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

[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