Today’s article is sci-fi in orientation but fantasy GMs should stick around, there’s stuff for you too before I’m done. In a similar way, this is all about “world” design, but the techniques can be applied elsewhere, for example, adventure creation. So Buckle Up, we’re about to take a wild ride together.

Whether the tech in your campaign is new-school, old-school, or something else entirely, this article might be of value to you.
Image 1: spaceship-1516139 by Gerhard Bögner
Image 2: rocket-2265040.png by Alexander Antropov
Image 3: m5-hovercar-5029121.jpg by Paul Birman
Image 4: dragon-4425077.jpg by Xandra Iryna Rodríguez,
all from Pixabay.

Theory / Concept -> Alternatives -> Implications & Applications

I’ve mentioned in passing, in multiple posts, the notion that designing a campaign should involve central concepts that make the campaign unique, with various game elements being customized to accord with that theory.

The races and character classes in D&D being one example. I find that some are more easily altered than others, though. Elves and Orcs are more amenable to change than, say, Halflings. Changes to the (usually unstated) underlying question of how magic works directly affect Wizards and Sorcerers and sometimes Clerics. Different answers to the question “What are the Gods” directly impact Clerics and often Paladins. And so on.

I’ve also talked about considering alternatives and looking for ways that such conceptual elements can interact in interesting ways when choosing between them can produce uniqueness that is greater than the sum of its parts, and the pyramid of design (most recently, for example, in AI Miseducation and Rehabilitation).

In discussing the Rings Of Time campaign, I make the point that notes on concepts that weren’t chosen should never be thrown away, as you never know when they will come in handy. Or maybe I’m the only person who ever gets asked to create a new campaign at the drop of a hat?

In a nutshell, circumstances arose in which I was asked to throw a campaign together at zero notice, and was able to do so using concepts that were discarded when developing my Fumanor campaigns.

So the design work done to investigate and select campaign concepts is never wasted in the long run even if that particular alternative to a “Big Design Question” (see my early post at Campaign Mastery, A Quality Of Spirit – Big Questions in RPGs) doesn’t get used in the specific campaign for which the options were considered.

You have to do at least some of the design work to choose between the alternatives, and the work done on rejected concepts is not only good practice, but can be regarded as an investment in future campaigns. I may not have a D&D campaign that’s running right now, but I’m perpetually coming up with a stockpile of campaign concepts to put toward the next one, if and when they are needed.

(Wow, for a sci-fi oriented post, there’s been a lot of stuff about Fantasy so far! Bear with me, almost there).

The Asimov Inspiration

One of the books that I’m currently reading is a collection of non-fiction articles by the late Isaac Asimov, in which one article discusses the units of energy and work and force and so on. At one point, he casually uses Gravity as an example of a Force with which we’re all familiar, and that happened to connect with a thought about artificial gravity (often used in sci-fi settings) and anti-gravity (ditto), specifically giving rise to a number of alternative concepts of how those might work in a sci-fi setting.

I didn’t want to throw away the ideas, even half-formed and half-baked as they were, for the reasons described earlier. But instead of simply filing them away in my campaign notes somewhere, I decided that they would make the foundations of a great article illustrating the processes involved, so I’m sharing them here for anyone to use.

Gravitic Engineering

The skills system in my superhero RPG rules is the most comprehensive that I’ve ever seen, anywhere. One of the skills is “Gravitic Engineering”, and it covers the application of “Gravitics” (short for “Gravitic Physics”) which – in turn – is all about the Science of Gravity. You with me so far?

“Gravitic Engineering” takes “Gravitic Physics” and applies it to create ‘mechanisms’ (generic term) for the creation and manipulation of Artificial Gravity and Anti-Gravity, which are described as two mutually-incompatible technologies that have to work in harmony to create the sort of dog-fights in space that you see in Star Wars, which are what I wanted to embed in the superhero rules.

Simply put, the two applications are so fundamentally opposed that the interaction between both is a specialist field within super-science / future science engineering.

And, along the way, they help explain superheroic Flight, leading to more of those dog-fights being inherently part of the game universe – a nice bonus!

A Warning to those who take their Science seriously

I’m not a physicist. My state of knowledge is more or less at the level of the “rubber sheet” theory of gravity; I know that this has been superseded, and was never anything more than a metaphor to describe how physicists thought Gravity and the Theory Of Relativity worked in the first place.

None of the content is intended to be serious or even hard science in any realistic sense. I’m not aiming for that; what I want is credible-sounding technobabble that is internally consistent, nothing more.

At best, you might describe it as pseudo-science, if I were to take it seriously – which I don’t. So any responses of “gravity doesn’t work like that, and here’s a more up-to-date understanding of the physics” are missing the point, okay?

What Is Gravity?

I’ve never pretended that the Campaign Physics embedded within the game system held all the answers. Originally written in the mid-1980s, though, it stood up for twenty-odd years before research and theoretical physics discovered something that wasn’t compatible with it (and I forget what that something was). It was written to describe the “state of the art” of science available to super-scientists within the game world in a supplement to the campaign background.

In fact, it was written to be one step beyond the super-science available in-game at the time, but the campaign’s super-scientists quickly caught up over the next 10 years or so of game-play. It’s been extended multiple times along different vectors in the course of many adventures as a result.

One of the ideas that I had, and immediately fell in love with, was the notion that there were two mutually-incompatible theories of gravity, and each of them led to practical engineering outcomes that proved that theory to be correct. According to the other theory, the engineering shouldn’t work – but in both cases, it does.

No-one has any idea of how to square the circle and unify the two theories.

Artificial Gravity

Artificial Gravity represents a divorce between Mass and the Gravitic Attraction that mass creates, enabling that attraction to become much stronger than the mass normally possesses. It permits people to walk around normally within a microgravitic environment such as a starship or space station.

Gravity is normally a pretty weak force, in fact it’s the weakest of them. It takes the mass of the whole of planet earth to create a 1G environment at the earth’s surface. Since E=mc^2, it takes a huge amount of energy, correctly applied, to substitute for Gravity. Apply that much energy incorrectly and most things simply cease to exist for all practical purposes.

The solution to being able to turn gravity on and off with a switch is to use a smaller amount of energy to act as a lever or catalyst, creating a disproportionate effect for the amount of energy pumped into the system – there’s no other practical answer.

Explaining Artificial Gravity (let alone manufacturing some engineering solution to actually use it) requires explaining exactly how this works, and where the energy that is ‘triggered’ comes from, and why it doesn’t blow the object experiencing or creating the artificial gravity to smithereens.

Anti-Gravity

Anti-Gravity means turning off or turning down the natural gravitic attraction between two objects. Which sounds simple enough on the face of it, but the doing is a great deal more complicated. If you have anti-gravity of some sort, then you can fly, lift heavy objects as though they were much lighter, and so on. In particular, they let you accelerate at ridiculous (and normally lethal) rates, achieving much higher speeds in a short period of time than would otherwise be possible.

Quite often, the existence of an Anti-gravity is implied in a game setting without ever being explicitly stated and without the ramifications and other applications being properly explored. For example, in Traveller, the time it takes to move around within a solar system is ridiculously short – less than a handful of days is usually enough to get from the outer solar system (Neptune / Uranus / Saturn) to the Inner (Mars / Earth / Venus / Mercury).

(It can be argued that the Jump Drives that enable Interstellar FTL in that game system impart enough velocity to make such travel times possible – but that then requires you to be able to slow down from such speeds in that sort of time-frame or less without reducing the crew to strawberry jam on the bulkheads – it’s exactly the same problem all over again, just in a different direction).

Things begin to grow even more complicated when you consider properties such as Inertia and Momentum. Consider: you use artificial gravity to pick up something weighing a lot, and then throw it at something else. Does it hit the target with the impact that it’s true mass says it should, or with the impact that goes with it’s apparent mass? I would argue the latter. But then, what if at some point before it gets to its target, the anti-gravity gets switched off? Does it fall to the ground short of the target? (arguably, yes). And if it hits the target anyway, what is the impact like? (I would argue that it’s velocity instantly slows, proportionate to the change in apparent mass, because conserving momentum in this way is a lot simpler to understand than having momentum appear out of nowhere).

So there are a lot of interactions with classical physics that need to get explained.

On top of that:

Anti-Gravitic Polarization

The key to using both at the same time is to have the anti-gravity only apply to gravity being experienced in a specific direction (that of or opposing the ship’s thrust). Without that, you can have artificial gravity but can’t use it at the same time as you’re using anti-grav; the two are mutually incompatible.

Which requires some explanation of how this is possible. And of what happens at the fringes when the two rub shoulders.

The Rubber Sheet, distended by Mass

Before we can tackle those complicated questions, we need some sort of working understanding of what gravity is, beyond “it’s what makes things fall down”.

The classical post-einsteinian description is that the universe is like a multidimensional rubber mat along the surface of which, things move. The mass of objects causes the mat to deform, or maybe the existence of the objects causes the mat to deform, creating the mass (the difference between the two descriptions might become important, deeper down the rabbit hole).

Objects in motion are effectively pulled toward valleys and pushed away from peaks, just like a ball rolling over uneven ground.

As descriptive analogies go, this isn’t bad – most people can picture a ball rolling over uneven ground and get a feel for what Gravity does, even if they don’t understand how or why.

Achieving Arti-G and Anti-G – the simplified models

Artificial Gravity can be thought of as amplifying an existing gravitic attraction – in a specific direction. Yep, there’s polarization again.

Here’s a cross-section of a basic corridor:



It’s a simple square. If we assume that there’s an object in the ‘middle’ of that corridor, like this:



…then it can be seen that each of the four walls will have roughly the same attractive power on the object (and vice-versa).



If we attach a body to that object that extends toward one of the four walls, then proximity causes that wall to have a slightly greater attractive effect – but it doesn’t matter which of the walls we’re talking about.



Eventually, if acted upon by nothing else, things will come to rest against whichever of the four walls happens to be closest to the object’s center of gravity.

With artificial gravity, everything changes. One direction becomes down, and massively, dominantly, overwhelmingly so. We might be talking 1/500th of a G up and to either side, and 1G ‘down’ – a 500-to-1 ratio. So our rubber sheet gets far more deeply deformed in that one direction.

There are three parts of the reality that can be altered to achieve this: either the properties of the sheet itself (I know, I’ll come to that shortly); the properties of the object being affected; or the properties of the interaction.

A little thought will show that the same three options apply to anti-gravity as well.

Adapted from Image by [[:en:User:{{{1}}}|{{{1}}}]] aka Tompw at the English-language Wikipedia and used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Mass and the deformation of space-time

Oversimplifying, Mass Creates Gravity, right?

Actually…

sorta…

ummm, no.

The 64 million dollar question is does mass cause the deformation of space-time — or does some other attribute of an object cause the deformation, and we then interpret the consequences of that deformation as ‘Mass” and “Gravity” (the first being a measure of the degree of deformation, and the second being the strength of the interaction between two deformations and the impact on the motion of objects)?

No-one knows. Occam’s razor means the first is the popularly-accepted view just because it’s simpler, but when you try to dig into the mechanisms by which these phenomena operate, that simplicity vanishes.

So let’s go right back to the basics. What is 1G? We all know that, right?

1G

That’s the force of gravity that we experience at the surface of the earth, 9.8 meters per second per second, expressed as the acceleration created by the Force, right?

Umm, not so fast.

If the earth was made of completely uniform materials, and wasn’t lumpy, then yes.

Neither of those things are true. The gravity at the top of a mountain is ever-so-slightly less than at sea level, which is ever-so-slightly less than at the bottom of a hole – the deeper the hole, the greater (in relative terms) the difference. Heck, even ‘sea level’ poses a problem – with waves and tides, the sea is anything but level!

What’s more, the earth isn’t quite a perfect sphere – it bulges outward at the equator just a little and is squashed just a little along the axis of rotation.

An on top of that, some natural materials are more dense than others. If there’s a large lump of high-density material, it will create a slightly greater gravitic force. The closer to the surface / point of measurement, the more pronounced this effect. And the materials of which mountains are made are some of the highest-density types of rock.

These two facts are fighting each other, everywhere on Earth. 9.8 m/s^2 is an overall average, good enough for most uses – but there are times when it’s an oversimplification.



This Image is a frame extracted from an animation created by NASA and therefore in the public domain according to the terms of the NASA copyright policy page. Wikipedia Commons then provides a long list of caveats and warnings, refer to the image link above before re-using it..

Combine them, and exaggerate to make the consequences visible, and the effect is rather profound, as shown to the right. This view is of the North American side of the planet, the lump you can see in the lower left is Australia, from whence I write. Hawaii looks like a volcano (upper middle left)!



Image taken from Lunar Gravity Model 2011, which was licensed by the author(s), Geodesy2000, under the terms of the the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license. I have reorganized the images into a vertical orientation and re-sized them. Follow the image link provided to access the unaltered image, which is available in much higher resolutions than that shown here. I am unsure of the meaning of the caption but have left it unchanged.

Lunar Mascons

Things get even more extreme on the Moon, first because it’s so much smaller, and second because there is greater variation of density. In fact, the moon is “the most gravitationally ‘lumpy’ major body [currently] known in the Solar System” according to Wikipedia.

The mascons (mass concentrations) have been known to play havoc with lunar orbits, which “alter the local gravity above and around them sufficiently that low and uncorrected lunar orbits of satellites around the Moon are unstable on a timescale of months or years. The small perturbations in the orbits accumulate and eventually distort the orbit enough for the satellite to impact the surface” (same source).

The moon in fact has only four orbital “channels” which may be employed with any expectation of orbital stability. Outside of these channels, the largest mascons “can cause a plumb bob to hang about a third of a degree off vertical, pointing toward the mascon, and increase the force of gravity by one-half percent” (same source).

Implications

So no, we can’t even be certain of what “1G” means. The 9.8 m/s^2 value (which I think – from memory – translates into 32 ft/s^2) is nothing more than a convenient approximation.

What can be said is that using the net Mass of an object only gives such an approximation; what really should be used is the global sum of density multiplied by volume, and that’s an important clue to how Gravity works.

What determines the density of a substance?

The chemical structure of the substance causes it to have a particular molecular shape. That shape is the result of the configuration of electrons into electron shells of the constituent elements, which in turn are a consequence of the number of electrons the element has.

The number of electrons, in turn, has to match the number of protons in the atomic nucleus. This combination is such a definitively fundamental value that changing it transforms one element into another, completely changing its chemical profile.

There are two types of arrangements – ones in which an electron is donated by one atom to another to create a covalent bond between them; this creates relatively loose molecular structures, which in turn have lower densities than the alternative.

The other arrangement ‘shares’ electrons with neighboring atoms in search of a stable configuration, which requires the atoms to pack together in a more compact molecular structure. Crystalline structures like graphite, diamond, metallic substances, and the like, all depend on this type of structure and cause them to have significantly higher densities (and higher melting and boiling points, amongst other characteristics).

So it’s the number of protons that is important?

Kinda, sorta. The nucleus of an atom of a particular substance has a number of protons that is definitive of that element, but these all have the same electrical charge, which is trying to make the nucleus fly apart. Countering that is another force, but it’s not strong enough to do it without adding neutrons to the mix. These effectively ‘buffer’ the protons from each other. Adding or subtracting a neutron or two creates a different isotope of the element, each of which has a different level of stability; if there are too many or too few neutrons, the nucleus doesn’t hold together strongly enough, and it becomes prone to shedding parts of itself, process known as radioactive decay (that’s all a slight oversimplification, but it’s close enough for us to work on).

So what’s the difference between a proton and neutron?

A proton consists of two up quarks and one down quark. These have electrostatic charges of +2/3e and -1/3e each, respectively. Calculate 2/3 + 2/3 – 1/3 and you end up with 3/3. But the quarks themselves contribute less than 1% to the mass of the nucleus; the rest exists in the form of quantum chronodynamics binding energy, which includes the kinetic energy of the quarks and the energy of the gluon fields that bind the quarks together.

A neutron consists of one up quark and two down quarks, with electrostatic charges as given previously. 2/3 – 1/3 – 1/3 = 0 electrical charge. Again, most of the mass of the neutron comes from the energy being used to hold it together. So, if gravity is lurking anywhere, it’s in this binding energy and intrinsic to the atomic structures of the molecules of the substance.

To look any deeper, we really need to go back a step and think about the traits that are common to forces, and what a force really is.

Forces Of Nature

There are five principle forces of nature – Electrostatic, Magnetic, Weak Nuclear, Strong Nuclear, Gravity. There are other things like friction and centripetal motion that are also labeled as forces but that are not actually considered the same thing as these five; these days, they are labeled “Fictitious Forces” or “pseudo forces”; they arise from the interaction of frames of reference where one is accelerating relative to the other.

The fundamental definition of a ‘real Force’ is “an influence that can cause an object to change it’s velocity, ie create an acceleration. Velocity can be thought of as “speed in a specific direction”, so causing it to change direction counts, even if the speed of travel remains the same..

• Electrostatic Force is caused by interactions in the static electric charges of two bodies. If the right electrostatic materials are connected by a conductor, a current or dynamic electrical energy flows along that conductor.
• Magnetic Force is caused by magnetic fields interacting. If you move a conductor through a magnetic field, it induces a current to flow through the conductor. This was discovered at more or less the same time as it was found that a chemically-generated electric current creates a magnetic field.
• The Strong Nuclear Force holds atomic nuclei together. As it became clearer that the components of the nucleus were either neutrally-charged or had the same charge, and therefore repelled each other, it became obvious that some force had to be resisting and overcoming this repulsion. This is also the force that has to be overcome during nuclear fission and fusion.
• Weak Nuclear Force is what holds particles together. It causes radioactivity.
• Gravity is the attraction of one mass to another. It’s the oldest of the forces and superficially – in practical terms – the best understood. It’s also the least understood when you dig into the fundamentals of why it works.

Combination Theory

First, Electrical and Magnetic forces were combined into one force, Electromagnetism, by the work of James Clerk Maxwell, in 1864.

The concept that what had been considered two separate forces was actually just two different modes of expression of the more fundamental Electromagnetic Force, struck the world of classical physics like a lightning bolt; it became one of the most cherished goals of modern physics to complete the task of unifying everything into one unified field theory that explained, well everything.

The next force to succumb was the Weak Nuclear Force, which was combined with the Electromagnetic to create the Electroweak force.

Finally, quantum theory brought the Strong Force into the fold – kinda, sorta. You don’t have to read very far into the subject to discover that it’s really complicated down in the nitty-gritty details. For example, within a certain distance, the Strong Force attracts particles, but beyond that distance, it repels – so it keeps nuclei discrete from each other.

The presence and behavior of the strong force depends on multiple factors including the spins of protons and neutrons amongst others. These days, the fundamental forces are described as “Interactions”, each of which has one or more particles that interacts with the particles that experience the forces. It is often said that the “interactive particles” carry the forces.

The electromagnetic force is ‘carried’ by the photon, which “creates electric and magnetic fields, which are responsible for the attraction between orbital electrons and atomic nuclei which holds atoms together, as well as chemical bonding and electromagnetic waves, including visible light, and forms the basis for electrical technology.” — Wikipedia, Fundamental interaction.

The weak interaction is “carried by particles called W and Z bosons, and also acts on the nucleus of atoms, mediating radioactive decay.”

The strong interaction is “carried by a particle called the gluon and is responsible for quarks binding together to form hadrons, such as protons and neutrons. As a residual effect, it creates the nuclear force that binds the latter particles to form atomic nuclei.

There is also a fifth force described by quantum theory – or more properly, has been proposed to explain certain anomalies and breakdowns of the current theory. This is theoretically possible but unproven, and the characteristics of this fifth force are inconsistent; this is one of the cutting edge areas of research in physics. The anomalies are enough to show that current theory is incomplete; “fifth forces” are speculative attempts to plug the gap.

Gravity is the outlier. Currently attributed to the curvature of spacetime, described by Einstein’s general theory of relativity, i.e. the ‘rubber sheet’ that we have been discussing.

Physicists detest outliers. Another of those cutting edge problems is to make Gravity a force like the others. Amongst other things, that requires a particle to carry the force – one that has never been observed in nature, called the Graviton.

Gravitons

Scientists have been looking for the fabled Graviton, and determining what its characteristics would have to be, since the 1930s. So far, it’s proven a stubborn nut to crack. As of right now, its existence is purely hypothetical.

But, if it exists, it defines that interaction between two objects that causes the effect we observe as Gravity.

The Wikipedia page linked to, above, is both fascinating and frustrating. You can skim over the technical terminology to get an overall sense of the concept, but can’t escape the sense that you’re missing something. Maybe that’s because the theory has been unproven for so long, and it’s not you that’s “missing something” as a reader, but the scientists concerned – and you, as a reader, are simply reacting to their sense of a gap in the theory.

“The Graviton plays a role in general relativity, in defining the spacetime in which events take place. In some descriptions energy modifies the “shape” of spacetime itself, and gravity is a result of this shape, an idea which at first glance may appear hard to match with the idea of a force acting between particles.” — From that page.

“Unambiguous detection of individual Gravitons, though not prohibited by any fundamental law, is impossible with any physically reasonable detector. The reason is the extremely low cross section for the interaction of Graviton with matter. For example, a detector with the mass of Jupiter and 100% efficiency, placed in close orbit around a neutron star, would only be expected to observe one Graviton every 10 years, even under the most favorable conditions. It would be impossible to discriminate these events from the background of neutrinos, since the dimensions of the required neutrino shield would ensure collapse into a black hole.” — same source.

Part of the problem might be in those derived traits – what if they are oversimplifications, causing us to look for Gravitons that don’t exist and wouldn’t be in the places we were looking, anyway? Whether or not this is completely or partially true, our ‘hypothetical answers’ have to explain our inability to detect them so far.

Which brings me back to the theories of gravity that I mentioned earlier in this article. These are not being proposed as real-world solutions to the problems, or as any sort of universal truth, I must again emphasize – they are, at best pseudoscience and technobabble, just reasonably well-defined examples.

Theory Of Gravity #1: Micro-wavicle Quantum Bindings

The first theory extends from the Quantum Theory described earlier. If mass derives from the interactions of the strong and weak forces, then the particles that give rise to those interactions must also yield a secondary interaction in the form of Gravitons. In particular, interactions between the Gluon that binds quantum particles together.

So Gluons experiencing the strong and weak forces create Gravity, according to this theory.

The smallest known

To start this element of the discussion, I want to draw attention to something that I came across on Quora mere minutes after reading pretty much the same thing in the Asimov book that inspired this article: Why is the Planck length the smallest measurement unit, and why [isn’t] there anything lower?

Go ahead, read it now, I’ll wait – it’s short, barely more than a screen-full.

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All done? Okay, so the proposal is this: There’s a binding sub-particle within the Gluon that is smaller than the Planck Length (i.e. impossible to observe). It has various energy states / structures similar to electron shells. When the gluon interacts with the strong and weak forces, a Graviton is emitted. These are present in huge numbers, are wavicles like photons, but very rarely interact with matter in any detectable way except en masse. They will yield to statistical modeling, however. In a nutshell, we can’t see them, but we can see the impact that they have in aggregate.

When a Graviton intersects an atomic nucleus, it’s never alone. The swarm of Graviton from this particular source interact with the Weak and Strong forces to attract the Gluons, and the particles that they hold together, in the direction from which the Gravitons came, i.e. it’s an attraction. No repulsive force is possible, because that would require the source atoms to have negative mass. The heavier the source at the macroscopic level, the more Graviton are emitted, and the more Graviton are captured. The resulting gravitational attraction is exactly what we observe at the macroscopic level.

The Graviton are absorbed by the target, forcing the sub-gluons into a more energetic state, which they spontaneously shed in the form of their own Graviton. Mass therefore creates space-time.

Engineering based on Theory #1

Pump energy into a material substance – and some are more receptive to this than others – in exactly the right way, and you artificially force the sub-gluons into a higher energy state, which leads them to both transmit and absorb more Graviton than their actual mass warrants. The result is an increased and artificial gravity that pulls objects toward the mass being “gravitationalized” (to coin a term). The gravity field is effectively polarized because it always acts in the direction of the gravitationalized mass.

The results: gravity can be increased in any desired direction through the artifice of embedding materials prone to this behavior into the surface or subsurface of the “floor”.

Engineering Structure

If this was deployed in a single strip, things would get messy, because everything would be attracted to that specific line. Unless standing right on the line, you would feel like you were leaning toward the strip, and could even overbalance and fall even though perpendicular to the broader surface. Instead, multiple strips would be laid in close proximity, running the length of the corridor or room. These don’t even have to be straight lines, they can bend to follow the curvature of a facility.

Energy

The more energy you pump in, the higher the artificial gravity. Obviously, there is some kind of limit, beyond which the Gluons can’t pump out Gravitons fast enough, and individual atoms start breaking down into their constituent particles – best to avoid that!

Beyond that, we have to consider the sheer scale of energy needs, and the practicalities of generating and shunting that much energy from source to destination, and any peculiarities of configuration involved.

Early models are likely to be highly inefficient and demand as much energy as can be delivered, probably for not a lot of result in terms of G-forces.

Both the efficiency of the artificial gravity generation and the capability of energy systems are likely to improve side-by-side for a while. Then energy systems will max out, and all improvements will come from better efficiency in converting that energy into gravity. Some of that efficiency would undoubtedly be turned toward reducing the energy demands for achieving the same result, so the energy demands would slowly reduce to the merely insane.

How much energy are we talking about? Well, 1G = 1 Earth Mass in energy, and that’s at 100% efficiency. But an earth mass would provide that gravity for something approaching eternity – we don’t need that. So we can divide by billions of years, and then 365.25, and then 24, and then 3600, to get the energy demands per second. And that will be in an uncomfortable small unit, ergs, which we then have to translate into something more useful, like Megawatts or Gigawatts.

Mass of the earth = 6 ×10^24 kg = 6 ×10^27 g.
Speed Of Light = 3 × 10^8 m/s = 3 × 10^10 cm/s
E=mc^2, so 6 ×10^27 × 3 × 10^10 × 3 × 10^10 = 6 × 9 × 10^(27+10+10) = 5.4 × 10^48.
Lifespan of the Earth = about 9 billion years or 10^10.
E/s = 10^38 ergs / year = 2.738 × 10^36 ergs / day = 1.14 × 10^35 ergs / hr
        = 3.17 × 10^31 ergs / second = 3.17×10^24 joules / second = 3.17×10^18 MJ / sec
        = 880556260000000000 kW h = 880,556,260,000 GWh.
Call it 881 Billion Gigawatts.

The largest power plant in the world today is the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Plant, delivering 7.965 GW. One hundred and eleven of those will do the job. Plus spares to allow some to be down for maintenance. This is comparable performance to what a Fusion power-plant of similar size could theoretically produce – except that the scaling of efficiency is not linear, it’s by volume. So, in theory, you could make 150 plants of 8 GW, or 1500 plants of 0.8 GW that take up 1/1000th the physical size. Let’s be cautious and call it 1% of the physical size. That means that if they were arranged and configured properly, our 1500 reactors are only 1.5 times the size of the Fission Power Plant we’re using as a standard.

Somewhere along the line there would be a sweet spot where efficiency of design is optimized; we don’t care about that. The important thing is that this sounds a heck of a lot more practical than that 881 Billion Gigawatts did.

Advancing Tech

In fact, from the time of first invention, all this represents a practical difference between tech levels – the amount of energy they can safely employ, and the resulting artificial gravity.

Some materials are likely to be prone to Graviton emission, others to Graviton reception – natural variations between atomic and chemical structures are enough to ensure this. It’s also possible that there would be variations between isotopes. That’s a LOT of combinations to try. It’s also possible that compound strips of material would be more effective than any single absorbing elements can be. On top of that, I can imagine the development of some sort of “wave guides” that use quantum effects to increase the polarization.

So there are plenty of options for future refinements in terms of describing the technology in “practical” terms, with just a little technobabble thrown in to hold it all together..

Theory Of Gravity #2: Fragmentation Of 3-Dimensional Space In 6 dimensions

This theory of gravity starts from the exact opposite theoretical foundation to the previous one, by asking, “Assuming that the deformed space-time sheet is real, where is it, why can’t we perceive it, what’s it made of, and what are its properties?”

A Separate 3-dimensional Space

The simplest answer to the third question is that it’s in a separate dimensional space that is in some way co-existent with the one that we can perceive by virtue of living within it.

One theoretical way of achieving FTL is to break the local piece of our space-time off from the main frame of reference and then accelerate that ‘local’ frame of reference in the direction we want to go, while the ship happily sits, cruising at sub-light velocities, within the local frame of reference.

This breakaway is not easy to achieve. It’s entirely possible that something like Jump Gates are needed, or perhaps there are ways for ships with sufficient internal power to create a ‘bubble’ of space-time independent of the general reference frame.

The conjoined three-dimensional space is sometimes named “subspace” even though this is a misnomer; it’s our space-time that’s a subspace within the greater existence, under this theory. Nor does it have to be the only one; this model supports branching time-lines and parallel worlds.

The maths involved is greatly simplified by assuming one temporal flow common to both, but this isn’t necessarily the case, either. The universe, after all, has no need to dumb itself down for our convenience in describing it! The physics in my superhero campaign, as has been explained in multiple other posts, assigns each ‘dimension’ its own temporal vector within a 3-dimensional temporal space; we perceive travel along that vector as the passage of time. Events within each space-time of sufficient magnitude can twist, accelerate, or decelerate travel along that vector relative to another one, giving rise to a number of transitional phenomena when traveling from one space-time to another.

I won’t go into that any further in this post; if you want to check out some of the game-world consequences, see Time Travel In RPGs, a 3-part series,

and

A Long Road: Zenith-3 Notes For All, another 3-part series (especially part 3 of the series). Be warned – Part 2 is 35,000 words and part 3 is 53,565 words!)

A Foam-like Graviton Gel with our 3-dimensional space on top

So, what’s the sheet made of? Well, actually, according to this theory, it’s just the surface of a foam-like Gel made of Gravitons. Everything above the surface is our natural space-time (or other such), which we perceive as “reality”, full of planets and stars and galaxies, matter and energy.



In addition to showing the Graviton ‘foam’, this version of the image illustrates two separate space-times – one distant and large enough for an entire galaxy and another holding a single planetary mass. To achieve this, I have added a modified version of Kised_truncated_icosahedron_spherical.png by Tomruen via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International, a foam image by Mdiproducts LLC, released into the public domain, and a view of NGC-4414 which is in the Public Domain because it was created by NASA and ESA. NASA Hubble material (and ESA Hubble material prior to 2009) is copyright-free and may be freely used as in the public domain without fee, on the condition that only NASA, STScI, and/or ESA is credited as the source of the material. [It is possible that by combining this with the other elements, I may have violated the terms under which the image has been made available, so be cautious about re-using the resulting image – but it’s a small enough element that I don’t think anyone will object].

Let’s update the “gravity well” diagram from earlier in the post (shown to the right):

 
Wow, that’s quite a startling difference, which is why I wanted to share an approximation of what I was seeing in my mind’s eye; now we’re all ‘on the same page’ in terms of visualization.

The Mass Crater of Earth

Exactly as visualized, a gravity well is a depression in the surface of the Graviton ‘gel’ caused by the mass of the object, which sinks into the foamy ‘substance’.

But Graviton don’t compress very well; at some point, the upward resistance equals the downward mass potential. The greater the surface area presented, the more opportunity the resistance has to act, so the depth of the gravity well is therefore proportional to the mass of the object divided by the surface area.

Foams are delicate. Objects with mass disrupt the foam, spraying Gravitons out into the space surrounding the mass by the billion. These Gravitons diffuse through the volume of space, carrying less collective attractive force as they spread out, so gravity gets weaker with distance.



Lunar Gravitational Attraction

These Gravitons do nothing until they intersect another mass. They then displace the Gravitons that the second mass – the moon, say – would otherwise be spraying. This forces the displaced Gravitons to fire out not at random, but in a line directly away from the originating mass (Earth), which propels the second mass toward the first, creating the gravitational attraction that we experience and observe

At the same time, of course, Graviton from the lunar mass are impacting on the Earth, so it attracts us as much as we attract it.

The Graviton Cycle

Clearly, the outflow of Graviton caused by Graviton reception must always equal the inflow. Some Graviton will not reach a target mass before the attraction they create becomes immeasurably small; they fall back into the general foam, pushing aside those that are already there and increasing the internal pressure within the Graviton gel. The only way of relieving that pressure is to spray more Graviton out, and that only happens where there is a mass shattering the foam, so there is a never-ending cycle of fresh Graviton being forced into the disruptive influence of the mass, and hence a never-ending flow of Graviton from the mass. No state other than equilibrium within the system is possible.

It’s as though each mass were a ‘hole’ in the foam sheet through which a spray of Graviton erupts, and the mass perches atop this spray like a ping-pong ball floating atop the outlet of a garden hose from underneath it.

The total number of Graviton is therefore the exact number required to account for the total mass of the universe and everything within it.

Black Holes, White Holes

But that’s not enough to create the foam and its internal currents; there needs to be more. The addition comes from Black Holes.

There has long been speculation about what happens to the objects swallowed by these celestial monsters. The information of structure and state can be considered a form of energy, and energy is the same thing as mass – but the mass of the black hole doesn’t grow by the amount of the mass PLUS these additions, just by the amount of the actual mass of the object. There has long been speculation that the excess is emitted from White Holes, but no such object has every been observed.

That’s because the white holes are in the ‘overspace’, not in our observable universe. And, since only Gravitons can exist without a space-time surrounding them, created by a mass, and the black hole keeps the actual mass, the ‘extra’ is converted into raw energy of some unidentified sort which then ‘condenses’ into the only acceptable form – more Graviton, ready to be vomited forth by the black hole.

Cosmic Regeneration

Even in universal heat-death, objects will still get consumed by Black Holes, and the Graviton Cycle will continue. Except that everything in the observable universe is structurally locked and static, so there is ultimately no relief for the buildup of Graviton.

Eventually, there is too much Graviton Pressure, and every mass in the universe gets pushed out of the foam by it, lightest masses first. Gravity ceases to exist, and all the potential energy that used to be there instantly gets liberated, explosively. The last to go are the black holes themselves, so powerfully explosive by this point in time that the space-time itself can’t withstand the force; it gets torn asunder.

The resulting shockwave hurls the debris of the lesser explosions outwards, reducing the energy density as these intersect other space-times, until eventually new particles condense. As soon as one with mass is produced, a new space-time begins to form in a ring within the shockwave expanding both inwards and outwards, eventually enveloping the former black holes.

The sudden appearance of mass causes the space-time to contract as all these masses attract each other – the center of the ring is the center of gravity. So a series of implosions and explosions occurs until stability is achieved, and a new Universe emerges from the ashes of the old.

In other words, the Graviton gel and it’s flow prevents the second law of thermodynamics from creating perpetual heat death in the form of ‘holes’ in the closed system, eventually triggering a new big bang.

Contrast with Theory #1

It has to be pointed out that this theory of gravity is totally incompatible with Theory #1; in that case, the entire concept of a space-time ‘sheet’ was discarded, and in this theory, it’s indispensable.

Can they both be true?

It’s theoretically possible, if there are two completely distinct systems of creating gravitic attraction. Just because theory #1 doesn’t need a space-time to distort, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t one, of the nature described in theory #2. But the interactions between the two theories create phenomena that have never been observed, at least potentially; explaining their absence complicates everything, when the hope of physicists was that explaining Gravity in terms of quantum mechanics would simplify their understanding of reality. It’s like climbing an impossibly tall mountain until finally you reach the summit – and discover a neighboring peak that’s even steeper and more impassable.

Engineering based on Theory #2

If a sentient species ever finds a way to interact (directly or indirectly) with the foam, they can effectively control the release of Gravitons, and hence induce or reduce Gravity.

It’s easy to show that if there is Graviton Motion, and Graviton resistance to compression, they have to be banging into each other continually, attempting to move but unable to do so. Influencing that motion is the simplest means of interacting with the Graviton foam.

The key to doing so stems from known facts about Black Holes: they can become electrically charged, and if there is any sort of internal motion of that charge, they will emit an electromagnetic field. What’s more, if the internal ‘structure’ of a black hole consists entirely of Gravitons from the hole’s gravity well, which they do under Theory #2, it means that Gravitons can both carry a charge and emit an electromagnet field under the right conditions.

Humans are pretty adept at manipulating charged particles in vacuum tubes and other electromagnetic interactions.

There are two interaction modes possible: increasing the ‘motion’ of the Graviton Quiver and reducing it by drawing energy from the Quiver.

The first adds ‘heat’ to the system and produces enhanced gravitational attraction – artificial gravity, in other words – and the second generates power and creates anti-gravity as a byproduct, and both are fully controllable electronically.

Artificial Gravity

The big problem with generating artificial gravity this way is the heat. Thousands, if not millions, of degrees. Something beyond simple fusion, we’re talking Nova or Supernova conditions. This is so far beyond what’s technically feasible that the reality is that this simply doesn’t work.

Anti-Gravity

This, on the other hand, works perfectly. And the potential as an energy supply is incredible.

In 2022, humans used 25,530 terawatt-hours of energy, ie 2.553×10^16 Watt-hours.

1000 gigawatts = 1 terawatt. Let’s assume that we’re talking about a billion times this much to allow for future growth – and the total has been growing every year.

So 10^9×10^12×2.553×10^4 Watt hours = 2.553×10^(9+12+4) = 2.553×10^25 Watt-hours per year.

2.553 x 10^25 Wh/yr = 7 x 10^22 Wh/day = 2.917 x 10^21 Wh/hr = 8.18 x 10^17 Wh/sec = 8.18 x 10^8 GWh/sec. = 227222 GWsec/sec.

227,222 GW/sec = 2.27222×10^21 ergs/sec.

Divide by C^2 to get M: 2.27222×10^21 / 9×10^20 = 2.525 g.

That’s roughly the weight of one US penny. To power human civilization at 2022 levels for 1 BILLION years. Or to power a future society, using a Billion times as much energy, for a year.

Two concepts of Gravitic Engineering

So, there you have it. Two completely different concepts of gravity, one that is great for artificial gravity and one for anti-gravity. And you get a theoretical hyperdrive / Jump Drive / FTL Drive as a side-benefit. These are not the only options, there are undoubtedly more out there.

Practicalities

The Anti-gravity is fairly easy. It actually generates a massive amount of power – which has to be stored or dissipated, and that’s the hardest part of the engineering.

But it’s not so easy when it come to artificial gravity, as noted earlier. The energy requirements are prodigious – so it’s a good thing that a zero-G power plant generates so much. Way beyond fusion.

I would suggest levels of 0.25G, 0.5G, 0.75G, 1G, 1.5G, 2G, 3G, 5G, and 10G.

3G is enough to render most people not in some sort of power armor helpless. It immobilizes, break bones, but probably doesn’t kill. 10G is enough that even test pilots and the like will struggle to stay conscious, and permanent damage will result to anyone not wearing a pressure suit. Death is certainly not impossible. You’re trying to breath with a family car sitting on your chest. Broken bones are the least of your troubles.

2G is a shock weapon at best, more useful for keeping things pinned down. That safe doesn’t weight 600 lb, it weighs in at 1200 or so, and is that much harder to remove as a result.

1.5 G is the same, but even less so.

1 G and below are for crew comfort and efficiency.

But you could easily max artificial gravity out at 1.5G or even less and put subsequent improvements into greater efficiency of power generation / transmission.

Choosing for other purposes

Which theory you go with depends on the tech that you want to be available in-game. Some GMs will be happy just to have a reasonable hyperdrive, others want a shirtsleeve environment on board starships. Star Wars arguably uses both, and – while it’s never stated – so does Star Trek. I’ve found both to be necessary for superhero campaigns.

If you choose one, that leaves the other one to be exploited in some other campaign, immediately affecting the look-and-feel of the campaign.

What you do with these conflicting visions is up to you.

There’s magic in them-there bones

I haven’t forgotten Fantasy GMs. Lots of creatures are capable of Magical Flight in fantasy gaming (or are incapable of flying without magical assistance, which amounts to the same thing).

The second theory explains how this is possible – these creatures have the ability to reduce their own mass to the point where some otherwise impossible biology is sufficient to create flight. If you permit selective polarization of gravity, it becomes easy to accelerate in a particular direction and then glide.

Decide how you want the ability to work and it will give you masses of detail to employ for look-and-feel. You never have to tell the players how magical flight works – not until they hitch a ride on one, anyway, and even then, just describe the sensations that they experience. Once you know why it works, the narrative prose becomes a lot easier to craft, either improv or in writing.

Final Observation

It’s easy to add nuance of technology if you want it. Deciding that a certain rare type of crystal is a necessary component, for example. These are conceptual starting points; what you do with them is up to you.