this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2024
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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 (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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (52 children)

This isn't a ship-destroying weapon, this is a civilization-ender if not planet-killer.

You've got a projectile moving at a significant fraction of the speed of light. This is a relativistic weapon: it's going to hit harder than if it was a nuke.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

@[email protected] honestly, a baseball at a significant fraction of c is sufficient - you don't need a tungsten crowbar

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