PaRARGdox 39
DING DONG – Rarg calling… Force Magellan is moving pretty quickly here – probably less than an hour has passed since the main team arrived back at the island and they’re ready to start war preparations with an alien race… too bad the Rarg seem to be well ahead of schedule.
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“What?! Shields to maximum! Evasive action, Lieutenant! All crew to battle stations!”
heh
*Free* ice cream?! That makes me wanna… shout! Kick my heels up and shout! 😁
Not YOU, TOM!
“What’s your timetable?”
“We think they’ll arrive at, oh, now o’ clock.”
Evacuate the Island, engage all defenses, and get this man a shield
They’re heeeere!
Hey hey, 50 000 km is a really really long way. Like, 4 times the diameter of the earth, between an eighth and a seventh of the way to the moon. Easily far enough that “directly above” seems rather unimportant. If the Rarg travel by more conventional means the rest of the way there may be a lot of time for preparations still.
Did some calculations
Assuming that the Rarg have no artificial gravity and can withstand up to 2g of acceleration, they could land in 31 minutes.
This would require them to accelerate at 3g for the first 1/4 of the journey (2 with engines, 1 from gravity), then decelerate at 1g for the rest of the way (2 from engines, -1 from gravity).
If they have artificial gravity or higher tolerance to acceleration, they could arrive sooner.
Some degree of both! Rarg like hanging out around gas giants so they seem to enjoy the higher gravity… and even though Jupiter is, near the ‘surface’ only about 2.4 Earth’s gravity that’s still more than we’d be comfortable with.
… we wouldn’t be comfortable with 2.4g but trained pilots can do 10g short-term. It’s quite likely trained Rargs can do 25g short-term if not more … I suspect we have less than 10 minutes.
I’d expect the initial attack to be a bombardment with KE, HE, or possibly even tac-nuke projectiles, to test the defenses. Or maybe, given their nature, they’ll bring the house and light the place up 🤷
I think it’s been said and shown that their MO is to attack in great numbers. This not only makes it unlikely that they are all trained to 10x acceleration, but 25 g for a better part of that trip is also challenging in terms of energy requirements. I think the sensible approach would be to accelerate and decelerate at somewhere between 5 and 10 g, and have a minute of breathing room to check the course at full speed – if you can power your rocket without carrying the rocket fuel, which I guess would be possible by extending the tech from the hydrogen mining operation (quite a lot). But I don’t know their tech or their physiology and the word sensible seems to not apply, so… no idea really!
(these rambling thoughts brought to you by the unwieldy and under-stimulated brain of an engineer doing too little engineering)
I’d also add that, apart from generally hanging around high grav gas giants, the Rarg have a very different physiology… the amount of g-force they might be able to withstand is likely to be much higher than us puny, fleshy 1g humans…!!
“Tolerate”, not “be used to”.
We humans are used to 1g, but the 2g was assumption based on humans. I think any human could tolerate it, if they were lying down on soft material.
If the Rarg live in 2.4g, their tolerance is surely higher than that.
With energy requirements, well, they have jump drive. If they can power that, they are more likely to be limited by their squishiness, than energy.
Or in other words, Ms. Green: “RARG!”
I am curious exactly at what tech level the Magellan verse is. Given that the sensor tech hear knows for, and is scanning, “jump space” I presume they do have intra-system jump technology. And we have been told humans have contacted aliens in other solar systems somehow, so interstellar FTL tech is also likely.
And yet what we’ve seen of regular life and cities isn’t above our world in terms of technology. I know it’s a proud comic book tradition, see Reed Richards Is Useless on TV Tropes. But it does make not-Elon Musk and his Prometeus company’s complaints about Magellan hogging everything a lot more reasonable.
It’s a reasonable enough question. There will be some elements of the technology seen around Magellan Island in wider use but the powers that be on the island has wisely (or selfishly, depending on your viewpoint) kept the vast majority of it under wraps knowing the potential for nefarious or catastrophic use were it it ever in the broader population. Even the seemingly beneficial tech (like the levitation transports) could be turned into weapons of potentially mass destruction… or its innocent use could trigger a series of events that could piss off a bunch of homicidal aliens. Chances are this stuff will make its way into the world at some point, some has, most hasn’t.
Wellllll fiddlesticks
Communications: “Sir! We’re receiving a message!”
Tom: “What does it say?”
Communications: “Space-Shark”
Tom: “Bump THAT noise! Put the world on Invasion status!”
Communication: “Sir! We’re receiving another message…Candygram.”
Tom: …
Tom: “Oh, well that’s okay then. Give them permission to land.”
Communication: “RARG ship. You have permission to land at space portOH MY GOD!!!!”
RARG: “RARG!!!”
🙂
lol