Stutterwarp as a WMD?

[McPerth]

Er.


Stutterwarp doesn't add normal space velocity, it sidesteps Newton by scaling up microjumping.


So the stutterwarp field shuts off, ship should have the velocity it had at stutterwarp initiation, or arguably none.


So IMO stutterwarp ships hit grav fields of the planet it stops, and just plinks into the planet.

The idea in the OP (and in the post it derivates from) is to let the gravigy of a planet to accelerate your ship, then stutterwarping away to be accelerated again, and so mounting up speed until it becomes a kinetic superbomb.

Then stutterwarping until your target, and, as you say, your speed is kept, so letting the ship to crash at this monstruous speed against the target planet.

Spoiler

See that this is not too much different than CT Yaskoydray planet busters (IIRC as described in Secret of the Ancients), that accelerated by gracity to a portal that teleported it again to the starting point, so being accelerated again until near -c speeds, and then were released at those speeds against a planet

Now, there is one other aspect of the stutterwarp that might be an issue.

Since you are effectively teleporting entire ships into X space ahead of the original position, the ship could be set to rematerialize inside a station or other fixed object not stutterwarping. That might be a messy fusion event.

This is mostly handwaved in 2300AD setting, but it seems there's some safety that avoids it to happen, as no such collisions are reported in the entire (AFAIK) 2300AD literature.

My take on it (and just this, my take) is that the own gravity of any object, as insignificant as it can be, stops the warping.

See that a cololary of this would be that no bullet can hit a warping ship, as the time it stays in real space is too short (nanoseconds) to be hit, and it will not end up in another object. See that all anti-ship wepons in 2300AD are beams, be them detonation ones or not.

The main stutterwarp WMD I came up with was an anti-matter warhead. A mini-stutterwarp takes a bottled isolated chunk of anti-matter and stutterwarps it into the same space as a duplicate of matter and- kaboom.

I'm afraid anti-mater weapons are still as science fiction in 2300AD setting as they are now...

 

[giant.robot]

That's fine for militaries, but not for terrorists.

One of the key aspects of terrorism is "we can do this bad thing any time and anywhere" but as the thread points out that's not really possible with this tactic. Old fashioned WMDs would be much more attractive for terrorists for the same reasons they're attractive today.

Terrorists are also interested in terror for the sake of social influence/control. Something so destructive as destroying a colony or continent (in the best case relativistic Footfall) would unite everyone in human space against the terror group.

It's the same argument as mass destruction today, some terror groups might convince themselves some massive event would cow their enemies but it would likely result in their own utter destruction. WMDs in the hands of terrorists would be more effective if they weren't used but the powers that be and populace at large knew they had them.

 

[McPerth]

One of the key aspects of terrorism is "we can do this bad thing any time and anywhere" but as the thread points out that's not really possible with this tactic. Old fashioned WMDs would be much more attractive for terrorists for the same reasons they're attractive today.

Terrorists are also interested in terror for the sake of social influence/control. Something so destructive as destroying a colony or continent (in the best case relativistic Footfall) would unite everyone in human space against the terror group.

It's the same argument as mass destruction today, some terror groups might convince themselves some massive event would cow their enemies but it would likely result in their own utter destruction. WMDs in the hands of terrorists would be more effective if they weren't used but the powers that be and populace at large knew they had them.

Fully agreed, terrism has political goals that make any such use of WMD probably countrproducent for themselves. And also happens to states, as the main value of those same WMD is more as a threat than as weapons to be really used (and probably would produce retaliation).

------------------------

This said (now mod hat on):

[m;]Please, beware the risk of any discussion about terrorim to turn into politics. It has been fine to now, but the line is thin, and I'd hate to have to act if things go that way[/m;]

 

[aramis]

Any reasonably fast space drive is inherently also a WMD.

If it can get you away from a gravity well, it can at least kill a city.

If it can go FTL, it should be able to crack a planet, or better.

My players realized very quickly that, since Stutterwarp didn't negate inertial vector, then you can use it to set orbit, or accumulate a huge vector and smash a planet.

Most system controllers are going to know the same. Any ship even starting to look like they're doing that is going to get dealt with severely.

 

[Brandon C]

My belief is that if stutterwarp can be used as a WMD, the French would have done so against the Kafers in retaliation for atrocities on Arcturus and Aurorae and I doubt any other nation involved in the war would have given more than a token protest.

 

[Libris]

My take is that stutterwarp induces micro-jumps in the mega or giga hertz frequency making the chances of appearing inside something else pretty low - at least in a gravity well. Similarly, the local kinetic energy bleeds off in a gravity well when the drive is operated much like the stutterwarp discharge itself. The higher the local gravity the quicker it happens making kinetic attacks with stutterwarp vessels fairly impracticable. Although in the deeps you can do some clever stuff to get enough kinetic energy to make some spectacular drive flares when you cross the shelf into a system.

The most you're going to be able to get is in the range of double the potential energy you have above a planet. Not an insignificant amount of Joules to be fair but low enough that your ship vs the planet would be akin to insect vs windscreen.

Of course this is all handwavium science - but it's plausible sounding enough without just saying, 'nope can't do it'.

 

[aramis]

Your take, libris, is obviously not grounded in the math.

If the stutterwarp operates at 1 GHz (1e9 hz) maximum, and can do 10 psl in gravity well, that's 29,970 km per second, 1e7 m/s ... For 1e-2 m per flick, during which time, at the 0.1g "cutoff", it can hover for 1e7 sec, and maybe 1e7 m/s normal vector, which is exactly matched by the displacement... Assuming the flicker takes 1 plank time ... So 1e14 joules per kilogram and roughly 4.2e12 j/kT ör 2.38e1 MT per tonne meds. The ability to overcome local gravity allows accumulated vector. When out just past the sub-C threshold, 10x the vector, and 100 x the vector... You can generate a vector of 0.999999C and, while dying from the hard rads, be utterly undetectable after release, until impact.

The issue is timing the impacts... So if you're in a spot where be to accumulation even hints of impact, they send intercept. To make a miss,just kill it before optimum, and it goes wide

Later aren't quite dumb enough to let it happen.

 

[AnotherDilbert]

Near anything interesting (in a system) a stutterwarp ship will move in the region of 0.1 c. Each warp jump is roughly 100 m. (According to FFS.)

0.1 c = 30 000 km/s, so the drive will cycle in the region of 300 000 times per s (300 kHz).


The ship materialises about every 100 m, so will certainly hit anything thicker than 100 m.

If the ship is longer than 100 m it will hit anything in its path however small.

If the ship is longer than 50 m it will certainly hit anything thicker than 50 m.

 

[Libris]

Not classical maths. No. More McGuffin based TANSTAAFL principle.

As implied in previous posts you effectively gain a free amount of potential energy which can be converted indefinitely to kinetic energy as you yo-yo back and forth. By classic physics this totally breaks conservation of momentum. You're getting something for nothing.

However, having some aspect of the stutterwarp's quantum effect nullify this gain in energy and subsequent free momentum is not that unreasonable and neatly ties up the problem posed.

However, if canon is that vector is retained then it leads to all sorts of challenges.

 

[Libris]

Near anything interesting (in a system) a stutterwarp ship will move in the region of 0.1 c. Each warp jump is roughly 100 m. (According to FFS.)

0.1 c = 30 000 km/s, so the drive will cycle in the region of 300 000 times per s (300 kHz).


The ship materialises about every 100 m, so will certainly hit anything thicker than 100 m.

If the ship is longer than 100 m it will hit anything in its path however small.

If the ship is longer than 50 m it will certainly hit anything thicker than 50 m.

Well, a collision is a collision. Between conventional ships at orbital velocities each is likely to be confetti. A stutterwarp collision is going to have the same result with perhaps a considerable amount of extra radiation and really impressive explosion.

 

[McPerth]

My belief is that if stutterwarp can be used as a WMD, the French would have done so against the Kafers in retaliation for atrocities on Arcturus and Aurorae and I doubt any other nation involved in the war would have given more than a token protest.

Even if this was possible, the french (or the human race at large, for what's worth) have no explored beyond Arcturus when Triumfant Destiny attack began.

So, they did not attack the Kafers in any way, at leat until 2302 (I don't know much about 2320, but by then, for what I've read here, humans are counterattacking.

 

[Brandon C]

Even if this was possible, the french (or the human race at large, for what's worth) have no explored beyond Arcturus when Triumfant Destiny attack began.

So, they did not attack the Kafers in any way, at leat until 2302 (I don't know much about 2320, but by then, for what I've read here, humans are counterattacking.

I didn't mean immediately, but at any point in the war.

 

[aramis]

The "extra energy" seems to be drawn by pulling from extra dimensions, possibly compact ones, connected to the matter of the drive. For, when those hit zero, it goes boom.

As for acceleration forces overcome... the only real math needed is the maximum gravity gradient it can stutterwarp at, the hertz of cycle, and the duration of each stutter's non-newtonian time. If that hop takes more than say, about 1 nanosecond (1e-9), at the 300 kHz (3e5), we get to significant fractions of the second that it's not being accelerated. (3e-4 sec, or 0.1 millisecond ... If we go to a microsecond, (1e-6), we get 0.3 sec eaten, and thus can get to 1.3x the stutterwarp's 0.1C "while near anything interesting" speed. Hover outside the system, tho', and you still come in at a screaming fast .9 C+, with the only real issue being accuracy.

Any n-space FTL drive, be it warping space, quantum tunneling, projectable wormholes, or inertia suppression fields, turns the ship into a gravity bomb unless further handwavium is applied.

Hell, any decent sublight drive capable of 1G or better does the same.

 

[sudnadja]

This also can act as a gravity tractor for solar system engineering purposes. You can place the ship (effectively place) at a static location above a planet somewhere, just above the stutterwarp wall, which will continuously attract the planet to the ship. Of course the mass will be very small and thus the acceleration will be very small, but relativistic mass of the ship will increase as it approaches c - to the point that the gravitational effect on the planet will become significant. Even without that consideration, it would be a very effective gravity tractor, moreso than the current real-world proposals.

 

[epicenter00]

This is mostly handwaved in 2300AD setting, but it seems there's some safety that avoids it to happen, as no such collisions are reported in the entire (AFAIK) 2300AD literature.

There's two examples of some sort of accident occurring because of the results of Stutterwarp drives doing various foolery. I know these off the top of my head because it's bugged me for decades now.

The first is on p86 of the Colonial Atlas where the book discusses how the starship Carolina Dream vanished in the Mu Hercules (Hermes) system. It describes how it is thought the Carolina Dream "...while traveling at stutterwarp speeds, it collided with an object: possibly an element of the system's Oort cloud. Such accidents are not unheard of and usually result in the total obliteration of the vessel."

Since ships using SW are constantly flickering about, a "collision" would likely mean a materialization into another mass.

Meanwhile, while Stutterwarp coils don't explode, apparently Stutterwarp drives can fail in catastrophic explosions as described on the sidebar on page 14 of Bayern where during a shakedown cruise, an umbilical attaching the Bayern to the space station had not been detached. The computer decided it had to move both the ship and the space station it was tethered to and the "...overloaded stutterwarp suffered a critical failure and exploded, destroying itself and doing severe damage to one of the other units in the process."

Now both of these canon examples of Stutterwarp foolery bug me for different reasons; the Bayern explosion just seems plain ridiculous to me. You mean after over a century of using SW starships, drive software is still so dumb as to just assume a space station is a part of starship and tries to move both instead of just spitting back an error saying "dangerous mass overload, please re-check mass of starship" and then a physical circuit breaker just to be extra sure? You'd think this sort of problem would happen exactly once (or maybe a few times in depending on how tough guy "we dun need no regulations to get in the way" 2300 is), but regardless, within a few decades of SW drive working, you'd think there'd have been enough explosions that people would have figured out how to prevent accidents like this from occurring.

The other example of the Carolina Dream is more troubling. Apparently while rare, incidents where ships just destroy themselves by jumping into something do happen. While it wouldn't work for terrorists trying to ram a ship into a planet (around any decent gravity, SW efficiency drops so badly it can't even be used for station-keeping, which is pretty bad), it does again mean that some complex dance of sensors and software are what keeps a Stutterwarp ship from materializing into another object. But there's even a more troubling implications about Stutterwarp:

What about micrometeors and even tinier space debris - stuff that sensors would find too small to detect - wouldn't stuff like this be materializing into ship's systems and passengers every so often?

Then there's the idea of people materializing into radiation. So lets say your SW ship is zipping around the Life Zone of a system. Your ship is materializing onto a patch of space - while the area might be clear of physical debris, there's still radiation in that area. The ship appears, all this radiation is absorbed by the ship ... and its passengers. This is repeated thousands of times per second as the ship basically moves through space, scooping up all the solar radiation. Wouldn't that accumulated radiation turn into heat and ... basically cook the brains of everyone on board the ship within a few seconds of cruising around?

 

[BRJN]

Do we HAVE to bring the stutterwarp drive along to crash into the planet?

Inspired (in part) by the Yamamoto mission from Larry Niven's Man-Kzin Wars series, let's do this:
Pick an uninhabited system with several large gas giants and a star, lined up so we can slingshot around several of them per pass. (It will help if the system also has a significant motion relative to the target system.) Using rockets / thrusters, accelerate a big heavy object (asteroid?) so it can slingshot around the sun and a gas giant or two. Only turn on the stutterwarp when you are well away from gravity wells, to reduce the multi-year transit time. When you are heading out of the system, use the stutterwarp to move you across / around the system so you are heading back towards an astronomical body for another slingshot. Repeat until you have a large enough near-C vector *which will have to be approximately in the direction of the target.* Now use the stutterwarp to travel to the system you want to hurt, and arrive at a point where your realspace vector will take you to the designated target. Maybe use the stutterwarp again to cut your time of passage through the system. At some point near the target, detach the stutterwarp and charge off at a tangent vector. Leave the big heavy speeding object on a collision course for system defenders to deal with … if they can.

The designer of the supercomputer that can calculate all that correctly, may earn a lifetime supply of Undercover Government Security Agents trying to become his best friends.

 

[Bromo33333]

We always played that stutterwarp wouldn't function in a gravity well. I don't know if there are rules with that stipulation, we probably cribbed it from CT and the 100 diameter limit.

 

[LeagueOfSuns]

The idea in the OP (and in the post it derivates from) is to let the gravigy of a planet to accelerate your ship, then stutterwarping away to be accelerated again, and so mounting up speed until it becomes a kinetic superbomb.

Then stutterwarping until your target, and, as you say, your speed is kept, so letting the ship to crash at this monstruous speed against the target planet.

Once you're going at relativistic speed there's no way you can stay within a gravity well long enough to discharge your drive. You would have to build up your velocity in a system within 7.7 ly of your target. Which, as has been pointed out already, takes several years. I think those two factors combined would make this impractical for almost any application, military or terrorist.

 

[AtlanticFriend]

Once you're going at relativistic speed there's no way you can stay within a gravity well long enough to discharge your drive. You would have to build up your velocity in a system within 7.7 ly of your target. Which, as has been pointed out already, takes several years. I think those two factors combined would make this impractical for almost any application, military or terrorist.

Yes for military operations, but I can see a terrorist group willing to spend several years preparing for such a strike - even though it'd have to be a group ready to launch literally Earth-shattering attacks with little consideration for consequences.

 

[McPerth]

Yes for military operations, but I can see a terrorist group willing to spend several years preparing for such a strike - even though it'd have to be a group ready to launch literally Earth-shattering attacks with little consideration for consequences.

Curious, as I see it really the other way...

While as a military operation it would only work if situation stealmated for long, I don't believe a terrorist group could do this for years without detection, mostly if you think this must be done at 1 transit from your target, and that stutterwarp is quite easy to detect (and turning it off is not an option in this case)