Re: Black globes and gravity

Mark F. Cook [email removed] writes:
>
> A)  Black globes cut off gravity.  If you turn one on while in orbit
>     around a large body (i.e. planet), you suddenly take off in a straight
>     line, tangetial to that body.

Does the theory about gravitons apply in Traveller?  If so, how's this for
a perpetual motion machine?

1. Vehicle with black globe sits at a certain height.  Globe is off.  Vehicle
falls.
2. Vehicle switches on its globe.  Vehicle now takes off as described above,
and also absorbs the gravitons.
3. Vehicle shuts off globe, uses some of the energy absorbed to move along
back to its previous position, and beams the rest at the planet.
4. Go to 1.

In another article, Mark F. Cook [email removed] writes:
>       You're right.  I just ran through the equations, and what I found
>  was that the energy in de-orbiting and that which a J-1 ship could
>  absorb was well over 10 million times in difference.
>       The scarry thing about this was that the lion's share of the
>  energy was in the form of potential energy ( E=mgh ).  This means that
>  a globed ship had best stay away from a planet.  A slight change in
>  depth to a gravity well could spell doom.

How far away must it stay from the planet?  The further it gets away,
the more potential energy it gains, as h in the above equation gets
bigger.  Meanwhile, it's losing potential energy as it gets closer to
something else, e.g. a star 2 parsecs away.

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 "Keyboard?  How quaint!" - M. Scott

 Adrian Hurt			     |	JANET:  [email removed]
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