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.
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.club Yes, but if everyone built 1g torchships pretty soon there’d be no oceans! Much better to use Jupiter instead: nobody will miss it, right?
@cstross@wandering.shop yeah!
Or there’s that possibility that Europa has more ocean water than earth, why not drain that? You can get there pretty easy with a torch ship…
Or hell, with free thrust let’s just deorbit all the comets in the oort cloud into Mars and use the new Barsoom Ocean as our remass.
@foone@digipres.club @cstross@wandering.shop Don’t drain Europa! It will anger the hyperintelligent squid there!
@michaelgemar@mstdn.ca @cstross@wandering.shop
that just provides an episode for our Torchship Explorers show. Captain Laser has to go help some ice miners working to set up a portal farm on the bottom of the European ocean, when their drills keep getting attacked, and the crew has to learn to communicate with the squids and figure out how to stop the miners from just going “fuck it” and poisoning the whole ocean.
@cstross@wandering.shop (I did think about jupiter more seriously but the problem is that you’d have to build a structure that could withstand the pressures of Jupiter’s atmosphere as it falls into the planet. That’s way harder than something that can survive the earth’s oceans, even if you would get more thrust out of it)
@foone@digipres.club @cstross@wandering.shop Why not just open a portal into the Sun?
@cstross@wandering.shop @foone@digipres.club As long as you only use it sparingly, climate change induced ocean level increase isn’t an issue. Probably doesn’t help with the rest of climate change, and when we inevitably don’t use it sparingly we get fun new environmental crises, but hey.
@adehnert@mastodon.mit.edu @cstross@wandering.shop unfortunately the Half Life universe has the oceans already having dropped by a significant amount, because someone else (The Combine) is already draining the oceans. So using the ocean as remass is not the best idea, as easy as it is.
But yeah: you could use it just enough to get to Jupiter or some other source.
@cstross@wandering.shop @foone@digipres.club
I seem to recall Jupiter is the reason we only have planet destroying asteroids every half a billion years or so…
@StompyRobot@mastodon.gamedev.place @cstross@wandering.shop planet destroying asteroids are the kind of thing that only civilizations without relativistic impactors have to worry about.
@foone@digipres.club @cstross@wandering.shop good point!
@cstross@wandering.shop @foone@digipres.club most of the water harvested from Jupiter would be burned getting away from Jupiter and eventually be recaptured by Jupiter because Jupiter is fucking massive
@aethylred@mastodon.nz @cstross@wandering.shop not if you’ve got portals! you can harvest remass from the bottom of a gravity well and transport it anywhere, for free!
@foone@digipres.club @cstross@wandering.shop oh, put the planteside portal low in the gravity well where the atmospheric pressure matches your requirements and have the shipboard aperture vent directly into space, won’t even need to torch it
…it would very slightly suck the gas giant towards the planetside portal though