Bay 12 Games Forum

Great. Now you got me imagining a neutron star with planets orbiting around it like electrons x3

Naw, that'd have to be a Proton Star with an Electron Planet.  And I wouldn't like to deal with the issue of the cyclotron radiation (and short-lived orbit!) from such a system.  But, hey, you'd soon have yourself a neutron star with no electron planets at all around it, right?   

Quote from: thobal on March 17, 2011, 04:07:10 pm

I'd always heard that a neutron star is basically one giant neutron.

Lolwut.


They are made of the stuff. Billions of them. But one hugeass one? No way.

I think "one big atom" is indeed more apt.  ¹²C is 6 protons and 6 neutrons.  ²³⁸U is 92 protons and 146 neutrons.  Hydrogen, Deuterium and Tritium (¹H, ²H and ³H) each have one proton but also 0, 1 or 2 neutrons, respectively.  A neutron star would be ^ahelluvalot? with zero protons[1] and ahelluvalot neutrons.

You're talking about one of the exotic low-energy forms of matter (BEC?) where the 'whole' is an indistinguishable amorphous mass, and there's going to be too much energy within the neutron star to allow that to happen.  OTOH, a true singularities could be considered a giant (by mass, not volume) particle, I suppose, with its spin/mass/charge properties dictated to by the sum of the source material for it.  Whichever way, we're not looking at anything like Jumbonium...


[1] Near as damnit, if for any reason there was an electron sufficiency or some other odd imbalance.

Going back to the issue of news reports, I know it's unwieldy, but even interviewed experts are failing to distinguish between releases of radiation and releases of radionuclides.

There are different issues with each.  When it comes to the people working on site, if there's an actual radiation spike you still need to be behind as much concrete (or at as far a distance) as you can manage given your job.  The civilian population and all those not needed to be on site are almost certainly going to be safe due to distance.  And once the immediate crisis is over, with everything nicely settled (or entombed in concrete[1]) the evacuation and exclusion can be lifted and there are no more problems[2].

The issue of the actual, physical isotopes being spread around is another case.  In turn emitting all the different types of actual radiation, in various quantities, proximity alone isn't an issue and you can protect yourself with pretty much any NBC-suitable suit/vehicle/building from direct on-skin and in-lung exposure to dangerous particulates and gasses (although that doesn't help civvies), but the quantities flying around shouldn't be anything like as much of a problem as being within a few tens of metres of a naked nuclear pile, like as from the perspective of those firefighters at Chernobyl.  Instead, the problem is the particles getting onto skin, into the lungs and generally stuck on or in the human (and wildlife!) body.  Whatever the particles are, and whatever their radiation (even alpha, which famously gets stopped by a good sheet of paper or two) they can then directly and unobstructively give an extended dose of radiation to the cells they are adhered to, or near, as increasing numbers of them do what comes natural and decay to various other isotopes which may or may not have chance to further decay, before becoming stable.  And that's not even including the chemical effects of the heavy metal and other elements (and compounds thereof) that this dust or gas is at various stages of its decay cycle.


The fact that the current effort appears to be concentrating on keeping things cool means that they are most likely working towards minimising the potential for radionuclide emission, although they will of course be displacing some in their steam-generating process.  Also that they're still working towards cooling.  There's nothing known (other than directing more radiation at a sample, to change the nucleus's internal configuration) that will speed up or slow down radiation emission and decay.  Which is why various isotope dating techniques are (for suitable samples of historic materials) very good, and which is why we know that nuclear waste products are going to have to be stored for so-many hundred or thousand years.

Excessive heating the materials will not cause (on its own) increased radiation emission, although material disbursement due to the burning of the material (and/or its otherwise mundane casing) or in a particularly badly-designed container the pooling of melted fuel into a larger unit would be a problem.



The most recent bugbear report I've been hearing is today is "If the ponds dry out, the spent fuel rods will emit more radiation".  The real problem is most likely about their burning and releasing isotope-laden oxides into the air, not directly irradiating the surroundings more.  Direct radiation exposure, given some very basic assumptions about the way that storage is laid out, wouldn't be much of an issue to the surrounds anyway, as long as current or future workers weren't in the habit of peeking over the top of the pond walls.  (Arguably that wouldn't be something you could say about the pilots of the water-dumping pilots, but I suspect they've been given heights to work from where the situation on/in the ground is within limits that are prepared to be risked exposure to.  This might mean they're not as efficient at delivering their cooling water, of course.)


I think that as long as the authorities do manage to prevent a 'burning stack' of fuel rods (within either reactors or ponds, and last I heard the only actual fires were ones generally around the building, although there were naturally concerns about the spent-fuel pools), the biggest danger to the population in the greater "stay in or get out" zone, and possibly even significantly within the evacuation zone, is going to be the chill winds, snow and general lack of supplies.  Including fuel for the infrastructure which would normally bring the supplies that exist in the other parts of the nation into the entire tsunami-hit zone, assuming they don't still have problems with debris-blocked highways and other rescue effort issues.


However, I have made a few assumptions, above.  It's so hard to get good facts, given the mix-up of details that this post was initially all about, various different news organisations relaying possibly spurious facts from similar mis-understandings or sheer hype, or possibly even believing unwarranted down-playing by those who are supposed to pass on details!  Please treat this as a general exposition, not in any way authoritative of the true situation on the ground.


[1] A bad choice, in general, because of the lack of ability to monitor and deal with the situation at later leisure.  OTOH, the 'leaky sarcophagus' of Chernobyl might be considered a strange way of doing it too.  I think the thought process there was that they were keeping people out of the area, anyway, so they'd allow it to cool itself by air blowing through it.

[2] Yes, high radiation levels could make otherwise safe materials in the area radioactive in their own right.  But compared to the radionuclide problem this would really be just like a few more cosmic rays striking down upon the Earth's atmosphere and ground.

Generate a tiny, tiny PRETTY FREAKING tiny black hole, something of such a little volume its attraction would only make up the gravity of earth, i guess.. but we will never have such technology.

Much apart from the problem of tides[1], how are you going to keep the black hole where you want it?  Bolt it to a bulkhead?

And if it's the mass of the Earth (which it won't be, you'd go for something smaller, which you sit nearer, as in the footnote, but it's still going to be hyper-massive) you're now trying to propulse a ship with a total mass certainly no less than that of Earth.  Away from whatever point it is that you had just managed to bring at least one Earth-mass of material into in order to form the black hole and ship itself.

Best bet: find a way to shove black holes around, grab a handy one and build a Dyson Sphere-style ship around it, expending most of your energy moving the black hole around but keeping some spare to make sure the relatively featherlight Dyson Ship around it maintains positional parity with it, lest it go all eccentric and Bad Stuff happens.  But by the time you can shove BHs around, in the first place, the rest should be fairly simple.



[1] Lay on the floor.  Now get up and lay on your table.  The inverse square law means that you're getting a small (but essentially negligible) difference in the amount of gravity you're feeling at each distance from the earth's barycentre.

Try the same with any blackhole-like mass designed to sit a hundred metres away and give you 1G at your current position.  Moving a metre "up" would (if my mental arithmetic is holding up) give you an 0.98G gravity.  50 Metres down (not so difficult to do proportions) you'd be experiencing 4G, being 25m away from the source means 16G, 12.5m away is 32G.  (Ignoring all kinds of stranger effects, that I'll miss out of these in-the-head calculations.)  And the 'sweet-spot' for this black-hole is quite narrow.  To fit sizeable amounts of accommodation and workspace without undue discomfort at the lower levels or heading into inconventiently low gravity at the upper levels demands a larger black hole, set at a greater distance, such that the zone if 1G+/-10% (say) is enough to contain everything one would want.  (Perhaps as a spherical 'world' around the point source of gravity.)[/1]

Well, the problem is that there is no variety. I've seen dozens of veins in different layers, but the are ALL THE SAME.

The dolomite area I mentioned about  had hundreds of tiles worth of tetrahedrite, but nothing else. No iron, nor coal, nothing. Not to metion that these layers were split between two differnt biomes (mountain and forest) but there was no difference in ore content

Sorry, had this stuck on my browser for a couple of days now, I was only going to quickly check my own situation and report.

For me, the upper limestone layers are almost completely dominated by limonite, in the current fort I'm playing, although there's a few spots of platinum nuggets.  Below the limestone layers are marble layers, with very little in the way of intrusions (but I've not explored the level much).  All the way down, down, down to the magma sea I've not really found very much of any other ore (or economic stone) although down where I've built my magma forges I know it's a diorite layer, I've found a little bit of granite, and I must have found a spot of native silver somewhere, but I've tried to find where, in amongst all my corridors, but the only evidence I have for this is that at one point I had smelters producing iron, platinum and a couple of bars of silver.  (Right now, I've got iron coming out of my ears, and I'm charcoaling some trees to the end of getting a significant amount of steel out of my available resources.)

Apart from import materials (and I've been requesting silver and steel anyway, in particular, from 'my homies', for all the usual reasons) no other metals are available to me.  Well, except for a couple of spots of cyan visible from where I punched into the magma sea, but I'm only two years in and only just dealt with my first 'normal' ambush[1], so not ready to pursue that yet.


Anyway, I post this as a datum point, even though the reasoning behind has already been explained.


[1] Lost my only alpaca, and a civvie mechanic also got shot in the guts by the bowgoblin squad who were the first a double-amush 'one-two' episode[2], and is now recovering in hospital, but the largely iron-clad military got away with few serious injuries in and of themselves)

[2] The mêlée squad ran over some wildlife-capturing cages, except a couple who ran off scared.  The cages were force of habit, even though with the current need for grazing I'd probably be best off sticking with the hoards of pre-tamed animals.  The tempremental yak bull, cow and calf and their water buffalo counterparts will have even more animals to attack if I ever do bring the local roaming warthogs, giraffes and even unicorns under my control.

I mostly[1] found that original idea of "You can use the induced force of gravity to provide a gravity-based power source sufficient to power the induction of the gravity" to be a bit dodgy.  If that's what was trying to be said[2], someone's forgotten about losses and inefficiencies.  Which will exist even in the power transfer to this elusive "electrogravitanium"-type stuff.



Also, this conversation reminds me of that episode of DS9 where Siskos Sn and Jr decide to re-enact a "Kon-Tiki"-type solar-sail trip between star systems, in a replica claustrophobic capsule of a craft.  "But for our own comfort," goes my paraphrasing of the father's chat with his son, "I've installed a bit of gravitational plating".  Nah, mate, it's so you don't have to worry about Paramount's SFX budget being wiped out by trying to hide the strings, or booking you a trip on the Vomit Comet a la the Apollo 13 movie.



[1] Well, not exclusively, but I'm ignoring the other stuff that already flashed conceptual alarms in other people.   Of course, Scood has ninjaed me on the inefficiencies issue, but I spent more time than I wanted (less time than would do it proper justice) drawing that diagram, so I'm still posting.

[2] The alternative is that it was an attempt to make perpetual energy, like using the following badly diagrammed setup:
   _____
  /  _  \
  |^|  v    |
  | |       |
  |^|~~~~~~~|
  | |~~~~~~~|
  |^|~~~~~~~|
  | |~~~~~~~~\
  |^|~~~~~~~~~\
  | #########~|
  |^# PULLS #~|$$
  | ######### |
$$|~# S77∩d #v|
  |~######### |
  \~~~~~~~~~|v|
   \~~~~~~~~| |
    |~~~~~~~|v|
    |~~~~~~~| |
    |~~~~~~~|v|
    |       | |
    |    ^ _|v|
       \_____/
...to get a whole lot of water giving power (at the $$ points) that can then spin the drained water around the side of the device (where gravity doesn't affect it) before being sent back into the other tank as feedstock for more gravitational energy farming from the back-to-back gravity system.  But nope, that's got the same problem anyway.

Ouch, the overheads of image data when representing mere (formatted, tabled) text data.

Might have been best to link the Wiki article I just dug up that isn't exactly the same but appears to be based on the same info (and is latest, regardless of how long between that being posted and read).  And the links would have been clickable.

(c.f. 380kb of picture with... ohh, lessee, 192kb of raw HTML plus 155kb of other files (mostly images and CSS stuff, at least the latter of which is already cached on an regular Wiki user's machine), with more than just that one table in and still smaller in size overall.)