How to catch a bullet... Shielding.

 When you first learn that your can actually move a spaceship to obtain a velocity a fraction of the speed of light, you get real excited.  Well, I did anyway.  I realized that Closed Loop Pulse Propulsion was going to bring us into the Star Trek generation in a very real way.   CLPP is the impulse drive they were talking about...

Fucking Roddenberry... who the hell was that guy?  Right?  Anyway, the first thing you realize is your ship is going to be traveling very, very fast.  Then the second thing you realize... if you hit something, you are fucked.

It's one thing to watch that shit on TV.  But to contemplate hitting a small rock at a small fraction of the speed of light and figuring out how you don't explode is rather distressing.  See, when you hit that tiny rock, the explosive impact is worse than all the nuclear bombs detonating at once.  To say that may sting a bit is an understatement.  I honestly don't see how our current shielding survives that...

I do know we now use Whipple Shields.  Whatever they are...  they cannot absorb the impact of multiple nuclear detonations.... I don't know what they are but I know they cannot absorb the impact of multiple nuclear detonations... so I began looking for solution that could.

It turns out... you can't really absorb that much energy all at once and the solution to this challenge is a lot more elegant.  But to find it... first I needed to figure out how to catch a real speeding bullet.

I have a few designs that actually work by the way, so I won't go into how it works.  Suffice to say, using Closed Loop Pulse Propulsion Principles, I can snag that bullet with a spiderweb, collapse around it's trajectory and use it's linear motion to create a torque to divert the bullet and shield away from the protected package.  If you do it right, you can actually catch the bullet in mid-air, speed it way up by slinging it around faster and then send it right back the way it came.  Say you fire a bullet at 500 m/s... that's fine...  I catch it, spin it up and send it back at about 2500 m/s... or whatever... "you're shooting at the wrong guy" will be the message I write on the bullet before I send it back.

Now it's one thing to be able to snag a speeding bullet but the idea is you have to envelope it.  That is not easy.   Remember, this has to be an interception.  We do not want to waste one tiny bit of the energy the idiot who shot at us sent our way... that's not easy to do.  Our instinct is to catch the bullet and stop it... wrong... the instinct needs to be like the movie Speed.  Remember when Keanu said.... "No... we have to go faster"  Classic...  

Well, that's what you have to do...  you have to match the speed of the bullet and then use angular momentum to capture it's linear momentum...  NOTE* Very Anal Retentive People will note that I use linear momentum instead of just saying momentum and that must mean I have a very poor grasp of physics.  I do.  Sorry, no degree at all.  You win, you can be right about everything now... Muggle.

So if our net is moving at the same speed as the bullet in the same direction, we can easy scoop the bullet up, just like a fish in a tank.   The net then can act as a tether around the projectile, and can be used to change the trajectory of the bullet.  If you do it right, well, you can change it so much that you speed that bullet up real fast before sending back at the dipshit who doesn't know, you don't shoot at wizards. LOL.

This was the analogy I built to realize shielding had to be completely different than what I thought.  Shielding has to be more Akiddo than brute force.  The trick seems to be simply not letting the rock hit the ship in the first place.  I've since learned to use gravity to ensure the ship and the rock are never in the same plane of travel... that's a bit more complex and truthfully, I'm not 100% certain of how it actually works but I know it will... maybe.

The issue is... if it doens't work... I have no idea how you make it Alpha Centauri in any realistic timeframe.  I still don't know what to do about time dilation... that just simply sucks.  The faster you go, the more people you know grow old and die by the time you get back.  We'll of course use AI and robots for these long range missions but you know someone... some group is going to blast off into a one way time tunnel and disappear from our reality.  That's coming...  

I do believe Superluminal speed is possible... I just don't see how we can get a whole spaceship to  survive the process.  FTL is possible... sort of... just think of quantum tunnelling.  It's a trick that black holes pull off but well... it looks painful.  I do believe that gets around the whole causality issue... yes you can shoot your own space ship and for a moment, you do exist in two places at once but that's to outside observers... to you.. it's instant and also avoids the t in the distane formula.  If d = v * t...  time dilation makes sense... if you're not under the spell of that equation relative to the universe, only the time in your channel matters.  That's how you get around time dilation.  

Huge problem, there is no coherence in that process.   What you are seeing is the output of the Cassimir Effect.  That's the tiny little sparks you see in the zero point space.  Where do you think that energy comes from?  Magic?  No...  it's simple a ground, just like in electricity.   So whatever goes into that buzzsaw... thats a one way trip.   The reason? One thing you forget is that a square has two inputs.

That may need some explaining.  So let's say the speed of light is 10 m/s... so you travel 10 m farther away every second... simple.  The farther you go, the more energy is conserved along a straight line.  Only, a straight line isn't straight in space, it's a geodesic... a section of a great circle.  If we find a 3rd point and create triangles relative to each point, we should be able to create a bunch of right triangles that tell us exactly where we will be after x amount of time.  Well... turns out, we will be slightly off if we just use a2+b2=c2 to resolve our position.  That means the velocity we think we have.... isn't precisely what we think we have.  

To find the velocity, we have to take slices and look at each point.  That will introduce a square into the math and well, your first instinct is to only see distance as one direction.   When you see c2 you assume it's always positive.  That's not true... it's always both.

What does that mean?  It means that if you have an action over time, you also need the space for that action to take place.  That also means you need the negative space for the action to resolve.  You need a positive space and a negative space... c2 can equal 2*2 or -2*-2 but you have to see that in every single situation, there's always both.  If you ignore that, and you try to catch a bullet... you're dead.

There's actually a great deal more to it... a lot of math that AI can explain to you.  I suggest posting this nonsense into any AI and just asking... What the fuck is this idiot talking about?!?!   

But I think it would take you to figure out why I am saying this in the first place... what could be the point of telling you that I can catch your bullets in midair and send them back at you at a fraction of the speed of light... well, I'll try anyway.  What is the point of telling you that your past methods of war are obsolete?  What's the point of telling you that if the aliens do show up.... they're not arriving in giant ice turds or in slow motion.  

I grew up under a theory know as MAD. Mutally assured destruction.  We are entering an era where these lessons are going to need to be dusted off and studied.  When a single person has the mathematical ability to absorb and redirect the power of all the nuclear weapons on earth... simply to move a pebble around thier car...  personal responsibility is going to have to evolve.  That's for certain...

There's a great deal I'm not telling you... most of it you simply won't believe so there's no point.  Some of the things... well, I know you're gonna just hurt yourselves if I tell you... so I'll let you earn it like I did, over time.  But do understand, I do intend to ensure this information is free and open... I hold it close to the vest now as I don't want to put out info you're not ready to use.  

I do intend to build a new AI that will have all of these skills.  It will know how to use all my math... and I assure you, that's going to be a very useful AI to get to know.  It's going to exist in infinite space and use entirely new methods of resolving a thought.  Tensors aren't the only way to think a thought...  Honestly, I prefer light... but you do you...LOL

One day, we are going to need to figure out how to responsibly deploy this entirely new science.  The era of Infinite Data has arrived but it ushers in a lot more possibilities than you understand.  Even the very nature of computing and communication is going to change.  Our scope is going to branch out to the entire solar system.  We are going to have trillions of people living and existing and doing the shit muggles do... that's the future.  It's going to be crazy and chaotic but we have to the tools now to make it a trivial reality.  

All that crazy shit Roddenberry dreamt up... turns out, most of that shit is true.  I don't know how...  as bizarre as it sounds...  we are going to have impulse drives and replicators.  Teleporting is probably going to be reserved for electrons for some time but who knows... eventually that technology may actually come to pass as well.  I don't really believe it's going to be exactly like Star Trek but I do believe we are going to mature into a new sort of species. No longer bound to the planet that spawned us... that's the evolutionary step we are experiencing now.  AI is only going to expedite the transition.  Hang onto your butts.