Gravity gun Vs Portal gun

[Enigma]

Portal Gun and a remote controlled robot with a scoop. Open a portal to the moon and send the robot in to grab some moon rocks\dust.

How about just a shovel with a long handle?

A re-purposed remote control bomb robot with an extra long vacuum hose attached to it instead.

[Gil Hamilton]

The moon is already in a harder vacuum than most vacuum cleaner pumps can pull. Seriously, what's wrong with the common shovel and wheelbarrow?

[lordofchange13]

PORTAL GUN!!
Let us usher in the age of the Commonwealth with its wormhole connected planets!

[Napoleon the Clown]

The Portal Gun seems to have a similar lift capacity to the gravity gun, so unless we're counting the super gravity gun, I'll go with making portals.

[Purple]

How small can I make the portals? Can they be like big enough for a truck? What about a peep hole I could put... well places.

[Venator]

How small can I make the portals? Can they be like big enough for a truck? What about a peep hole I could put... well places.

They have a fixed size, roughly large enough to accommodate an upright-standing human. Larger or smaller versions would have to wait on reverse-engineering or modification, unless Portal 2 has introduced varying-sized portals.

Also, really?

[Zor]

Question, how fast do the bolts that a Portal gun fires travel?

Zor

[SilverWingedSeraph]

The portalgun bolts appear to travel at roughly lightspeed based on the commentary in Portal 2 and how long it takes for a certain long-range portal to open, I believe.

[Enigma]

The moon is already in a harder vacuum than most vacuum cleaner pumps can pull. Seriously, what's wrong with the common shovel and wheelbarrow?

Can the average person afford a spacesuit?

[Norade]

I'd be wary of actually opening a portal between here and the moon simply because that is going to be one hell of a lot of suction trying to pull you and everything nearby through that hole.

[Raxmei]

I was thinking in terms of having some sort of organizational backing. It would be absolutely priceless to NASA even if the moon portal thing was the only thing it did. I suppose if you wanted to do it as an individual you could rig up some sort of vacuum cabinet arrangement with a long bendy shovel poking through if you really had to. At least it makes more sense than trying to use a vacuum cleaner in a vacuum.

[Serafina]

I'd be wary of actually opening a portal between here and the moon simply because that is going to be one hell of a lot of suction trying to pull you and everything nearby through that hole.

Eh, simply build a large airtight room and evacuate the atmosphere from it. Build in a couple of airlocks, and voila - problem solved.

[Norade]

I'd be wary of actually opening a portal between here and the moon simply because that is going to be one hell of a lot of suction trying to pull you and everything nearby through that hole.

Eh, simply build a large airtight room and evacuate the atmosphere from it. Build in a couple of airlocks, and voila - problem solved.

I know that it could be totally overcome, I was more thinking of your typical person pulling a 'Hey, look what I can do' and causing shenanigans.

[Skgoa]

I would go for the ASHPD, too. As others have mentioned, it would revolutionize travel. The cost savings/economic potential for even just one pair of portals would be extreme in space travel. Sent a couple of satelites that aren't much more than big pieces of cardboard with station keeping systems into various orbits or to any place (in the solar system) we want... the biggest headaches in rocket science have just been solved. Oh, also no threat of meteors anymore, since we can put engines on them to push them out of our way far ahead of them becoming a threat.
Even if the portals conserve energy(i.e. stuff going through to places with higher potential energy will mean a consumption of energy at the portal device, my own pet theory of how it works ), the actual energy cost - if we get to spend it on/as electricity - would be lower than minimum wage in industrialized countries is.

About the moon dust issue: portals seem to work on many different surfaces. Of course CJ or GlaDOS could have had office walls painted with moon dust containing paint for arbitrary reasons, but since were are never told that its the only portal conductor... edit: I mean, seriously, does anyone believe they put this special moon dust paint that cost a fuckton of dollars to make on arbitrary surfaces in places were no one was supposed to be, ever again? In places that had been constructed long before portals were researched? (Or anyone had been to the moon...)

And one more thing to think about: iirc at the beginning of the first game Chell is let out of her chamber via portal... and it dosn't look like there is a portal device around. So obviously portals between static places can be built, too. Every form of transportation will get much, much easier and cheaper. At the cost of a huge number of jobs, though. But its staggering to think about how many more ressources we could spend on improving the quality of live of all humanity, now that we have unlimited instant travel that takes only electrical energy and very (hand-)portable infrastructure.

[Skgoa]

Edit window ended... added part in italics:


About the moon dust issue: portals seem to work on many different surfaces. Of course CJ or GlaDOS could have had office walls painted with moon dust containing paint for arbitrary reasons, but since were are never told that its the only portal conductor... edit: I mean, seriously, does anyone believe they put this special moon dust paint that cost a fuckton of dollars to make on arbitrary surfaces in places were no one was supposed to be, ever again? In places that had been constructed long before portals were researched? (Or anyone had been to the moon...) All of this for the convenience of a test subject that might travel through that area a hundred years or so later? Just so that said subject could propell itself over broken of sections of catwalks... that were perfectly fine back then?

[Rossum]

Well, about the Moon Dust, it could be that they synthesized the first batch of Moon Dust (it's basically silicon and trace amounts of other stuff) and then figured out that the Moon has sufficient amounts of it on its surface. Then they just have an airtight room in Aperture Science labs, create a portal in that room, zap anothre portal onto the moon, then have robots go to the moon and scoop up all the moon dust they can find.

Really, if you can create a portal between the Earth and the Moon by firing a gun at the moon then you can get all the moon dust you want. Its just getting (or synthesizing) that first batch or two of dust that could be a problem.

[adam_grif]

Of course they can make portal conductors, they have that fucking gel in unfathomable quantities. The issue is that you can only go to surfaces that are such conductors, and there doesn't seem to be many common building materials that are. It's one thing to be able to pull off these insane stunts in a controlled testing environment, but if you move into a city full of steel and brick, it becomes a lot more limited. As far as I know, concrete painted white is just about the only surface that takes portals that we don't know for sure hasn't been coated in a special conductor (it might have been, but we don't know).

Portal is in Half-Lifeverse, and Aperture science has had the portal gun since the 70's at the latest. There is probably a good reason why they aren't in common usage, and "limited utility in real-world settings" is a pretty good guess.

[Firnagzen]

ASHPD.

Thought. It seems we can now place portals on moving surfaces.

So. Put a portal on a steel plate, face it down on a concrete floor. (Steel faces seem to work, in portal 1, if they're not too rusted. If not, I can coat a steel plate or something with ground up moon rock I obtained by shooting a portal at the moon.)

Put the matching portal on another steel plate, with a handle on the back.

Stand in the middle of a busy road, holding the plate in front of you.

Any cars will immediately pancake like they hit the ground at 60km/h. (Which they just did.)

???

Profit?

[Rossum]

Actually: Doesn't the ASHPD have its own sort of built-in gravity gun that lets Chell carry all those big heavy cubes and turrets while she's simultaneously being launched through portals at high velocity? Even if the portal gun can't launch your old washing machine at high velocity, it can still pick the thing up.

So get the portal gun and even if you can't use it for instant teleportation all the time then you can still lift up heavy equipment. Heck, it might even be better than the gravity gun in that its less likely that you'll launch something you want undamaged into something else that you want undamaged.

[Zixinus]

I don't see how moon dust is even remotely an issue: you don't need it. There are plenty of surfaces in-game that just appear to be painted white (and for all we know, there are non-white surfaces that can act as portal conductors) that were obviously not meant to be part of testing (bricked-in walls painted over white paste). For we all, a common white paste with a certain mineral will do an excellent job.

Hell, in the first game, the surface didn't even need to be white. I can't recall from the top of my head, but then there were plenty of non-testing-are surfaces that you could portal trough.

So the bit with moon dust being a portal conductor may be part of a joke. After all, Aperture Science does things in the most inefficient way possible (the developers said so in one of the commentaries, that inefficient and grand solutions being a typical characteristic of Aperture Science, the commentary was talking about the vacuum transit though). Cave ordered seven tons of the stuff (somehow... and for whatever reason known only to Cave...) and likely tested whatever they can think of with it.

Think about it. I'm not a lunar geologist, but what can you do with moon-dust (think without portals)? Correct me if I am wrong, but as a mineral, you can't build anything unique with it and you can't economically refine it to a more useful material either. It's poisonous, so you don't want it being a building material either. Once the people in Aperture were done with analysing moon-dust and it's properties, someone said: hey, we have tons of this stuff that we can't use for anything else but for conducting portals. We might as well try and save money by see whether we can make that gel we talked about!.

[OmegaChief]

You can definatly portal on non-Moondust areas, just Moon Dust somehow makes a super awsome conductor, as all other conductive survaces apaprently need to be smooth, flat, consistant (IE no rust or grating gaps) and so on.

But with the Moon Dust Gel you can splatter it everywhere, or have uneven quantites and it'll still work, which is how I interpreted all the info anyway.

[Zixinus]

Someone needs to re-download Portal 1 and prove the whole focus on moon-dust both wrong and unnecessary.

[Ahriman238]

Portal Gun.

I will start by suspending a coil of copper wire over and under a portal. I may attache it to a wall or use a broad-base tripod design. Drop magnet down portal. Repeat until I have a few dozen and start selling cheap power to my city.

Then I will use the funds thus acquired to rent property in every major city of the world. I will turn these buildings into power stations as well and, eventually, into Portalports. Yes, ladies and gentleman, for just twenty bucks, you can visit your cousins in the Old Country, or anywhere else? Why fly? Eventually I will add a seperate network of linking portals to all the same locations and run a conveyor belt through them, so I can move cargo as well.

Each site will require a minimum of staff, some security, someone to keep the lines moving in an orderly fashion, plumber, electrician. Maybe some landscaping, or even greeters? Since each site will also be generating loads of 'green energy' that I will sell for just a little less than any competitors can manage, each site will cost minimal upkeep compared to the heaps of money they will make me.

Mankind is brought closer together than ever thru easy transport. Energy crisis, still not solved completly, but greatly diminished. Pity about the increased transmission of disease that always accompanies better roads, but it's hard to get much worse with that than we already are with airplanes. I'll get the CDC and every equivalent a nice fruit basket. All in a few months work. Then I can start expanding, using the original Portalports as hubs, to every city.

Moneymaking and immediate benefit to mankind done, I approach NASA. It will take some careful work, I'm thinking armored decompression chamber with airlock, and probably a different chamber for each one, but I'll give them portals to the moon, to Mars, to every 'rocky' body within the Solar System plus Europa (what? I like Europa.) I will also advise them to put observatories on Pluto and Eris, in the hopes of one day being able to portal to distant star systems. I know there are at least four potentially life-bearing worlds out there, and I think it'd be kind of cool to get to see one in my lifetime. Not to mention getting filthy rich for doing hardly any work and being remembered as a hero for it.

[Ariphaos]

You only get two portal placements.

[Whiskey144]

True, though said placements are far from permanent; you can re-emplace the portals. Arguably, that would give you more than two "placements", but you'd only get two extant portals at any one time.

Though that should be rather obvious, as without it then the entire premise of the game is balderdash.

...............I was going to write something else, but then decided it was extraneous and looked at the above line, and realized that I really *did* just write "balderdash". What surprised me wasn't the *use* of the word per se, but rather that I have *no recollection* of writing said word.