Greetings! And a question/clarification/food for thought.

[Drashner1]

The problem with that is that the exterior dimensions of the void bubbles are measured in picometers - too small to let in most wavelengths of light.

Aaaaand... I forgot that  

No worries - It's not exactly a topic of daily conversation around here.

Part of the strength of OA is it's distributed group nature - What one of us forgets someone else often remembers. It's not perfect, but it's held up reasonably well over the years.

Anyway, did a quick math: if you want to hit something around the size of our sun core, roughly 1 light second in diameter, on a linear flight path of 1000ly (31,500,000s per year), the margin of error is just 3.17 x 10^-9%, which I guess is well in range of godlike precision. I'd like then to presume that system wreaking metric bombs travel on a pre calculated flight path.

Hmm. I suppose that this would also allow for compensating for the motion of the target star or whatever over the 1000 years it would take to get there. A quite BOTE indicates the star would have moved about 6 trillion km in that time.

I do wonder about relativistic effects - not so much in terms of the void bubble itself, since the interior is at rest and won't really experience these, but not sure what (if anything) happens due to sheer distance and frames of reference and such. That might be something to ask Adam about. That said...

Found the article where gravity radiation was supposed to be a danger for void bubble, was the one on the Reactionless drive:

"A Void ship will generally ignore most classes of debris, i.e. non-exotic matter, being able to otherwise slip between molecules. Exceptions are things like magmatter, neutronium, q-balls, event horizons, or singularities (such as the track of a Thunderbolt).


Another rumoured hazard is a burst of carefully modulated gravitational radiation designed to destructively cancel the void bubble; such a weapon could conceivably be used in warfare between the archai, although there are no reliable reports of its use to date. "

Conveniently, Adam Getchell is the source of the core ideas in this article and the person I would try to consult about this anyway. Which means we can take his statement here as a reasonable confirmation that there is a way to disrupt a void bubble. Which - after a bit of thought - leads to the following notions:

Void bubbles allow you to move even very large masses around at extremely high speed very quickly.

Imagine a - let's call it a constellation for now - of void bubbles, possibly hundreds or thousands of them or more - floating in space and connected to a comm-wormhole linked to an S6 level sensor system that can detect an incoming metric bomb or other void bubble. Each void bubble contains a massive object, perhaps even a small black hole (Small = Ceres to Jupiter mass in this context - although a larger number of void motes each carrying a smaller BH could then use the Hawking radiation of the smaller holes to power themselves).

When something is detected incoming or it is otherwise determined that the constellation is needed, it activates. In a fraction of a second the void bubbles start moving in repeating patterns at nearly the speed of light - in the process generating 'a burst of carefully modulated gravitational radiation' in a spherical wave front that expands away from the constellation at the speed of light. Any void bubble caught in the wave front is disrupted and collapses, releasing its contents into deep space (presumably at a distance where the detonation of a metric bomb wormhole is not sufficient to cause significant - or at least unacceptable - damage).

The wavefront would presumably disperse to being ineffective beyond a certain distance from the constellation, but between having large numbers of constellations surrounding important infrastructure and each constellation being able to reposition at nearly the speed of light (to get into range of an incoming attack) it should be sufficient for our purposes to work as a defense. I'm imagining each wavefront being effective across light-seconds at least and possibly light-minutes or light-hours.

Another option (possibly operating in concert with the constellation system) could be a 'gwaser' cannon - a gravity wave beam weapon. It has been suggested that vibrating cosmic strings can produce intense beams of gravity waves (LINK). Assuming this is correct, or even if it isn't, it might be possible to arrange a number of void bubble in a fashion such that their movement in a rapid repeating pattern produces a gravity wave beam sufficient to disrupt any void bubbles it encounters within some significant range. Depending on how wide the beam can spread and still be effective, and how quickly the void bubble array producing it could be shifted or moved around, it might be possible to 'sweep' a significant volume with overlapping beams, at the least making precise aiming unnecessary and at most creating a situation where it is difficult or impossible for an incoming void bubble weapon to get close enough to be damaging before it is swept by a beam and destroyed.

Either of these devices might also be used offensively - destroying an opponent's void bubbles (and thus disabling all tech using them) pre-emptively, possibly as the first wave of a larger attack. This might have happened to the Sybil and so reduced the numbers of possible doomsday weapons considerably (although probably wouldn't eliminate all of them if the Sybil was even a bit properly paranoid).

It's also possible that other options might come to mind over time. But these two seem to offer at least an initial idea or three about how to defend against void bubble attack.

Thoughts?

Thank you all for your replies! Perhaps I'll try to write down something, got a couple of ideas. See you around!

See you around!

Todd

[Vitto]

Hmm. I suppose that this would also allow for compensating for the motion of the target star or whatever over the 1000 years it would take to get there. A quite BOTE indicates the star would have moved about 6 trillion km in that time.

Indeed. But I guess that precise motion of stars is know very well to compensate.

That might be something to ask Adam about.

Yup, let's hear the expert!


Each void bubble contains a massive object, perhaps even a small black hole (Small = Ceres to Jupiter mass in this context - although a larger number of void motes each carrying a smaller BH could then use the Hawking radiation of the smaller holes to power themselves).

I guess that you can't use too much mass for a system like this, that can't be everywhere at the same time, or the mass/energy investment is too much in favor of the aggressor. If you convert the mass of a Jovian class planet half in wormhole and half for void bubble and their fuel, plus energy to create everything, I presume you came up with a good million metric bombs in the "very annoying" level of power.

Another option (possibly operating in concert with the constellation system) could be a 'gwaser' cannon - a gravity wave beam weapon. It has been suggested that vibrating cosmic strings can produce intense beams of gravity waves (LINK).

Perhaps also use the same system that create Thunderbolts, whichever it is or one similar and on a way smaller scale, only the Archai know, to create a cone or a plane of gravity waves. A shaped charge of sort.

[stevebowers]

Indeed. But I guess that precise motion of stars is know very well to compensate.

This can be calculated, yes. But there are always uncertainties, which increase with distance and time. Since some of these uncertainties are caused by events outside the observer's light cone, these unknown unknowns can only be estimated.

[Drashner1]

Hmm. I suppose that this would also allow for compensating for the motion of the target star or whatever over the 1000 years it would take to get there. A quite BOTE indicates the star would have moved about 6 trillion km in that time.

Indeed. But I guess that precise motion of stars is know very well to compensate.

That might be something to ask Adam about.

Yup, let's hear the expert!

I can reach out to him, but there's no guarantee he'll respond. But nothing ventured, nothing gained.

Each void bubble contains a massive object, perhaps even a small black hole (Small = Ceres to Jupiter mass in this context - although a larger number of void motes each carrying a smaller BH could then use the Hawking radiation of the smaller holes to power themselves).

I guess that you can't use too much mass for a system like this, that can't be everywhere at the same time, or the mass/energy investment is too much in favor of the aggressor. If you convert the mass of a Jovian class planet half in wormhole and half for void bubble and their fuel, plus energy to create everything, I presume you came up with a good million metric bombs in the "very annoying" level of power.

Couple of things here that came to me this AM:

a) I need to qualify my earlier statement about putting larger black holes inside a void bubble. There is a limit on this (per Adam) based on the size of the event horizon of the BH. If the event horizon is larger than the external radius of the void bubble, then the bubble will basically be destroyed (by essentially being swallowed by the BH).

I don't have time to run the numbers through the relevant calculator, but quoting from the existing article on Void Pockets:

The ultimate limit of this process is when the total combined mass contained within the system of nested void pockets (generally consisting of exotic matter machinery, mattercaches, nanofacturing systems, and finished products) equals or exceeds the mass of a black hole with an event horizon larger than the diameter of its outermost void bubble. For a 1 picometer (1e-12m) radius void bubble this limit is reached when the interior mass reaches approximately 1.49e15kg (almost seven times the mass of Halley’s Comet in Sol System).

Of course as we've already been discussing, larger void bubbles are possible - Void Ships being the largest size apparently possible for the archai (1000nm across exterior dimensions). And all this really means is that a larger number of lower mass void bubbles may be needed.

In terms of the matter-energy required - That's what Grazers are for In principle the S6 can bring in up to thousands of solar masses of raw material from hundreds to thousands of ly away if they really want to. Not saying they are literally consuming that much all the time to fuel their projects - but they can certainly exceed planetary masses with ease.

b) An alternative to attempting to defend multiple targets is to surround the Sybil's cluster with these devices as part of the attack - creating a 'wall' to intercept outgoing void weapons. Although obviously it could have set them up far in advance so this would be of limited use.

Another option (possibly operating in concert with the constellation system) could be a 'gwaser' cannon - a gravity wave beam weapon. It has been suggested that vibrating cosmic strings can produce intense beams of gravity waves (LINK).

Perhaps also use the same system that create Thunderbolts, whichever it is or one similar and on a way smaller scale, only the Archai know, to create a cone or a plane of gravity waves. A shaped charge of sort.

Per Adam, generation of a Thunderbolt requires a wormhole and consumes it in the process of generating the Thunderbolt. The 'beam' of the Thunderbolt is as thick as the radius of the wormhole throat.

Speaking of wormholes - In the reactionless drive article talking about disrupting void bubbles it also mentions 'exotic matter' - which is what keeps wormholes open and which (I've learned over the years) is more 'matter-energy stuff' rather than something you can readily pick up or the like. The archai can either generate it or make use of it as it naturally occurs due to vacuum fluctuations an it forms the basis for a lot of their space-time tech (wormholes, void bubbles, stasis void bubbles).

If the stuff can disrupt a void bubble and if the archai can generate or manipulate it, then we might image that they could either generate a 'shield' or field of exotic matter-energy that would destroy void bubbles trying to pass through it or could cause a temporary(?) change in the vacuum in the regions around their installations such that exotic matter-energy creation increases greatly and disrupts any void bubbles within the volume. Think the exotic matter/energy equivalent of the USER from Neal Ashers Human Polity universe.

This is utterly speculative of course, but since we're playing at least partly in the realm of myth/rumor around this it might also be an option. I might ask Adam about that as well.

Ok - gotta start my day.

More later,

Todd