Scalar Stuff

Sounds great to me.

Wes, one thing I noticed was on Scalar energy - it was developed by 'Thomas E. Bearden'. Would this be the same Tom Bearden who apparently designed the MEG or Motionless Electrical Generator?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motionless ... _Generator

On this subject I found several interesting web pages which criticize him - although I will admit it went a little over my head.

http://www.phact.org/e/z/BeardenReview.htm
http://www.phact.org/e/z/bearden.htm
http://www.phact.org/e/z/BeardenReviewOld.htm (the formatting in this one seems a little off).

I'm interested that their appears to be a sport of 'Bearden Bashing'.

http://www.randi.org/jr/2006-06/063006simply.html#i4

On the other hand, here's an interesting article on Scalar weaponary:

http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~sai/beard_weapon.htm

From what I can tell from my reading he also believes there is currently a war between nations using 'weather weapons'.

When I was looking through pages which supported him I found myself in the sort of domain which I haven't been in since I did some research on AG before I joined SA. Most of it is laughable - just enough science to make it plausible, although I will admit I don't know enough about mechanics to understand what he's talking about. I have to rely on other.

In short, there part about the quarternions and Oliver Heaviside trimming it down to vectors is correct, and pretty much everything after that... is VERY questionable, at best, in places, and outright wrong in the remaining places, especially about unifying EM and gravity. The reason Einstein couldn't unify EM and gravity is that you can't go straight from EM to gravity, skipping the weak nuclear force. You might be able to skip the strong nuclear force, but electroweak theory is fairly well established, both theoretically and, most importantly, experimentally (using large particle accelerators). Current theoretical physics is working on unifying the electroweak and strong nuclear forces next, and then gravity, and possibly they should be going the other way around, but the union of the electromagnetic and weak forces has to come before any unification with gravity or the strong nuclear force.

Furthermore, there is no way to unify gravity with anything or electromagnetism with anything without taking into account general relativity and quantum electrodynamics, respectively, much unify them with each other with neither special (much less general) relativity nor the most basic formulations of quantum mechanics - and all of these were 20th century developments (and as a physics major, I actually understand most of this stuff in the "what those equations actually mean" sense, so I like to at least think I know what I'm talking about, but then again, I'm only an undergrad).

Incidentally, there is a kind of "weather weapon" that could be created and used today - laser-induced plasma channel (LIPC) directed lightning, although it would require the presence of a (pre-existing) thunderhead over the target to work. The basic principle is that you use a laser (mounted on a satellite or an airplane, for instance) to ionize the air along the path of the beam, and if you aim the laser at the target through the thunderhead, the path of least resistance between the thunderhead and the ground will be along the pasma (ionized air) channel created by the laser, and since electricity always follows the path of least resitance, your target gets hit by lightning. And don't even think of stealing this idea for yourself on the tech forum.

We seem to have a scientist back.

Note: Scalar weapons that fry people's brains and computers, and detonate their ammo and stuff are way too cool and interesting to be retconned away at this point, even if that were a viable option (which it probably isn't).

Speaking of which, what are we going to do about your FTL drives? There is a type of FTL drive permitted by general relativity, namely the Alcubierre warp drive, but there are two problems with this type of drive:

1. Creating a "warp bubble" requires the use of exotic matter

This is more of a technical issue than a physics one, since there is evidence that exotic matter does, or at least can, exist, and SA era tech shoud be able to produce and maintain usable quantities of exotic matter, though the difficulty involved would contribute to such drives being rather expensive.

2. The surface of the "warp bubble" is causally isolated from its interior when travelling at FTL speeds.

Translation: You can't "start" FTL travel, you can't stop if you are already travelling faster than light, and you can't steer at FTL speeds. This could be a bit of a problem, since a warp generator outside the buble would be left behind, and a warp generator in the surface of the bubble would be destroyed almost instantly.

3. The "Blue Sheet" - blueshifted light would deliver enough energy to anything inside the warp bubble to turn it into superheated plasma.

There's really not much you can do about this one. Sure, you could use shields of some kind, but they wouldn't last very long at any not-very-slow FTL speed (IE anything above, at most, a few c).

Wormholes would still work, though - assuming you could get around the associated difficulties (namely keeping them stable with exotic matter, opening them in the first place, making them big enough to fit the ship through, not getting crushed into neutron star material in transit). Note, however, that two wormholes between the same or nearby points going in opposite (or both in both) directions can form a "Roman Ring" and allow time travel to occur, allowing my character, (who hasn't even been "born" just yet) to go back in time and defeat the Star Army before it exists (by preventing it from coming into existence). I am assuming that this kind of thing would generally be considered bad.

We've had these issues before ... we usually just roll with what Wes came up with. Wes?

How's this:

1. Creating a "warp bubble" requires the use of exotic matter

Click to expand...

Star Army ships can create exotic conditions which allow for the continuum distortion bubble.

2. The surface of the "warp bubble" is causally isolated from its interior when travelling at FTL speeds.

Click to expand...

The ship can "flash" the bubble on and off to perform manuevers, scans, and weapons fire.

3. The "Blue Sheet" - blueshifted light would deliver enough energy to anything inside the warp bubble to turn it into superheated plasma.

Click to expand...

Light does not penetrate the bubble; it bends around.

Lady Xerena said:

Current theoretical physics is working on unifying the electroweak and strong nuclear forces next, and then gravity, and possibly they should be going the other way around, but the union of the electromagnetic and weak forces has to come before any unification with gravity or the strong nuclear force.

Click to expand...

The Standard Model already unifies EM, weak, and strong forces.

Now, I learned my physics under grad students who specialized in String Theory, so I'm biased. It has its detractors, but it's the best model we have so far. So I would say that we at least have a hypothesis on what the "Unified Model" looks like.

Finally, while we're striving to be scientifically plausible around here, we know that we're pushing the envelope with ZPE generators and FTL travel. If we absolutely have to, we're willing to sacrifice hard science for the sake of the story.

Last I checked, the Standard Model was still having slight problems with the strong force (and not-so-slight ones with gravity), with several competing theories, and QCD (Quantum Chromodynamics, which simply describes the strong force and does not itself try to unify it with any of the others) and electroweak theory (and quantum mechanics and general relativity) are the extent of what is known "for certain" (or at least has been confirmed experimentally thus far). It would appear that electroweak-strong unification is going to be next, but the theories still have a few wrinkles to iron out. More importantly, the all-important experimental work mostly isn't there yet, and what little there is (proton decay experiments, mostly) have yet to produce any conclusive results. What I meant to say is that the only way to know how things will turn out is to wait and see and pray that it happens in your lifetime.

String theory, which actually encompasses several different (and in most cases mutually exclusive) theories, does appear to be a good candidate for unifying electroweak and strong forces with gravity, if it can be made to work, but it's way ahead of experiment right now, and once you get too far from experimentation you cross the line between physics and "philosophy with lots of equations".

Wes, I think you misunderstood what I meant by the surface of the bubble being causally isolated from the interior. The issue I was bringing up is not that the ship wouldn't be able to interact with the universe outside the bubble (although this is also true and could also be a problem), but that the ship cannot interact with the bubble itself when the bubble is travelling at FTL speeds. Flashing the bubble is unnecessary (though it might make things easier on your gunners, and might be necessary for your missiles, fighters, and torpedoes to get very far in one piece) for combat, or other interactions with the rest of the universe, at sublight speeds, and wouldn't do anything to help make it possible to get the bubble from STL to FTL, steer while going FTL, or take the bubble from FTL back to STL if it were already going FTL. Only something in the surface (the regions where space is contracting/expanding), rather than the interior (the flat region behind the contracting region and ahead of the expanding region) where the ship usually is, could make the bubble transition between STL and FTL speeds (or between different FTL speeds) or change its direction of motion while at FTL speeds, and anything in the surface of the bubble would be destroyed, except a fully-formed black hole (and, as measured from outside the event horizon, it would take an infinite amount of time for a black hole to become a true singularity), so in practice your CDD would allow you to travel at relativistic speeds without experiencing relativistic effects (time dilation, length contractiion, mass increase).

All things considered, wormholes are the best way to go, since not only can they exist, but they can even be created and traversed (you'd need exotic matter to hold them open long enough to be useful, but you'd need it for an Alcubierre-type drive, and producing enough of it for either shouldn't be an insurmountable problem with the tech commonly avaailable in this setting). TTDs and other devices that take you from point A to point B probably have less to do with general relativity than quantum mechanics. FTL travel methods that rely on another universe or dimension in which distances are shorter than in ours (such as SW-style hyperspace drives, or "The Warp" used by Ayenee ships in the 2nd Draconian War) should work fine, assuming that said universe or dimension exists. Fold drives also may be plausible, though "folding space" as it is rather vaguely described, sounds like a wormhole by another name.

Yup, we have another scientist.

Like Yangfan said -- for the sake of the RP, we bend the rules of science. We're not scientists, so it's pretty easy. Players and GMs are not going to toy with difficult scientific concepts just to exploit some advantage in a fight or something. That's why stuff is kept vague -- it's good enough so we can understand it in a basic sense, but vague enough so we can't get into a theoretical pissing match.

Highly related: https://stararmy.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=2876

I'm not disagreeing. I'm just saying that there's a difference between "it is possible to be in state B" and "it is possible to get from state A to state B, and then back to state A", and the former does not necessarily imply the latter.