Wormhole Particle Beams

[SpaceMarine93]

It is commonly established in science fiction that, if you want to have practical FTL travel without violating casualty, you use wormholes. No science fiction that I know of however ever elaborate how exactly do the ships protect themselves when they travel through them. I mean, it's a WORMHOLE, a massive tunnel through space-time fabric. Some of the theories suggest that they could be form naturally in the center of Black Holes. It does suggest that, real or not, wormholes could be areas of exceptionally powerful gravitational distortion, enough to tear an unprotected ship apart and atomize it.

Then it occur to me.

If that's the case, why not weaponize them?

Think about it. If a wormhole have gravitational forces powerful enough to tear unprotected objects to atoms, it could also mean that it would accelerate them as they come out the other side. This could be exceptionally devastating.

So here's the thought - point a wormhole at an enemy star system and then throw, say, an massive planetoid into it. If the wormhole rips it apart and accelerates them to the other side at the speed of light, the whole thing would exit the wormhole in the form of an insanely destructive particle beam. It would devastate whatever world or fleet that happened to be caught in its wake.

And if wormholes are the only means of FTL travel, even better: the only practical means of defense is to somehow close the wormhole in war times. In that case, you lose the only means of transport, trade and communication for an entire star system. If you happened to be a planet with few arable land and a massive population on it, cutting off your only means to get food from a agricultural planet light years away would doom the entire planet to starve. On the other hand, not closing your wormhole would lead to your planet being particle beamed to oblivion. What a dilemma...

Then again, I may had got the science wrong and wormholes might be perfectly safe passages within the space-time continuum with normal gravitational force inside and around it. In that case, it's still a nice thought, though.

[Simon_Jester]

Think about it. If a wormhole have gravitational forces powerful enough to tear unprotected objects to atoms, it could also mean that it would accelerate them as they come out the other side. This could be exceptionally devastating.

...That "It could?"

That translates into English as "I don't know how wormholes work, so I'm going to come up with a random idea for how they work, then assume they work that way."

The rest of your speculation is kind of meaningless.

One of the big principles in physics is "no freebies-" it is very difficult to get massive amounts of energy out of a system without putting massive amounts of energy into it in the first place. I see no reason to assume that an artificial wormhole (should one be created) would act as a useful linear accelerator for throwing stuff out the other end. The fact that it rips things to pieces doesn't mean it sends them flying out the other end at great speed.

[SpaceMarine93]

Bugger.

Well, looks like it's time for me to read more Physics.

[Eternal_Freedom]

If you want wormhole weapons, they did that in Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars, where it was an uber-WMD. No doubt there are other examples, but none of them AFAIK use anything about using them to accelerate shit at people.

[Simon_Jester]

Bugger.

Well, looks like it's time for me to read more Physics.

Trust me, a rigorous understanding of what wormholes really are takes about eight to ten years of study from your current age. It's not worth the effort just so you can get into versus debates.

Concentrate on the fundamental problem- your tendency to jump the gun and assume you know how things work, without applying due diligence, and assuming that big consequences will always unfold from small effects.

[Knife]

Besides which, if you have the tech to make a wormhole/mini blackhole to chew up at planet, why worry about shooting it at someone, just having a planetary eating hole on demand is a terrible enough weapon right there.

[Number Theoretic]

In Reynolds' "House of Suns" novel, i've seen another use for wormholes as weapons: Place one end of the wormhole in the center of a star and use some magitech on the other end to open or close it at will. While open, it spits out a devastating beam of star core material. The justification why this works and no wormhole FTL in the novel was, if i recall correctly, that it is not possible to transmit information through the wormhole, just matter in a state where it cannot possibly transport information.

[evilsoup]

That's just silly. I'm pretty sure that you could transmit information using superheated star-core matter, though of course it would be massively difficult compared to more mundane stuff. If nothing else, turning the wormhole on and off gives you the ability to transmit binary code.

[lordofchange13]

The Commonwealth books by Peter F. Hamilton also use wormholes as weapons, i believe they actually used it in the fashion the OP is talking about. though those novels were based around the fact that making wormholes was easy to do with 21st century tech.

[Simon_Jester]

That's just silly. I'm pretty sure that you could transmit information using superheated star-core matter, though of course it would be massively difficult compared to more mundane stuff. If nothing else, turning the wormhole on and off gives you the ability to transmit binary code.

Or you could, say, stick both ends of the wormhole in open space and fire bursts from a machine gun into one end. The bullets might get ripped apart passing through the wormhole, but if stellar plasma can come out, I'd bet on something coming out from the bullets. Which, again, gives you Morse code at least, and is probably easier than turning the wormhole on and off while one end is dipped into a star.

[evilsoup]

These are obviously not 'wormholes' as the term is normally used, though. For all we know the bullets would just bounce off the event horizon/mouth of the wormhole and register no change on the other end. But even if only superheated plasma was allowed... given magitech, you could shoot different amounts of plasma at slightly different temperatures (I'm assuming you have tech to differentiate between 5000 degrees and 5002 degrees) and use that for an even more complex code. But I haven't read that book, for all I know the author dealt with all this in a satisfactory way. And I realise I'm nitpicking, if you can only shoot superheated plasma through the wormhole then that does prevent FTL travel, and you'd end up with something like le Guin's ansibles.