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.

  • Foone🏳️‍⚧️@digipres.clubOP
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    10 months ago

    But yeah this is the ultimate doomsday weapon. You can accelerate indefinitely for free, you just have to wait.
    (and if you can put your portals in orbit of a more massive object, you get faster acceleration than 1g)

    So you don’t need more than a portal gun, a tungsten rod, and some time to blow the atmosphere off a planet.

      • Foone🏳️‍⚧️@digipres.clubOP
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        10 months ago

        The Nihilanth could teleport an entire army to earth, the combine can conquer a planet in hours, the g-man has control over time and space, but Cave Johnson’s invention could put a hole in a planet

        • Guy@hachyderm.io
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          10 months ago

          @foone@digipres.club boring “explanation” that the energy which can cross a portal is limited by the power of the portal generator - so you can only accelerate to c if your generator can output that much juice - it’s not free just super efficient

          • Foone🏳️‍⚧️@digipres.clubOP
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            10 months ago

            There’s also the gravity interaction: an infinitely falling object that never reaches the bigger body is also accelerating the bigger body.

            Your forever falling object is shoving the earth upward, very slowly. That could matter in the long enough term… But it seems kinda meaningless compared to the other ways you could use a portal.

            Still, might be handy if you need to adjust the orbit of a planet and are willing to wait.

            • Damon L. Wakes@mastodon.sdf.org
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              10 months ago

              @foone@digipres.club Now this is bugging me too. If you actually wanted to loop a falling object between two portals and forget about it, would it have to be at one of the Earth’s poles? I feel as though otherwise the object would start to drift out from between the two portals due to the Coriolis effect (ignoring the fact that an object left falling like this at the equator would constantly be cancelling out whatever effect it produced 12 hours previously).

                • Foone🏳️‍⚧️@digipres.clubOP
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                  10 months ago

                  The lab boys tell me that if you dump enough iron into a star, it’ll turn off. Well, we don’t have that much iron on hand, but what if it’s moving at 99% the speed of light?
                  They told me that wouldn’t help, but I said pack your bags: We’re doing it anyway

                  • Alisdair Calder McGregor@topspicy.social
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                    10 months ago

                    @foone@digipres.club don’t forget as well that the portal transit is instantaneous. Never mind the other implications, that alone breaks the universe in a number of exciting ways

                  • Foone🏳️‍⚧️@digipres.clubOP
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                    10 months ago

                    Portal 2 does establish that the portal-placing shot moves at the speed of light, but that just raises the question of how fast you move through the portals themselves.

                    It basically can’t be slower than light, or you’d chop yourself in half if you moved halfway into one and then backed out.

                    So it has to be lightspeed: which means, if relativity is still correct, that it’s also a time machine.

                  • Dan Turner@cosocial.ca
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                    10 months ago

                    @foone@digipres.club I wonder if the lab boys can find a way to convert energy to matter. If so, then you get an infinite iron machine because a portal is an infinite energy machine. If it go brrrrrr fast enough, Johnson might be able to create enough iron to end the sun.

                  • MultisampledNight@peoplemaking.games
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                    10 months ago

                    @foone@digipres.club heavy coughing so the experiment went fine, it was quite interesting! the control group told me they’d be experiencing some influence as well, but it’s probably just some measuring error. at least that’s what the lab boys tell me.

                  • viq@social.hackerspace.pl
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                    10 months ago

                    @foone@digipres.club
                    In a book (Bobiverse) two moon sized bodies were accelerated to very close to speed of light, and hit a star, coming at it from opposite directions.
                    Result was described as basically a nova.

                  • Dot@chitter.xyz
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                    10 months ago

                    @foone@digipres.club You just so happened to catch me while I had enough gunk in my throat to have a proper shake at the voice

                  • Henryk Plötz@chaos.social
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                    10 months ago

                    @foone@digipres.club Exclusive footage of Cave Johnson after performing the “turn star off” experiment dropped.

                  • EddiKat@meow.social
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                    10 months ago

                    @foone@digipres.club @garrwolfdog@yiff.life Without even seeing your first toot, I read this in Cave Johnson’s voice. Bravo, good job.

            • Coffeemancer Vanvidum@tiggi.es
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              10 months ago

              @foone@digipres.club One wonders what kinds of electromagnetic interaction tricks you can do with portal technology as well. At the very least, you can build a computer that’s physically enormous while being linked together through portals as if it’s microscopically adjacent.

      • Stainless Steel Raziel@mastodon.social
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        10 months ago

        @foone@digipres.club
        I think this is predicated on the assumption that a portal acts as if it’s anchored the same way a bell is to a rocket engine.

        I don’t think it is. Does anything in the games show a portal imparting thrust onto the wall/object it’s mounted on? I don’t think so. I think portals can’t be used for thrust.

        It’s also pretty clear to me that transfer through a portal is instantaneous, not limited to lightspeed. You can hang out/change direction halfway through a portal as much as you want.

    • Linus@schreibt.jetzt
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      10 months ago

      @foone@digipres.club how do you make sure it’s aligned right? It’s no good if it drifts to the side and hits the edge of the portal, maybe already at a dangerous speed, at your weapon site rather than your target