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In Portal, using the portal gun to get to the moon is the obvious space travel usage, but I think people are overlooking how it'd let you trivially break the rocket equation. (digipres.club)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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In Portal, using the portal gun to get to the moon is the obvious space travel usage, but I think people are overlooking how it'd let you trivially break the rocket equation.

Hell, you could build a >1g torchship using nothing but the ocean.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (82 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (72 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

@[email protected]

I think - I am a physicist but not a rocket engineer - that a portal wouldn't propel anything.

Putting a portal on the underside of the spaceship and another in the deep ocean just makes the two of those places adjacent. The water would spray into space (and probably immediately freeze) but the reaction force wouldn't be on the ship: there's no water pushing back against it, after all. If there's any reaction force it would be against the ocean.

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