Re: FT Taskforce and Fleet Actions

On Tue, 7 Aug 2001, Ryan M Gill wrote:

> At 10:16 AM -0400 8/7/01, Jerry Acord wrote:
> 
> >
> >Consider two scenarios: 1) the Earth orbiting the Sun at 1 AU; 2) the
Earth
> >orbiting a 1-solar mass black hole at 1 AU.	The orbit is the same in
both
> >scenarios.  Replacing the Sun with a b.h. will not magically suck all
the
> >planets into it.  1 solar mass is 1 solar mass.  However, close in
you
> 
> Course getting the Sun to become a black hole when it isn't over the 
> Chandrakar (sp?)
> limit is of course impossible. Thats the nice thing about a main 
> sequence dwarf.

Chandrasekhar Limit, which is 1.4 M(solar). My info is a little out of 
date (it's been a LONG time since I seriously studied black holes, and
really most recently only galactic-sized super-massive BHs), but I think
there was theoretical evidence that you could have a black hole of 1
solar
Mass. 

In any event, what Jerry was trying to illustrate is simply that the
mass
should be irrelevant when looking at the overall gravity well effects.
You
could look at all masses as point-sources for this exercise, too.

> >_will_ get weird effects and spacetime _is_ warped much more severely
close
> >to the b.h. than it is near the Sun.  It's just further out that the
severe
> >warping smooths out.  That's why a b.h. will have an event horizon,
but the
> >Sun obviously doesn't...
> 
> Ok, I see, the slope is sooner for the gravity well in the case of 
> the larger star. But is the well as deep since it's spread out?

Be careful your adjective "larger". Do you mean more volume or more
mass?
It does play a difference. ;-)

IIRC (without having all my texts onhand and no time to spend going up
to
the library to do this research) the volume of the source plays a role
in
how wide the gravity well is, but the depth should be essentially the
same for the same mass.

> >(SImilar argument, but in the opposite direction, for G2V vs. red
giant)
> >
> >So as far as FTL / hyperspace travel is concerned, you could say the
"higher
> >order spacetime perturbations" of the denser object lead to a
relatively
> >further stand-off distance for safe hyperspace entry etc. etc. etc.
(hands
> >waving vigorously...)
> 
> Yeah, it'd be easier in my mind to base it off of total mass of the 
> star/system. The safe region of a Moderate to distant binary system 
> (or even a trinary with a 2 dwarfs and a compact main sequence) would 
> be nasty.

Don't hurt your head on this stuff. Find a good PSB solution.  :-)

Mk