Any GURPS stats for black holes, pulsars, etc?

[DataPacRat]

Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2

Not if your drives are firing, then it's a contest of the power of the drive vs. the friction with the medium. Ditto the influence of gravity or other forces.

(Though Smith did screw up his own imaginary physics badly on this very point in Vortex Blaster.)

Do you have more info on what he did wrong in there? (I'll admit that when I last read it, I was focused more on trying to extrapolate and fill-in Vegian society than on looking for physics exploits.)

Exactly how that works is not clear. The ship has no momentum, so it has to be the structural strength of the ship transmitting the force of the drive to the particles.

It might be less the ship's structure and more the shields.

In a major battle in Second-Stage Lensman, we're informed that nega-matter responds to gravity the opposite way that normal matter does; and we're also told that shields pull nega-matter projectiles in towards the shielded ship, implying that shields exert a pushing force on regular matter. Ships of this era, including the speedster with the 30M wall-shield, also often have a couple of tractor and pressor beams, so it might be safe to model the ship's effect on interstellar dust particles as just shoving them to the side before they actually impact its structure.



Has anyone got any suggestions on how to convert the local temperature of space into damage?

The earlier suggestion of converting space-dust into the equivalent of a neutral particle beam worked out well; are there any rules-of-thumb to say things like "If you're close enough to a star that things get heated up to a temperature of 8,000 Kelvins, that's dumping X gigajoules of energy into your shields per turn, which can be treated like a laser doing Y damage per turn"? (If surface area matters, the speedster is 216 feet long and 12 feet in diameter, implying an area of around 8,400 sf.)