Jedi Master Spock wrote:A starship requires peak outputs ranging all the way up to the zettawatt range – but should not be idling much higher than the low exawatt range (e.g., 12.75 exawatts). Then you have to wait for a while – a few years to “warm up†to higher powers – and then have to flood the (tiny, see pictures of Romulan power cores) control room with a highly precise stream of thousands of tons of matter to recharge it.
A 12.75 exawatt black hole would, IIRC, be 5,300 tons – and, unfortunately for anyone trying to feed it in a controlled fashion, has a very small event horizon, substantially smaller than an atomic nucleus. You need to be feeding a stream of 140 kg of matter per second to a region a few millimeters in diameter.
So what's your solution? So far you have made these two mutually contradictory claims:
"I could also bring up the issue of Romulans using artificial black holes as power generators with controlled outputs; gravitational blocking and/or local variation of G provide very elegant solutions to a number of problems that otherwise make things quite messy."
and
"Did I mention that if you lighten mass, the
entire universe is in the "shadow"?"
You see, a bigger "artificial black hole" made by mass would, well, be very massive. The only way the ship could move around would be to mass-lighten the black hole. But in your version of mass-lightening, the gravity well--the entire point of having a black hole--is also reduced, and so a mass-lightened black hole wouldn't be a viable power source.
Which is it?
Yes it is. When you are “thrown out†along different paths, you experience different forces as a result.
You misunderstand. The exit point is the same, while
starting in different areas of "shadow" with 0 graviton flux. They then move to the same location, and the exiting particles would each experience the same force.
I have. Not explicitly, but I've described exactly what it has to look like in the static case. The precise analytic function invoked doesn't matter (there are an infinite number of possible analytic eddy functions I could use, expressable in terms of the blocked flux, which would satisfy COE).
Then
do it. The function
does matter, because that's what's needed to analyze. Just point out what assumptions you're making.
Being able to point out that one path conserves energy isn't evidence that all possible paths are conservative. That's why an actual function is required.
Now, I could build my own function based on the picture you provided and easily show that it isn't conservative, but then you'd just complain that I didn't build it correctly, right?
Now, it's easy to fix that discontinuity – all you need to do is bend the edges a bit until they meet back up with the original well.
[...]
I can take any surface of the form z=f(x,y), and the gradient of f will be a conservative vector field if there are no discontinuities involved in the surface. It's very trivial geometrically that something you can sketch a nice and continuous mesh model for has a line integral of zero along any closed loop on the surface.
Does it matter what any of the actual functions are? Nope. COE is really easy to handle.
Note that – in general – it requires energy to enter the shadow (going “upâ€) and you gain energy upon leaving it, but as you move away from the blockage, the effects drop off rapidly (1/r^2). Once you get a good distance from the blockage, you don't even notice the effect anymore.
Yeah, it's really easy to handle when you don't use any math; just use circular logic.
At which point the eddy has a different value – the eddy drops off as you increase in distance from the blockage – and does not contribute as much delta-v on exit, corresponding precisely to the energy it would have lost traveling from point A to point B in a path that didn't intersect the shadow.
No part of any object, passing through any closed loop, is going to gain any energy
Really? 'Cause you have it backwards. The "eddy" would have to
increase here. Remember: as the wheel radius increases, the amount of vertical distance it covers while in the eddies is
reduced, but the energy gained during the drop outside the shadow is
increased. The "eddies" have less of an effect.
No, that doesn't work either. If you brush the edge of something pushing outwards while rotating down, you're going to be sped and slowed by the same amounts. Now you're just getting silly.
The horizontal movement would be canceled, but the vertical acceleration from your "eddies" is not canceled. It'd be really easy to show this to you if you built an actual function that we could use. (After all, you wouldn't accept mine, I'm sure.)
Your questions are based on the assumption of an incorrectly constructed field.
Perhaps you could give me a correctly-constructed field to work with? Because all I'm seeing from you so far is a circular argument: "the field is conservative because I say it's conservative."
Inside a magnetic envelope is in an area with the distinct absence of a gravitational field, or anything behaving identical to a gravitational field. Do you understand yet why this is relevant?
Do you understand that the fact that this field
can affect neutrons (and gravitons) is relevant? If it can affect neutrons, then it can affect matter in general. It is obviously not a magnetic field as we know them.
If you're going to claim an enclosed envelope through which gravity flows around, you need to invoke a strong and most peculiar effect in the edges of the envelope, as well as energy due to the motion of the envelope – which, in turn, invokes messier versions of exactly the same set of problems.
Come to think of it, flowing around the envelope may allow for a CoE violation as well. (Situate the aforementioned PMM so that the weight just touches the edge of the "eddy" without entering the envelope, and you've got a waterwheel under a waterfall, so to speak.)
As “silly†and as much a “waste of time†as your originally bringing up the problem as an objection. If you can establish location of the signal through some flavor of parallax, you can be sure of a source; if not, you cannot be sure of a source.
Two different problems. For the CE, you have a new gravitational vector pointing (pulsating, really) towards an object you already know the location of. The required assumptions are minimal.
For the case of dropping into a system with
x number of objects and using gravitational sensors as your primary means of mass measurement, you've got a limited number of vectors compared to the gravity wells. Even gathering data over time, the problem isn't guaranteed to converge.
Though I suppose they could just chalk those situations up to "gravimetric interference," but it still doesn't explain detection of starship mass FTL, particularly given how weak a starship's gravity well would be at such distances.
So, again, I must contend that Federation starships use gravimetric sensors as auxiliary sensors, and not primary sensors.
And just how long does it take before something drops out of warp? (I don't recall anything staying in warp for hours before dropping out.)
You
really don't know your Trek then. Try “Encounter at Farpoint Station.†The saucer is detached at warped.
You're dodging the question. How long does it stay in warp?
Yes, it can be predicted, at least for larger objects. See also “Encounter at Farpoint Station.†Now, why couldn't that be used for detection of an incoming FTL object? Provide an explanation and we'll talk about it.
Is it a set period of time before dropping out? Or is there variation?
Physics may require gravitons to exist. Some “new properties†are to be expected (e.g., the energy of a graviton). Gravitation is an active field of study.
So you feel you can just make up whatever properties suit your needs?
We need those either those properties – incidentally, a doppler type effect is more or less required in a relativistic treatment, and directionality would be integral to any particle treatment – or absurd resolution for the sensors to be useful.
Black/white fallacy. Or gravity sensors just have limited use, as auxiliary sensors.
As there exist no non-gravity based methods of remote mass measurement without inventing new branches of physics, and we have occasional reference to the detection of graviton fluxes as well as the remote measurement of mass, there need to be useful gravitic sensors.
Federation sensors can detect various types and amounts of materials remotely. Obtaining density and therefore mass from that is trivial. Direct graviton observation is not required for this.
And graviton flux can simply refer to the strength of a detected gravity well. Again, direct graviton observation is not required to accomplish this.
Not at all. You're assuming a free falling starship completely inappropriately.
Perhaps you could explain.
Usually one does measure force without measuring acceleration. Stepped on a scale lately?
A scale technically measures distance.
How does a spaceship know its position?
One possible method is triangulating its position based off of relative locations of known stars. However, in order to get acceleration due to gravity from this, your sensors would have to be able to determine the distance of those stars precise to the subatomic level. Again, we're getting into "absurd" territory here.