10-17-2012, 06:53 PM | #31 |
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Berkeley, CA
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Re: Inertialessness (the Lensman & Arilou sort), top speed, and spinning
Smith usually avoided providing information about that sort of thing; while he did have super-materials, he didn't explain what they were made of (there was an oddity in the Skylark series where he had this coating that caused copper to be converted directly into energy. Didn't work on most things, but worked on copper. Later, it was revealed that it also worked on uranium, which provided a useful power-up. What exactly made copper and uranium similar was never revealed).
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10-17-2012, 07:58 PM | #32 | |
Join Date: Aug 2007
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Re: Inertialessness (the Lensman & Arilou sort), top speed, and spinning
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Later, the bulging skull wise elder race of Norlamionians provided a variant exciter which made "X" affect uranium. Other elements might have been possible with fuirther redesigned exciters but you're not going to beat uranium for commoness and density so that didn't come up.
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Fred Brackin |
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10-17-2012, 08:20 PM | #33 | |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: Inertialessness (the Lensman & Arilou sort), top speed, and spinning
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Besides, if inertialess matter "collides" with inert matter, it comes to a dead standstill in an instant. No inertia means no tendency to keep going. I know that everyone who understands relativity is holding their head to keep their brains from exploding. This was a very pop science understanding of "inertia" and "relativity"; for example, Smith showed people on inertialess ships floating in the air, with no mention that colliding with air molecules would bring them to a stop and leave them hanging. There is also the swinging of space axes, which can cut through armor, even though the axe has effectively no mass and is only exerting the force of the wielder's current muscular contraction. Bill Stoddard |
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10-18-2012, 09:24 PM | #34 | |
Join Date: Feb 2007
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Re: Inertialessness (the Lensman & Arilou sort), top speed, and spinning
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For ex, Smith knew perfectly well that the accelerations used by the spacecraft in those stories would not only kill the crews, but turn the ship into metal mush, but that wasn't the point of that series. The Lensman stories have their share of warped science, but he consciously tried to make them somewhat less so than the Skylark stories. The 'inertialess' drive may not make physical sense, but the stories don't pretend that light-speed is irrelevant or that men and machines can survive limitless 'conventional' accelerations. Likewise, the tech is less starkly magical than in the Skylark stories, what it can and can't do is more precisely spelled out. Smith did make some mistakes. His description of antimatter is accurate in some ways but totally weird in others, it has negative mass, for ex, and experiences attractive forces as repulsion and vice versa. When I first read the Lensman series as a teen, I remember scratching my head over his textual description of positrons, to my surprise I later discovered that he was actually drawing on a conceptualization by Dyson that was no longer much used in descriptions by the time I first read them.\ EDIT: I said Dyson when I meant Dirac. That's what I get for posting when I'm that tired. One other thing Smith sometimes did was disregard the scale implications of the energy levels involved in his stories. (He was hardly unique in that, and I've seen some supposedly 'hard SF' stories that paid less attention to the issue than he did.) For ex, Kimball Kinnison's personal dreadnaught, the Dauntless, embodies technology far beyond ours. At one point Smith gives the necessary data to calculate the power budget of the Dauntless, and it comes out to roughly five to six times the insolation Earth experiences. That is, on 1/6 power, the Dauntless could take the place of the Sun, as far as the Earth's biosphere and weather systems go. Now, that might actually be a realistic appraisal of a true starship's energy budgets, for all we know. But a tech that can do things like that would have all kinds of knock-on effects that aren't shown in the stories. Last edited by Johnny1A.2; 10-19-2012 at 10:27 PM. |
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10-18-2012, 09:36 PM | #35 |
Join Date: Feb 2007
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Re: Inertialessness (the Lensman & Arilou sort), top speed, and spinning
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10-18-2012, 11:10 PM | #36 | ||
Join Date: Dec 2007
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Re: Inertialessness (the Lensman & Arilou sort), top speed, and spinning
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10-18-2012, 11:27 PM | #37 |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: Inertialessness (the Lensman & Arilou sort), top speed, and spinning
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10-18-2012, 11:28 PM | #38 | ||
Computer Scientist
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Dallas, Texas
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Re: Inertialessness (the Lensman & Arilou sort), top speed, and spinning
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10-18-2012, 11:57 PM | #39 | |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: Inertialessness (the Lensman & Arilou sort), top speed, and spinning
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I also suggest that this is consistent with the fact that the interstellar medium acts as if it had a viscosity that gave inertialess ships traveling through it a terminal velocity. An incredibly high terminal velocity, in parsecs per hour or more, but still. . . . Bill Stoddard |
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10-19-2012, 02:37 AM | #40 | |
Computer Scientist
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Dallas, Texas
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Re: Inertialessness (the Lensman & Arilou sort), top speed, and spinning
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Tags |
arilou, inertialess, inertialessness, lensman, lensmen, physics |
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