New user + what is up with all the mentions of fractals?

[ExabyteMiner256]

Wait a minute.

You said: WH radius = 1 km
And: If ship length > WH radius, then ship breaks
And: If ship length > 2 km, then ship breaks

Thing is, if it's assumed that the "WH radius" and "2 km" in the second and third lines are the same, then you get

1 km = 2 km

which is obviously false. Did you perhaps mean to say "diameter" somewhere in your post?

I didn't write as artfully as I should have and it would likely have been clearer if I had said diameter in at least one spot. To clarify:

For stylistic reason we generally speak in terms of a wormhole's radius - an 1800m WH means the Throat has a radius of 1800 meters.

If the radius of the wormhole Throat is 1km, then a ship passing thru it can be 2km long since the diameter of the Throat would be 2km.

However, if the ship were at the center of the Throat, then the zone of max tidal forces would be 1km from that center - and if any part of the ship extended more than 1km from that center (meaning if the ship were more than 2km long or had cables or other extensions extending from it's center point more than 1km from it), that portion would experience extreme tidal forces and be torn apart.

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Also, I gather that a big loose collection of ships all piled loosely together would be OK, even if the pile exceeded the size limit for a normal rigid ship (as long as the individual subunits didn't. Am I correct in assuming this?

It depends on what you mean by a 'loose pile'. If you spaced individual craft out in a line entering the wormhole, then each would experience the folding effect individually. If you literally had them all in a clump then the clump would likely experience the transition as a single object and be subject to the same size limits as a single ship. I suspect that there is some minimum distance that ships would have to maintain between each other to be sure to experience the transition as an individual vessel. Perhaps a distance equal to or greater than the minimum size of the Throat itself.

A weirder effect is that (IIRC) two ships entering a wormhole mouth from opposite sides (from the 'top' and 'bottom' say) can transit through it and exit out the other mouth (out of the opposite sides) without ever actually encountering each other.

Hope this helps,

Todd

If I understand this correctly, the tidal forces are trying to pull things in/near the WH apart from each other. This causes super long ships to experience all that tidal force along the axis of too-long-ness summed up, and something breaks. However, once every (broken-off) segment is shorter than the max length, they can handle the stress. So in your example of the ship with a 2km cable on it, the parts that break wouldn't necessarily be the parts at the ends--it could happen anywhere, though it would be more likely to break wherever doing so would require the least energy (i.e. at weak points).

Because the little piled-up ships in my example aren't tied together or anything, the tidal forces would just make them all fall away from each other, and nothing would need to break because no single object is longer than the max length. What's your reasoning for multiple ships going through together acting like the same ship?

Also, thanks for clarifying that "radius vs. diameter" mix up. (By the way, what does "IIRC" mean?)

A weirder effect is that (IIRC) two ships entering a wormhole mouth from opposite sides (from the 'top' and 'bottom' say) can transit through it and exit out the other mouth (out of the opposite sides) without ever actually encountering each other.

I knew this already. The visualization of a WH with two disks connected by a tube could help...

The page with the above picture in it

This is approximately what a wormhole in Flatland would look like to us 3D beings. What you are calling the "Throat" seems to refer to the ring around the middle of the "tube" where the Flatlanders would go through. Each "disk" is a region of Flatland (or another 2D universe) where, again, the Flatlanders would be going about their business. They are not aware of the 3D space that we see inside the tube or between the two disks, and to them, the Throat has no "interior". The "interior" for observers on one side is the "exterior" for those on the other side. So, while this model has fewer dimensions than a real WH, it's a good analogy, and a while back, I used it to figure that the two ships from opposite sides wouldn't hit each other, among other things (e.g. the inside and outside flipping).