Alice Averlong🏳️⚧️more sci-fi should deal with the fact that your average Enterprise starship has a fuel tank measured in Chicxulubs of antimatter
"a spaceship crashed" shouldn't be a bunch of wreckage in a forest and plucky scavengers finding neat bits of technology to resell, it should be a "so the dominant species on that planet has been forever changed"
even if it blows up in orbit, that's still 90 teratons of TNT going off. That's equivalent to a solar flare.
You're still going to Have A Bad Day.
oh, to clarify, when I say "Chicxulubs of antimatter", I don't mean, like, the amount of antimatter is equivalent to the mass of the Chicxulub asteroid: I mean the amount of antimatter has energy approximately equal to the impact at Chicxulub that extincted the dinosaurs.
that's the thing with antimatter FTL starships: they're super dangerous in multiple ways, and that's an inherent part of how they work.
even ignoring them potentially being armed, even ignoring that they can go very fast (and what happens when they crash into something?), just the power they'd need to store to be able to do all that makes them weapons of mass destruction on a scale we can't even conceive of
like, every nuclear weapon on the planet is like 1.5 gigatons. A full on world war 3 is less than ONE TEN-THOUSANDTH as energetic as the fuel tanks of an enterprise
which makes me wonder about the fact that anyone lets these starships orbit their planets, let alone sometimes they manage to land.
Earth keeping their shipyards at Mars is a good start, I'd think if I was in charge of biosphere protection, I'd be more like "yeah ya'll can park at Jupiter, and take some chemical rockets down to Earth"
because, yeah, they may be very safe normally, but when even one of these spaceships could sterilize a hemisphere from orbit, you really don't want them anywhere near you, no matter how well-maintained and friendly the operators of that star ship is
yeah it's a one in a million chance that the warp core ruptures, but if that one in a million chance hits, it kills BILLIONS.
so... no. keep that shit far enough away. Maybe if you're nice you can park on the far side of the moon
maybe that's the depressing answer to the Fermi Paradox:
The kind of energy storage needed to travel the stars is so high that every civilization that attempts is eventually has a Bad Accident that Chicxulubs their whole species.
The cosmo is full of planets which have a few decaying unmaintained space stations in orbit of a planet where the dominant species is a small non-sapient rodent, insect or fish.
There's a printout in one of those decaying space station of the last transmission of an FTL ship, and it's either "oops" or "oh shit"
anyway this means that the way some people think about, like, photon torpedoes is incorrect.
They aren't weapons per se. They're a guidance system, to let you aim where your fuel is going, and to track a moving target.
an antimatter starship without torpedoes isn't "unarmed", it's just not able to be precise with what it's blowing up. They're always armed, because they are inherently a weapon of mass destruction, and even calling them that is understating it by several orders of magnitude
they're not a WMD in the sense of Tsar Bomba, they're a WMD in the sense of "they can end an entire civilization".
.katie caliber (alice)@foone this whole thread sounds a bit like how people talk about nuclear reactors being bad but I'll admit I'm by far not smart enough to argue about it
Winchell Chung ⚛🚀Jon's Law: Any interesting space drive is a weapon of mass destruction.
The scifi author must consider the ramifications of the civilian use of the equivalent of thermonuclear weapons. How would you like to have the captain of the Exxon Valdez with an antimatter drive tramp freighter? The more devastation a drive can wreck, the shorter the leash the captains will be on.
So if drives are too powerful, there won't *be* any colorful tramp freighters.
https://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/prelimnotes.php#johnslaw
Bobby Politte@nyrath @foone Just flying the ship into a planet at full impulse would be devastating. I’m not sure why the genesis device what such a WMD worry for the Klingons when a warp-driven drone would be just as destructive.
The Killing Star absolutely ruined space travel for me… aliens aside, eventually, every ship is a weapon. You just need some fanatics.
60sRefugee@bpolitte @nyrath @foone As I recall from the novelization of "Search For Spock", the Klingons feared that if the Genesis Device worked to specs (which ultimately it didn't), it would be a Weapon of Mass Creation: instantly convert entire planets into whatever you want them to be; so you could wipe out your enemies and then move into the newly terraformed planet. A monopoly on it would remove the Mutual from Mutual Assured Destruction.
Sannemen@bpolitte @nyrath @Foone as I grew up watching Star Trek, that’s the bit that suspended my suspension of disbelief: “we have a whatever-zer weapon capable of destroying your planet!”. Yes, but you can also accelerate matter to multiples of the speed of light! You don’t need a weapon to destroy a planet, you just need an Ensign at the helm to get the pedals switched!
Custard Smingleigh@foone
All I did was show up at a stranger's house and try to show him the cool trick I can do with a plutonium sphere, two hemispherical neutron reflectors, and a screwdriver. Now he and his entire neighborhood try to shoot at me on sight before I can get near them.
All I did was show up at a stranger's house and try to show him the cool trick I can do with a plutonium sphere, two hemispherical neutron reflectors, and a screwdriver. Now he and his entire neighborhood try to shoot at me on sight before I can get near them.
ctrlsaltdelete@foone the Honor Harrington books kinda suck but what they do get right is that even the smallest, most lightly-equipped ship capable of interstellar travel is also capable of rendering pretty much any planet uninhabitable, and the only reason it doesn't happen more often is because there is a huge confederacy of planets whose single point of foreign policy agreement is that they will fuck up the day of anyone who takes advantage of that
Michael Gemar@foone This seems like an extension of the Kzinti Lesson.
Riley S. Faelan@foone Neither word appeared in the world-famous Halifax Telegram. https://darrenfisher.ca/december-6th-1917-on-that-cold-day-in-december-the-halifax-harbour-and-surrounding-communities-were-ripped-apart-by-a-massive-explosion/
December 6th 1917: On that cold day in December, the Halifax Harbour and surrounding communities were ripped apart by a massive explosion
“Hold up the train. Ammunition ship afire in harbour making for Pier 6 and will explode. Guess this will be my last message. Good-bye boys.” -Vince Coleman, Train Dispatcher December 6th 1917 On that cold day in December, the Halifax Harbour and surrounding communities were ripped apart by a massive explosion. Homes and buildings were flattened. Windows shattered everywhere. The
Frost, wolf of winter 🐺🎄
@foone counterpoint: mass extinctions are depressing
sometimes departing from reality is a good thing, IMO.
Digital Mark λ ☕️ 🚀 🌗@foone Niven & Pournelle dealt with that a bit in The Gripping Hand sequel to Mote in God's Eye. The orbital & space colonies survive the routine apocalypses of the homeworld by distance, but that just leaves them to decay.
Gazoche@foone Not to mention, antimatter explodes when it touches LITERALLY ANYTHING. So the only way to store it is in a vacuum capsule with a magnetic field that keeps it from touching the walls.
If the capsule is breached or the magnetic field stopped for any reason, everyone dies.
Matt Palmer@foone or "hold my beer"