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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 (1 children)

my guess based on how big supernovas are (bigger than that. no matter how much you estimate "that" to be), the answer is "enough"

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

anyway so there's a point in Portal 2 where you fire a portal at a surface that's far enough away that there's noticeable light-speed delay before the portal opens, right?

but is that based on the distance between portals or the distance from the gun?

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

like, in the game's specific scenario, the distinction is irrelevant, but the portal gun is mobile after all. what if you set up a portal on earth, then hop in a rocket to pluto, then when you land, you fire it at the surface of pluto.
The distance between the gun and the surface is minimal, but the portal pair you just set up is about 5 light-hours long.

Does it take 5 hours for the portal to open? or does it open instantly?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (3 children)

anyway the fact the aperture science facility extended so deep underground in portal 2 was interesting.

hey, you know what a very deep underground facility would be real useful for? dropping stuff through portals and having it fall a long time, accelerating as much as possible.

I bet there's a borehole we never see that's just top to bottom and has as much atmosphere as possible evacuated from it, to lower air resistance

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

@[email protected] as long as you have two portals set up in a loop, would the actual distance between them matter at all? You could just put two portals 1nm apart in a vacuum and create an infinite accelerator. Then move the exit portal and BOOM

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

@[email protected] Why even bother evacuating the atmosphere, that's probably how they manage to heat the whole place :-)

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

@[email protected] Fun fact: holes like this are also useful for testing the effects of microgravity. NASA maintains several near Cleveland for studying the effects of microgravity on fluids like air, water, plasmas, etc. IIRC you get useful results until you hit terminal velocity