Introducing superscience into THS while keeping the feel

[Michael Thayne]

Originally Posted by Anthony

GURPS doesn't generally model immobile installations, which for practical purposes Hawking station is. Neither system is actually likely to have very good performance for its system weight (billions of tons), it's just compact.

Deep Beyond heavily implies that Hawking Station's research could leads to advanced fusion tech that doesn't require a billion-ton black hole. Maybe that's just TL11 fusion tech though? (Assuming 4e tech levels.) And IIUC black hole computing has been seriously entertained as a way to get high computing-power-per-weight, not sure how that works, if it involves billion-ton god brains or even tinier short-lived singularities.

[jeff_wilson]

Originally Posted by johndallman

The difficulty with this is that the black hole suspects in the THS Oort are hundreds of AUs apart, and not moving rapidly. If they were originally created close together, why didn't they merge? If they were created widely separated, why wasn't that side of the Oort evaporated in the explosion?

Isn't there less reason for them to merge versus other objects of similar mass? Having no appreciable surface area there's a scarcity of collisions or light pressure on them.

Originally Posted by johndallman

Also, black holes are black holes. Primordial ones would not have properties that let you tell them from ones of similar mass, charge and spin that were created more recently. It's just that small ones would be suspected of not being primordial because those should have evaporated by now.

Primordials would have longer to accumulate more extreme values in one respect or another than more recent ones.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Michael Thayne

Deep Beyond heavily implies that Hawking Station's research could leads to advanced fusion tech that doesn't require a billion-ton black hole. Maybe that's just TL11 fusion tech though? (Assuming 4e tech levels.) And IIUC black hole computing has been seriously entertained as a way to get high computing-power-per-weight, not sure how that works, if it involves billion-ton god brains or even tinier short-lived singularities.

While I can't think of any reason researching a singularity would tell you anything useful about advanced fusion tech, it just sounds like a higher TL. As for black hole computing, that's more a specialized model of reality than a practical thing, and it would probably require constructing your own black hole to get useful information out of it.

Originally Posted by jeff_wilson

Isn't there less reason for them to merge versus other objects of similar mass?

Yes, one of the problems with quantum black holes is that it seems nearly impossible for them to actually eat, their capture cross-section is barely larger than an atomic nucleus (a 10 billion ton black hole has a Schwarzschild radius of 14.85 femtometers, the nucleus tends to be a couple femtometers).

[Michael Thayne]

It occurs to me that the advanced fusion tech might shake out to be something like what Spaceships 4e calls an "advanced fusion pulse drive". That brings with it a significant step up in delta-V, without being as crazy as a total conversion drive.