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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 10 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 10 months ago (68 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (59 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (57 children)

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.