On Lensman-verse Aliens (From PSW)

Darth Hoth · Post by **Darth Hoth** » 2009-07-30 10:32am

Simon_Jester wrote:Though the Arisians are doing the same super-intelligent trick, and they're better at it than the Eddorians... and they're the good guys. So the Arisians are a good example of a transhuman species passing through the Singularity too; it's just that they got there by a different path (one that we're now reasonably confident is closed to us).

The Arisians are at least human-derived and have emotions and sentimentality, and are benevolent because of their basically human (although augmented) nature. A "strong" artificial intelligence developed in real life would be computer-based (programming the AI itself would be easier than trying to copy human intelligence to any meaningful extent, or so I hear), and fundamentally alien not only to humanity, but to all terrestrial life (a new kingdom, at least; we would probably have to invent another taxonomical level for them). They would have no trace of our emotions, which are evolutionarily derived and unnecessary to it, and work purely logically for maximum efficiency and expansion after Darwinian parameters. It would have far more in common with an Eddorian than an Arisian.

Teleros · Post by **Teleros** » 2009-07-31 07:47am

Darth Hoth wrote:
Haven't read New Lensman, but Moon Prospector was ok and helps with the timeline (200 years between WW3 and Triplanetary IIRC, and by Kinnison's time the Patrol is at least 500 years old), as well as some of the hard sci-fi bits Doc Smith left out (such as the lack of radiators on ships). GURPS Lensman is both very minimalist and not proof-read all that well, whilst I don't think Kyle's attempts worked all that well. Both GURPS and Kyle also take quite a different view to robots & computers than the one Doc Smith took in Triplanetary and Vortex Blaster etc. Ellern's work was approved by Doc Smith, and all the others by his daughter, as the controller of his estate. Me, I'm happy to be a Doc Smith purist, although one day I might get around to going over the non-Doc Smith books in the setting for technical stuff.
As I understand it, New Lensman incorporates Moon Prospector as part of the book edition. While I found the writing subpar, I did like some of the technology details (my favourites include the only hard-and-fast firepower figures in the universe, e20 Watts range for Jovian Wars era starship cannon, and the WWIII era lasers that consumed several kilograms of allotropic iron's worth of power in a second - which also incidentally gives a nice estimate on how fast matter-energy conversion goes in those reactors . . .). Taken altogether even the pre-WWIII Lensman Earth is a force to be reckoned with - they could probably beat even Draka's technowank.

I doubt that the weapons were in the 1e20J range, given that it took cosmic energy screens to generate those figures in Grey Lensman and was a major leap forwards in terms of power generation for the Patrol.

Darth Hoth wrote:The chronology is one of the setting's uncertainties. From Ellern, we know that "centuries" passed between the building of the moon base (which was before WWIII, which GURPS places in 1962 and in any case was not later than 1999) and the events in First Lensman/New Lensman. Then, in The Vortex Blaster, Cloud notes that "atomic power" (which in Lensman means total-conversion engines, rather than fission or fusion) has been in use for over a thousand years. Since this was invented/stolen in Triplanetary and refined by Bergenholm in First Lensman, this means that taken together, Galactic Patrol is set at least twelve hundred years into the future from now, but how much later we cannot know within a century or two.

A century or two between WW3 and TP / FL makes sense anyway given that WW3 was a nuclear war (although most of the US apparently escaped mostly unscathed, and the Arisians worked almost openly to fix the place up afterwards). If we assume the "atomic power" quote to mean any use of atomic energy, then Galactic Patrol must be set around 2945 onwards at the earliest, and likely later given the time between WW2, WW3 and TP / FL.

Darth Hoth wrote:I have not read the Kyle books; since you apparently have, are they any good? From what you hear on message boards, they seem to make no attempt whatever to maintain continuity, with robot revolutions and freaking ghosts and goblins. The GURPS book suffers from rampant minimalism and at times downright stupidity, and does ignore continuity on a number of points, so it is not my favourite by far (although it does have some high points, notably faster-than-light computing and sunbeams that will scatter Tellus-mass planets; if you are pedantic about it, you can probably explain away its most glaring errors while preserving the good stuff). As for robots, Lensman did have them in Second Stage Lensmen, so that is not just Kyle inventing them out of nowhere.

I read the Kyle books a few years back, but it does rather follow from what you said: Spoiler

Darth Hoth wrote:
I don't think that they copied the Patrol much, although both sides stole technology. They did develop their own "Black Lensmen", but that never really got anywhere. As for being parasitic - that's more because they wanted power than because they needed them - Eddorians could have manned all the fortresses around their homeworld, but they just preferred control too much (not to mention, using for Gunner #114 a guy who can out-think a Culture Mind and is a power-hunger sociopathic megalomaniac is a recipe for trouble ).
It was hinted that the Black Lensmen were a larger corps, who had been waging an undeclared war on Civilization for some time when Kinnison met Melasnikov, built to mimic the Patrol's own Lensmen because the Eddorians were impressed with their performance. I took it that they tried to copy their social model; they did experiment with various means of controlling their subjects indirectly before (from direct mindscrubbing, to political propaganda (left- or right-wing as best suited the planet in question, always extremistic), to merely taking advantage of dupes (like the Petrinos). Of course, their need for secrecy made certain that they could not themselves train their Lensmen like the Arisians did Civilization's, so they ended up weaker.

Given the lack of impact the Black Lensmen made on things (we only meet a few / evidence of their work), I doubt they were that effect or that numerous.

Darth Hoth wrote:
It was the Arisians who had that "Visualisation of the (Macro)Cosmic All". Mentor described it to Samms as their equivalent to chess - they do it for mental exercise and enjoyment, but also in the case of the war with Eddore to be able to plan effectively. Here's perhaps the most ridiculous quote about it for you, from First Lensman:

SNIP
Whilst we never find out if those hairs all land in the "right" spot, Mentor is right about the "gross occurrences", as well as the bit about his descendant Clarissa MacDougall visiting a shop called Brenleer's... on the planet Thrale, which wouldn't be even captured by Civilisation until Kim Kinnison's time, hundreds of years later.
Oh, I know that one. But it is mentioned that the Eddorians have it as well (in Children of the Lens, certainly), and that the Arisians and Eddorians keep trying to confound each other in their "guessing game". The Children have it also, I think; it is an inherent feature of third-stage stability.

[/quote]
I can't remember about the Eddorians off-hand, but it'd make sense (else the Arisians would have out-manoeuvred them aeons ago), and I know the Children could do it.

Darth Hoth · Post by **Darth Hoth** » 2009-07-31 09:37am

Teleros wrote:I doubt that the weapons were in the 1e20J range, given that it took cosmic energy screens to generate those figures in Grey Lensman and was a major leap forwards in terms of power generation for the Patrol.

Well, it may be that they had power storage that was better than their onboard power generation, allowing them to field heavier guns but with beams of limited duration. It could be a trade-off. Doc authorised the story, after all, and he usually did a decent job with keeping continuity, so he must have had the figures he gave for the Dauntless in mind. Did not Currald also run some calcs on primaries that indicated firepower in excess of a superdreadnought's continuous wattage?

Another explanation might be that allotropic iron conversion to energy is faster than the uranium the GP used as of Gray Lensman; the annihilation rate New Lensman gives for the moon prospector's portable generators would seem to indicate something to that effect, when you compare it to the hourly fuel consumption given for the Dauntless's engines.

A century or two between WW3 and TP / FL makes sense anyway given that WW3 was a nuclear war (although most of the US apparently escaped mostly unscathed, and the Arisians worked almost openly to fix the place up afterwards). If we assume the "atomic power" quote to mean any use of atomic energy, then Galactic Patrol must be set around 2945 onwards at the earliest, and likely later given the time between WW2, WW3 and TP / FL.

I never got it just how much time passed between Triplanetary and First Lensman. On the one hand, the formerly system-bound Triplanetary League (inner system, at that) has colonised a dozen or more planets, and interstellar travel is commonplace. On the other, the characters carry over and have not aged markedly. So logically it cannot have been more than a couple of decades at most, and should be less, but that gives them an absolutely crazy rate of expansion.

Cloud was talking about when the first loose "atomic vortices" had turned up. Since fission cannot generate that kind of slow-paced, self-sustaining nuclear reaction, he must have been referring to the more exotic Lensmanverse atomic power.

Spoiler
The spirits of the various dead Eich have found a way to influence our universe from the next plane of existence, and are able to do stuff like listen to a Lensed conversation & even possess a Velantian Lensman at one point. There's another (secretly) female lensman out there, sapient robots that want to rebel but are persuaded to head off to Andromeda (itself much close than Lundmark's Nebula), evidence that the in-universe theory of planetary formation is completely wrong, and a finale along the lines of the spirits of dead Lensmen fighting the Eich spirits to protect the universe. Yes I've missed a fair bit out, made lots of generalisations and such, but they're the main points that I remember off-hand.

Spoiler

Given the lack of impact the Black Lensmen made on things (we only meet a few / evidence of their work), I doubt they were that effect or that numerous.

Well, I would not be so sure. Remember, the two galaxies are a big place, with tens of billions of settled planets; a corps of Black Lensmen could cause quite a lot of grief without ever appearing onscreen, especially if they were performing covert operations. As well, Children of the Lens perhaps more than any other book in the series hints at that scale, with seemingly throw-away references to troubles and sabotage on myriads of worlds; what we see of Kinnison's work there (prior to the relaunch of the military campaign, at least) is really a very small part of the battle against Boskonia's destabilising influence. And given that even Kinnison, an L2, had a hard time subduing Melasnikov, Black Lensmen do appear to be serious business.

I can't remember about the Eddorians off-hand, but it'd make sense (else the Arisians would have out-manoeuvred them aeons ago), and I know the Children could do it.

I remember it for certain that Mentor elaborated on it in Children of the Lens. There might be something on it in the backstory part of Triplanetary as well.

Simon_Jester · Post by **Simon_Jester** » 2009-07-31 05:34pm

Darth Hoth wrote:The idea about "always going in" I always took more as metaphorical or an illustration of esprit de corps than a hard and fast rule. Otherwise any undercover work or monitoring operations overall would be problematic.

I interpret it as "Whenever a Lensman sees a mission that is worth accomplishing, he pursues the mission regardless of risk to his own life." That can include undercover work; Lensman don't seem to shift to a monitoring role unless they're badly injured enough that they would no longer be effective in the field.

Oh, I know that one. But it is mentioned that the Eddorians have it as well (in Children of the Lens, certainly), and that the Arisians and Eddorians keep trying to confound each other in their "guessing game". The Children have it also, I think; it is an inherent feature of third-stage stability.

True. Though there are obviously different levels of competence: the Children of the Lens have something they call a "visualization of the Cosmic All," but it isn't necessarily much more detailed than what a normal human could imagine given the same data. Whereas the Arisians have freakish levels of precognizance; presumably Eddorians fall somewhere in between.
________

Darth Hoth wrote:The Arisians are at least human-derived and have emotions and sentimentality, and are benevolent because of their basically human (although augmented) nature. A "strong" artificial intelligence developed in real life would be computer-based (programming the AI itself would be easier than trying to copy human intelligence to any meaningful extent, or so I hear), and fundamentally alien not only to humanity, but to all terrestrial life (a new kingdom, at least; we would probably have to invent another taxonomical level for them). They would have no trace of our emotions, which are evolutionarily derived and unnecessary to it, and work purely logically for maximum efficiency and expansion after Darwinian parameters. It would have far more in common with an Eddorian than an Arisian.

Hmm. Maybe.

A strong AI could be almost anything; it won't necessarily care about expanding itself or being more efficient, or at the least it may not care more about those goals than it cares about something else. Maybe it would discover the "ethical calculus" that human thinkers have been trying to come up with, or maybe it would have the mindset of a giant intelligent tumor (an Eddorian)... it's difficult to predict what something alien to us and created in a different environment would do. Especially since it wouldn't have evolved as such; it could come into existence without being descended from swarms of other, less capable beings that competed for resources.

But what I was getting at that the Arisians are an example of a version of the Singularity that fell out of fashion before people started using the word 'singularity' to describe a revolution in the capability of intelligent beings: the Psychic Singularity. Once we unlock the full power of the mind, the reasoning goes, we will become superbeings!

Of course, a lot of this was based on very limited and confused understanding of what the brain is and is not capable of, so the idea went out of fashion as I describe. But translated into modern terms, it is a form of Singularity, just a wetware oriented one and not a hardware oriented one.

Teleros · Post by **Teleros** » 2009-08-01 03:38am

Darth Hoth wrote:
Teleros wrote:I doubt that the weapons were in the 1e20J range, given that it took cosmic energy screens to generate those figures in Grey Lensman and was a major leap forwards in terms of power generation for the Patrol.
Well, it may be that they had power storage that was better than their onboard power generation, allowing them to field heavier guns but with beams of limited duration. It could be a trade-off. Doc authorised the story, after all, and he usually did a decent job with keeping continuity, so he must have had the figures he gave for the Dauntless in mind. Did not Currald also run some calcs on primaries that indicated firepower in excess of a superdreadnought's continuous wattage?

Another explanation might be that allotropic iron conversion to energy is faster than the uranium the GP used as of Gray Lensman; the annihilation rate New Lensman gives for the moon prospector's portable generators would seem to indicate something to that effect, when you compare it to the hourly fuel consumption given for the Dauntless's engines.

Power storage was already well ahead of power generation in FL days - the first battle with Roger's fleet is a good example, with ships' power supplies being drained by the intensity & duration of the battle. By GP the Boskonians had a clear advantage in power generation, but once the Patrol had cosmic energy screens both generation and storage seemed roughly equal (although one was obviously limited by what you'd stored beforehand), as we see when maulers don't apparently need their cosmic energy screens to defeat Boskonian ships / bases.

On the subject of primaries, the only difference between a primary and normal beam weapon ("secondary") is that the former just pumps in enough power to fry the projector, but in doing so creates an unusually powerful, high-intensity & short-lived beam, so there are clear limits on how much firepower you can get from one for a given power supply.

As for the allotropic iron / uranium conversion... the Dauntless used her reactors just to kick-start the cosmic energy screens, so they may have had much faster reactors.

Darth Hoth wrote:
A century or two between WW3 and TP / FL makes sense anyway given that WW3 was a nuclear war (although most of the US apparently escaped mostly unscathed, and the Arisians worked almost openly to fix the place up afterwards). If we assume the "atomic power" quote to mean any use of atomic energy, then Galactic Patrol must be set around 2945 onwards at the earliest, and likely later given the time between WW2, WW3 and TP / FL.
I never got it just how much time passed between Triplanetary and First Lensman. On the one hand, the formerly system-bound Triplanetary League (inner system, at that) has colonised a dozen or more planets, and interstellar travel is commonplace. On the other, the characters carry over and have not aged markedly. So logically it cannot have been more than a couple of decades at most, and should be less, but that gives them an absolutely crazy rate of expansion.

A dozen or so colonised planets doesn't sound too bad given the circumstances (very fast, cheap FTL starships), and it's not like we found out how many people actually went to, say, Valeria. The figures for the growth of the Patrol in the Foreword are also astronomical: 4-5 years after FL there are 100, after 10 there are 1,000, and after 100 years a million worlds under the Patrol's banner, never mind the billions by CotL.

Darth Hoth wrote:Cloud was talking about when the first loose "atomic vortices" had turned up. Since fission cannot generate that kind of slow-paced, self-sustaining nuclear reaction, he must have been referring to the more exotic Lensmanverse atomic power.

God only knows how those atomic vortices worked, but it helps set a definite lower limit on things anyway.

Darth Hoth wrote:Spoiler
Wow. That sounds like all of my fears compounded. Seriously, what the Hell? I thought those books were continuity-checked. How can a woman pass the Academy and just pretend to be a man? Was she some kind of shapeshifter? And that ignores the Arisians, who are literally semi-omniscient mind-readers.

To be fair to Kyle, if Lundmark's Nebula is supposed to be a reference to the Wolf-Lundmark-Melotte Galaxy, it would indeed be farther away than Andromeda (which is mentioned in the series). That seems to be about all he got right, though. Talk about pissing on canon . . .

Spoiler

Darth Hoth wrote:
Given the lack of impact the Black Lensmen made on things (we only meet a few / evidence of their work), I doubt they were that effect or that numerous.
Well, I would not be so sure. Remember, the two galaxies are a big place, with tens of billions of settled planets; a corps of Black Lensmen could cause quite a lot of grief without ever appearing onscreen, especially if they were performing covert operations. As well, Children of the Lens perhaps more than any other book in the series hints at that scale, with seemingly throw-away references to troubles and sabotage on myriads of worlds; what we see of Kinnison's work there (prior to the relaunch of the military campaign, at least) is really a very small part of the battle against Boskonia's destabilising influence. And given that even Kinnison, an L2, had a hard time subduing Melasnikov, Black Lensmen do appear to be serious business.

Perhaps, but I was under the impression that Kandron was the one primarily behind those campaigns on Civilisation's worlds. The L2s and Children seem to dismiss the Black Lensmen rather quickly too.

Darth Hoth · Post by **Darth Hoth** » 2009-08-01 11:15am

Teleros wrote:Power storage was already well ahead of power generation in FL days - the first battle with Roger's fleet is a good example, with ships' power supplies being drained by the intensity & duration of the battle. By GP the Boskonians had a clear advantage in power generation, but once the Patrol had cosmic energy screens both generation and storage seemed roughly equal (although one was obviously limited by what you'd stored beforehand), as we see when maulers don't apparently need their cosmic energy screens to defeat Boskonian ships / bases.

Well, that is probably the explanation, then – even if they only used some more primitive form of intra-atomic energy extraction beforehand, they could store up those gigatons in onboard capacitors. It does not say for how many seconds they could sustain those Watts, after all . . .

On the subject of primaries, the only difference between a primary and normal beam weapon ("secondary") is that the former just pumps in enough power to fry the projector, but in doing so creates an unusually powerful, high-intensity & short-lived beam, so there are clear limits on how much firepower you can get from one for a given power supply.

Of course they are limited by the available power, if they obey conservation of energy. But as I recall it, Currald did some calcs (here) that showed Primary power in the tens to hundreds of teratons. Unfortunately, the link to those calcs is dead, but assuming that he knew what he was doing, that does imply power storage orders of magnitude ahead of generation.

As for the allotropic iron / uranium conversion... the Dauntless used her reactors just to kick-start the cosmic energy screens, so they may have had much faster reactors.

I know GURPS says that, but Gray Lensman lists exciter power in rate of conversion per hour, which does imply that they are in continuous use; if we want to reconcile the sources, perhaps they are used as auxiliaries in situations where every Watt counts, such as battles with a roughly equivalent ship. And if we go just by the stated figures, 400 lbs per hour does appear inferior to the several kilograms per second we get for the moon prospector’s portable allotropic iron generator (consuming a "small bar" of iron in less than that time).

A dozen or so colonised planets doesn't sound too bad given the circumstances (very fast, cheap FTL starships), and it's not like we found out how many people actually went to, say, Valeria. The figures for the growth of the Patrol in the Foreword are also astronomical: 4-5 years after FL there are 100, after 10 there are 1,000, and after 100 years a million worlds under the Patrol's banner, never mind the billions by CotL.

I rechecked the passage; supposedly, the second generation of Valerians is already predominant on their world, the first-generation settlers having been unable to adapt to the hostile environment. So they must have been there for twenty years at least, which makes more sense with regards to the massive space infrastructure they have, but does not appear to match with Costigan’s family (two young children). Still, it is strange that expansion would be that quick, with private corporations owning entire populated planets.

The Foreword is not quite comparable, given that many/most of Civilization’s worlds were not necessarily settled by Tellurians, but joined as formerly independent states in their own right; the Galactic Union is an adoptive organization, after all, and supposedly most of the First Galaxy’s systems had developed cultures already just waiting to be discovered. Then again, it also has some discrepancies, notably Virgil Samms being around at the unification of Earth, prior to the Jovian Wars. That would make him older than Gray Roger.

Spoiler
After talking to Connor, it looks like Lundmark's Nebula is a few million parsecs from the Milky Way, so Andromeda is certainly closer. The woman was made a Lensman without going to the academy IIRC, and of course the Arisians must have quietly given it the go-ahead.

Spoiler

Perhaps, but I was under the impression that Kandron was the one primarily behind those campaigns on Civilisation's worlds. The L2s and Children seem to dismiss the Black Lensmen rather quickly too.

The scope of the covert attacks alone precludes that it would just be him; I think Nadreck ran some statistics as he hunted him down and eventually reckoned that he had only managed a thousand or so of the disorders. Ploorans and Black Lensmen are explicitly shown to have been involved (the mysterious “X” and Cleonie of Lyrane), and would presumably have been so in greater numbers. The Kalonian admiral that led Kinnison to Melasnikov also boasted about how the Black Lensmen had been killing off Unattached Lensmen in large numbers. Why they were written off so easily I never quite understood, but it had something to do with them not being trained by the Eddorians in person.

Darth Hoth · Post by **Darth Hoth** » 2009-08-01 11:33am

Simon_Jester wrote:True. Though there are obviously different levels of competence: the Children of the Lens have something they call a "visualization of the Cosmic All," but it isn't necessarily much more detailed than what a normal human could imagine given the same data. Whereas the Arisians have freakish levels of precognizance; presumably Eddorians fall somewhere in between.

In case of the Children it was them being immature minds that were unused to Visualizing, if I remember the dialogue right; they would develop Arisian-like or superior predictive abilities with time and practice. If we trust Mentor, the Eddorians were almost as good as/slightly inferior to the Arisians themselves, though their use of automatic electronic supercomputers (as per Triplanetary) might have played a part in that.

A strong AI could be almost anything; it won't necessarily care about expanding itself or being more efficient, or at the least it may not care more about those goals than it cares about something else. Maybe it would discover the "ethical calculus" that human thinkers have been trying to come up with, or maybe it would have the mindset of a giant intelligent tumor (an Eddorian)... it's difficult to predict what something alien to us and created in a different environment would do. Especially since it wouldn't have evolved as such; it could come into existence without being descended from swarms of other, less capable beings that competed for resources.

As I understand it (which according to some is not very well), the best mechanism for predicting its behaviour is still to look at analogies in real life, which is defined throughout by competition for resources and a desire for perpetuation of the species. Assuming that the AI is capable of truly independent thought and evaluation, it would reasonably follow similar mechanisms (if for nothing else because the creatures in its environment do). Though it is not something we can be certain of, it appears likely to me.

But what I was getting at that the Arisians are an example of a version of the Singularity that fell out of fashion before people started using the word 'singularity' to describe a revolution in the capability of intelligent beings: the Psychic Singularity. Once we unlock the full power of the mind, the reasoning goes, we will become superbeings!

Of course, a lot of this was based on very limited and confused understanding of what the brain is and is not capable of, so the idea went out of fashion as I describe. But translated into modern terms, it is a form of Singularity, just a wetware oriented one and not a hardware oriented one.

Hm. I never looked at it in those terms, but that does make sense - and not just for the Arisians, but for all the various "ascended ancients" and "energy beings" that space opera is littered with.

Teleros · Post by **Teleros** » 2009-08-01 12:57pm

Well, that is probably the explanation, then – even if they only used some more primitive form of intra-atomic energy extraction beforehand, they could store up those gigatons in onboard capacitors. It does not say for how many seconds they could sustain those Watts, after all . . .

But why would the situation be worse come Kim Kinnison's time then?

I know GURPS says that, but Gray Lensman lists exciter power in rate of conversion per hour, which does imply that they are in continuous use; if we want to reconcile the sources, perhaps they are used as auxiliaries in situations where every Watt counts, such as battles with a roughly equivalent ship. And if we go just by the stated figures, 400 lbs per hour does appear inferior to the several kilograms per second we get for the moon prospector’s portable allotropic iron generator (consuming a "small bar" of iron in less than that time).

I'm referring to Gray Lensman not GURPS

.

Darth Hoth · Post by **Darth Hoth** » 2009-08-01 05:32pm

Where is it stated that that era has worse weapons? As far as I know the core series gives no figures for capital ship weapons, and few calcable incidents. Which was one reason why I liked that number - it gives a safe lower limit.

Connor MacLeod · Post by **Connor MacLeod** » 2009-08-01 08:30pm

Darth Hoth wrote:Where is it stated that that era has worse weapons? As far as I know the core series gives no figures for capital ship weapons, and few calcable incidents. Which was one reason why I liked that number - it gives a safe lower limit.

There are several indications in the novels that weapons power is within a reasonable magnitude of their power generation capabilites.

Besides which, as Telereos correctly notes, wattage isn't going ot tell you anything by itself. How long a duration is the power figure for? We can make lasers in the petawatt range with current tech, but that doesn't mean they dump out kilotons of energy.

Darth Hoth · Post by **Darth Hoth** » 2009-08-02 06:26am

Which, more exactly?

The passage said, in paraphrase, that they could not use lasers on their ships because of problems with waste energy; even with an efficiency of 99.999 percent their e20 watts guns required large planetary-based heat sinks to get rid of the petawatts of waste heat. It was only with the invention of "multiplex projectors", which were "ultra" efficient, that they could mount those magnitudes as shipboard weapons. Can you approximate anything from that?

When multiplex projectors turn up in the Triplanetary, they are continuous-beam weapons similar to macro beams, although there is the possibility that those particular ones may not be as powerful as those listed in New Lensman.

Teleros · Post by **Teleros** » 2009-08-02 07:27am

Where is it stated that that era has worse weapons? As far as I know the core series gives no figures for capital ship weapons, and few calcable incidents. Which was one reason why I liked that number - it gives a safe lower limit.

Okay, let's assume that a Triplanetary / FL - era ship has firepower in the 1e20J range, thanks to their capacitors and other on-board energy storage. The Patrol must therefore be capable of generating that kind of energy somehow, in order to charge those capacitors. However, by Kimball Kinnison's time, warships with similar levels of power generation (ie, Boskonian ships with the top-secret cosmic energy screens) are capable of outfighting any Patrol ship of similar tonnage, or escaping anything heavy enough to fight them. Either Doc Smith's figures for cosmic energy screens are too low (due to a typo, it's either 4.54e19J or 4.54e20J)*, Ellern's figures are too high, or there's a never-mentioned 40K-style case of lost tech, or Ellern's figures don't factor in the duration, as Connor notes.

GL p46 wrote:The power situation, which had been his gravest care, since it was almost the only factor not amenable to theoretical solution, was even better than anyone had dared hope; the cosmic energy available in space had actually been increasing as the matter content decreased - a fact which seemed to bear out the contention that energy was continually being converted into matter in such regions. It was taking much less excitation of the intake screens to produce a given flow of power than any figure ever observed in the denser media within the galaxy.
Thus, the atomic motors which served as exciters had a maximum power of four hundred pounds an hour; that is, each exciter could transform that amount of matter into pure energy and employ the output usefully in energising the intake screen to which it was connected. Each screen, operating normally on a hundred thousand to one ratio, would then furnish its receptor on the ship with energy equivalent to the annihilation of four million pounds per hour of material substance. Out there, however, it was being observed that the intake-exciter ratio, instead of being less than a hundred thousand to one, was actually almost a million to one.

Each cosmic energy intake screen can usually furnish a ship with the energy equivalent to 1,814,369.5kg of matter per hour - or 1.63e24J per hour assuming 100% efficient atomic motors (which seems to be close to what the Patrol ships have, based on "Triplanetary"). This works out at 4.54e20W per intake screen. These figures incidentally are for galactic space - for intergalactic space, multiply the figure by 10.
It should also be noted that Dauntless, instead of having 2 or 3 intake screens like most ships, had 200 (see below).
One final (and very important) note: whilst the energy per second for the ship is 4.54e20W if you use the 400lb and 100,000:1 ratio in the calculations, it is off by an order of magnitude if you use the 4,000,000lb figure mentioned in the same quote (ie, 4.54e19W). Obviously Doc Smith made a mistake with one of the figures, so one should be careful when using them. Personally I'm inclined to think he got the calculation right and the outcome wrong given the way the passage is written.

Connor MacLeod · Post by **Connor MacLeod** » 2009-08-02 11:20pm

Darth Hoth wrote:Which, more exactly?

First Lensman with the Slugger ships designed to take on the fleet from Petrino. Weapons (macro beams) were designed to take on the maximum output of the ship's reasources (IE powerplant + accumulators). Galactic Patrol with the Britannia - Kinnison orders the gunners to max out firepower against the Boskonian pirate to burn out the screens so that he could use the Q-gun against the wall shield. The super-maulers (whose single primary was able to stnad up to 10 seconds of a first class' battleships' maximum primary output) and Sunbeams (which could channel the entire output of a sun into a single beam) from Second Stage Lensman. Hell Roger's planetoid (which is hardly high tech compared to the stuff we see later on) was able to do max power from its power systems (and the Nevians could devote max power from their ship to stop it, which suggests a comaprable output for weapons). Like I said, lots of examples.

The passage said, in paraphrase, that they could not use lasers on their ships because of problems with waste energy; even with an efficiency of 99.999 percent their e20 watts guns required large planetary-based heat sinks to get rid of the petawatts of waste heat. It was only with the invention of "multiplex projectors", which were "ultra" efficient, that they could mount those magnitudes as shipboard weapons. Can you approximate anything from that?

Well if the heat sinks operate as you claim, then they're releasing 2e15 joules of energy each second. I'm pretty sure most heat sinks and radiators would operate in a sustained function. 99.999% efficiency would be consistent with e20 joules of energy for the weapon.

If they had "multiplex projectors" by the time of these supposed "ship cannons" then I would guess that that eliminates the possibility of a short duration pulse. That does not, however explain any of the points Telereos brings up.

More to the point you have ignored a fairly substantial problem in that 2e20 watts is going to be 50 GT/sec or about 1/4 the output of a Quad TL on an Acclmator. Assuming (quite probably) they mount more than one gun (say, 8-12, which we can justify from First Lensman or Gray Lensman as a nice low end) you're going to get into the E21 watt range. For a massless beam weapon (IE Etherwaves, as established in Triplanetary) that is going to generate a recoil of nearly 7e111 kg*m/s (I could just round up to 3e20 joules and an even 1e12 kg*m/s too, but what the hell it won't make much difference) and that is PER GUN. If we charitably assume a single one second shot for thegun also accompanies a 7 gee backwards acceleration (assume compensated for by the thrust of the ship) you still need a ship that masses many millions of tons MINIMUM. More likely, something on the order of tens or hundreds of millions of tons, if not BILLIONS of tons. Which is before inertialess drive, anti gravity and all that other fun stuff, and the practical problmes in LANDING multi-million (nevermind billion) ton starships on a planet. I also more than likely overestimated the acceleration from weapons impact, as people do not get tossed around or shaken around violently by weapons impacts in Triplanetary.

Ther'es also the small issue with internal volume and mass. During the test of the inertialess drive the first time it generated some 100 yard radius field, whicfh sets an upper limit on how big the Boise could be (which IIRC was the biggest ship Triplanetary had ever built, their supership.) Assuming a 100 meter radius sphere that is a solid block of tungsten it would mass about 80 million tons. Which is an UPPER limit, not a lower, unless they have some exoticalyl superdense metals at least an order of magnitude better than modern stuff.

Oh but it gets better. Let's assume that ship masses 40 million tons, and uses a 2 g sustained thrust to escape the Earth's gravity. You're going to need many gigatons worth of energy expended in thrust EACH SECOND (assuming a conventional reaction drive with 1e8c exhaust and expending roughly 8 tons of mass a second.) for the ship to thrust off the planet. And to reach escape velocity at 2 gees is going to require nearly ten minutes of said thrust. THAT is hardly going to be a minor, unnoticed problem to deal with.

And lastly there's the "recharge rate" issue. Let's be generous and assume atomic motors have NOT changed from the time of triplanetary to Gray Lensman (even though we know they changed from Triplanetary to First Lensman, nevermind from FL to galactic patrol - imrpovement of technologies was rather rapid in the series) We'll assume 2-3 atomic motors as standard as well prior to the Dauntless (again GL) So sustained out put is ~3.3 MT/sec (400 lb/hr on a per second basis).

The aforementioned 50 Gt/sec beam weapon. Lets assume they store enough for a single beam for 2 minutes. We'll ignore the fact they will use multiple beams for now. 120 esconds is. 6,000 gigatons. Or 6 million megatons. At 3.3 MT/sec, you ned around 1.8 million seconds to recharge the accumualtors. Which works out to... 21 days. you can cut that by half, or a quarter (30 seconds of continuous fighting) and it still comes out to more than a week to charge up. And that MULTIPLIES quite sharply if you consider multiple beams. It seems pretty damn unlikely they take weeks or months to charge up between bloody battles, just for a few minutes of fighting, unless you have something alot more clever to explain that.

When multiplex projectors turn up in the Triplanetary, they are continuous-beam weapons similar to macro beams, although there is the possibility that those particular ones may not be as powerful as those listed in New Lensman.

And that makes sense.. how? You've clearly latched onto your hyptoethical energy figures without thinking through the logical conseequnces of such things in the least bit, else you wouldn't need it explained to you the contradiction they represent.

Darth Hoth · Post by **Darth Hoth** » 2009-08-05 05:23am

Connor MacLeod wrote:More to the point you have ignored a fairly substantial problem in that 2e20 watts is going to be 50 GT/sec or about 1/4 the output of a Quad TL on an Acclmator. Assuming (quite probably) they mount more than one gun (say, 8-12, which we can justify from First Lensman or Gray Lensman as a nice low end) you're going to get into the E21 watt range. For a massless beam weapon (IE Etherwaves, as established in Triplanetary) that is going to generate a recoil of nearly 7e111 kg*m/s (I could just round up to 3e20 joules and an even 1e12 kg*m/s too, but what the hell it won't make much difference) and that is PER GUN. If we charitably assume a single one second shot for thegun also accompanies a 7 gee backwards acceleration (assume compensated for by the thrust of the ship) you still need a ship that masses many millions of tons MINIMUM. More likely, something on the order of tens or hundreds of millions of tons, if not BILLIONS of tons. Which is before inertialess drive, anti gravity and all that other fun stuff, and the practical problmes in LANDING multi-million (nevermind billion) ton starships on a planet. I also more than likely overestimated the acceleration from weapons impact, as people do not get tossed around or shaken around violently by weapons impacts in Triplanetary.

The passage said "10^20" watts, with "10^15" watts of waste heat per gun assuming 99.999 percent efficiency; the plural on petawatts was following on the phrasing with multiple guns. Each gun is around 24 gigatons, assuming beams that persist for a second or longer. My apologies for being unclear.

I cannot remember any figure on a ship's mass ever being stated. If we take the Dauntless as representative, she sank twenty feet when she landed on a concrete field (on Medon, in Gray Lensman), although without knowing the area/volume of her hull that does not tell us much. Ships generally use special landing facilities with reinforced "dry-docks" (which may or may not incorporate special technology like force-fields; their precise construction is never described as I recall it, but such would be available).

There is also a possibility that the projectors use ultra-wave, rather than EM-range ("ether-wave") radiation; if we accept the GURPS material as having some official standing, ultrawave-based weaponry was in use during the Jovian Wars. You might want to disregard this, given that Roger's scientists were not aware of any sub-ethereal rays, but on the other hand there are some indications that such were at least theorised (the rumours the captain of the Hyperion was commenting on in the first chapter of Triplanetary proper). It might be that the "Service Special" transceivers were merely a new application of ultra-waves, rather than a new discovery, or that their previous use was classified and thus not general knowledge. If so, ultrawave-based beams might not produce as much recoil as EM-based beams do.

Ther'es also the small issue with internal volume and mass. During the test of the inertialess drive the first time it generated some 100 yard radius field, whicfh sets an upper limit on how big the Boise could be (which IIRC was the biggest ship Triplanetary had ever built, their supership.) Assuming a 100 meter radius sphere that is a solid block of tungsten it would mass about 80 million tons. Which is an UPPER limit, not a lower, unless they have some exoticalyl superdense metals at least an order of magnitude better than modern stuff.

Where do you get a 100 yard radius figure from? My copy of Triplanetary (p. 176, Pyramid Books edition, second printing) describes it thus:

[quote=""The super-ship is launched""]For the atomic-powered "Rodebush-Cleveland" neutralizers were more powerful by far, and had a vastly greater radius of action, than the calculations of their designers had shown; and for a moment everything within a hundred yards or so of the Boise behaved as though it were an integral part of the vessel.[/quote]

At least to me, it looks like those hundred yards are measured outwards from the ship’s hull, the size of which is unspecified.

Oh but it gets better. Let's assume that ship masses 40 million tons, and uses a 2 g sustained thrust to escape the Earth's gravity. You're going to need many gigatons worth of energy expended in thrust EACH SECOND (assuming a conventional reaction drive with 1e8c exhaust and expending roughly 8 tons of mass a second.) for the ship to thrust off the planet. And to reach escape velocity at 2 gees is going to require nearly ten minutes of said thrust. THAT is hardly going to be a minor, unnoticed problem to deal with.

The Triplanetary Service has access to reactionless drives (else the Boise would not be able to manoeuvre, as reaction drives are quite useless for an inertialess ship). This implies that they would be able to somehow work around conservation of momentum, even before the discovery of Nevian neutralisation of inertia, which might be involved in how they handle gun recoil, or how they can lift potentially huge masses into space without the energy expenditures and environmental effects that would result from the mechanisms you calculate.

And lastly there's the "recharge rate" issue. Let's be generous and assume atomic motors have NOT changed from the time of triplanetary to Gray Lensman (even though we know they changed from Triplanetary to First Lensman, nevermind from FL to galactic patrol - imrpovement of technologies was rather rapid in the series) We'll assume 2-3 atomic motors as standard as well prior to the Dauntless (again GL) So sustained out put is ~3.3 MT/sec (400 lb/hr on a per second basis).

The aforementioned 50 Gt/sec beam weapon. Lets assume they store enough for a single beam for 2 minutes. We'll ignore the fact they will use multiple beams for now. 120 esconds is. 6,000 gigatons. Or 6 million megatons. At 3.3 MT/sec, you ned around 1.8 million seconds to recharge the accumualtors. Which works out to... 21 days. you can cut that by half, or a quarter (30 seconds of continuous fighting) and it still comes out to more than a week to charge up. And that MULTIPLIES quite sharply if you consider multiple beams. It seems pretty damn unlikely they take weeks or months to charge up between bloody battles, just for a few minutes of fighting, unless you have something alot more clever to explain that.

There are in fact signs that atomic motors running on allotropic iron were better in at least some respects than the uranium-powered engines that Bergenholm perfected from the original Rodebush-Cleveland design. Judging from the available evidence, their conversion rate was faster than the 400lbs/hour figure; in New Lensman, a car-portable iron-driven engine converted a "small bar" of iron into energy in less than a second. Given the density of iron, I personally do not think I would be out of line to say that a "small bar" could easily weigh a kilogram, but let us assume that it converts half a kilogram a second just to be conservative. This means 30 kilograms a minute, or 1,800 kilograms per hour, well in excess of the figures for the Dauntless's individual engines. I can only speculate that there was some "hidden" drawback with using iron that did not immediately become apparent, but made switching to uranium a better option; safety or reliability of the drive, perhaps?

We can run a quick calc on the energy figures this implies for ships. Assuming virtually total efficiency, which is the norm for Lensman, the obtained energy works out to 1.6e20 Joules per hour (each kilogram of iron containing 8.99e16 Joules of mass/energy). This is, again, for a car-portable engine, but we will assume that the starship engines are not that much bigger for the sake of being extremely conservative (say that they consume about twice as much fuel, which is ridiculous for engines described as "Gargantuan" in Triplanetary). The Boise has at least ten engines (Cleveland talks about "number ten power room" in Triplanetary), so the lower limit for her available power is 10kg/s, or 9e17 watts of continuous power generation. Converted to TNT-equivalent, this is on the order of 215 megatons/second. Going by this, the recharge time drops by orders of magnitude to less than eight hours for a two-minute beam. Which is still considerable, but given the travel times for their STL ships on patrol in the solar system, not too insane. (All calcs were made on the fly, so if there is a mistake somewhere it is genuine, not malicious distortion.)

All of the above is hard to apply to the Jovian Wars, however, given that that era's power generation was decidedly inferior (Nevian total conversion was considered revolutionary). Thus their previous power source would have been worse by at least an order of magnitude; if we take something from real life to compare, deuterium fusion is more than two OOMs worse, assuming similar efficiency. In such a scenario your objection is noted; my best explanation would be that they reload their batteries from bigger power plants "ashore" when they can, and have a hard time doing so otherwise. This might be why they bother to make their biggest ships capable of planetary landing, when they could easily crew and refuel them in orbit by demonstrated use of smaller shuttles.

And that makes sense.. how? You've clearly latched onto your hyptoethical energy figures without thinking through the logical conseequnces of such things in the least bit, else you wouldn't need it explained to you the contradiction they represent.

I took the number as it was provided in the book and attempted to fit it in with the bulk of the evidence. Given the book’s status as authorised by Smith himself after review of the manuscript, I consider it canon and would not throw it out unless it was demonstrated to be absolutely incompatible with the core series. I admit that I did not calculate the momentum, but I did think of the issues with power generation.

Teleros wrote:Okay, let's assume that a Triplanetary / FL - era ship has firepower in the 1e20J range, thanks to their capacitors and other on-board energy storage. The Patrol must therefore be capable of generating that kind of energy somehow, in order to charge those capacitors. However, by Kimball Kinnison's time, warships with similar levels of power generation (ie, Boskonian ships with the top-secret cosmic energy screens) are capable of outfighting any Patrol ship of similar tonnage, or escaping anything heavy enough to fight them. Either Doc Smith's figures for cosmic energy screens are too low (due to a typo, it's either 4.54e19J or 4.54e20J)*, Ellern's figures are too high, or there's a never-mentioned 40K-style case of lost tech, or Ellern's figures don't factor in the duration, as Connor notes.

It might also be that in such battles the Boskonians first fight a conventional battle for a couple of minutes (or however long they have stored-up power for) and then smash the Patrol when they run out of power and have to rely on onboard engines (where the Boskonians are superior). From GURPS Lensman again, many ships carry only capacitors and no conversion engines (or at best, an engine as a backup) even before cosmic screens were invented; although the source here is an unreliable one, it fits with power storage being greater than power generation at this stage.

Connor MacLeod · Post by **Connor MacLeod** » 2009-08-05 11:33pm

Darth Hoth wrote: I cannot remember any figure on a ship's mass ever being stated. If we take the Dauntless as representative, she sank twenty feet when she landed on a concrete field (on Medon, in Gray Lensman), although without knowing the area/volume of her hull that does not tell us much.

We can extrapolate sizes from Children of the Lens and the from Gray Lensman onwards - Directrix (at least reasonable lower limits) since they give us benchmarks (the Dauntless levelled 5 blocks in landing in Children, and the Directrix gets a lower limit from the volume of the display and it being a teardrop.)

Not that this bears on anything. The only thing remotely close to lugging around "mililons upon millions of tons" of any mass was the Nevian starship after it had sucked up the iron of Roger's planetoid AND the triplanetary fleet and even then the ship was rather sluggish moving (despite having been designed as a fuel transport.) And most of that would have been from Roger's planetoid. And even then the Triplanetary fleet numbered some hundreds of ships as well.

Ships generally use special landing facilities with reinforced "dry-docks" (which may or may not incorporate special technology like force-fields; their precise construction is never described as I recall it, but such would be available).

The fact that they can land on a planet at all is telling in and of itself. Stuff like that (like the Venators and Acclamtors in the prequels) don't work without fantastic technology behind it (especially on spindly little landing gears). SW ships (for example) need repulsors on their ships in order to land those stupendous masses on planets, and what you are proposing requires ship's as massive as Star wars ones, when these sorts of ships don't even show up until Kimball Kinnison's time.

There is also a possibility that the projectors use ultra-wave, rather than EM-range ("ether-wave") radiation; if we accept the GURPS material as having some official standing, ultrawave-based weaponry was in use during the Jovian Wars. You might want to disregard this, given that Roger's scientists were not aware of any sub-ethereal rays, but on the other hand there are some indications that such were at least theorised (the rumours the captain of the Hyperion was commenting on in the first chapter of Triplanetary proper).It might be that the "Service Special" transceivers were merely a new application of ultra-waves, rather than a new discovery, or that their previous use was classified and thus
not general knowledge. If so, ultrawave-based beams might not produce as much recoil as EM-based beams do.

1.) If the Jovians had devised widespread ultrawave that they could use it as weaponry, I find it highly unlikely that they would devise a more energy intensive application (weapon) before they devised a less energy intensive application (communications or sensor.) That tend s to fly in the face of historical evidence if anything, and the fact that the Triplanetary service developed sensors and communication before weapons.

2.) If I disregard it, I'd disregard it becuase you're reaching with what sounds like nonsensical pseudoscience. If you're going to debate, do it with something better than idle conjecture on your part. I do not appreciate people who decide to bullshit me that way.

Where do you get a 100 yard radius figure from? My copy of Triplanetary (p. 176, Pyramid Books edition, second printing) describes it thus:

[quote=""The super-ship is launched""]For the atomic-powered "Rodebush-Cleveland" neutralizers were more powerful by far, and had a vastly greater radius of action, than the calculations of their designers had shown; and for a moment everything within a hundred yards or so of the Boise behaved as though it were an integral part of the vessel.

At least to me, it looks like those hundred yards are measured outwards from the ship’s hull, the size of which is unspecified.[/quote]

What part of "more powerful" and "vastly greater radius of action" escaped your notice, exactly? It's not going to be "vastly greater" if the ship is several hundred meters in diameter now, is it? Or are you going to twist words around to claim the ship is a good quarter mile in diameter?

The Triplanetary Service has access to reactionless drives (else the Boise would not be able to manoeuvre, as reaction drives are quite useless for an inertialess ship). This implies that they would be able to somehow work around conservation of momentum, even before the discovery of Nevian neutralisation of inertia, which might be involved in how they handle gun recoil, or how they can lift potentially huge masses into space without the energy expenditures and environmental effects that would result from the mechanisms you calculate.

So basically your answer is to wave your hands frantically in the air and say "I don't know, but they must somehow!" and invoke technobabble physics? Sorry, that doesn't fly on this board. Try again, with something more concerete and better supported.

Oh and as far as the "reactionless drive" bit

First Lensman wrote: Out into the
space-field, the scarred arid blackened area devoted solely to the widely-spaced docks
of the tremendous vessels which plied the vacuous reaches of interplanetary and
interstellar space. Spacedocks were, and are, huge and sprawling structures; built of
concrete and steel and asbestos and ultra-stubborn refractory and insulation and
vacuum-breaks; fully air-conditioned and having refrigeration equipment of thousands of
tons per hour of ice; designed not only to expedite servicing, unloading, and loading, but
also to protect materials and personnel from the raving, searing blasts of takeoff and of
landing.

..

The airport, an extremely busy one well outside the city proper, was located
easily enough, as was the spot upon which the Tellurian ship was to land. Lightly, slowly,
she settled downward, her jets raving out against a gravity fully twice that of her native
Earth. Those blasts, however, added little or nothing to the destruction already
accomplished by the craft then lying there -a torpedo-shaped cruiser having perhaps
one-twentieth of the Chicago's mass and bulk.

Gray Lensman wrote: Energy raved from the driving jets, but still nothing happened. There was none of the
thrust, none of the reaction of an inert start;

..

From her jets flared blast after blast of energies whose intensity paled the brilliance of
the madly warring screens, and to Boskone's Observers the immense Patrol raider vanished from
all ken.
...

"Drop down, maulers!" Haynes ordered. "Low enough so that your screens touch ground.
Never mind damage—they'll blast the whole city if we don't stop those beams. Surround him!"
Down the maulers came, ringwise; mighty protective envelopes overlapping, down^until
the screens bit ground. Now the caterpillar and mobile-screen crews were safe; powerful as
Prellin's weapons were, they could not break through those maulers' screens.
Now holocaust waxed doubly infernal. The wall was tight, the only avenue of escape of
all that fiercely radiant energy was straight upward; adding to the furor were the flaring
underlets—themselves destructive agents by no means to be despised!
Inside the screens, then, raged pure frenzy. At the line raved the maulers' prodigious
lifting blasts. Out and away, down every avenue of escape, swept torrents of superheated air at
whose touch anything and everything combustible burst into flame. But there could be no firefighting—
yet.

Sounds like their propulsion systems DO release energy, do exert forces (as if that weren't obvious), and CAN inflict damage on things. Try again.

There are in fact signs that atomic motors running on allotropic iron were better in at least some respects than the uranium-powered engines that Bergenholm perfected from the original Rodebush-Cleveland design. Judging from the available evidence, their conversion rate was faster than the 400lbs/hour figure; in New Lensman, a car-portable iron-driven engine converted a "small bar" of iron into energy in less than a second. Given the density of iron, I personally do not think I would be out of line to say that a "small bar" could easily weigh a kilogram, but let us assume that it converts half a kilogram a second just to be conservative. This means 30 kilograms a minute, or 1,800 kilograms per hour, well in excess of the figures for the Dauntless's individual engines. I can only speculate that there was some "hidden" drawback with using iron that did not immediately become apparent, but made switching to uranium a better option; safety or reliability of the drive, perhaps?

We can run a quick calc on the energy figures this implies for ships. Assuming virtually total efficiency, which is the norm for Lensman, the obtained energy works out to 1.6e20 Joules per hour (each kilogram of iron containing 8.99e16 Joules of mass/energy). This is, again, for a car-portable engine, but we will assume that the starship engines are not that much bigger for the sake of being extremely conservative (say that they consume about twice as much fuel, which is ridiculous for engines described as "Gargantuan" in Triplanetary). The Boise has at least ten engines (Cleveland talks about "number ten power room" in Triplanetary), so the lower limit for her available power is 10kg/s, or 9e17 watts of continuous power generation. Converted to TNT-equivalent, this is on the order of 215 megatons/second. Going by this, the recharge time drops by orders of magnitude to less than eight hours for a two-minute beam. Which is still considerable, but given the travel times for their STL ships on patrol in the solar system, not too insane. (All calcs were made on the fly, so if there is a mistake somewhere it is genuine, not malicious distortion.)

Bullshit and entirely speculative. First off, I question whether allotropic iron is completely 100% matter to energy conversion, given they never achieved that sort of thing with explosives UNTIL Children of the Lens:

Children of the Lens wrote: It may not, perhaps, be generally known that the "completely liberating" or
"super-atomic" bomb liberates one hundred percent of the component energy of its total
mass in approximately sixty nine hundredths of one microsecond.

That even outdoes Duodec (and replaced allotropic iron munitions after Triplanetary, I might add), which is used from some time in First Lensman til some time after SEcond Stage Lensman but before Children of the Lens:

Children of the Lens wrote: Duodecaplylatomate, that frightful detonant whose violence is exceeded only by that of nuclear disintegration!

Oh, and speaking of First Lensman:

"With one notable exception," Kinnison pointed out. "Me attack, if any, will be
strictly modern. I hope we'll be able to handle it. One good thing, the old mountain's got a
lot of sheer mass. How much radioactivity will it stand?"
"Allotropic iron, U-235, or plutonium?" Rodebush seized his slide-Tale.
"What difference does it maker"
"From a practical standpoint . . . perhaps none. But with a task force defending,
not many bombs could get through, so I'd say. . ."

That suggests allotropic iron can risk similar radioactivty to the radioactive debris you get from fission-driven nuclear weapons (which makes it FURTHER unlikely that it's "tolal mass to energy conversion") so we can't really say how much energy it outputs (aside from being less than Duodec, but possibly less than fission and possibly fusion weapons.)

STrike three.

All of the above is hard to apply to the Jovian Wars, however, given that that era's power generation was decidedly inferior (Nevian total conversion was considered revolutionary). Thus their previous power source would have been worse by at least an order of magnitude; if we take something from real life to compare, deuterium fusion is more than two OOMs worse, assuming similar efficiency. In such a scenario your objection is noted; my best explanation would be that they reload their batteries from bigger power plants "ashore" when they can, and have a hard time doing so otherwise. This might be why they bother to make their biggest ships capable of planetary landing, when they could easily crew and refuel them in orbit by demonstrated use of smaller shuttles.

All you've done so far to address my points is ot wave your hands away with alot of speculation and conjecture and made up figures.

You know what I really like? I went back to read Triplanetary, and if we followed your absurd conjecture that would mean that the Nevians and the Triplanetary fleets fougth over an Earth city.. AND WERE HURLING HUNDREDS OF GIGATONS OF ENERGY AT ONE ANOTHER. energy that would likewise be radiating off those same shields, I might add. Oh wait, I bet its MAGICAL energy right? It disappears into some fairy realm and is replaced with glitter, right?

The fact is you're supporting a quote that is ultimately irreconcilable with existing evidence (of an arguably higher authenticity, no less) and then trying to twist facts and make shit up just to make your position better. And yet you STILL can't make it work! Give the fuck up already.

I took the number as it was provided in the book and attempted to fit it in with the bulk of the evidence. Given the book’s status as authorised by Smith himself after review of the manuscript, I consider it canon and would not throw it out unless it was demonstrated to be absolutely incompatible with the core series. I admit that I did not calculate the momentum, but I did think of the issues with power generation.

You aren't making it fit. you're just saying it works "somehow" and then trying to evade actually proving how its supposed to work. That's not analysis its fucking wishful thinking. Moreover, you're trying to pass it off as if you've actually done some work, which is dishonest in the extreme. My patience with you is rapidly diminishing.

Teleros · Post by **Teleros** » 2009-08-06 08:59am

The Triplanetary Service has access to reactionless drives (else the Boise would not be able to manoeuvre, as reaction drives are quite useless for an inertialess ship). This implies that they would be able to somehow work around conservation of momentum, even before the discovery of Nevian neutralisation of inertia, which might be involved in how they handle gun recoil, or how they can lift potentially huge masses into space without the energy expenditures and environmental effects that would result from the mechanisms you calculate.

Actually, they used a sort of magic reaction drive, described in Galactic Patrol thus:

GP wrote:It is of course well known that all ships of space are propelled by the inert projection, by means of high-potential static fields, of nascent fourth-order particles of "corpuscles", which are formed, inert, inside the inertialess projector, by the conversion of some form of energy into matter. This conversion liberates some heat, and a vast amount of light. This light, of "flare", shining as it does directly upon and through the higly tenuous gas formed by the projected corpuscles, makes of a speeding space-ship one of the most gorgeous spectacles known to man; and it was this very spectacular effect that Kinnison and his crew must do away with...

It might also be that in such battles the Boskonians first fight a conventional battle for a couple of minutes (or however long they have stored-up power for) and then smash the Patrol when they run out of power and have to rely on onboard engines (where the Boskonians are superior).

Why?

What part of "more powerful" and "vastly greater radius of action" escaped your notice, exactly? It's not going to be "vastly greater" if the ship is several hundred meters in diameter now, is it? Or are you going to twist words around to claim the ship is a good quarter mile in diameter?

Actually this only means that the area the field encompassed was bigger than the Boise, but doesn't help much with the size of the Boise. Given its description as a dreadnought or superdreadnought in FL though, I doubt it's much, if any, bigger than the dreadnoughts / superdreadnoughts of Kim Kinnison's day.

Bullshit and entirely speculative. First off, I question whether allotropic iron is completely 100% matter to energy conversion, given they never achieved that sort of thing with explosives UNTIL Children of the Lens

Roger seemed to think it was near-as-damnit 100% efficient (and given he's Gharlane of Eddore, he ought to know what he's talking about). There have been enough monster bombs and torpedoes though that I wonder if either (a) they had 100% efficient conversion in bombs from the same time, or (b) they developed the bombs after the reactors (unusual though I'd admit). Roger's quote on it to his staff in Triplanetary:

TP wrote:Their source of power is the intra-atomic energy of iron. Complete; not the partial liberation incidental to the nuclear fission of such unstable isotopes as those of thorium, uranium, plutonium, and so on.

In addition to this, it must also be considered that nobody ever seems to consider the use of radiators or heat sinks (Cleveland & Rodebush even mention the need to install them on the Boise on its first trip, as they're heating up due to friction). A (for sake of argument) 90% efficient reactor will still result in 9e15J of waste heat per kilogram of fuel, assuming all the fuel is actually involved in the annihilation reaction.

Regarding the CotL super-atomic bombs, I'm wondering if miniaturising the equipment was the problem. It's one thing for Adlington in TP to build a bomb big enough to dent a planet, another to make one small enough to be used in large-scale "missile spam" fleet actions. Alternatively, the CotL bombs released their energy in the form of ultrawaves or something, which may not have been possible in the TP / FL era.

That suggests allotropic iron can risk similar radioactivty to the radioactive debris you get from fission-driven nuclear weapons (which makes it FURTHER unlikely that it's "tolal mass to energy conversion") so we can't really say how much energy it outputs (aside from being less than Duodec, but possibly less than fission and possibly fusion weapons.)

Or that it can be used in less efficient reactions (ie a "dirty" allotropic iron bomb).

Connor MacLeod · Post by **Connor MacLeod** » 2009-08-06 02:22pm

Teleros wrote:Actually this only means that the area the field encompassed was bigger than the Boise, but doesn't help much with the size of the Boise. Given its description as a dreadnought or superdreadnought in FL though, I doubt it's much, if any, bigger than the dreadnoughts / superdreadnoughts of Kim Kinnison's day.

First off, yes, it does help us. I have NEVER heard of an inertialess ship whose inertialess field has extended VASTLY beyond the ship itself - doing so seems like a Bad Idea given what happened in triplanetary, so naturally they would want ot limit the effects (since they do go inertialess on planets, I doubt you would want to be scooping out huge chunks of matter when around planets.) If the field extends at ALL beyond the ship (which I highly doubt) it would be a miniscule distance, not a major one. That a 100 yards is considered to be a "vastly greater radius of action" tells us much about the ship's own diameter - as I said, having the ship itself be half a mile in diameter is NOT going to represent "vastly greater" increase in the radius of the field, for example.

Second, I doubt it was as big as anything in Kimball Kinnison's day. The Dauntless was as big as a mauler and bigger than anything previously built, and so were the maulers. They constnatly upped the scales of warship design post Triplanetary (Smith had a very liberal view of research and development it would seem, rivalling Star Trek in some ways.)

Roger seemed to think it was near-as-damnit 100% efficient (and given he's Gharlane of Eddore, he ought to know what he's talking about). There have been enough monster bombs and torpedoes though that I wonder if either (a) they had 100% efficient conversion in bombs from the same time, or (b) they developed the bombs after the reactors (unusual though I'd admit). Roger's quote on it to his staff in Triplanetary:

TP wrote:Their source of power is the intra-atomic energy of iron. Complete; not the partial liberation incidental to the nuclear fission of such unstable isotopes as those of thorium, uranium, plutonium, and so on.

I'll concede that allotropic iron is "complete" liberation (further reinforced by atomic motor statements in Grey Lensman). On further reflection however, that does not neccesarily change my fundamental point. Just because it releases ALL its energy does not mean that all that energy is in a usable form. Mike gives some examples when discussing proton torpedoes and antimatter and in discussing their reactors and its known that the sun (which operates by fusion reactions) is also known to emit neutrinos.

So yes, while the energy is completely liberating, it won't neccesarily all be in a "useful" form. We dont know enough about allotropic iron to predict it, either. I would submit, however, that the apparent "low" conversion figures in Gray Lensman (400 lbs an hour) does suggest that not all the energy is useful in such reactions (at least prior to COTL) and this limits the controlled "rate" at which they can convert said matter. This would be consistent with what I noted about Duodec and the super-atomic bombs as well.

As far as bombs go.. different story from reactors, and I can't really care to speculate. I've had a bit of a headache figuring out bomb yields though (or size/masses for that matter.) and the efficiency/inefficiency factor would be a whole 'nother story (again, we dont know enough to really predict THAT far, I think.) Its arguably more efficient than the nuclear stuff we have today, but we can't say how much more really.

In addition to this, it must also be considered that nobody ever seems to consider the use of radiators or heat sinks (Cleveland & Rodebush even mention the need to install them on the Boise on its first trip, as they're heating up due to friction). A (for sake of argument) 90% efficient reactor will still result in 9e15J of waste heat per kilogram of fuel, assuming all the fuel is actually involved in the annihilation reaction.

As a rule I assume reactors exist, just as I assume some forms of computer assistance exist despite the implication in many of the books that they don't really exist. (Radiators, like robots and computers, would seem to be an "after thought" on Smith's part - one of those many changes he made throughout the series as time went on. authors do change their minds after all.) That Lensmanverse screens work like an absorption/reradiation medium would suggest, however, radiators exist in some manner. This may even be a secondary funciton of screens in non-combat situations for all we know (It would make some odd implications for combat too.)

Your statement about reactors would be accurate My note above about reactor efficiencies would make radiators and heat sinks of some kind neccessary. However, we don't know efficiencies of the devices (like reactors) or radiators though, other than they might be insanely (unrealistically) efficient like SW ones. Or the radiators are sufficiently exotic (again like SW neutrino radiators).

Regarding the CotL super-atomic bombs, I'm wondering if miniaturising the equipment was the problem. It's one thing for Adlington in TP to build a bomb big enough to dent a planet, another to make one small enough to be used in large-scale "missile spam" fleet actions.

We never get any definite idea of missile sizes for most of the series, save with the Britannia. In (IIRC) Second Stage Lensman when Kinnison is acting as that renegade Jeweler he dumps 10 duodec torps down a mineshaft and that neccesarily wasn't his whole stockpile, while in Children of the Lens he claims to have enough super atomic" bombs on his ship to wipe out a planet. That's about it that comes to mind, however.

In any case why would miniaturising it be an issue? They've used "remotely guided" munitions all throughout the series (nevermind stuff like shells or stuff.. like the attack by maulers on Bronseca in Gray Lensman) - I've never gotten the impression that propulsion or guidance were an issue at most likely combat ranges (given the insane miniaturization shown for drive tech and ultrawave stuff is. Hell worse comes to worse, use tractors and pressors to guide it in..) And miniaturization would only affect volume mostly, not mass. To generate the insane yields possible you still need a certain minimum of mass for your explosives anyhow (and compressing THEM down would introduce other problems, like insane gravity)

Alternatively, the CotL bombs released their energy in the form of ultrawaves or something, which may not have been possible in the TP / FL era.

I doubt it. In Childern of the Lens the description of the Super-atomic warhead that destroyed X when Karen and Tregonsee were pursuing him didnt' sound remotely like ultrawave (too slow, and too easily visible to the naked eye) - the only time we see them used against warships is when the Patrol fleet englobes them (towards th end)

Or that it can be used in less efficient reactions (ie a "dirty" allotropic iron bomb).

Perhaps.

Teleros · Post by **Teleros** » 2009-08-07 04:27am

First off, yes, it does help us. I have NEVER heard of an inertialess ship whose inertialess field has extended VASTLY beyond the ship itself - doing so seems like a Bad Idea given what happened in triplanetary, so naturally they would want ot limit the effects (since they do go inertialess on planets, I doubt you would want to be scooping out huge chunks of matter when around planets.) If the field extends at ALL beyond the ship (which I highly doubt) it would be a miniscule distance, not a major one. That a 100 yards is considered to be a "vastly greater radius of action" tells us much about the ship's own diameter - as I said, having the ship itself be half a mile in diameter is NOT going to represent "vastly greater" increase in the radius of the field, for example.

The only ship with an inertialess field larger than itself that I can think of is the Boise on its first flight - and that was an accident, so I wouldn't worry about it for other ships afterwards. As for the size of the ship, yes I agree that it's unlikely to be say 1/2 mile across, but you can't really tell, for example, if it's 100m or 200m across from the passage.

Second, I doubt it was as big as anything in Kimball Kinnison's day. The Dauntless was as big as a mauler and bigger than anything previously built, and so were the maulers. They constnatly upped the scales of warship design post Triplanetary (Smith had a very liberal view of research and development it would seem, rivalling Star Trek in some ways.)

Certainly the maulers & supermaulers were a hell of a lot bigger than anything before, as was the Dauntless, but prior to that I'm not sure how much bigger, if any, the later Patrol ships were (the Z9M9Z I don't count given its unique status).

I would submit, however, that the apparent "low" conversion figures in Gray Lensman (400 lbs an hour) does suggest that not all the energy is useful in such reactions (at least prior to COTL) and this limits the controlled "rate" at which they can convert said matter.

Make that "prior to Kim's era" - that 400lb an hour was generating useful / useable energy:

GL wrote:Thus, the atomic motors which served as exciters had a maximum power of four hundred pounds an hour; that is, each exciter could transform that amount of matter into pure energy and employ the output usefully in energising the intake screen to which it was connected.

Your statement about reactors would be accurate My note above about reactor efficiencies would make radiators and heat sinks of some kind neccessary. However, we don't know efficiencies of the devices (like reactors) or radiators though, other than they might be insanely (unrealistically) efficient like SW ones. Or the radiators are sufficiently exotic (again like SW neutrino radiators).

An unrealistically efficient reactor which unfortunately happens to produce a lot of neutrinos (eg 100% efficient, but 20% of output is in neutrino form) might work. Lensman shields are generally one-way only (god knows how that works), so going by the GL statement above, the reactor would consume 500lb per hour and pump out a hell of a lot of neutrinos, which would disappear out of the ship and past its shields without any problem.

In any case why would miniaturising it be an issue? They've used "remotely guided" munitions all throughout the series (nevermind stuff like shells or stuff.. like the attack by maulers on Bronseca in Gray Lensman) - I've never gotten the impression that propulsion or guidance were an issue at most likely combat ranges (given the insane miniaturization shown for drive tech and ultrawave stuff is. Hell worse comes to worse, use tractors and pressors to guide it in..) And miniaturization would only affect volume mostly, not mass. To generate the insane yields possible you still need a certain minimum of mass for your explosives anyhow (and compressing THEM down would introduce other problems, like insane gravity)

I agree, but why they only seem to mention using such super-atomics in CotL when it appears they've had highly efficient reactors for centuries is, well, weird. Especially when you consider that it's probably easier releasing the energy in an uncontrolled fashion than in a controlled fashion (kinda like nuclear power).

Darth Hoth · Post by **Darth Hoth** » 2009-08-08 05:55am

My apologies for the long delays between posts; I am doing some renovation here at home, so it is an inopportune time for me to be involved in lengthy discussions.

Connor MacLeod wrote:We can extrapolate sizes from Children of the Lens and the from Gray Lensman onwards - Directrix (at least reasonable lower limits) since they give us benchmarks (the Dauntless levelled 5 blocks in landing in Children, and the Directrix gets a lower limit from the volume of the display and it being a teardrop.)

Not that this bears on anything. The only thing remotely close to lugging around "mililons upon millions of tons" of any mass was the Nevian starship after it had sucked up the iron of Roger's planetoid AND the triplanetary fleet and even then the ship was rather sluggish moving (despite having been designed as a fuel transport.) And most of that would have been from Roger's planetoid. And even then the Triplanetary fleet numbered some hundreds of ships as well.

So now even Roger's planetoid, described in Triplanetary as an "artificial planet of metal", measures only a few million tons? Assuming that it was only as big as Pluto (which is no longer even counted as a planet, but was one at the time), and that one thousandth of its volume was iron in some form (rather extremely conservative as well, since ship material does seem to be some form of steel at this point), that's still more than 6 million cubic kilometres' worth of iron. With iron density at 7,900 kg/m^3, that is close to 8 BILLION metric tons per cubic kilometre . . . This of course gives ridiculous numbers for Nevian cargo capacity. We can divide these numbers down by a million, that the Nevian ship can lug around these kinds of masses still speaks volumes about its size and capabilities (although we never see it land carrying such masses, of course).

And Triplanetary does note that the Boise was more massive than the Nevian ship:

[quote=""Super-ship In Action""]Prodigiously massive and powerful as the Nevian was, the Boise was even more massive and more powerful;[/quote]

1.) If the Jovians had devised widespread ultrawave that they could use it as weaponry, I find it highly unlikely that they would devise a more energy intensive application (weapon) before they devised a less energy intensive application (communications or sensor.) That tend s to fly in the face of historical evidence if anything, and the fact that the Triplanetary service developed sensors and communication before weapons.
2.) If I disregard it, I'd disregard it becuase you're reaching with what sounds like nonsensical pseudoscience. If you're going to debate, do it with something better than idle conjecture on your part. I do not appreciate people who decide to bullshit me that way.

How is it nonsensical? Ultra-waves propagate at trillions of c; why is it nonsensical to assume that they have different mass properties than electromagnetic rays? And we have iron-hard evidence from the core series that ultra-waves ARE used in weapons applications eventually (from Triplanetary onwards), so there is no inherent impossibility to it under the rules of the setting. Suspension of disbelief, and all that.

What part of "more powerful" and "vastly greater radius of action" escaped your notice, exactly? It's not going to be "vastly greater" if the ship is several hundred meters in diameter now, is it? Or are you going to twist words around to claim the ship is a good quarter mile in diameter?

It is unspecific enough to be of little value. But if you want to interpret it like that, you must also take the description of Roger’s planetoid as planet-sized, quoted above, equally literally. Which means that it is incredibly massive, orders of magnitude beyond any Earthly element at room temperature and surface pressure.

So basically your answer is to wave your hands frantically in the air and say "I don't know, but they must somehow!" and invoke technobabble physics? Sorry, that doesn't fly on this board. Try again, with something more concerete and better supported.

Under suspension of disbelief, we observe the feats they perform and extrapolate logically what these would require. So how do you propose that they manoeuvre inertialess ships with reaction engines again? The source material is clear that they DO have technology that allows them to violate conservation of momentum by demonstrating the same (and, Hell, GURPS Lensman even calls it just a "reactionless drive" in plain letters), and you cannot just handwave it away by saying that it is arbitrary technobabble – it is, but so are inertial dampers, anti-gravity, hyper-drives (regardless of setting or type) and I know not what else that makes various space-opera settings work. Or is all of the core series non-canon now because it uses a technology you think should not exist?

Oh and as far as the "reactionless drive" bit

SNIP

Sounds like their propulsion systems DO release energy, do exert forces (as if that weren't obvious), and CAN inflict damage on things. Try again.

Driving jets used for inert flight are reaction engines, whatever made you think I was claiming otherwise? This in no way disproves that they use reactionless (gravitic, apparently) engines for "free" flight, nor does it show that such are not used as auxiliary engines for lifting heavy loads in-atmosphere.

That even outdoes Duodec (and replaced allotropic iron munitions after Triplanetary, I might add), which is used from some time in First Lensman til some time after SEcond Stage Lensman but before Children of the Lens:

And your evidence that super-atomics were invented in Children of the Lens would be? The book never says so, but GURPS does note that one of the Jovian moons was subjected to a super-atomic bombardment that stripped it of its atmosphere in the late Jovian Wars (presumably sometime after Triplanetary, given that the Triplanetary League conquered Jupiter somewhere between then and First Lensman, although the dating is uncertain). Which fits with the timeline: super-atomics are total-converters, just like the allotropic iron bombs that then became available. One might merely be a name for another.

As for duodec, it did in fact not replace atomics in First Lensman, but was used concurrently with them, as the battle with the Black Fleet shows:

[i]First Lensman[/i] wrote:All of the Patrol ships had, of course, the standard equipment of so-called “violet”, “green”, and “red” fields, as well as duodecaplylatomate and ordinary atomic bombs, dirigible torpedoes and transporters, slicers, polycyclic drills, and so on;

It might be that duodec is easier to handle, and thus preferred. Then again, the Eich used duodec torpedoes to disrupt and volatilise worlds:

[quote="Gray Lensman, "Eich and Arisian""]The giant voice ceased. Eichlan’s tentacles moved towards the controls. The vast torpedo launched itself.

But instead of hurtling towards distant Arisia it swept around in a circle and struck, in direct central impact, the great cruiser of the Eich. There was an appalling crash, a space-wracking detonation, a flare of incandescence incredible and indescribable as the energy calculated to disrupt – almost to volatilize – a world expended itself upon the insignificant mass of one Boskonian battleship and upon the unresisting texture of the void.[/quote]

Coming close to vaporising an Earth-like planet like Arisia should, by my rough estimate, require at least e29-e30J worth of energy. Yet the torpedo, although described as "vast", was ship-launched, which puts an upper limit on its volume. So either duodec is in fact better than total-conversion (and violates e=mc^2), or it can be packed at extreme densities yet still function (a preferable solution, but with its own problems).

That suggests allotropic iron can risk similar radioactivty to the radioactive debris you get from fission-driven nuclear weapons (which makes it FURTHER unlikely that it's "tolal mass to energy conversion") so we can't really say how much energy it outputs (aside from being less than Duodec, but possibly less than fission and possibly fusion weapons.)

So you will cheerfully ignore Roger’s dialogue that Nevian iron conversion is total:

[quote="Triplanetary, "Roger Carries On""]Their source of power is the intra-atomic energy of iron. Complete; not the partial liberation incidental to the nuclear fission of such unstable isotopes as those of thorium, uranium, plutonium, and so on.[/quote]

while using Rodebush’s dialogue to say that it is worse than plutonium fission? A Triplanetary engineer supposedly knows how things work better than an alien super-mind billions of years old? And there is not even any necessary contradiction, there; it could be that they are discussing some variant, less than total-conversion application (a dirty bomb, so to speak – which would make sense, given that the discussion continues on the topic of specialised radiation weapons specifically).

Another thing I ran across while checking this:

[i]First Lensman[/i], Chapter 2 wrote:" . . . Well, the original Rodebush-Cleveland free drive was a killer, you know . . . "
"How I know!" Kinnison exclaimed, feelingly.
"They beat their brains out and ate their hearts out for months without getting it any better. Then, one day, this kid Bergenholm . . . says:
"'Why don't you use uranium instead of iron and rewind it so it will put out a wave-form like this, with humps here, and here; instead of there, and there?' and he draws a couple of free-hand, but really beautiful curves.
"'Why should we?' they squawk at him.
"'Because it will work that way,' he says ( . . . ).
"Well in sheer desperation, they tried it - and it WORKED! And nobody has ever had a minute's trouble with a Bergenholm since. That's why Rodebush and Cleveland both insisted on the name."

Which incidentally proves my earlier point: iron was abandoned for reasons of reliability, not conversion rate.

You know what I really like? I went back to read Triplanetary, and if we followed your absurd conjecture that would mean that the Nevians and the Triplanetary fleets fougth over an Earth city.. AND WERE HURLING HUNDREDS OF GIGATONS OF ENERGY AT ONE ANOTHER. energy that would likewise be radiating off those same shields, I might add. Oh wait, I bet its MAGICAL energy right? It disappears into some fairy realm and is replaced with glitter, right?

Absurd as it sounds, Lensman does have some way of tolerating ridiculously extreme in-atmosphere bombardments without widespread environmental damage. We quote First Lensman again, from the first battle with the Black Fleet:

Chapter 7 wrote:Those Black bombs should have peeled the armor off of that mountain like the skin off a nectarine and scattered it from the Pacific to the Mississippi. By now there should be a hole a mile deep where the Hill had been But there wasn’t. The Hill was still there! It might have shrunk a little – Clayton couldn’t see very well because of the worse-than-incandescent radiance of the practically continuous, sense-battering, world-shaking atomic detonations – but the Hill was still there!

The reason that the observer is surprised is that the Hill has a new gravitic shielding system, of which he is unaware, which has protected it from destruction. The Hill is described elsewhere as a "truncated cone" of a mountain coated in armor with a "mile-wide" flat top. We can thus calculate a rough figure for the energy that would have been required to crush it like Claytonhad expected. Destroying the mountain and leaving a crater should take hundreds of megatons at least as an order-of-magnitude estimate (disregarding its ultra-wave theatre shield, which would hold off an unknown amount of energy), and could well go into low gigatons. Despite this, no environmental effects of these detonations are ever mentioned, even locally.

And then after that description, several ships hit it in suicide runs at high inert accelerations (New Lensman has one of them, a heavy cruiser, going at a "significant fraction of the speed of light"). Still no ruined environments recorded.

I do not pretend to know HOW they can throw around this kind of firepower without ruining the planet (nevermind the North American continent), any more than I can know the nature of the Force or the secret of the fabrication of hypermatter. All I can establish from canon is that they HAVE DEMONSTRATED these abilities beyond any reasonable doubt, and thus they have them under any reasonable consideration for suspension of disbelief. As a consequence, we must assume that they have some kind of technology to deal with it, even if we have no idea how it would work.

The fact is you're supporting a quote that is ultimately irreconcilable with existing evidence (of an arguably higher authenticity, no less) and then trying to twist facts and make shit up just to make your position better. And yet you STILL can't make it work! Give the fuck up already.

"Doc" Smith apparently did not think that it was irreconcilable, since he authorised it. This whining is unbecoming of a senior debater such as yourself. The bottom line is that we have canon descriptions of weapons power and damage-control mechanisms, some of it in the series, some in a prequel authorised upon review by the author. Your refusal to accept canon figures is reminiscent of the Trektards who claim that the ICS is not a valid source. You do not get to decide what is canon, Smith (and somewhat more tentatively, his estate) has that exclusive privilege. You cannot just throw out any occurrence you dislike. Under suspension of disbelief we accept that the fictional technologies work as described, and attempt to define limits from that. If this leads to apparent contradictions, we attempt to produce a rational explanation for them if possible; otherwise, we just note them down. Cheerfully ignoring the source material is not an option.

Teleros wrote:Actually, they used a sort of magic reaction drive, described in Galactic Patrol thus:

No, I am aware of this. This is the reactionless drive; "fourth-order" particles are related to the propagation of gravity, rather than particles carrying mass. From GURPS Lensman:

[quote=""Driving jets" - The fourth-order nascent corpuscle drive"]Fortunately, the development of the Bergenholm inertialess drive led to other discoveries in the fourth order of forces, which include mass, gravity, and inertia, and made possible the creation of driving jets that do not rely on Newton’s Third Law – a reactionless drive![/quote]

It then goes on to quote the passage you provided, above. Given that gravity is included in the Skylark definition of the fourth order of forces (which is obviously useless as evidence, here, but might be indicative of writer’s intent), and that there is no Lensman description of such matters, I see no reason to disregard it.

Edited to correct a small mistake in a quote

Teleros · Post by **Teleros** » 2009-08-11 09:14am

How is it nonsensical? Ultra-waves propagate at trillions of c; why is it nonsensical to assume that they have different mass properties than electromagnetic rays? And we have iron-hard evidence from the core series that ultra-waves ARE used in weapons applications eventually

Eventually, yes. However, it seems... odd... that you would develop ultrawave weapons, use them, then forget about them in time for Roger's planetoid and have to re-develop them again. Also note that at least one North Polar Jupiter adept worked for Triplanetary (he/she trained Jill Samms to muscle read), so it's not like the victors totally annihilated the enemy - they obviously had people on / around Jupiter, so reverse engineering shouldn't have been a problem if only the Jovians had ultrawave technology.

So how do you propose that they manoeuvre inertialess ships with reaction engines again?

I thought I'd explained it. It's a reaction drive that uses magic particles instead of ordinary hot gas / plasma / radiation. It also maintains conservation of momentum (sort of), because once you go inert again you immediately regain the velocity you had prior to going inertialess (the Bergenholm just "suspends" this).

So either duodec is in fact better than total-conversion (and violates e=mc^2), or it can be packed at extreme densities yet still function (a preferable solution, but with its own problems).

We don't know the size of the Eich ship, nor whether or not it & the torpedo were specially built for the job. Given what warfare was like in the series, I find it quite possible that they had ships dedicated to dropping monster-sized torpedoes on planets (although yes, this is speculation).
As for duodec itself, my thinking is that it's a chemical than can be induced somehow to undergo a near-total-conversion into heat and light radiation (say IR down to UV bands). This would allow for a propagation rate of c, a power equal (or nearly so) to nuclear weapons, and lots of devastation (because unlike gamma rays, infrared radiation will tend to heat up most stuff in its path, not zip through half of it). As a chemical it is also stable and very cheap to produce, and can be stored in large quantities without the risks inherent in, say, large-scale uranium storage (ie, a reaction starting). Unfortunately, the elements used in duodec are typically lighter than, say, uranium or iron, so a 1m^3 duodec bomb will result in a less devastating explosion than a 1m^3 total conversion bomb that uses iron or uranium (or some other heavy element) as its fuel.

Another thing I ran across while checking this

<SNIP>

Which incidentally proves my earlier point: iron was abandoned for reasons of reliability, not conversion rate.

Iron was used because it's what the Nevians used, who in turn were prodded in that direction by the Arisians. However, uranium is a lot denser than iron, which means that for the same volume you get more fuel.

I do not pretend to know HOW they can throw around this kind of firepower without ruining the planet (nevermind the North American continent), any more than I can know the nature of the Force or the secret of the fabrication of hypermatter. All I can establish from canon is that they HAVE DEMONSTRATED these abilities beyond any reasonable doubt, and thus they have them under any reasonable consideration for suspension of disbelief. As a consequence, we must assume that they have some kind of technology to deal with it, even if we have no idea how it would work.

The Hill may have had an unmentioned system for limiting the collateral damage - remember also that the Reservation at the foot of the Hill is never mentioned during or after the bombardment, despite the people living there & nearby. During the covert operation at the lake in FL, a Patrol ship is able to generate forcefields that can stop both beam and projectile weapons from functioning, and we know that they can stop both radiation and physical matter with their shields - this technology, properly employed, could be used to restrict the collateral damage of the assault on the Hill, assuming power supplies and such were up to the job.

No, I am aware of this. This is the reactionless drive; "fourth-order" particles are related to the propagation of gravity, rather than particles carrying mass.

I thought the quote was pretty clear about the drive functioning as a reaction drive:

It is of course well known that all ships of space are propelled by the inert projection, by means of high-potential static fields, of nascent fourth-order particles or "corpuscles", which are formed, inert, inside the inertialess projector, by the conversion of some form of energy into matter. This conversion liberates some heat, and a vast amount of light. This light, of "flare", shining as it does directly upon and through the higly tenuous gas formed by the projected corpuscles, makes of a speeding space-ship one of the most gorgeous spectacles known to man; and it was this very spectacular effect that Kinnison and his crew must do away with...

Note those two bolded sections:

1. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.
2. The corpuscles are some form of matter.
3. The corpuscles are inert.
4. Therefore, the force required to push the corpuscles out of the engine will push the static field generators.
5. As this push is continuous, it will affect inertialess matter.
6. Thus the ship will be moved along, despite being inertialess.

Regardless of whether or not Doc Smith intended for these corpuscles to be related to Skylark science (shudder), the above quote provides a perfectly functional way for a reaction drive to propel the ships. In addition, it is much easier to tie this model of the drive in with the statements in the later books that link inert drive acceleration to inertialess drive velocity. For example, Haynes boasts in GP about how the Britannia can zip along at 10gs of acceleration when inert - and then basically says "figure out for yourself how fast that means she can go when free". It's much easier to reconcile this with the operation of the inertialess drive if both the inert and free drive use the same mechanisms - hell, you may even be able to use the corpuscle generator in the Bergenholm to manufacture matter for the ordinary drive.

As has been noted, the GURPS Lensman book suffers from a fair amount of minimalism and various other errors, hence why I basically ignore it. To give a few examples:
- The "Recognition" box on p12. Ships were generally described as being nearly identical (when they weren't obviously different, like tear-drops vs spheres), communication was almost always excellent between ships (else the Z9M9Z wouldn't work), and coloured forcefields were also used on occasion to help identify each side. Ranges were such that targeting aids were also necessary.
- The 10% efficiency of allotropic iron converters on p68.
- The primary beam design on p72. Duodec was not used in it.
- Tractor beam range and diminishing returns on p75.
- Crew size for the sample ship on p89 - the Dauntless had about 600-700 tops, this thing (same class too) has 300,000!
- The ranges in the combat system. Major fleet battles could and did take place at between lightsecond and lightyear ranges (min and max, although multi-AU ranges seems like the limit).

Darth Hoth · Post by **Darth Hoth** » 2009-08-11 12:40pm

Teleros wrote:Eventually, yes. However, it seems... odd... that you would develop ultrawave weapons, use them, then forget about them in time for Roger's planetoid and have to re-develop them again. Also note that at least one North Polar Jupiter adept worked for Triplanetary (he/she trained Jill Samms to muscle read), so it's not like the victors totally annihilated the enemy - they obviously had people on / around Jupiter, so reverse engineering shouldn't have been a problem if only the Jovians had ultrawave technology.

I always understood it that Jupiter itself was not under Triplanetary control until after the novel with the same name, it having been conquered only later (the Jovian sub-system being inducted was basically why the Triplanetary League turned into the Solarian League). So if they maintained isolation it could be that they kept the secret. That would still be hard to reconcile, however, given that New Lensman had the Triplanetarians adopt the 10^20 watt weapons as early as the First Jovian War.

We don't know the size of the Eich ship, nor whether or not it & the torpedo were specially built for the job. Given what warfare was like in the series, I find it quite possible that they had ships dedicated to dropping monster-sized torpedoes on planets (although yes, this is speculation).

It was identified as a "cruiser", which would tend to suggest that it was smaller than a battleship/superdreadnought/whatever. Even if not, the torpedo would have to be very large to carry even a big enough super-atomic bomb if they are of uranium density or lower; with 9e16J per kilogram of matter, an e29J range bomb would still have to mass upwards of a billion tons.

Iron was used because it's what the Nevians used, who in turn were prodded in that direction by the Arisians. However, uranium is a lot denser than iron, which means that for the same volume you get more fuel.

I thought the passage I quoted pretty obviously said that uranium was a more reliable/safer fuel to use than allotropic iron. This explains the possible contradiction between the conversion rates for iron in New Lensman and the (presumably) uranium fuel in Gray Lensman.

The Hill may have had an unmentioned system for limiting the collateral damage - remember also that the Reservation at the foot of the Hill is never mentioned during or after the bombardment, despite the people living there & nearby. During the covert operation at the lake in FL, a Patrol ship is able to generate forcefields that can stop both beam and projectile weapons from functioning, and we know that they can stop both radiation and physical matter with their shields - this technology, properly employed, could be used to restrict the collateral damage of the assault on the Hill, assuming power supplies and such were up to the job.

I would hesitantly propose something similar (or essentially, handwave it like "Doc" seems to have done). The problem which Connor points out is conservation of energy; all the firepower released has to go somewhere, and the conventional description given for Lensman shielding (i.e., radiating it into the environment) is not helping there. If I have to imagine some more specific mechanism, I would chance a shot that either the shields reradiate only part of it as heat &c, with most of it going away in some harmless form (or SW neutrino conversion, basically, only somewhat less efficient), or they dump it off in hyper-space or some similar Trektard-style explanation. The first has the problem that it could be said to contradict descriptions of how shields work given elsewhere, and the second has its obvious problems. It might be better not to speculate, and just accept it as the proverbial "black box" technology.

Regardless of whether or not Doc Smith intended for these corpuscles to be related to Skylark science (shudder), the above quote provides a perfectly functional way for a reaction drive to propel the ships. In addition, it is much easier to tie this model of the drive in with the statements in the later books that link inert drive acceleration to inertialess drive velocity. For example, Haynes boasts in GP about how the Britannia can zip along at 10gs of acceleration when inert - and then basically says "figure out for yourself how fast that means she can go when free". It's much easier to reconcile this with the operation of the inertialess drive if both the inert and free drive use the same mechanisms - hell, you may even be able to use the corpuscle generator in the Bergenholm to manufacture matter for the ordinary drive.

The entire system for inertialess travel is quite strange, really; with zero inertial mass and "air resistance" from cosmic particles being the only limit on speed as relating to propulsion, a ships that puts out multiple gravities of sustained inert acceleration (for pretty much any reasonable tonnage, including low-ball tens of thousands of tons range) should easily be many orders of magnitude faster than the stated figures (in the 10-100 parsecs per hour range). If as you say the engines used are the same, it would feel very much like "Doc" just inserted arbitrary limits where he felt they fit in. But in-universe, I take it to mean that inert and inertialess propulsion are very definitely not the same mechanisms. It would also feel odd that they would require full-blown matter-from-energy creation for their ordinary jets; that would be truly insanely bad engineering and waste of power.

As has been noted, the GURPS Lensman book suffers from a fair amount of minimalism and various other errors, hence why I basically ignore it. To give a few examples:

Most telling would probably be how the writers downright ignored Children of the Lens giving figures for scale by talking about "millions" of Patrolmen (not even Lensmen, ordinary troops!) and how the Academy on Tellus graduated all the human Lensmen in the First Galaxy. I am the first to say that the writers of that book were idiots (just like most SW EU authors), but given Verna Smith’s involvement and approval I am prepared to give it some weight. I consider what it has to say when it does not contradict the series or the authorised novels; basically I treat it like the bottom tier of the canon (although if what you said about the Kyle books is true, they will probably replace it there if/when I get ahold of them).

- Crew size for the sample ship on p89 - the Dauntless had about 600-700 tops, this thing (same class too) has 300,000!

And it also ignores completely the increase in conversion rate per reactor mass that they got after adopting Medonian equipment.

As a nitpick with nothing really to do with your point, the Dauntless actually had a crew/passenger total of about 2,100:

[quote="Second Stage Lensmen, "Wide-Open N-Way""]And only about half of the twenty one hundred or so other guys aboard this heap ( . . . )[/quote]

- The ranges in the combat system. Major fleet battles could and did take place at between lightsecond and lightyear ranges (min and max, although multi-AU ranges seems like the limit).

What would be an example of LY-range combat? One of the FTL chases? The highest directly mentioned effective range I found for ordinary weapons was half a million miles for lunar "blaster" batteries in New Lensman (although that was old stuff and not ultrawave-based). Bombardment of stationary targets would of course be longer-ranged, like the aforementioned Eich torpedo (fired from the far end of the system Arisia), and theoretically ultrawave-based weapons ranges could be huge. And then you have special weapons like 'tubes and the sunbeam, of course.

Teleros · Post by **Teleros** » 2009-08-11 06:14pm

Darth Hoth wrote:I always understood it that Jupiter itself was not under Triplanetary control until after the novel with the same name, it having been conquered only later (the Jovian sub-system being inducted was basically why the Triplanetary League turned into the Solarian League). So if they maintained isolation it could be that they kept the secret. That would still be hard to reconcile, however, given that New Lensman had the Triplanetarians adopt the 10^20 watt weapons as early as the First Jovian War.

Grey Roger was supposedly a survivor from the Jovian Wars, so the North Polar Adepts and their like had obviously been defeated by then. Whilst the Jovian sub-system may not have been a part of the Triplanetary League, it doesn't have to be for the Triplanetarians to be able to rifle through their tech and whatnot.

Darth Hoth wrote:
We don't know the size of the Eich ship, nor whether or not it & the torpedo were specially built for the job. Given what warfare was like in the series, I find it quite possible that they had ships dedicated to dropping monster-sized torpedoes on planets (although yes, this is speculation).
It was identified as a "cruiser", which would tend to suggest that it was smaller than a battleship/superdreadnought/whatever. Even if not, the torpedo would have to be very large to carry even a big enough super-atomic bomb if they are of uranium density or lower; with 9e16J per kilogram of matter, an e29J range bomb would still have to mass upwards of a billion tons.

Leaving aside Doc Smith's sometimes slapdash approach to ship classes (eg the Dauntless, a superdreadnought the size of a mauler, ships that were far bigger than normal superdreadnoughts when they were first built), a 1e10 tonnes of plutonium (19.8 tonnes per m^3) would fit into a cube a little under 800m on each side (before things like critical mass etc are taken into account). A denser material would obviously take up even less space.

Darth Hoth wrote:
Iron was used because it's what the Nevians used, who in turn were prodded in that direction by the Arisians. However, uranium is a lot denser than iron, which means that for the same volume you get more fuel.
I thought the passage I quoted pretty obviously said that uranium was a more reliable/safer fuel to use than allotropic iron. This explains the possible contradiction between the conversion rates for iron in New Lensman and the (presumably) uranium fuel in Gray Lensman.

It's unclear exactly why, and furthermore as dialogue it must be treated carefully as well. You're also forgetting that Bergenholm told them to do change some wave-form or other. The "use uranium" bit may just have been an extra - along the lines of "and hey, if you use uranium you'll get more bang for your buck" sort of thing.

Darth Hoth wrote:
The Hill may have had an unmentioned system for limiting the collateral damage - remember also that the Reservation at the foot of the Hill is never mentioned during or after the bombardment, despite the people living there & nearby. During the covert operation at the lake in FL, a Patrol ship is able to generate forcefields that can stop both beam and projectile weapons from functioning, and we know that they can stop both radiation and physical matter with their shields - this technology, properly employed, could be used to restrict the collateral damage of the assault on the Hill, assuming power supplies and such were up to the job.
I would hesitantly propose something similar (or essentially, handwave it like "Doc" seems to have done). The problem which Connor points out is conservation of energy; all the firepower released has to go somewhere, and the conventional description given for Lensman shielding (i.e., radiating it into the environment) is not helping there. If I have to imagine some more specific mechanism, I would chance a shot that either the shields reradiate only part of it as heat &c, with most of it going away in some harmless form (or SW neutrino conversion, basically, only somewhat less efficient), or they dump it off in hyper-space or some similar Trektard-style explanation. The first has the problem that it could be said to contradict descriptions of how shields work given elsewhere, and the second has its obvious problems. It might be better not to speculate, and just accept it as the proverbial "black box" technology.

Dumping it into the earth itself would be an easy way of getting rid of it for a fixed base like the Hill. Or as Atomic Rockets points out with its section on ship radiators, if it can be released in a form of energy that the atmosphere is transparent to, then re-radiating it straight up would do the trick.

Darth Hoth wrote:
Regardless of whether or not Doc Smith intended for these corpuscles to be related to Skylark science (shudder), the above quote provides a perfectly functional way for a reaction drive to propel the ships. In addition, it is much easier to tie this model of the drive in with the statements in the later books that link inert drive acceleration to inertialess drive velocity. For example, Haynes boasts in GP about how the Britannia can zip along at 10gs of acceleration when inert - and then basically says "figure out for yourself how fast that means she can go when free". It's much easier to reconcile this with the operation of the inertialess drive if both the inert and free drive use the same mechanisms - hell, you may even be able to use the corpuscle generator in the Bergenholm to manufacture matter for the ordinary drive.
The entire system for inertialess travel is quite strange, really; with zero inertial mass and "air resistance" from cosmic particles being the only limit on speed as relating to propulsion, a ships that puts out multiple gravities of sustained inert acceleration (for pretty much any reasonable tonnage, including low-ball tens of thousands of tons range) should easily be many orders of magnitude faster than the stated figures (in the 10-100 parsecs per hour range). If as you say the engines used are the same, it would feel very much like "Doc" just inserted arbitrary limits where he felt they fit in. But in-universe, I take it to mean that inert and inertialess propulsion are very definitely not the same mechanisms. It would also feel odd that they would require full-blown matter-from-energy creation for their ordinary jets; that would be truly insanely bad engineering and waste of power.

The speed figures are a real pain in the neck actually, for various reasons:

1. Matter almost certainly behaves differently at FTL speeds when trying to calculate friction.
2. If I've got my maths right, then using the drag equation, a spherical ship with a 10m reference area travelling at 90 parsecs per hour would encounter drag equal to 2.34e7 Newtons in open space.
3. That said, given FTL speeds and such, the drag equation is probably inaccurate anyway

.

Also, Doc Smith does seem to link the two propulsion systems for some reason:

Haynes to Kinnison in GP wrote:She is the fastest thing in space, developing at full blast an inert acceleration of ten gravities. Figure out for yourself what velocity that means free in open space!"

The Boise's first flight wrote:... velocity attained by inertialess matter driven through an almost perfect vacuum by the Boise's maximum projector blasts - a blast which would lift her stupendous normal tonnage against a gravity five times that of earth.

Etc. Regardless of how efficient it is to have the same exhausts etc used for magic corpuscles and ordinary hot gas and plasma, it seems they are very closely related.

Darth Hoth wrote:
- Crew size for the sample ship on p89 - the Dauntless had about 600-700 tops, this thing (same class too) has 300,000!
And it also ignores completely the increase in conversion rate per reactor mass that they got after adopting Medonian equipment. As a nitpick with nothing really to do with your point, the Dauntless actually had a crew/passenger total of about 2,100:

[quote="Second Stage Lensmen, "Wide-Open N-Way""]And only about half of the twenty one hundred or so other guys aboard this heap ( . . . )

[/quote]
Bleh, haven't got around to going through SSL properly yet, I was going by a conversation in GL. Still, a hell of a lot lower than the GURPS numbers.

Darth Hoth wrote:
- The ranges in the combat system. Major fleet battles could and did take place at between lightsecond and lightyear ranges (min and max, although multi-AU ranges seems like the limit).
What would be an example of LY-range combat? One of the FTL chases? The highest directly mentioned effective range I found for ordinary weapons was half a million miles for lunar "blaster" batteries in New Lensman (although that was old stuff and not ultrawave-based). Bombardment of stationary targets would of course be longer-ranged, like the aforementioned Eich torpedo (fired from the far end of the system Arisia), and theoretically ultrawave-based weapons ranges could be huge. And then you have special weapons like 'tubes and the sunbeam, of course.

At Jalte, Grand Fleet was ordered to surround the star cluster to attack, we have (although it's slightly different) lightyears-long ranges on the tractor beam setup built on Velantia, and during the planning of the Battle of Arisia, each subordinate commander in the Z9M9Z is given a region tens of lightyears across to oversee. As I said though, most of the stuff points to multi-AU ranges at best, if only because otherwise Prime Base itself could have knocked out Boskonian bases in nearby solar systems (!). Certainly the battle at Helmuth's was almost certainly conducted over several AU, given the number and positioning of his fortresses (18, englobing a solar system = sodding big gaps = those fortresses must have been able to cover those gaps with their guns).

Just for kicks, a final nail in the coffin for the GURPS book's ridiculous allotropic iron efficiency figures (and other things):

Cleveland & Rodebush on the [i]Boise[/i]'s first flight wrote:It's [their velocity] constant, of course, at the value at which the friction of the medium is equal to our thrust. Incidentally, we can't hold it too long. We're running a temperature, which shows we're stepping along faster than anybody ever computed before. Also, it points out the necessity for something that none of us ever anticipated needing in an open-space drive - refrigerators or radiating wall-shields or repelling or something of the sort.

I can picture Nyrath banging his head against the wall right about now

. Calls into question just when Ellern's "multiplex projectors" were developed too, because for spaceship designers to not even consider this a problem means that the last ship from Venus / Earth / Mars with a decent on-board power plant and no radiators was either a long time ago or (probably thanks to Arisian meddling), never appeared.

In the mean time, I've ordered New Lensman from Amazon, in spite of its apparently atrocious writing and such, so I'll probably have a quick read through when it comes.

Darth Hoth · Post by **Darth Hoth** » 2009-08-12 07:13am

Teleros wrote:Grey Roger was supposedly a survivor from the Jovian Wars, so the North Polar Adepts and their like had obviously been defeated by then. Whilst the Jovian sub-system may not have been a part of the Triplanetary League, it doesn't have to be for the Triplanetarians to be able to rifle through their tech and whatnot.

It could also be that Jupiter had gotten tired of the Adepts at some point when the war was going badly, with their military or whatever launching a coup, throwing them out, and brokering some kind of status quo peace. Roger had supposedly spent some time out of the system before he came back with his planetoid; perhaps the Jovians exiled him?

Leaving aside Doc Smith's sometimes slapdash approach to ship classes (eg the Dauntless, a superdreadnought the size of a mauler, ships that were far bigger than normal superdreadnoughts when they were first built), a 1e10 tonnes of plutonium (19.8 tonnes per m^3) would fit into a cube a little under 800m on each side (before things like critical mass etc are taken into account). A denser material would obviously take up even less space.

Well, that was my point, more or less. A cube of 800 metres would likely still be bigger than any ordinary ship design (except perhaps super-maulers). Now, obviously they can build ships of these sizes (and masses) and much larger still, given Roger's planetoid, but it does not appear to be a common occurrence, so one would think that they would at least mention that this "cruiser" was really a miles-long monster that fired torpedoes as large as battleships.

The speed figures are a real pain in the neck actually, for various reasons:

1. Matter almost certainly behaves differently at FTL speeds when trying to calculate friction.
2. If I've got my maths right, then using the drag equation, a spherical ship with a 10m reference area travelling at 90 parsecs per hour would encounter drag equal to 2.34e7 Newtons in open space.
3. That said, given FTL speeds and such, the drag equation is probably inaccurate anyway .

Good point, I suppose. I tried to run some numbers on this earlier this spring, but I also used some GURPS data, which might not have been the smartest thing. I intend to go through my books when I get them back to see if I can find anything useful; if so, I will drop a call. But as you said, calcs on Newtonian assumptions might not be valid anyway. Though given how Lensman screws up relativity otherwise with regards to FTL travel, who can say for sure.

Also, Doc Smith does seem to link the two propulsion systems for some reason:
Haynes to Kinnison in GP wrote:She is the fastest thing in space, developing at full blast an inert acceleration of ten gravities. Figure out for yourself what velocity that means free in open space!"

The Boise's first flight wrote:... velocity attained by inertialess matter driven through an almost perfect vacuum by the Boise's maximum projector blasts - a blast which would lift her stupendous normal tonnage against a gravity five times that of earth.
Etc. Regardless of how efficient it is to have the same exhausts etc used for magic corpuscles and ordinary hot gas and plasma, it seems they are very closely related.

Were it just Haynes I could well dismiss him; he has shown his fair amount of scientific ignorance elsewhere in the series and is notably prone to oversimplifications and inaccuracies. Third-person narration is of course more problematic. An inclusionist could perhaps say that those passages refer to the power plant, which powers both types of engines, though that requires tendentious reading of the second passage in particular.

At Jalte, Grand Fleet was ordered to surround the star cluster to attack, we have (although it's slightly different) lightyears-long ranges on the tractor beam setup built on Velantia, and during the planning of the Battle of Arisia, each subordinate commander in the Z9M9Z is given a region tens of lightyears across to oversee. As I said though, most of the stuff points to multi-AU ranges at best, if only because otherwise Prime Base itself could have knocked out Boskonian bases in nearby solar systems (!). Certainly the battle at Helmuth's was almost certainly conducted over several AU, given the number and positioning of his fortresses (18, englobing a solar system = sodding big gaps = those fortresses must have been able to cover those gaps with their guns).

Given ultra-wave detection and free travel speeds, a Devil's advocate could say that loose formations are less telling because of small reaction times; a fortress could easily move into position to deal with any one intruder close up (assuming of course that the ship is not undetectable/stealth-equipped). Of course, that explanation would make Helmuth's defences leak like a sieve if they were confronted with a larger force. At Arisia, were those groups an outer detector screen of some sort? (Children of the Lens is one of the books I do not have available for reference at the moment.) The tractors I do remember now; those were rather impressive, both the range and being FTL.

I can picture Nyrath banging his head against the wall right about now . Calls into question just when Ellern's "multiplex projectors" were developed too, because for spaceship designers to not even consider this a problem means that the last ship from Venus / Earth / Mars with a decent on-board power plant and no radiators was either a long time ago or (probably thanks to Arisian meddling), never appeared.

Yeah, well. As Connor said, they pretty much need radiators already regardless of what some guy said (in battle, they need to dissipate all those fiercely refulgent rays and starkly irresistible incandescences they throw around, somehow), and their shields are noted as reradiating energy, so that passage make little sense. If we twist it a little, you could perhaps take it to mean that civilian ships would also need military-rated radiating screens now. Though that is almost certainly not the author's intent, of course.

In the mean time, I've ordered New Lensman from Amazon, in spite of its apparently atrocious writing and such, so I'll probably have a quick read through when it comes.

Oh, the writing is absolute crap, certainly; worse than most SW EU. But it does help to fill out the Lensman universe, and at least does not intentionally shit on "Doc's" writings like Kyle seems to have done. Supposedly Ellern also wrote another story that ran in Perry Rhodan, "Triplanetary Agent", but I know nothing about that one; supposedly it was of very low quality and has never been reprinted since.

Nyrath · Post by **Nyrath** » 2009-08-12 05:22pm

Teleros wrote:I can picture Nyrath banging his head against the wall right about now .

Until my head bleeds...

Nyrath · Post by **Nyrath** » 2009-08-12 05:27pm

Darth Hoth wrote:Oh, the writing is absolute crap, certainly; worse than most SW EU. But it does help to fill out the Lensman universe, and at least does not intentionally shit on "Doc's" writings like Kyle seems to have done. Supposedly Ellern also wrote another story that ran in Perry Rhodan, "Triplanetary Agent", but I know nothing about that one; supposedly it was of very low quality and has never been reprinted since.

Well, in my opinion, "Triplanetary Agent" is about on the same level as "New Lensman." It ain't Doc Smith, but it is far superior to that David Kyle dreck.
I occasionally re-read "New Lensman." I burned my David Kyle books.

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