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 I seem to recall Larry Niven played with this stuff in his teleportation short stories in the 70s (notably “All the bridges rusting”). And I had fun with it in “Glasshouse”.
@cstross@wandering.shop @foone@digipres.club Peter F. Hamilton also uses the idea in a lot of various ways in his Salvation books. E.g. why deal with complicated propulsion systems when you can chuck the ingress end of a portal into a star and stick the egress end on the back of your ship.
@abursey@me.dm @foone@digipres.club A portal gun (with the other end of the portal inside the photosphere of a blue-white supergiant) makes a really neat blaster!
@cstross@wandering.shop @foone@digipres.club @abursey@me.dm Backblast might make it a weapon of last resort, though.
@lispi314@udongein.xyz @abursey@me.dm @cstross@wandering.shop true, but the fun part of a portal-ship is that there’s really no difference between a crewed lander and a remote-controlled doomsday missile.
if you land somewhere uninhabited and/or friendly, you can drop a portal and then send people through. if it’s unfriendly, you open the supergiant portal, and have the portal gun throw itself through a return-home portal that instantly closes. you build another ship