The Nightstar Zoo

Just something to do while bored:

http://www.schlockmercenary.com/d/20010325.html
Petey is just over a kilometer tall...
Lets assume there aren't any breachers and his shields are tight, projected out only to a point where the surface area is the same as a kilometer sphere.

That's a surface area of 12.5 million square meters ... oooh

http://www.schlockmercenary.com/d/20010715.html
Given: at least a 9-1 ratio of shield power needed. Rounded up to 10-1
Assuming: your railgun fires shells with less than 1 square meter cross sectional area.

Right there, you have a 125 million to 1 advantage.

Given a 500m plant on petey, and assuming that annie plant power is roughly proportional to volume...
4pi * 500*500 / 125M ~=~ 4pi * 0.045 *0.045
So you'd only need a 5cm annie's worth of power to *just* breach a static shield around a Thunderhead.

Of course, if the AI is operational, it will concentrate the power where the hit is expected, and can vary the shield's radius & shape as nessesary. The target will also be dodging, and you still need to get through armor after the shield has sapped much of your kinetic energy.

http://www.schlockmercenary.com/d/20001105.html
The Kitesfear's AI probably wasn't too powerful; it certainly didn't talk much. And having a human muck around with the shield settings is just plain dangerous... the sabots seem much more respectable of a threat now despite the availability of shields.
I imagine the station ended up taking some amount of collateral damage (if not to the hull, at least to the stress level of the administration). But they'd have the computational power to pick off the sabots and minimize the repair bill.

-----

Note:
Also, if annie power is proportional to volume, all ships that are big enough to pull off unified shields will have about the same protection from conventional weapons. (Since they're roughly the same proportions of ship vs annie plants)

-----

PS:
Considering the Buuthandi story, and the starbomb comments, we could get a minimum power output per volume of annie plant.
Consider that petey said the blast had a planetary fry zone of X light years, what kind of power such a kill implies, and that the ships were on the order of a few light hours or less from the star.
Take the annie plant needing to shield almost an entire hemisphere, and you should have a decent minimum guesstimate.

Took me a minute to get this. You are saying that the power of the defender's annie plant is spread evenly over the surface area of the shield, while the entire power of the attacker is focused on the 1m cross-section of the "bullet".

I'm not sure that is safe to assume...since gravitics are a completely made-up technology, they work any way that Howard says. If he decides that generating the shield is the hard part and expanding it requires comparatively little power, then that is how it works. So you would still have a slight advantage to the attacker, but probably not anything noticeable.



I believe it has been canonically stated that power of an annie plant does not scale linearly.



Ermm...volume of a sphere is 4/3 * pi * r * r * r. So, if the plant was 500m in diameter, then we have:

(4/3)pi * 250 * 250 * 250 = 65,449,846 m**3 (cubic meters)

Now, let's assume for the moment that you're right, that the attacker has a 125M-to-1 advantage, and that output scales linearly by radius, so that the attacker's plant can be 1/125M-th the volume of the defender's. That means that the required volume of the defender's annie plant is 0.52m**3. Which means that said annie plant needs a radius of 0.54m**3, which means a diameter of a little over 1m. Still substantially smaller than the Thunderhead's plant, but larger than you thought.

Remember that volume increase as a cube function; if you double the radius, you increase the volume eight-fold.

I'm not sure whether comparing powerplants is sensible... the "height" of a gravitic "bump" required to deflect light is not dependent on the intensity of the light, it's just geometry. Once you can do that, you're safe from lasers. In fact, you're safe from anything, since the critical variable for overcoming a gravitic obstacle is velocity, not momentum (the repulsive force is proportional to the projectile's mass). Good luck making such a gravity gradient, though. It's basically the opposite of a black hole. A white wall?

There's a loophole in this argumentation, though. Natural gravity fields of that magnitude are only made by huge mass densities. Schlockiverse gravitics somehow simulate this effect without the huge masses, by the clever application of preposterous energies (but obviously not energies in the scale of black holes... there's only a limited amount of antimatter a battleship can store). It is thinkable that such an artificial gravity gradient is not capable of providing a force proportional to the target mass when the latter exceeds a certain limit.

Quick nitpick - the AIs onboard ships are what control the shielding, and they do so by effectively using ten times the amount of energy required to generate the attacking beam weapon in the first place in order to deflect the beam. That's the reason combat ships like Thunderheads have those huge annie-plants; the AI control to focus on that locus between beam and shield is very tightly timed, and thus the whole shield doesn't need to be incredibly powerful - it's the point of impact which is amplified. Faster and smarter AIs can do more loci of intersection at once, especially if they have access to a lot of power, which means they can fend off several attacks in a fleet engagement, and also have enough time to drop the shields long enough to 'flick' out at incoming projectiles like breacher rounds with gravy guns or engage in terapedo/breacher counterfire.

Nitpick #2: they're using neutronium reactors, not 'antimatter' reactors (that's Star Trek), so the natural product of a neutronium reactor is... gravity. Thus, as it has been stated earlier, gravy guns and shields are powered directly from the reactors. Stronger shields and stronger guns require a larger gravitic power source, which means a larger annie-plant.

The neutronium is just the fuel source, the reactors are matter annihilation. (Hence Annie plants, which I think is the phrasing causing the confusion here)

I get the impression that anything can be plugged into an annie plant and turned into energy, but neutronium is the least volume-intensive, as its a mass-to-energy conversion.

I believe it's a direct mass-to-energy conversion, with probably an extremely high efficiency. As Howard occasionally says, they have more power than they know what to do with for most applications.

It's only in military applications, where it's the relative amounts of power that matter, that one needs large annie plants.

As per this strip (which I've posted often enough before), they use 'direct conversion of neutronium' in order to create power through neutronium annihilation. Neutronium is easy enough to create given gravy guns and sufficient power to fire them; battleplates seem to use this technology to generate their own fuel and it's also a dandy way of removing evidence.

The power plant generates the gravitic field which, I assume, is what keeps the neutronium safely contained. Thus, any matter can be used as fuel once it's been converted to neutronium... but there's no getting around that step. And yes, it's mostly when they've got military applications which involve heavy shielding to deflect large masses, high-energy weapons applications, or high acceleration requirements are the large plants really needed.

Oopsy
So a 1m plant's worth of energy blasting away is needed.

The AI has got to be extremely important, since a static shield would be almost worthless and screwing up the calculations or taking too long at them means you get even less shielding at the point of impact.

http://www.schlockmercenary.com/d/20020703.html
If we take him to mean a Sun-like star, that's 10^30 kg worth of conversion bomb.
10^30 * (3x10^8)^2
= 9*10^46 J of energy being deposited.

1 Light hour is 10^12 m
so out of a sphere with surface area 4 pi * 10^24, the thunderhead would absorb about a circle of area pi * 500^2, or 6 x 10^-20 of it.

Which gives 5.4x10^27 J

Which then implies that a military-grade Tausennigan 500m annie can easily generate 5x10^28 J of energy in however long it takes for the nova to wash over it.

Which would use up a minimum of ...
M = 5x10^28 / 9x10^19
= 5x10^8 kg of reactor fuel. Sounds like a half million tons of neutronium down the tubes, unless I made another mistake.

10 Kg of neutronium generates no more or less gravity than 10 Kg of styrofoam. It just packs the generating mass into less space. I can’t think of any reason to compress the matter and anti matter to neutronium before use, but then, I’m not the writer. For capture of that energy, then neutronium would be useful. Trying to capture the energy of MeV level photons is difficult business. The Ten-thickness of neutronium would allow most of the energy to be captured in a small space.

From the comic, the “shields” in the Schlock universe seem to be more of an interceptor than an actual barrier. Much of the Schlock universe runs on magic, but it remains internally consistent and I’m willing to suspend disbelief for a fun story.

“If you're wondering how he eats and breathes And other science facts, Just repeat to yourself it's just a show, I should really just relax.” MST3K

The neutronium is just the standard fuel for the reactor.
If you had styrofoam, it would give you the same except really hard to carry around.

PS:
Besides, if you look at http://www.schlockmercenary.com/d/20020703.html it practically begs you to run with the numbers.

From what we've seen, part of the reason the matter-annihilation plants work is because of the fuel in question - and that the act of generating power means generating the gravitic waves which let you make more fuel from normal matter.

*slap-slap*
There is no antimatter

I know that 'annie' plant is confusion, leading to that conclusion. I also know that the most reasonable method to 'annihilate' matter is matter-antimatter reaction.

However, AFAIK, it is canon that the annie plants take neutronium and simply convert it to energy, no ifs, buts, or antimatter.

The type of fuel dosen't matter. You can compact anything down to neutronium if need be.

Carrying around a million tons of styrofoam would look terribly silly, and restrict your movement in inhabited systems somewhat, but it would still provide the mass you need for your reactor.

If you used the styrofoam, you ship would float. Assuming you landed slowly enough that you didn't melt all the styrofoam, that is.

And you could hide in it. Considering the volume involved, you might be able to hide a couple of planets in it.

In fact, if this is feasible, it might be desirable to have a system whereby your neutronium fuel can be converted to styrofoam peanuts, clamshells, pellets, or kreely action-figures.

On a slightly scarier note, what if it the entire core of a single Thunderhead annie-plant were converted to Ovalquick and fed to Schlock? Would he then demand moon-sized plasma cannons?

Something is missing from this post, but I'm too sleep-deprived to think what it might be at the moment.

Bah. Use aerogel instead. if it wasn't translucent you might be able to hide a few stars.



Heh. Or full size aerogel decoys of your own ship.



God help us.



Thank you God.

Again, look at the first strip that I linked to - they do EXACTLY that; convert normal matter to neutronium fuel grains. 'Breed their own neutronium fuel grains' is the exact quote, which suggests rather strongly that you do need neutronium for the annie process to work properly. Carrying around a million tones of styrofoam in a pre-neutronium state will probably not work for you, and indeed take up far more volume than it's worth. Better to just compact it so it's immediately usable as fuel and save yourself the time later.

Every annie-plant we've seen reference to, be it in military or civilian use, has apparently been fueled by neutronium. They go out of their way to point out that the reactors make their own fuel, and Howard has stated before that it is the product of the neutronium annihilation reaction (gravity) which is used for firing gravy guns and forming shields or propelling ships across the void. Therefore, trying to use something not as heavily 'concentrated' as neutronium seems to be counterproductive if not impossible, especially if the reaction is supposed to generate gravitic effects.

well, one could build an annie plant based around the annihilation of Styrofoam, just as one 'could' build a steam locomotive designed to burn old newspapers. In either case, you are using a viable fuel source, but the relatively low energy density of your fuel limits your applications. Coal carries a much higher energy density than Newspaper, and Neutronium carries a higher fuel density than anything else.

Also, it would be extremely difficult, even for AIs, to locate incoming railgun rounds, while the energy a kinetic weapon is capable of carrying is ultimately limited by it's own mass. (no exceeding C in this case) Thus, a greater area of shielding does need to be kept up in power against most weapons. Especially when one considers the mimimum resolution of shield strength concentration. If ACME shield model XYZ-928 cannot concentrate power in an area smaller than 10m^2, then a 1cm^2 sabot still requires an area 100 thousand times it's own size be driven to a power capable of deflecting it.
+100
x100
10,000
x10
100,000

No, it's not. You have to take relativity into account for the kind of kinetic weapons that get thrown around in the Schlockiverse. E = ½mv² doesn't cut it at those speeds. Relativistic kinetic energy, E = ( mc² / (1-v²/c²)^0.5 ) - mc², approaches infinity as v approaches c, for any m > 0. This means that you can get kinetic energy arbitrarily close to infinity, from any mass at all, without exceeding the speed of light.

Though I suppose it could technically be claimed that it's still limited by the projectile's mass... it's just that the projectile's mass also approaches infinity as its velocity approaches the speed of light, and the limit increases accordingly.

and gravetic shielding would make the projectiles actual mass convieniently irrelevent. at any rate, I suspect this debate may be quickly approaching the point of throwing a brick at a mattress, and the energy sink on the shielded ship is the mattress. (I'll take the super-king size, with extra padding thank you!)

hmm... If we accept an increase in mass as Velocity approaches C, (a theory I could never quite accept), then any shielding at all will square it's own effect in slowing such a projectile down. not only a reduction in the projectile's actual velocity, but it's effective mass as well.

umm... are railgun rounds solid slug, or do they carry nifty, hull breaching 'packages'? (the kind that go "BOOM!")

You must accept it, but it won't have any effective benefit to the shields. The energy required to decellerate the projectile is the same as the energy required to accelerate it. There's no way around that.

It's a matter of definition. In school, we learnt that the mass increases with relativistic speed (m* = m gamma), and the momentum was p = m* v, as usual. At uni, we didn't tamper with the mass, but departed from the classical definition of impulse instead , making it p = m v gamma instead. Is that easier to understand?

(It's been a while, I might be remembering it wrongly.)