Greetings! And a question/clarification/food for thought.

[Drashner1]

The problem with that is that the exterior dimensions of the void bubbles are measured in picometers - too small to let in most wavelengths of light.

Aaaaand... I forgot that  

No worries - It's not exactly a topic of daily conversation around here.

Part of the strength of OA is it's distributed group nature - What one of us forgets someone else often remembers. It's not perfect, but it's held up reasonably well over the years.

Anyway, did a quick math: if you want to hit something around the size of our sun core, roughly 1 light second in diameter, on a linear flight path of 1000ly (31,500,000s per year), the margin of error is just 3.17 x 10^-9%, which I guess is well in range of godlike precision. I'd like then to presume that system wreaking metric bombs travel on a pre calculated flight path.

Hmm. I suppose that this would also allow for compensating for the motion of the target star or whatever over the 1000 years it would take to get there. A quite BOTE indicates the star would have moved about 6 trillion km in that time.

I do wonder about relativistic effects - not so much in terms of the void bubble itself, since the interior is at rest and won't really experience these, but not sure what (if anything) happens due to sheer distance and frames of reference and such. That might be something to ask Adam about. That said...

Found the article where gravity radiation was supposed to be a danger for void bubble, was the one on the Reactionless drive:

"A Void ship will generally ignore most classes of debris, i.e. non-exotic matter, being able to otherwise slip between molecules. Exceptions are things like magmatter, neutronium, q-balls, event horizons, or singularities (such as the track of a Thunderbolt).


Another rumoured hazard is a burst of carefully modulated gravitational radiation designed to destructively cancel the void bubble; such a weapon could conceivably be used in warfare between the archai, although there are no reliable reports of its use to date. "

Conveniently, Adam Getchell is the source of the core ideas in this article and the person I would try to consult about this anyway. Which means we can take his statement here as a reasonable confirmation that there is a way to disrupt a void bubble. Which - after a bit of thought - leads to the following notions:

Void bubbles allow you to move even very large masses around at extremely high speed very quickly.

Imagine a - let's call it a constellation for now - of void bubbles, possibly hundreds or thousands of them or more - floating in space and connected to a comm-wormhole linked to an S6 level sensor system that can detect an incoming metric bomb or other void bubble. Each void bubble contains a massive object, perhaps even a small black hole (Small = Ceres to Jupiter mass in this context - although a larger number of void motes each carrying a smaller BH could then use the Hawking radiation of the smaller holes to power themselves).

When something is detected incoming or it is otherwise determined that the constellation is needed, it activates. In a fraction of a second the void bubbles start moving in repeating patterns at nearly the speed of light - in the process generating 'a burst of carefully modulated gravitational radiation' in a spherical wave front that expands away from the constellation at the speed of light. Any void bubble caught in the wave front is disrupted and collapses, releasing its contents into deep space (presumably at a distance where the detonation of a metric bomb wormhole is not sufficient to cause significant - or at least unacceptable - damage).

The wavefront would presumably disperse to being ineffective beyond a certain distance from the constellation, but between having large numbers of constellations surrounding important infrastructure and each constellation being able to reposition at nearly the speed of light (to get into range of an incoming attack) it should be sufficient for our purposes to work as a defense. I'm imagining each wavefront being effective across light-seconds at least and possibly light-minutes or light-hours.

Another option (possibly operating in concert with the constellation system) could be a 'gwaser' cannon - a gravity wave beam weapon. It has been suggested that vibrating cosmic strings can produce intense beams of gravity waves (LINK). Assuming this is correct, or even if it isn't, it might be possible to arrange a number of void bubble in a fashion such that their movement in a rapid repeating pattern produces a gravity wave beam sufficient to disrupt any void bubbles it encounters within some significant range. Depending on how wide the beam can spread and still be effective, and how quickly the void bubble array producing it could be shifted or moved around, it might be possible to 'sweep' a significant volume with overlapping beams, at the least making precise aiming unnecessary and at most creating a situation where it is difficult or impossible for an incoming void bubble weapon to get close enough to be damaging before it is swept by a beam and destroyed.

Either of these devices might also be used offensively - destroying an opponent's void bubbles (and thus disabling all tech using them) pre-emptively, possibly as the first wave of a larger attack. This might have happened to the Sybil and so reduced the numbers of possible doomsday weapons considerably (although probably wouldn't eliminate all of them if the Sybil was even a bit properly paranoid).

It's also possible that other options might come to mind over time. But these two seem to offer at least an initial idea or three about how to defend against void bubble attack.

Thoughts?

Thank you all for your replies! Perhaps I'll try to write down something, got a couple of ideas. See you around!

See you around!

Todd