[Spaceships] Reactionless Drives, Pseudovelocity, and NOT breaking a setting (much)

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

Nah, not a construction brick that's much too small. Even if you run it up to near C inert on a precisely chosen intrinsic and then render it free all you've got is something that will blow up as soon as it hits atmosphere.

After several shenanigans involving undetectable speedsters everyone is running a massive overlap on their electros and either free you'll see the mini-bergenholm on the brick detected or the naked brick at near c will be detected by the ionization as it flies through interplanetary medium of normal density.

That's not how you'd do it. With the Bergenholm, what you'd do is take a brick or a rock or a ball of cotton, put on a ship, and let that ship accelerate inert until it's pressing against c, relative to Prime Base. That wouldn't be hard for ships like those of the later Lensman books. It doesn't matter if it takes a week to do it.

Then, when you've got a velocity of .99c or .999c relative to Prime Base, then you turn on the Bergenholm. Now you transport the thing to Prime Base, making very sure to keep it constantly inertialess. You take it to Earth and sneak it near whatever your target is.

Then you turn off the Bergenholm, either with a timer, a remote, or a suicide bomber, and watch the film of the multi-megaton fireball on the evening news.

Note that this technique can be used on any scale. Any given 'free' cargo could actually have a megadisaster intrinsic velocity, there's nothing to indicate this until you turn off the Bergenholm. You could weaponize any shipment of anything that way.

Granted active Bergenholms are themselves detectable by sensors, but all that tells you is that there's an active Bergenholm. That's not even unusual on most Civilized worlds, especially near military facilities and space ports. Spacecraft usually inert in space, but they use Bergenholm-equipped space armor, etc, all the time on the ground. Nor is it improbable that an active Bergenholm could be shielded from sensors anyway.