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Interdiction fields and Pre-Existing Wormholes

X

Xerena

Inactive Member
It is well established that interdiction fields, among other things, prevent or impair attempts to open wormholes. What is less clear is how they affect already-open wormholes.

Some people will probably just assume that activating an interdiction field next to an open artificial wormhole will collapse it. However, interdiction fields work, as I understand, by making space more rigid, so to speak, and resistant to effort to change its structure - regardless of what that structure may be at the moment the field is activated, which may not be "flat".

Most devices affected by interdiction fields, like CDD or fold drives, is constantly changing space. A wormhole, once opened, however, just sits there. Since collapsing a wormhole, rather than holding it open, would mean changing the structure of space, wouldn't an interdiction field serve to prop open an existing wormhole, and make it harder to collapse?

If so, then, for example, if ship A opens a wormhole and flees through it, ship B, in hot pursuit, could use an interdiction field to prevent ship A from closing the wormhole behind it before ship B can follow it.

I first brought up this point in the discussion of the Rift Generator tech, but I think this question deserves a more general, and more direct, answer.
 
Wormholes are a non-normal state of space; therefore, an Anti-FTL field would likely collapse them by returning the space to a normal state.
 
So interdiction doesn't "stiffen" space in whatever configuration it's in (like freezing the sea beneath a ship), but pulls it flat, healing whatever "bumps" (like wormholes, or folds-in-progress) may be in it like pulling a sheet tight over a bed...

I'm guessing that it isn't strong enough to heal spacial tears like those caused by some Yamataian starship weapons, though?
 
I can see this argument applying to the kind of wormhole that you have to constantly expend energy to hold open, but not to the kind that, once created, requires no further energy input and will stay there until something or someone deliberately (or perhaps accidentally) closes it.

Granted, wormholes generated by ships to get from point A to point B quickly are usually of the type that requires energy to keep open. However, wormholes of the type that stay open once opened may be created as permanent "bridges" between locations, or may occur naturally.
 
In which case the Interdiction field would close the natural ones too. If you go with the bedsheet metaphor, and think of wormholes as being two points of that bedsheet being folded so they touch each other, an interdiction field would be like four people at each corner of that sheet pulling it smooth. The field forces the wormhole shut, whether it's being held open or not.

If it's being held open then it becomes a matter of "Which is stronger? The field or the generator?" In most cases, though, I think the generator would overload and the wormhole would close rather quickly, just like it's easier to force a door closed than to hold it open when you have two people of equal strength trying to force it one way or another. Or, to prevent mixing metaphors, it's easier for the four people to pull the sheet flat even if someone's in there trying to pull two points together.
 
In the case of a natural wormhole or semi-permanent wormhole, the sheet is not merely folded, but actually re-sewn (or was sewn that way to begin with). And actually ripping the "sheet" of spacet-ime is both completely beyond the capabilities of interdiction fields (unless, by "interdiction field" you really mean "transposition cannon") and probably dangerous to everything within a fairly large distance.

Exotic matter stabilizing a wormhole is static and does not require constant energy input. Rather than two people holding a door open against two guys trying to close it, a better analogy would be two guys trying to close the door against the compressive strength of a Yamacrete block, and unless the two guys trying to push the door closed are NH-28s, I'd have to put my money on the Yamacrete.
 
"Pulling space flat" wouldn't work, because space naturally curves when exposed to mass, right? One of the theoretical reasons we have orbits is because the sun "stretches" space into an indent or pit, like a marble in a piece of slightly slacked toilet paper. The planets have their own ndents in space, but spiral within the larger one rather than going straight...much like the funky funnel things kids put a penny in and it goes round, and round, and round before falling in the hole...think of that as a decaying orbit.


In summary, the natural curvature of space around a mass is thought to be the force we consider gravity. Pull it flat along with other types of artificial flattened space which you target, and you nullify all gravitational force in the area...planets in orbit will fly out straight into open space, atmospheres will float off of planets, the gravitational forces needed to hold planets and stars together would be canceled and cause immediate outward explosions of matter, and other BAD STUFF (TM).

Of course, this would also make folding and wormholes obscenely gravitational in nature themselves, so I don't know if this theory will be considered SA canon.
 
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