I’ve been working on an idea for an SF story, (the type with starships and aliens) and it has come time that I hammer out all of the kinks in one of my central plot devices. Thing is, it looks more and more like I really need to be an astronomer and an engineer to figure this one out. I clearly need help to work out all the prerequisites and ramifications. So I’ve come here to ask for doper insight into my problem. Any answers you guys (or gals) can give will be greatly appreciated.
So anyway, let me lay it out:
There’s these Applied Phlebotinum bombs. When the bombs detonate, they emit infrared radiation on a narrow spectrum. Someone has gone and distributed very many of these bombs- in fact Billions of them, if not many, many more- through the chromosphere of a main sequence star. When these bombs are all simultaneously detonated, they will trigger a nova-like explosion, producing a devastating shock wave.
These are some issues I’ve got when trying to make sense of this:
The individual bombs are not particularly powerful. On the other hand, they can continue emiting for days. They are hot enough to melt steel within seconds of contact; for example they are susceptible to china syndrome. I need a number to describe their energy output, a number to describe how hot things get around one of them in a terrestrial atmosphere, and- assuming they emit for 24 hours to trigger the nova- a number to describe about how many of them are in this star. It is okay if that last number is very, very large- constructing and placing all the bombs is the job of the phlebotinum.
It has occured to me that any explosion powerful enough to force a nova-like explosion in a main-sequence star may be either (A) more powerful than the nova it produces, making the whole operation somewhat silly or (B) doomed to produce a full-blown supernova (-like explosion) which doesn’t invalidate the plot device (and in some ways makes it work better) but does require retooling of associated plot points in my story.
How quickly will this shockwave move through the star system? How much damage will it do? Will the star’s planets be ripped apart or merely stripped of their atmospheres? Would a starship meeting the blast be incinerated by the radiation or carried along by the shockwave?
What sort of stellar object might a main-sequence star forced to nova reasonably be expected to leave behind?
The closest life-bearing planet to this star is important to the story, and the plot dictates that it is ‘a relatively short distance away’. Since I haven’t determined the abundance of life-bearing planets or the upward speed limit of FTL in this universe, that could be anything. Given that the exact power of this nova is really vague, what’s a minimum safe distance from the nova for the life-bearing planet and how many stars might be found along a straight line between the two of them?
I hope this problem is at least a little bit entertaining even if nobody has any idea what the answers are. Again, any help will be very much appreciated.
I’m not an engineer nor an astronomer.
But I read a lot of science fiction.
While it is good that you are earnestly tryimg to be accurate, nothing slows down a story like a lengthy explanation. The vast majority of your readers want character and plot development.
So be like Star Trek - simply announce a matter transmitter and faster than light travel.
Or EE ‘Doc’ Smith’ producing first impenetrable armour - then unstoppable forces - then a new, improved impenetrable armour …
In your case the paragraph “There’s these Applied Phlebotinum bombs. When the bombs detonate, they emit infrared radiation on a narrow spectrum. Someone has gone and distributed very many of these bombs- in fact Billions of them, if not many, many more- through the chromosphere of a main sequence star. When these bombs are all simultaneously detonated, they will trigger a nova-like explosion, producing a devastating shock wave.” is excellent*.
It explains all the reader needs to know, builds up the excitement and gets the reader thinking "Who put those bombs there? What do they want? Who can disarm them?
Also don’t worry about how many planets would ‘typically’ be present. Just tell us!
If you want to see how it’s done, read the first three ‘Foundation’ series by Isaac Asimov. He keeps the plot moving (he doesn’t explain any science), introduces characters we identify with and has Galactic-wide action - all written in the 50’s!
*I’d edit your paragraph slightly:
“When a billion Applied Phlebotinum bombs detonate, they trigger a nova-like explosion, producing a devastating shock wave. Someone has distributed that many bombs in the star Alpha. This threatens all life on our planet!”
Glee I really appreciate your input but my post was not an excerpt from a draft. I was trying to boil down the plot device without including anything from the story, for the benefit of anyone with enough background in astronomy to help me. I certainly don’t intend to have one of the characters spell out the entire situation in one expository speech- in fact much of the story revolves around slowly figuring out what’s peculiar about the star and why it’s important.
I’m still slowly working through various bits of literature on stars, and the reason they aren’t helping me enough is that real life novae and supernovae are complex processes developing over millions of years. For example, the entire issue of core collapse in Type II supernovae is totally irrelevant to my story’s artificial explosion- but core collapse is the focus of many articles on supernovae. At the moment I’m trying to find pertinent information by reading up on star collisions.
It’s necessary that I have this central plot device worked out in advance because, as I too read a lot of science fiction, I know what a wall-banger it can be when the reader notices an irreconcilable scientific plot hole. It wasn’t until I was working on this thread that I realized the possibility of the nova nuking the other star in the story- I’d just been thinking of it as a weapon for destroying everything in one star system. If nothing else, laying out the issue for this thread has helped me think it through.
Speaking of Asimov, part of this story I’m hoping to write was actually inspired by his Pâté de Foie Gras.
Ah, but your typical SF reader happily accepts things not invented yet, or that are impossible according to our present knowledge. I appreciate that you are worthily trying to avoid goofs, but I’m still convinced that the plot, phrasing and characters are far more important than the science.
After all, how many people here (on a very knowledgeable board ) are able to answer your questions? How many (less knowing) readers will know whether your science is feasible?
(If you don’t get an answer here and still want one, you could try www.badastronomer.com )
glee, read some Larry Niven and Arthur C. Clarke and come back to us. Your suggestions make for bad science fiction, and I don’t think you’ve discovered Hard SF yet.
I’ve read a lot of Niven, thank you, including engineering discussions on how the Ringworld can be viewed as a suspension bridge with no endpoints. Or how teleportation would affect society, depending on the distance that could be travelled.
I note that Arthur C. Clarke discovered the geo-stationary satellite, yet strangely he fails to explain how Bowman travels across the Galaxy, nor how he is transformed, nor how monoliths reproduce themselves.
My point was that you shouldn’t clutter up a story with lengthy explanations and that plot, phrasing and characters are far more important than the science.
Perhaps **you ** should discover good writing. :smack:
Right, explaining everything is tiresome and explicitly what the OP has said he does not want to do. However, there is a large difference between explaining the mechanism in the story, and doing behind-the-scenes work to make sure that what you put in is accurate. I remember in Expanded Universe, Heinlein talks about how, for one of his stories, he and his wife spent 3 days independently working on a ballistic mechanics problem; all that effort went into a single line of text. The idea isn’t to show the reader you know what you’re talking about, it’s to make sure that readers who do know what you’re talking about can be satisfied that what you’ve set up is feasible.
If you haven’t already, you might want to read Charles Sheffield’s books Aftermath and Starfire. They deal with the effects, on Earth, of one of the Alpha Centauri stars going nova; the second one in particular deals with the issue of forcing a star to go nova. It’s not exactly like your idea, but it might help, and Sheffield was actually a physicist, so it’s not like he’s just making everything up.
One thing I can suggest: don’t read 50-year-old science fiction and expect to function in today’s world. Read today’s science fiction.
As for your bombs, well, as a reader these would be my thoughts.
If you have spaceships capable of operating in the heat, gravity, and radiation well of a sun, and if you have bombs capable of operating in the heat, gravity, and radiation well of a sun, and if you have the capacity to manufacture and transport billions of bombs, and if you can build bombs strong enough to counteract a sun of all things, and if you can do all this without anybody noticing the fantastic amount of activity…
Then, Why not just bomb the planet?
It would be, literally, a billion times easier. And it would get around the sheer movie-style impossibility of your entire notion.
See, that’s the kind of question you need to ask yourself when writing. Why are your characters doing things the impossible way when the easy way is right at hand?
As you describe it the phlebotinum bombs release thermal energy into the star’s outer layers gradually over a course of days. While solar physics is not my field, it would seem to me that this would have the effect of causing the outer gas layers to heat up and expand, producing a massive outgassing of plasma, effectively a solar flare across the entire surface of the star at once. I would expect the outpouring to move at a speed comparable to a high-energy CME, perhaps a few thousand kilometers per second. That’ll reach planets in likely life-bearing orbits around that star within probably not more than a few hours. Planets in orbits around other stars won’t even notice - the physical shock wave would take hundreds or thousands of years to reach them, and by the time it did it would be far too widely spread to have any effect.
The rapid expansion of the star’s outer layers will cause the pressure in the star’s core to decrease, which will greatly decrease the star’s fusion output. So rather than a nova-like explosion, the star will actually get dimmer after the initial flare. Then the cooling gas will fall inwards, re-igniting the fusion. It’ll probably take a few centuries of erratic pulsing and flaring for the star to return to normal, steady-state operation. People in adjacent star systems will have something interesting to watch through telescopes, but won’t be in any danger.
However if there is only a tiny number of readers who understand the science, it seems unwise for a new writer (I assume Strain of Thought is not experienced) to spend literally days researching rather than developing the plot + characters.
Plus an SF story usually has some (currently unknown) scientific advance, which cannot be challenged.
Finally every good story demands interesting and believable plot characters and phrasing (read Rex Stout on the placing of paragraphs, for example). I think it is putting the cart before the horse to put anything else before mastering these.
Come on, guys. The OP isn’t asking for a lesson on how to write science fiction. These are extremely direct questions, and I’m interested in learning the answer too. Can’t we just focus on those very specific questions, rather than try to teach Strain of Thought on how to write?
Imagine watching a billion butterflies fly into orbit around the earth and have each explode a firecracker. Now imagine that causing the earth’s core to vaporize.
It’s not remotely scientifically feasible, no matter how much handwaving you do. The butterflies aren’t possible, the firecrackers aren’t possible, the vaporizing isn’t possible.
The OPs scenario is similarly impossible. Nobody writes science fiction like that. Comic books, maybe. Movies, possibly. But there’s no point in trying to come up with numbers for real print sf. You can’t defeat ignorance by contributing to it.
One explanation that makes sense is if you had some technology that isn’t very powerful in itself, but could trigger a huge explosion if seeded into the sun. Something like being able to shoot a missile into the sun containing a proton-decay catalyst, or some strange matter.
Yea, even with phlebotinum, I can’t really see it happening. A nova or supernova happen either when enough mass accumulates to trigger a nuclear reaction, or a star runs out of fuel and collapses in on itself (thus creating enough heat and density to create a reaction).
So pumping energy into a star wouldn’t create either case (and is actually counter productive in the latter scenario).
) are able to answer your questions? How many (less knowing) readers will know whether your science is feasible?