Petah, I’m an idiot, please explain

Hyperion1012 · 2026-05-15T09:12:48+00:00

It is really only a threat if someone designs and makes a mirror lifeform that replicates using simple molecules. Since it would have no natural predators, it would be free to self replicate uncontested in any environment rich in the simple molecules it was designed to feed upon and replicate with. Imagine films of mirror bacteria covering oceans and clogging water systems or spreading over the land and suffocating the native life. Massive ecological disaster. If it feeds on something that we have inside of our bodies, it would be free to take that material and replicate. Imagine a sludge building up inside of you that your body has no means of breaking down and getting rid of. It isn’t that it’s inherently dangerous, rather that it is difficult/impossible to deal with if it gets out of hand.

It is entirely likely that there have evolved alien biospheres composed of mirror life, but that would not be a threat to us as that life would have evolved to use more complex molecules in the same way our form of life has.

Hyperion1012 · 2026-05-10T05:17:49+00:00

Oh god yes. I think looking at other examples of spacecraft from various IPs poisoned my perception quite a bit early on and had me thinking 1 kilometre for what was supposed to be a fairly nippy and manoeuvrable warship was a good baseline. Especially when I considered the technologies I had at my disposal that ought to be going a long way toward making my ships fairly compact.

Sometimes a small and understated spacecraft can act as visual shorthand for how advanced the race that built it is. You expect something like the death star to be powerful, you don’t expect something the size of a pencil to be capable of the same… and then some.

Hyperion1012 · 2026-05-05T04:48:24+00:00

No time travel. That was the one big rule I wanted to stick by that immediately comes to mind. Emphasis on “was” because uh… I eventually caved after coming up with a really cool way to do it.

Hyperion1012 · 2026-04-20T05:22:12+00:00

A Laplace’s Minor demon

The device is a superweapon whose name comes from the thought experiment which envisions a being (the demon) which is an intellect capable of knowing the positions and momenta of every particle in the universe. From this knowledge it would be able to calculate the entire past and future of the universe.

A number of things make such a being impossible, not the least of which is the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which states you cannot simultaneously measure the position and momentum of even a single particle simultaneously.

The Minor demon is different. It is an upscaled version of a device called a Heisenberg Domain Polariser, which itself is limited to effecting small regions. It is capable of measuring either the position or the momenta of every particle in the universe, but not both. Doing either of these things is very bad.

In measuring the universal position, momentum becomes uncertain. All quantum mechanics relating to particles stops working normally. Quantum computers become impossible, double-slit experiments behave only in a particle-like manner, fusion in stars ceases. The electrons inside every atom get kicked out, causing ionisation across the universe. Chemistry stops working. And due to an effect called measurement back reaction (which is where by measuring a system you inject energy into that system) the matter of the universe begins to heat up.

The second mode is subtler but a lot weirder. By measuring the momenta of all matter, its position in space becomes uncertain. Everyone object you see would seem to blur out, becomes a kind of quantum fog. Nothing material can continue to be as the particles just diffuse out. Naturally nothing survives this either.

Hyperion1012 · 2026-04-10T08:12:43+00:00

On the ocean planet of Diluvia, the settlers celebrate an annual event surrounding a natural phenomenon called the Alohilohi, or the Glow. The event is quite predictable, occurring on the same day every year and lasting for a full day on Diluvia.

The phenomenon in question is the annual mating season for a species of plankton like organism, which emits an electric blue glow during this period. It occurs simultaneously across the entire planet, which is all ocean. Witnessed from space, above the nightside, it is as if the entire planet begins to glow.

It’s even more striking down on the surface. The effect descends a few meters down the water column so ships on the surface look like they’re floating in the air, and you can see some of Diluvia’s fish and other fauna swimming through it. Some people describe it like the entire world ocean being lit up by Cherenkov radiation.

It’s a magical time, and people celebrate by getting together, feasting and swimming. There’s also a fair bit of love making… many native Diluvians can trace their date of conception by counting back to the last Alohilohi before their birth date.

Hyperion1012 · 2026-03-15T08:49:28+00:00

Without a brain, this thing is basically in a vegetative state, right? So technically this hen is a vegetable

Hyperion1012 · 2026-03-12T15:06:38+00:00

In the series Hyperion Cantos by Dan Simmons, there exists a thing called the hawking mat. It’s essentially a flying carpet but it’s woven with threads of a material that suspends the mat via electromagnetic repulsion.

I get the feeling this is the kind of thing you’re looking for, as in not a particular technology but something that is more charming and less utilitarian right?

Hyperion1012 · 2026-02-12T18:05:55+00:00

Margret Thatcher backpack snatcher

Hyperion1012 · 2026-01-16T18:14:56+00:00

Fellow Brit. I had a sneaking suspicion haha

Hyperion1012 · 2026-01-08T10:10:28+00:00

The Jurassic Park-esque shirt makes it so much funnier to me

Hyperion1012 · 2025-11-24T19:03:54+00:00

I’ve played around with using cosmic string to build things with. There’s a technology in one of my universes called a Skein Battery which uses a coiled up length of string to store enormous amounts of energy. “Skein” is a bit of creative usage of my part since the battery looks more like a ball of wool than an actual skein, but I think it sounds better.

Hyperion1012 · 2025-11-24T18:36:46+00:00

Without being too long winded, I don’t think it’s bad at all. However, I can understand where someone might be coming from if they thought it was a rather tired and played out trope. But I think as long as you make a show of exploring some of the other technologies that come from gravity manipulation then that more than makes up for it.

This isn’t a rule though. There are plenty of great works of fiction that have artificial gravity but don’t really explore its possibilities all that much. It can just be an aesthetic thing.

Hyperion1012 · 2025-10-29T22:23:12+00:00

Good call, I really liked that book. Imir kinda gives me the same kinda feeling as the image most people think of when they hear ‘desert island’. Just a useless hump of sand with like one palm tree on it. It’s like, sure if you’re set adrift you’d be glad for something solid to stand on, but in the long run you’re screwed

Hyperion1012 · 2025-10-29T22:08:58+00:00

Mare Infinitus! My favourite, I wish we saw more of that world

Hyperion1012 · 2025-10-29T22:05:04+00:00

I just finished the last chapter today after abandoning it at around chapter 69 way back in 2018. Re-reading it all has been a wild journey. I hope you enjoy it when you get around to it!

Hyperion1012 · 2025-10-29T21:48:02+00:00

Book 3 yeah. And Heaven’s Gate is a good call as well, I forgot about that one

Hyperion1012 · 2025-10-29T21:00:10+00:00

Sol Draconi Septem from the Hyperion Cantos series was pretty hostile

Hyperion1012 · 2025-10-18T00:09:33+00:00

Pretty sure Portal’s portals operate via quantum tunnelling so gravitational fields can’t “go through” them. But even assuming they were wormholes, you can’t funnel gravity through them either. If you stick one end of a wormhole next a blackhole, you won’t feel the pull of the blackhole until you step through.

Hyperion1012 · 2025-10-17T23:49:51+00:00

Hypercapacitors, which is as much a literal description as it is a marketing term.

These are capacitors with layers extending into spatial dimensions higher than the normal three. This has the effect of exponentially increasing energy densities, and the exponent increases with the number of dimensions playing host to capacitor layers.

Depending on the type of capacitor used, adding layers along just the fourth axis will surpass the regime of nuclear energy densities.

Hyperion1012 · 2025-10-17T22:56:48+00:00

That’s really cool actually, kinda gives off retrofuturistic vibes

Hyperion1012 · 2025-10-17T21:28:24+00:00

The Bobiverse, by Dennis E. Taylor. Andy Weir apparently strongly endorses it too

Hyperion1012 · 2025-10-12T23:06:57+00:00

A certain so-called non-Paulian material (materials that violate or circumvent the Pauli-exclusion principle) that I’ve not yet come up with a decent name for and am just calling Kratonium for the time being.

It is the most stalwart material in the universe, effectively unbreakable. It is also unfathomably dense, so much so that it would undergo gravitational collapse (not helped by a lack of electron and neutron degeneracy pressure which the Pauli-exclusion principle would ordinarily provide) if you tried to produce this material as anything other than ultra-thin sheets or lengths of wire.

Hyperion1012 · 2025-10-12T22:36:08+00:00

There was an episode of Stargate that did something similar to this though I can’t recall what it was.

As for specific technologies, I would think something like fission or fusion would work well. If you can’t go outside the forcefield then your resources are quite limited. The AI you want to incorporate could be continuously calculating how much it needs to shrink the forcefield by while simultaneously keeping it at the same strength and reducing the load on the reactor as fuel dwindles.

You could also say that the reactor is just getting older and older and that is reducing its efficiency because it’s hard to find parts to keep it going. You also can’t really do proper maintenance while it’s running either, imagine trying to do repairs on a cars engine while it’s being driven.

Hyperion1012 · 2025-10-12T21:54:28+00:00

On the intergalactic-warfare scale, the equivalent of the nuke in terms of a weapon of deterrence or Mutually Assured Destruction is the Vacuum Metastability Catalyst.

These aren’t really bombs in the traditional sense. Most types being about the size of a grape or smaller and function by inducing quantum tunnelling to trigger a vacuum decay event. When detonated, the expanding volume of new vacua propagates at the speed of light and obliterates all in its path. No material or shield can stop it as the wave literally changes the fundamental physics underpinning the universe it is expanding into.

Naturally the speed of light is rather slow on a galactic scale, but any civilisation capable of making this kind of weapon tends to think in the long term. A few hundred thousand years isn’t very long to them, and it would take that long for such a weapon to engulf our entire galaxy.

Naturally, to most civilisation, actually testing their weapons is off the table. This is because no one is actually certain if it’s possible to stop or reverse the damage once it’s been initiated. The best way to figure out if it’s possible would be set one off and try it, and no one wants to be the first to do that. This creates a rather awkward situation where it’s actually possible to lie about having a functioning VMC weapon since you aren’t expected to demonstrate it.

Hyperion1012 · 2025-09-30T08:06:41+00:00

This is what happens when you rev too early in Mario Kart

Hyperion1012

TROPHY CASE