering the boiler room. :-)

Looks like a complete description of hypercannons is still way too complicated to explain in the middle of a battle:

By the process of elimination, I'm going with my original idea of some kind of energy beams that can "push" through a target's shields as if the shields don't exist (like neutrinos through matter), resulting in the beam hitting the hull directly. Seems rather like magic, but I no longer care.

I have to be careful not to make the first two chapters even longer. I currently have each of St. James's ships hit twice. The first time it does a lot of damage to the three ships, but not enough to fully cripple them. The second time, it hits like a bomb under the bridge of the Almighty (it shears off a big chunk of the main part of the vessel). Including the sister ships, that makes for a total of six strikes, most of them different in the specific damage they cause, so there is pretty good variety as far as trying to describe/keep the battle interesting. A 20% reduction could work, although it wouldn't really change much about the battle, but it might seem more realistic. For example, perhaps the Hercules ups the amount of energy it produces for the beams as part of the second strikes in order to really damage the Colonial ships. Doing so also damages (overloads?) the neutrino reactor onboard the Hercules, although not enough to fully cripple it (she loses all ability to fire weapons and engage her stardrive, but she can still maneuver at sublight).

I've been skimming a few articles on energy frequencies, since shields are really just energy. I could perhaps explain the superweapon by stating that it requires a huge amount of energy to produce beams powerful enough at "extreme frequencies" to do real damage, frequencies outside the range of what ordinary shields are designed to protect against since they were never intended to repel beams at those frequencies since nova/supernova weapons can't produce them. It requires too much energy to do so, which the Hercules is only barely able to produce six times before its neutrino reactor is damaged.

Some technobabble cacas like that. The alternative to frequency babble might be to use "phase" babble, the physics of which would remain conveniently undefined.

Physics says we've discovered all possible states of matter. When we find some new state, we'll need to reinvent the entire discipline.

Actually, I was referring to energy, not matter. "State" is probably a bad term for energy. Since the fired energy beams are just photons, I'm hoping to add some non-existent "phase" that energy can be in, which has yet to be discovered. I'm going to have to dig into photons, though, to see where I might be able to add some B.S. property or phase to it. My previous writeup had the fired energy come and go from our dimension based on something the weapon did to the energy.

I studied physics in high school and college. I'm probably a blend between hard core and space opera. I enjoy Star Wars but PLEASE, I want to see the energy source of the light saber and how it works... but they really look cool!

There are 4 classic states of matter and lots of non-classic states (wiki). And they list proposed states of matter. There might be some wiggle room for a new state. How about interdimensional matter? And maybe even more states.

I don't think such a weapon satisfies my story requirements. Firing the weapon just a few times drains the ship of energy, including all the reserves stored in atreidite. To continue firing, you have to be willing to drive your neutrino reactor beyond its safety limits. I'm talking about a reactor big enough and powerful enough to power the needs of an entire dreadnought (the Hercules).

The weapon I've currently defined requires that the Hercules somehow converts the energy into some state/phase that allows the fired weapon's quanta of energy to pass through the shields and thereby slam St. James's destroyers as if they had no shields, pretty much crippling all three ships with just a couple of shots each.