@AndyD273 That's usually how political debates turn out ;)

just a bunch of speeches pretending to be responses to questions

but I agree, it's great how people here can be so non-aggressive

@DaaaahWhoosh Thats what I was getting at :)

We have created a sentient bot...

$>say

I guess it's not sentient here yet?

no, not yet

@DaaaahWhoosh Nope. I deliberately haven't restarted it in here, because I get the feeling that command will get spammed. It's too amusing.

You can play with it in WB Robots, though.

Anyone want to hear about an idea I have for artificial gravity in my sci-fi universe? Perhaps find reasons why it wouldn't work?

ok ill bite, whatcha got?

Ok

so, from the beginning, I figured there's just some force we don't know about, like gravity only stronger

Woo, just got the bronze for reality-check

I called it neo-gravity, or neo-g. Figured that might be something people in my universe would come up with

then recently, I was figuring out how FTL space travel works in my universe. I said it happens when the ships shift into a different 'dimension' where the rules are different

@DaaaahWhoosh by come up with do you mean "observe" or simply "name" ? or somehow make up? also, do they also know about "regular" gravity?

Gravity is the weakest of the fundamental forces, so a stronger one is obviously feasible.

@AndreiROM I mean 'name'. They observe it somehow, I'm getting to that

so anyway, I figured that the whole 'super-fast dimension' idea is old, so I wanted to give it my own spin. I decided that there's actually a whole lot of different 'dimensions', many of which have undesirable or simply useless results

but I figured, if there's a dimension that lets you go fast, what if there's a dimension that magnifies gravitational forces?

so that's what I did: neo-g is generated by phasing an object into neo-g space, where its gravitational forces are magnified many millions of times over

You know, this discussion just makes me think of the Planar Shepherd from DnD 3.5.

ships can phase a sort of floor plan into neo-g at the bottom of their ships, and it'll suddenly act like it's incredibly massive, pulling everyone 'down' towards it

@Mourdos I keep thinking of quantum leap

@DaaaahWhoosh ...thats a pretty cool idea and new. at least to me.

@DaaaahWhoosh Sounds novel.

yeah, the only question I have now is if it would break anything

@DaaaahWhoosh You mean like physics?

@DaaaahWhoosh The only thing I could see wrong with it is that energy transfer between dimensions is possible.

@James I was thinking more along the lines of ship infrastructure

lol yeah i figured

Air circulation? Would air get compressed to the floor?

gravity does that normally

I'm thinking it should be just like flying in-atmosphere, except in a vacuum, but you're essentially pulling around a planet

Also, for instance some engineers in a lab phased something into a universe like that, but with gravity 10^100 times stronger, that object would sink to the center of the Earth and consume it in a black hole.

@DaaaahWhoosh Oh, that kind of wrong with it. Naw, it'd be like building a ship on the ground.

@DaaaahWhoosh If the opposite type of universe existed, it'd be a great way to make anti-gravity too.

@DaaaahWhoosh Build the ship on Earth, phase it to near zero gravity and push it up into space with a few ground crew and a mighty shove.

yeah, see, these are the kinds of considerations I need

is there a way to get earth-normal gravity that doesn't de-orbit nearby planets?

You can handwave that by saying you can only access nearby dimensions, which are fairly similar to our own.

I guess if neo-g forces diminish faster than gravitational ones with relation to distance, it could work

eh, I don't know, I'm going to a meeting

@DaaaahWhoosh That would mess with your gradient very badly. Your head could be floating.

I mean, to some degree it works, but you may as well go with gravity shielding to keep it all in the ship. Otherwise missiles would have a way easier time hitting you.

@TimB I kinda figure air isn't quite as dense on a spacecraft

The final community moderator election phase is now underway. Good luck to all candidates.

@Samuel I was thinking about that, but I decided it'd be better to just turn off gravity when in combat. Either way, I'm starting to think that most forms of artificial gravity cause more problems than they solve, it might be better to not have it at all

@DaaaahWhoosh Well, the pseudo-gravity usually works out. Rotating a section of the ship or something similar.

@DaaaahWhoosh Oh, but thinking more about your example, you'd want your ship based around a sphere. A flat deck would have weird gravity at the edges.

@DaaaahWhoosh It's worth checking out the Queendom of Sol series by Wil Mccarthy. He builds little planetoids with hyper dense cores to give them gravity.

@Samuel what if the plate extended out beyond the walls slightly?

@AndyD273 It'd still be pulling you to the center of gravity, which will always be a point

The density is achieved on the subatomic level.

@Samuel The protector Brennan did this in one of Nivens stories, with a small asteroid in the kupiter belt with a neutron heart

@Samuel If I had a dollar for every time someone recommended a book to me, I'd have enough money to buy some of these books people keep recommending to me

@DaaaahWhoosh But the center of gravity would be a flat plane...

plain

whatever

@AndyD273 It'd be interesting to look at the math for it, I suspect it would be an edge effect at a fraction of the total width, like with the alderson disc.

@AndyD273 See, that's what I thought, but every point on the plane is pulling on you, so it's equivalent to the center pulling on you extra strongly

@DaaaahWhoosh Depends on how large the effect is

yeah, I'm thinking the math could probably go both ways, I just can't wrap my head around it yet

It's been mentioned that you might want it to dissipate over shorter distances than normal gravity. you might still be a little lighter at the edge, but possibly not horribly so

actually, I think you were right

@DaaaahWhoosh It would have a very strong center pull. Because the depth is so much smaller, the more toward the edge you go the more "equivalent mass" is at an angle to you.

Normally the r*theta isn't so bad because most of the mass is really far away.

yeah, but if the gravity scales more sharply, and like Andy said the plate extends beyond the floor, it might work out a little better

Really big r means small theta is no big deal over all, but if the r is really small the same change in theta makes a much larger difference.

you're going to have to define your variables, I have no idea what equation you're using :[

but it sure sounds impressive!

hehe

Well gravity has a sphere of influence centered on a bit of mass, r is the radius from you to the mass. And theta is your angle to that mass against what you consider "up".

yeah, I just realized I actually knew both of those things

it's one thing to not know things, it's worse to not know you know them :P

Right, so when you add all those mass points together you have to look at your combined thetas and distance from them to determine how gravity would actually be pulling.

As you walked across the deck you'd be putting far more of the mass points behind you than if they were very deep under you.

well, I'd suggest that neo-g space is smaller than regular space, so phasing something into it actually makes it further away from where you think it is, but that's just adding a whole nother layer of complexity to something I'm obviously already not smart enough to comprehend

To self-promote a bit, you'd have this situation without the help of the infinite plane

Or like this

I mean, it's a good hard-science question. What's the best shape for the deck of a ship that has earth normal gravity when it's a meter thick?

It would also be interesting if neo-g was highly directional

almost like lased gravity waves or something

or at least focused

@AndyD273 At this point I'm thinking the portal to neo-g space allows the gravitational forces to come through like light would, so it's more the shape of the portal than the shape of the mass providing the neo-g-forces

@AndyD273 That could solve it. If you simply let gravity in through an opening you could get a coherent gravity field.

Ha, simply. For an idea anyway.

Right, just so long as you don't ask for the math... :)

the mass itself is 'dropped' into neo-g space where it is tethered to the portal at a distance large enough to provide enough r for the theta of the ship to be negligible

The math is the easy part, it's the engineering that's hard

the mass is tethered by electromagnetism, so the tether itself is massless, and since neo-g space is smaller than realspace you don't need the mass to actually be that far away

@DaaaahWhoosh Yeah, maybe thinking of it as a filter to a identical sized space far from a large star that only lets the gravity through.

@DaaaahWhoosh Though, in that case it would work inside a single dimension.

It could even be a modification on how the ship jumps through space.

yeah, but I like my current system. The neo-g dimension can just magnify mass so you can carry the 'large star' with you

Turn the jump drive from matter to gravity and aim it near a star. Now the ship has gravity but doesn't go through.

Yeah, your system allows for more fun.

I guess the only problem with this (and probably any physics-altering system) is weaponization

@DaaaahWhoosh You're coming up with problems trying to weaponize it?

@DaaaahWhoosh Yeah, but cool to put on a ceiling somewhere to cancel the gravity in that room.

@AndyD273 no, the opposite

the biggest problem in any sci-fi I see is that one dude could probably just kill everyone

New comer: You have anti-gravity!? Owner: That's fantasy non-sense, the ceiling links to another dimension with identical gravity and cancels Earth gravity in this room... (mumbles) primitive... anti-gravity...

Well, one way to keep it from becoming a weapon is to make it so that the equipment needed to open the door to the neo-g dimension only works near by. So I couldn't project a beam that causes the other ship to implode on itself...

@AndyD273 Yeah, proximity is good. And also I'm thinking it's hard to project these things in the first place. Like you need some super-strong mass to drop in, otherwise it just explodes into pure energy

Well, fun, but I gotta run

yeah, me too. Thanks everyone for helping flesh this idea out

I just started watching The Shannara Chronicles. 1000s of years into the future there's still skeletal buildings and rotting cargo ships. Would they even still be there? Relevant WB posts?

@Mazura worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/13373/3202

@James "outscienced" is a word now? I like it.

Also, looks like I missed a cool discussion.

@Samuel - Hmm. That's a good one but I don't think it's anywhere near 10k years.

@James I settled for a cheese sandwich.

@Mazura I'm not familiar with the books or the show.

@Mazura How do you know it's thousands of years?

Wikipedia says it's 300 years.

After some war or another.

Nice that it's apparently set in my homeland, the Pacific Northwest.

Well, it's Friday and I lost the election. I'm going to go home and have some whiskey. Cheers to all the other losers ;)

@Samuel - Just a quick search: "Shannara takes place thousands of years in the future, in a time when technology has died out" –TVguide. It's 300y after the most recent 'magical' war.