The Nightstar Zoo

We saw recently (3/18) that for annie plants, bigger is exponentially better. So the question is: Does that curve extend even up to the point of more than the energy-equivalence of the total mass of the neutronium?

Crunching some numbers: Oisri has a mass of 1.2 earths (3/11), or roughly 7.2×10^24 kg. Matter has an energy density of c^2, or roughly 9X10^16 J/kg. Thus, if conservation holds (and the curve either doesn't go that high, or is of how much energy can be produced per unit time), Oisri can produce up to roughly 6.48X10^41 J before being expended.

The Core produces many billion times as much energy as a really big star, for sufficiently absurd values of "many" (3/2/2009). One billion times the output of the sun is roughly 4X10^35 J/S, so Oisri's total capacity would be roughly 3 weeks' worth of that; "really big star" and "absurd values of 'many'" implies at least a few orders of magnitude better than that, meaning that if Petey thought it was worth diverting resources from Andromeda (and keeping the Core would probably be that important), he could counter it in a few hours at most. So is Gasca simply relying on surprise when he says he could take the Core with Oisri, or is it hyperbole (not likely), or does an annie plant that large violate conservation of mass/energy? (Or does the Core produce less than a few hundred billion times as much energy as Earth's sun?)

Annie plants do not violate Conservation of Mass and Energy. The power curve is more like the size of the nozzle -- you can deliver more at once, up to the point where (at some theoretical maximum) you can safely annihilate all your neutronium in one go.

The core DOES violate Conservation. A lot. But concentrating that as firepower is not something the core generator was built to do. There are large focusing mechanisms around it that provide that functionality, and it's safe to assume that Petey has been working on additional connected tools -- gears off the same giant drive-shaft, if you will.

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Creator and Cartoonist, Schlock Mercenary

My understanding (which isn't that good, because nobody's is) is that Zero Point Energy doesn't violate conservation of energy, because conservation of energy doesn't apply under those circumstances. If it works. Maybe.

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"A sufficiently-advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
Arthur C. Clarke
"Sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology."
Jack L. Chalker
"Magic is just another way of saying 'I don't know how it works.'"
Larry Niven

My understanding (which isn't that good, because nobody's is) is that Zero Point Energy doesn't violate conservation of energy, because conservation of energy doesn't apply under those circumstances. If it works. Maybe.[/quote]

It's a little bit like saying a United States Congressman going 100mph on the beltway isn't violating the speed limit because the law isn't allowed to stop him when he's on his way to a session.

HE IS STILL SPEEDING.

But yeah, I get what you're saying.

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Creator and Cartoonist, Schlock Mercenary

So taking the Core with Oisri would be possible simply because the Core can't focus its energy output and Oisri can?

This may've been covered way back, but can annie plants be refueled? I would imagine that once the thing is built it's a simple matter to put the anti-matter where you want it if it runs out. You'd have to for them to be of any use. Same thing for the neutronium.

If you need to build a whole new plant every time one runs out of fuel that'd be incredibly inefficient from a design standpoint.

Given that, the "big gun" metaphor would hold true, and this one can be reloaded.

Yes, they can. See the storyarc with Petey's (aka "the Rogue's") Mitt / Fastball ships taking the fuel out of an annieplant at high speed. Somewhere in there, there was either dialogue or a footnote that talked about refueling.

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After 3 long, weaponless years, I became the wielder of the Doobie/Dobie gun!

There's no anti-matter involved, remember? (There'll be references in the canonical science sticky if you want them.)

It says Neutronium is involved, it does in fact not rule out the presence of anti-matter in the underlying reactions.

I know they involve Neutronium, but the stickied science post was pretty clear on the underlying science being unknown, basically(and also warning against trying to figure it out, since it's not just unknown to us, it's unknowable under our current understanding of physics). I just assumed the annihilation of the neutronium was achieved through anti-matter reaction. I always imagined annie plants being a place where concentrated matter and anti-matter(Neutronium and Anti-Neutronium) annihilated each other.

The neutronium would be easy to get a hold of, with fine gravitic control you can make it yourself, the anti-neutronium on the other hand... a bit more messy. The simpliest solution would be to say the special thing(the part that we don't and cannot understand) about annie plants that make them work is that they can somehow convert the up and down quarks of a neutron into up and down anti-quarks. So the matter would stay matter until it's needed for conversion, quickly be turned into anti-matter, and then combined for energy release. It would explain why we normally only hear about the neutronium evaporating, and would explain this a bit better.

If an annie plant is just a ball of neutronium, a mechanism to quickly convert any amount of that mass to anti-neutronium, and a mechanism to harness that energy(not to mention all those neutrinos)... I'm not so good with the maths, but would a sphere of reaction matter of increasing size make the exponential growth of energy output feasible? I want to say yes(logically it makes sense to me), but I don't have any background in the mathematics I'd need to have to know for sure.

Also it could just be a lot of hamsters running around in a very large wheel.

Given how people react to the use of antimatter, I think it's safe to say that there is no antimatter carried in annie plants.

Annie plants are supposed to directly annihilate matter to energy, without the need for the use of antimatter. How exactly they do that has not been specified, so currently, it happens by "magic".

It's a little bit like saying a United States Congressman going 100mph on the beltway isn't violating the speed limit because the law isn't allowed to stop him when he's on his way to a session.

HE IS STILL SPEEDING.

But yeah, I get what you're saying.[/quote]

To be more exact, a "Law" only applies until it doesn't. The core generator is able to create energy without any apparent loss of mass-energy somewhere else. That means one of two things:
1) There is a mass-energy input from somewhere; it just isn't apparent.
2) The "Law" of Conservation of Energy is not universal.

Actually, a better example is the fact that it's a criminal offense (punishable by execution) to teach Christian doctrine in most Moslem Theocracies. A person teaching Christian doctrine in the US is not violating the law, because Muslim Law does not apply in the US.

It brings me back to a repeated dialogue in Larry Niven's various books:
"Isn't that impossible?"
"Not if it's being done; no."

If the core generator works, then Conservation of Mass-Energy is wrong.
Proof: COE says you can't get more out of a closed system than you put into it. The core generator is capable of producing almost infinitely more output than input. COE says this can't happen, but it does. COE is wrong. QED. Remember, COE is just an observation that's been right so far. It wasn't written on those tablets Moses brought down from the mountain. It isn't mentioned in the Sermon on the Mount, or the Qoran. It's not even on the Golden tablets Joseph Smith translated (Howard--check me on this; I haven't read the entire Book of Mormon; interesting though it was, even my fast reading couldn't finish it in a day).

COE is a Theory; it's a good one, and it's useful. If someone figures out how to make a ZPE generator work, COE will have to be amended. Every scientific theory is subject to revision when it doesn't conform to observed facts. In the Schlockiverse, the Core Generator works, therefore, COE needs to be revised.

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===============================================
"A sufficiently-advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
Arthur C. Clarke
"Sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology."
Jack L. Chalker
"Magic is just another way of saying 'I don't know how it works.'"
Larry Niven

I just figured that with spherical structures, volume goes up faster than surface area, so bigger is always more efficient if power is proportional to volume.

Annie plants were used to manufacture Antimatter (Fuller's Purifying Soap O' Doom) on Credomar, right? That kind of implies that it's not normally present, or at least not in large quantities.

There is also the possibility that vacuum energy is a limited (though huge) pool being drained, in which case a zero point generator isn't violating conservation of energy.

Of course, then you run into the implications that draining the (poorly understood) energy out of the fabric of the universe might turn out to be a very, very bad thing in the long run.

You just had to say that, didn't you...

Well, we do know that if you screw up the process, then you can get dislodged from the rest of the universe, and have a baby universe destroy everything.

That probably falls into the category of "very, very bad thing".

Made even worse by the fact that the Pa'anuri were using this as a weapon to get rid of annoying baryonic matter entities in our galaxy i.e. us. They did this just because we annoyed them with the teraport.

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The MacNut
Artist and writer of The Vanguard, a space opera superhero comic.

Err, no. Yes, we're annoying baryonic matter entities, but they weren't trying to get rid of us because our teraports annoyed them. Or at least, that isn't necessarily the case. Remember, teraport and teraport area denial fields were used as weapons to kill the Pa'anuri in our galaxy.

The really chilling and unanswered question is "How could they know that would happen?"

Past experience?

Simplest explanation: a sufficiently good understanding of hyperspatial math.

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After 3 long, weaponless years, I became the wielder of the Doobie/Dobie gun!

On this large annie plant, It converts matter to energy at a faster rate than smaller plants, same mass -> energy ratio.

This implies to me it's good for giving very short, very strong bursts of energy, before you need to dump another planet into it to refuel.

What few things might need insanely high energy input for brief periods of time?
//Torrenal

For a plant this size it's possible the neutronium inside has enough mass that it's own gravity can keep it from evaporating so they can use far less energy for containment.