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Originally Posted by Fred Brackin
A Space Navy or at least an Oribal Coast Guard to blow up any World-killers before they hit. It'd be much easier than Universal and Infallible Craziness Prevention.
The Orbital Guard would have many uses that were less apocalyptic.
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Hm... I'm assuming the existence of Robofacs which can Von Neumann themselves to higher output levels; and that people are spreading to a variety of stars. If folk around one star went suddenly crazy, built themselves a world-killer, and launched it towards a planet 5 light-years away, how soon would the rock be detected?
Let's see, SSp44, 12 (SM+12), -2 (Pyramid 34 armor), +5 (half-hour sweeps), -75 (7B miles), +32 (SM+31 array), +10 (in plain sight), +24 (silhouetted against deep space), -8 (stealth hull) = total -2 to detect from across the system. Even assuming a $900 quadrillion automated sensor array, it's not until the rock is 300 light-seconds away that it's autodetected, which doesn't give a lot of time to get any kind of interception into place.
Even with all the rear systems being Hot Singularity Drives, pushing at 6 gees, in 300 seconds, an interceptor could only move itself about 1600 miles, meaning they'd have to be peppered pretty thickly around any potential-target planet. And even then, a pile of rubble hitting a planet at .9c is almost as bad as a single solid rock doing the same.
How else might a Guard try to handle the situation?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Anthony
Any vacuum energy plant is still pulling energy from somewhere, just in this case it's the structure of space. That energy source can easily have a velocity, in which case performance would naturally drop off at high relative velocities (most likely it behaves like drag, in which case ships using that drive type have a speed limit). You still can't avoid having quite dangerous stuff around, but it eliminates the relativistic impactor.
This won't help if you actually need things moving at the higher speeds.
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I'm not /exactly/ using vacuum energy, that's just the closest equivalent in existing GURPS books. (I'm positing something called "horizon mechanics", an expansion of the present-day theory called "quantized inertia".) I'm prepping some lovely over-pretentious technobabble that has a core of actual math. (If it matters, what's being drawn on to create the energy or momentum is cutting off all future access to a sliver of the universe near the Hubble horizon; or, put another way, converting information into energy. Which, in this theory, is also how the forces of inertia and gravity are generated.)
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Originally Posted by ericthered
Don't put civilization on planets. If you have super plentiful energy not dependent on stars, you have no real reason to stay on a planet. Put everyone in rotating habitats and it becomes much harder to kill massive amounts of people. You can still do it, but it becomes senseless loss of life rather than a civilization crippling blow, which is what we'd really worry about.
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That's rapidly becoming my fallback plan, if I don't think of any way to keep planets intact.