EMP and water

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

As perhaps a final refinement, the Darrian probe triggers a series of devastating (but not hugely atypical) solar flares in the Darrian's home system and 168 hours later (+or- 10%) the same happens in every star system within 6 parsecs. Something must have propgated through jumpspace.

That's not a bad fix. It avoids inverse square law calculations about energy, which produce quite unreasonable results.

[Anaraxes]

Originally Posted by hal

One wouldn't think the mass of a probe would be sufficient to trigger the effects of a massive solar flare, let alone twenty of them.

It's not just simple mass impacting the start. The probe was actively doing things -- undescribed TL 16* things -- inside the star. There's no suggestion (for example) that a lump of asteroid of the same mass should have the same effects. It was an unintended consequence of their magic tech.

--
* Classic Traveller TL, not GURPS TL

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by hal

So theoretically, with the biosphere stripped off the world, we're looking at an uninhabitable world.

Or less. There are no survivors onworld, all the oceans and a significant fraction of the crust vaporized. Indeed with this sort of energy there are no survivors in the star system, and the star itself is so disrupted the system probably isn't safe for the next million years, if it survived at all.

The Traveller event has been well known to make no physical sense for four decades now and simply can't be squared with actual physics. Enough energy to kill electronics at 6 parsecs, especially in a setting where most electronics will be hardened for space-side use by default, requires something on the order of magnitude of a small supernova. It's possible for it to be low enough energy some planetary *cores* survive in the originating system, but anything humans care about is gone.

The most plausible efforts I've seen make use of the fact the canonical technobabble involves "mesons" - which in Traveller are particles that behave unlike real world mesons in all kinds of ways - and ditch the concept of the event involving electromagnetism or stellar flares in any significant way, making all the effects the results of "meson" pulses. There may be some flares too, for the dramatic effect of the thing, but they are minor side effects of no importance to the tech-killing effect.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by malloyd

Or less. There are no survivors onworld, all the oceans and a significant fraction of the crust vaporized. Indeed with this sort of energy there are no survivors in the star system, and the star itself is so disrupted the system probably isn't safe for the next million years, if it survived at all.

I'm not sure I'm calculating the right things, but it looks to me as if this is entirely right. I'm getting Earth surface temperature at least in the thousands of kelvin, if not the tens of thousands—likely hotter than the surface of the sun. Asteroidal habitats and such seem likely to just be vaporized.

Fred's idea of an FTL effect catalyzing EMP emissions from nearby stars seems like a much better handwave. That avoids massive inverse square law effects.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by whswhs

I'm not sure I'm calculating the right things, but it looks to me as if this is entirely right.

It really depends on how strong you need the EMP to be, and how much of the flare energy goes into the EMP as opposed to other effects. If we assume it's as efficient at producing EMP as a nuclear weapon and the 6 parsec planets are subject to the equivalent of a nuclear weapon EMP at 300 km, Darrian is subject to the equivalent of a nuclear weapon at 25cm.