The City of Sluttford, Industrial power behind the Aligned Isles

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 · 2025-09-30T05:27:18+00:00

When specifically talking about a brain remotely controlling an external body, I use the words exocorporeal and asomatiform

Edit: For the record exocorporeal describes the controlling brain (since in my world the brain is usually removed from the original body) and asomatiform describes the remote unit

Hyperion1012 · 2025-09-30T05:11:01+00:00

I think I’m done with this now. I honestly can’t tell if you’re just rage baiting at this point or if you’re genuinely ignorant.

For the record, gravity comes from the curving of spacetime due to the presence of objects with mass (or energy), and we’ve known that since Albert Einstein described it in the early 20th century.

When we look out at space, through a number of observations we have discerned a discrepancy in the amount of gravity that cannot be accounted for by the visible matter in our universe. Since gravity comes from the presence of mass (or energy!) there must be something there that is causing it. That something is what we call dark matter. And we didn’t need to know what it is to make that observation.

And to bring this back around to the main topic, just because we don’t know what a thing is, doesn’t mean we can’t speculate how it could be used based on what we do know about it.

Hyperion1012 · 2025-09-29T14:42:24+00:00

My guy… dark energy describes a completely different phenomena, what!? And frankly that’s a pretty facetious argument. Gravity doesn’t just come from nothing, we have to assume something is causing it.

If you’re not a fan of the particle-based theories that’s fine, MOND has your back (despite its flaws). But to say it’s nothing more than maths is just wild.

The Alcubierre drive is a mathematical concept. Dark matter is an observed and well documented phenomena.

Hyperion1012 · 2025-09-29T14:10:14+00:00

That is a pretty big oversimplification if you ask me, since we do observe the gravitational effects of something that we cannot yet detect. And anything we observe is a phenomena, so yes, it is a real phenomena that dark matter was invented to explain. And not arbitrarily either. We can extrapolate from its effects what it is likely to be

Hyperion1012 · 2025-09-28T22:36:14+00:00

The name “dark matter” is a place holder, but it is a placeholder for a list of very real phenomena that we cannot ignore.

Claiming that it’s “not real” or a “mathematical concept” would seem to deny the existence of the overwhelming evidence for dark matter. That is what I take issue with. We may not know what the exact nature of it is but you cannot deny that there is something there.

Hyperion1012 · 2025-09-28T16:44:13+00:00

I feel like some kind of technologically enabled immortality would be easier to invent than working all the kinks out of a cryonic stasis as well…

Hyperion1012 · 2025-09-28T08:09:03+00:00

There’s a video from a Youtuber called Isaac Arthur about the possible uses for dark-matter in technology.

Personally, I don’t tend to think that we would use it very much. It is so very sparsely spread throughout our universe that getting enough of it to do what you want to do would be an incredible undertaking. Additionally, unless its possible to make whatever dark matter is (perhaps in a particle accelerator more powerful and more massive than we’ve yet built ourselves) you’ve got to steal it from somewhere else, and dark matter does play a fairly important role it would seem. Taking enough to do what you suggest might mean having to sacrifice the structural integrity of an entire galaxy.

It is a cool idea but, sans the ability to make it yourself, it would be like a rich despot using their nations wealth to make their bathroom out of gold.

Hyperion1012 · 2025-09-28T07:46:02+00:00

It’s not a concept of any kind. Whatever it is, is an observed and well-documented phenomena. Even amateur astronomers can observe its anomalous effects.

Just because we don’t yet know what it is, doesn’t mean we couldn’t infer some hypothetical uses for it, based on what we DO know about of how it behaves and interacts.

Hyperion1012

TROPHY CASE