Re: [GZG] Ixx Psychology & behaviour?

On Thu, Dec 11, 2008 at 8:12 AM, Indy <indy.kochte@gmail.com> wrote:
> If the Ixx have these huge hive ships, how large are we speculating
them to
> be? Size of one of our largest asteroids (~500 miles), size of the
Moon,
> size of a dwarf planet, size of a terrestrial planet, or...?	Given a
size,
> it is going to put out heat from the energies generated within. While
some
> of that can be PSB'd into being being fed into the drives that propel
this
> hive/world ship through space (FTL or sublight), there's still going
to be
> detectable heat generated (unless you want to PSB some sort of mascing
or
> shielding, but nothing is perfect in every spectrum; it'll be
detectable
> somehow)

Someday, if I'm really good, will Grandfather Winter bring me a ship
that's powered by its own entropy?

I think you raise a really good point. Given sublight speeds and that
kind of size, why haven't we detected them already (or more to the
point why didn't the pre-contact human factions discover them)?

I think this is good evidence that they do have some form of FTL drive.

Also, going back to what I was saying earlier, even if you assume all
kinds of other things can be handwaved away (like heat dissipation--
the comparison to a giant inhabited iceberg as a vessel isn't an idle
comparison), you don't actually need a very large asteroid before
you're holding gargantuan numbers of people. A hiveship can be huge
and unweildy compared to spaceships, but tiny compared to an asteroid.

Math break: Let's take earth's 510 million km^2 of surface area. Let's
assume that our 7 billion humans need all of it: deserts, ice caps,
deep oceans, etc. Let's assume that we take a volume of 2km, one up
into the sky and one down into the earth. Let's assume that any
efficiencies that we get out of technology we need to cover for
overhead, engines, gravity etc. Now instead of spreading it over the
surface of a sphere, let's compact this volume into a spherical
asteroid. R=624km. So even with this very conservative approximation,
we have 7 billion people in something the size of a small dwarf
planet. Look how far down you go on the list to get there:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Solar_System_objects_by_radius

So basically yeah this is literally a world-ship. Even with very
conservative assumptions you end up holding millions or billions
within very small bodies. And I'll bet the Ixx can pack them closer
together than 7 per km^3.

Some PSB already in the tuffleyverse is that the further out you are
from a gravity well, the farther and more accurately you can jump.
Well, what if their hive ships (let's call them world ships; I really
like the idea of departing from the cliches) generate enough gravity
that they have to be further out of a system to begin with and have to
make small jumps (this need not contradict the last paragraph-- after
all, even a small world-ship will have much more spatial distortion
around it than a (to them tiny) human, kravak, etc ship. So while they
are FTL, it's FTL on an order of months or years rather than weeks
between worlds. And, they likely can't generate much delta-v, so the
world ships were probably accelerated to a medium-high velocity long
ago, and they maneuver using FTL and clever use of gravity wells.

_______________________________________________
Gzg-l mailing list
Gzg-l@vermouth.csua.berkeley.edu
http://vermouth.csua.berkeley.edu:1337/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gzg-l