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this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2024
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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.
@[email protected] I seem to recall Larry Niven played with this stuff in his teleportation short stories in the 70s (notably "All the bridges rusting"). And I had fun with it in "Glasshouse".
@[email protected] @[email protected] Peter F. Hamilton also uses the idea in a lot of various ways in his Salvation books. E.g. why deal with complicated propulsion systems when you can chuck the ingress end of a portal into a star and stick the egress end on the back of your ship.
@[email protected] @[email protected] A portal gun (with the other end of the portal inside the photosphere of a blue-white supergiant) makes a really neat blaster!
@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] Backblast might make it a weapon of last resort, though.
@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] true, but the fun part of a portal-ship is that there's really no difference between a crewed lander and a remote-controlled doomsday missile.
if you land somewhere uninhabited and/or friendly, you can drop a portal and then send people through. if it's unfriendly, you open the supergiant portal, and have the portal gun throw itself through a return-home portal that instantly closes. you build another ship