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this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2024
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I'd do the math on how much thrust you'd get out of sticking one portal at the bottom of the Mariana Trench and the other in a ship, but I think it'd maybe be slightly tricky because you've got yourself an inertialess thruster right there, which is slightly illegal according to physics.
The Einstein cops are gonna show up and impound your spaceship
And that's just thinking about a static arrangement of portals. You could also use a dynamic arrangement where you use gravity to accelerate mass to arbitrarily high speeds and then fling it out the back
If you could make portals bigger you could also have a fun setup where you build your spaceship and then just let gravity accelerate it though a portal-loop.
You get going as fast as you want, then just swap the portals so you're now aimed at Mars.
Anyway the lazy, boring way to use a portal and pretend you aren't violating a bunch of physical laws is to just use it for fuel transport.
You have a bunch of fuel on the ground, a tiny tank on your rocket, and you keep topping off the rocket's tank by piping in the fuel.
BTW, as a variant on the kzinti lesson, the portals are extremely dangerous as a weapon, because of how good they are as a weapon.
Ignoring the obvious ways to fight with them like opening a portal on the enemy's hull, shoving out a nuke and then closing the portal...
You could also just have a rock that you're letting accelerate to arbitrary speeds in a vacuum. That's free unbounded kinetic energy, the only limitation being the "charge" time.
@[email protected] there are no unarmed spaceships
@[email protected] I recall Peter F. Hamilton doing just that in one of his books. The nuke part at least. Not sure about the space rock yeeting.
@[email protected] I love this, just for the "Variant of the Kzinti lesson" reference.
@[email protected] k'chee u'riit maraai, indeed.
@[email protected] The Pierson's Puppeteers did this to fuel probes in Ringworld. The only difference was their technology required a physical teleportation device to be placed at the destination instead of just opening a portal anywhere, & transmission was limited to the speed of light.