On 07/28/2018 11:14 AM, John Newman wrote:
On Fri, Jul 27, 2018 at 07:40:50AM -0700, Mirimir wrote:
<SNIP>
Now of course, the g-forces involved would have killed everyone in the ships. But consider Vinge's ships, combining bobble tech with nuclear pulse propulsion. Bobbles, for those who don't know Vinge's stuff, are spherical stasis fields. Inside the bobble, time stops for some set external time. So from the outside, bobbles are perfect spherical mirrors. To everything, including acceleration. And you can have a complex structure, with configurations of bobbles nested within bobbles. So basically, the ship periodically drops a nuclear device, bobbles and rides the shock wave, and then de-bobbles and repeats. And there's no limit to the size of the nuclear devices. Could be the entire planet :(
I need to read some Vernor - I don't know his stuff at all, but actually own a couple paperbacks (unread, obviously). Too many fucking books, too little time.
Read *Peace War*, and then *Marooned in Realtime*. Della Lu was the heroine of *Peace War*, and she has the coolest ship in *Marooned in Realtime*. Or at least, she has the coolest intact ship. There's a minor character who has a piece of a _really_ cool ship that got mostly destroyed while debugging an antihydrogen distillery near the Sun's surface.