Quote:
Originally Posted by Varyon
Kromm noted you should be able to carry meteoric iron through a gate (it's just encumbrance), so provided you can figure out a way to survive a brief jaunt into the star, you can simply carry the stuff through. Or have some sort of purpose-made servant do it for you (in which case it only needs to survive long enough to bring the stuff through).
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That's what I was thinking. Riffing off of Ray Bradbury, I was wondering what the DF-era equivalent of a "magnetic scoop" might be. (Orichalcum mine cart?)
If magic can open a gate slightly within the surface of an iron star, but the iron of the star is immune to magic, then one interpretation is that the gate appears to open out onto a face of dense very hot metal but cannot by itself move the metal out. But a person, mechanism, or thing that does not rely on magic, could reach through the gate, collect a sample, and move it back through the gate.
In DF terms you'd probably not want to do this with a living hand or appendage. Perhaps some extremely-heat-resistant orichalcum or similar mechanical servitor could do this.
I'm not even sure what form of matter the iron would be on the inside of such a theoretical stellar mass. Plasma?
Edit: Anaraxes also brings up an interesting point:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Anaraxes
An iron star isn't an ordinary star, though. It's a stellar core that's not quite dense enough to be a neutron star, and has been around long enough for fusion to have ceased, remaining heat radiated away, and all the elements to decay into iron-56, or, if lighter than iron, to fuse via quantum tunneling effects bringing nuclei together in the dense core.
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If the heat has radiated away, then presumably it would be cooler than plasma, though I'm not sure about the effect of gravitational density. Perhaps it's a metallic soup?