Re: Gravitics in TNE

[email removed] (Britta B. Damwitz) [Scott "2G" Kellogg] writes:
> Has anybody noticed that there's some inconsistency in being able to focus
> light by gravitics and not get propulsion?  After all, one needs a huge
> distortion in gravity to bend light.  The mass of the moon only slightly
> bends starlight.
> To focus a laser, one would need something like a small black hole.
> Yet we can't use this for propulsion?

Playing devil's (or at least, GDW's) advocate here, the answer as I see it
is that yes, you can.  Allow the "Thruster Plates" alternative maneuver
drive technology in your game, and there you have it.

Actually, there are a couple of "holes" that science-knowledgable players
and referees can poke in the "gravitic laser focussing" pseudo-explanation.
One is the above, that such sophisticated and powerful gravity manipulation
should enable a "reactionless" thruster technology.  Another is that any
gravity well that could focus laser light on a target that far away could
also focus small sensor arrays with very high resolution on such targets,
obviating the need for large-diameter sensor arrays, just as the magic
gravitic focussing obviates the need for large-diameter laser mirrors.

There is only one real answer to this dilemma.  The "magic" laser focussing
was introduced for a specific game purpose: to increase the range of space
combat to the point where the distance and time scales involved made
spacecraft maneuver fuel an important combat consideration.  This makes
Brilliant Lances space combat *much* more "interesting", and is the only
reason for including the technology.

If your players (or your scientific training ;) give you too much trouble
with the gravitic focussing, you can try the following handwaving to try and
clear up the trouble:

Any forces exerted by the gravity field on objects in the field, have a
reaction force, exerted by the field generator on it's mountings.
Therefore, a spaceship can't accellerate itself using the gravity field,
because any net force exerted on the ship by the field will be countered by
an identical and opposite net force exerted on the ship by the generator.

The gravitic focussing can't be used to improve sensor minimum array sizes,
because the amount a photon is bent depends on it's frequency.  So a field
which focusses one wavelength of EMS radiation on the detector array would
scatter all the others, making broad-spectrum analysis (which makes the EMS
sensor what it is) impossible.  Gravitic focussing works on lasers because
they are monochromatic (all one freqneucy) and therefore won't be diffracted
by the gravity field.  While I realize that this isn't much of an
explanation (after all, different frequency bands could use different
focussers and detectors), it might be enough to argue that this approach
isn't practical for sensors.

Finally (and if all else fails) you can disallow the gravitic focussing in
your campaign universe.  This will certainly remove the objection.  The
"magic" gravitic focussing is a "physics nullifier" anyway - it's just more
subtle about it than say, Dean Drive is (I suspect that just about any
"physics nullifier" can have dire consequences for all of physics, if used
in tricky, devious ways - some are just more subtle than others).  On the
other hand, if you go this route, then be prepared to have to rethink many
of the things that "published" sources take for granted.  Things like ranges
in space combat, for example, will be vastly different (either that, or
starships will look very odd).


[email removed]
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