Thread:Ghelæ/@comment-1073312-20130210150225/@comment-47205-20130310074858

First of all, I need to point out that I've only been formally educated on special relativity. General relativity, I assume, needs a knowledge of tensor mathematics, which in turn requires knowledge of matrix mathermatics, which is itself first-year stuff (i.e. I'm still learning the basics). In fact, recently, my maths lecturer went off on a tangent about the application of a certain feature of some vector spaces which is important in general relativity for a particular reason, and then told us to immediately forget about it since it wasn't at all important to us yet.

I have at least been taught the Schrödinger equation now, though. :P

However, if something doesn't contradict reality as we currently know it, it shouldn't contradict the SporeWikiverse, simply on the principle that we want the SporeWikiverse physics (especially as far as the basics are concerned) to deviate from reality as little as possible. The only problem I can think of is that a gravtational constant is required for constant planck units (for those units that involve G in their calculation, which is most of them except for charge), but I don't think planck units haven't featured too heavily in our fiction.

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Ah, pp-waves of death. I mentioned them on User:Ghelæ/Tech, and AFAIK, they're not restricted to Brans-Dicke theory (I first read about them as the "Thunderbolt" weapon on Orion's Arm; I'm surprised you didn't propose introducing them to the SporeWikiverse before :P). If we allow naked singularities into the SporeWikiverse, I'm sure pp-waves of death can appear too; if we don't, then they can't.

However, I'm not so sure if it would actually be a feasible method of containing a false vacuum. You might as well make a pocket universe, trap your target inside it, and then destroy it (via vacuum collapse or otherwise). Since we should be near to discovering whether the false vacuum situation accurately describes our reality (with more precice measurements of the Higgs mass), perhaps we could have some sort of weapon that we don't currently describe as using false vacuum physics, but can easily be retconned into doing so if such a thing proves plausible?

Now onto pitch drives: firstly, you've reminded me of something else to add to that tech page. I'd forgotten about the possibility of truly adjustable constants like in Brans-Dicke theory. It would certainly work.

I can't quite remember the discussions about the weapon that you mention there, however. I would have thought that a black hole could be accelerated to ultrarelativistic speeds by... whatever mechanism it is that we normally use for such accelerations. So I might need a recap on that topic.