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.
@cstross@wandering.shop yeah!
Or there’s that possibility that Europa has more ocean water than earth, why not drain that? You can get there pretty easy with a torch ship…
Or hell, with free thrust let’s just deorbit all the comets in the oort cloud into Mars and use the new Barsoom Ocean as our remass.
@foone@digipres.club @cstross@wandering.shop Don’t drain Europa! It will anger the hyperintelligent squid there!
@michaelgemar@mstdn.ca @cstross@wandering.shop
that just provides an episode for our Torchship Explorers show. Captain Laser has to go help some ice miners working to set up a portal farm on the bottom of the European ocean, when their drills keep getting attacked, and the crew has to learn to communicate with the squids and figure out how to stop the miners from just going “fuck it” and poisoning the whole ocean.
@cstross@wandering.shop (I did think about jupiter more seriously but the problem is that you’d have to build a structure that could withstand the pressures of Jupiter’s atmosphere as it falls into the planet. That’s way harder than something that can survive the earth’s oceans, even if you would get more thrust out of it)
@foone@digipres.club @cstross@wandering.shop Why not just open a portal into the Sun?