Can you help with my crazy setting?

>In the distant future, a group of scientists embark on a mission to collapse a black hole with some kind of crazy laser beam so they science their way back to Earth.

>They collapse the black hole, and predictably get sucked in, but instead of being transported back to our Earth, they're transported back to string theory meta-earth.

>The party wakes up around a campfire, confused and disoriented. Everyone can remember being in space, but no one remembers how they got here.

>Near by, a slick talking robot is smoking a cigar on the hood of a 1970's muscle car, while trying to convince a duck wearing sunglasses that they should totally just leave this world behind, and move out into the mountains to farm Alpacas, like his brother Dave.

>The party knows something is wrong. Something is very wrong.

What would you, as a player, want to see in this kind of setting? I guess making it back to earth could be the main quest, but what kind of fun nonsensical things would you want to run into? What should I avoid doing?

Other urls found in this thread:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VY_Canis_Majoris
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_massive_stars
openstax.org/subjects/science
secret-satire-society.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/William-S-Burroughs-naked-lunch.pdf
files.libertyfund.org/files/753/0416_Bk.pdf
twitter.com/NSFWRedditImage

>collapse a black hole
What do you mean by that?

>predictably get sucked in
>after ?destroying? the black hole
Did the gravitational pull increase from the "collapse"?

I don't understand.

>the city of me
Sun. Collapse the sun into a black hole.

Okay, that makes more sense.
If you want to get scientific about it, *the* sun is not a good object to be turned into a black hole if you want to travel through that hole.
The sun is too small. It would rip you apart before you'd close enough.
But feel free to ignore this.

No, no, this is good. So what could I collapse for space travel? How would you travel lightyears, while also fucking up and winding mixed up in some crazy parallel universe/dimension?

Well, the bigger the black hole's mass, the smoother the ride, so I guess ideally you'd want to go through the black hole at the center of the galaxy. Alternatively, look for the biggest star you can find.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VY_Canis_Majoris

Amazing. This is exactly what I was looking for and know nothing about. What would you shoot into the sun to blow it up? I said some kind of antimater fusion thing, but I know that's meaningless verisimilitude.

Also, in the alternate timeline, is it better to do mashup slipstream style thing where Lovecraft hangs out with Tesla and Alexander the Great so they can team up to solve spooky mysteries, or to have a "Back to the Future 2" changed major events sort of thing that created a different near future?

Not that user, but
>Did the gravitational pull increase from the "collapse"?
is still an important question.

Black holes are not magically stronger than whatever they're made from. They have the same mass that they did as stars.
Strength of gravity is based on mass and distance. You can get closer to them, but at any exterior distance their gravity has the same strength.

The vibe that you're setting sets a very pulp vibe already. I think you should maybe attempt a vaporwave-esq cyberpunk setting.
I'm thinking along the terms of "Are you a bad enough dude to stop Edison's mechazord from decimating the province of Rhode Island?"
Remember to keep your weirdness leveled by reality. Things get less weird if the world is constantly lolrandum.
To answer Mashup slipstream seems the most apt for the current setting.

>What would you shoot into the sun to blow it up?
Interesting question.
What you want to do is to stop it from fusing atoms together, so basically an anti-fusion gun. When it stops fusing, it stops being able to support its own weight, and collapses. In theory. (I'll say this now, I haven't studied physics)
If a star's mass is sufficient, it'll collapse into a black hole on its own.

(actually, the star I linked to is probably not the best choice for your work. It's very large (meaning your gun needs to hit a very large object, but not as heavy as it could be. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_massive_stars shows the most massive stars)

>Strength of gravity is based on mass and distance. You can get closer to them, but at any exterior distance their gravity has the same strength.
So, to make sure I understand correctly, is there a "plane" from the even horizon that has infinite mass, but otherwise, it's just the same as any body orbiting the sun? I could always just have them drive into the black hole to test it out if the gravitational pull won't suck them in, assuming the stabilizers allow them to orbit the sun.

>"Are you a bad enough dude to stop Edison's mechazord from decimating the province of Rhode Island?"
That's the exact sort of vibe I wanted to go for. What kind of things are generally congruent without being too lolrandum? I was thinking of doing a Metamorphosis-style thing where, despite the weird circumstances, life is more or less the same, and the flesh-eating bug people are more concerned about watching their waist-line and the weather than murdering humans.

The other part is, how do I introduce adventure elements without making things too... janky? I was thinking about using a central hub-like agency that provides contracts for various thematic fetch quests, then just divide the planet into "Ninja Cowboy Land", "Zombie Tentacle Robot Underground Laboratory", or whatever trendy thing I think of.

The other option is to have someone fuck with the party in a mundane way, like taking the last movie ticket, or spilling the party face's coffee, then have an elaborate revenge quest divided into escalating chunks.

Oh, I think I've got this.

To collapse the sun, they could shoot some sort of pulse-wave siphon that super-charges the sun for a split second, so it suddenly burns brighter, before flat-lining, kind of like dying when you get a big electric shock. The pulse-wave siphon could then shoot a beam so that it interlaces the temporal breaches in two simultaneous locations, before stabilizing a tangible portal between points.

>is there a "plane" from the even horizon that has infinite mass,
No, it doesn't have infinite mass. It has the same mass as before, concentrated in a very small area.
The more mass you have in one place and the closer you are to that place, the stronger the gravitational pull from that mass. If the gravitational pull gets too big, light cannot escape any more.
Every body of mass has a theoretical radius (the schwarzschild radius) within which this is the case. But for most bodies, that radius is INSIDE of them. That means that most of their own mass is outside of the radius and thus negating the effect. But if you squeeze the body together until everything is within the radius, you have a black hole.
But that doesn't change the mass. If you are still as far away from the body's center as before, the gravitational pull is the same.
A black hole is smaller than the original body, and thus you can get closer to the center, and thus you can experience greater gravity.
>assuming the stabilizers allow them to orbit the sun.
You can orbit any celestial body. The question is just how fast you have to be to cancel out the gravity (or rather, to keep falling past it). The further away you are, the slower you can go.

A sun cannot die.
It fuses atoms together literally because it's so massive. If you cancel the effect for a second, it'll just start again after that. You need to stop fusion until the sun is completely gone. I imagine that if the sun started again after shrinking notably, you'd have a supernova on your hands.
But this is just me talking out of my ass. Stopping fusion in a sun is already really soft science fiction.

That was very succinct, thanks user. I also appreciate the appropriate vernacular so that I can sound like I know what I'm talking about.

Now, just to make sure I understand things correctly for when I write this down:

A black hole would have a proportionately smaller gravitational pull compared to a ship orbiting the same sun at the same distance, despite both being the same mass, because the black hole takes up less "space". Therefore, in order for a ship to get "sucked in" it would have to be proportionately closer so that it can't generate the speed to escape the decaying orbit.

>You need to stop fusion until the sun is completely gone.
I get what you're throwing down. It's just not practical to stall fusion in the sun until it turns into a black hole with real science.

>Stopping fusion in a sun is already really soft science fiction.
Fair enough, I'll just gloss over it with a bunch of hyphenated Russian/Chinese names and make it sound vaguely plausible because it's named after foreign people. I'm more excited about the non-sciencey things anyways.

>A black hole would have a proportionately smaller gravitational pull compared to a ship orbiting the same sun at the same distance, despite both being the same mass, because the black hole takes up less "space".
No. It's the same pull.
The distance is always between the center of the masses to each other.
Earth's pull on you right now is calculated by a distance of some 6370 kilometers distance (which is the Earth's own radius). That means climbing on a step ladder is not going to make a difference.
You need to get really high into the air so that you can feel a little lighter.
If you go 1000 km up (which is serious outer space), you'd still be pulled at 3/4s of Earth's normal pull. (astronauts are not actually in zero gravity)

That's the problem with small black holes. If you have a black hole with a schwarzschild radius of 1 meter, that means that at 1 meter distance of the black hole, you have 1/4 of the gravitational pull that you have on the schwarzschild radius.
You are literally torn to shreds long before you even touch the black "surface".

I see a couple routes to go with in this situation depending on the characters.
The first being an opportunity for the players to try and create a thriving business in this new world. Maybe the creation of the Thneed in this new Earth. Accidental drug kingpins, as inscrutably legit or irrationally illegal you feel like casting them. Maybe their opposition is literally the Mayor from Powerpuff girls.
The tried and true merc route where the fetch quest is instead fetch the head of the communist(Or whatever the party considers evil) leader, who happens to operate out of a small suburban home or something. This would fail to utilize the nature of the world, I feel unless you made him tragic, in a confusing way. He's not evil, the corp doesn't want him dead. Miscommunication does wonders here I feel.
Try to always press to players to acclimate to this odd world.
Otherwise, ya, I would try to introduce bait to give them bearings.The bearings are always leading to a larger hub to give the players a "Home Base". of sorts. Otherwise I'm kinda stumped at the moment.

Sorry for being so dense user, I didn't realize that the schwarzchild radius was at the center of the object, because my mind didn't process how gravity works for a second.

I FINALLY understand. If the black hole is small, you need to be impossibly close to get sucked inside it, which means that for all practical purposes, you wouldn't be able to travel through it because the gravity would be too strong. So, you need a black hole with a large enough schwarzchild radius that you could get close enough to get sucked in, without being torn apart by gravity.

Is there an easy calculation to determine what the schwarzschild radius would be, so I can sound all fancy and smart, or would it be better to just throw out a random, but plausible, sounding number on some unknown arbitrary star?

I like the idea of rebels and communist dictators running amok in nonsensical totalitarian hell. It would make it easy to have three sides for the players to choose from, SMT style: desire, body, and mind. I bet I could do all sorts of neat moral things by having really dogmatic "good guys" that want to have everything "normalized", versus the "bad guys" that want to let chaos consume everything, with the party stuck in the middle.

The drug quest is also a good idea. Maybe mundane components in the alternate earth could be combined into normal versions of street drugs that citizens weren't aware of, despite being hamfistedly obvious. Then the party could choose between being the drug distributors, or the police, while also determining if they should be pharmacists or meth-heads.

Neat user. Very neat, thanks so much.

>Near by, a slick talking robot is smoking a cigar on the hood of a 1970's muscle car, while trying to convince a duck wearing sunglasses that they should totally just leave this world behind, and move out into the mountains to farm Alpacas, like his brother Dave.

Haha, so random! XD

>because the gravity would be too strong.
Gravity at the schwarzschild radius is the same.
But with larger black holes the differences in gravity aren't so destructive. A few extra meters don't matter when you are still several thousand kilometers away from the center.

>Is there an easy calculation to determine what the schwarzschild radius would be,
For this calculation you need the gravitational constant G (6.673*10^−11 m^3* kg^-1*s^-2), the mass of the object M, and the speed of light c (2.99792458*10^8 m/s).
r = 2* G*M /c^2
r = M * 1.4849 * 10^-27 m/kg

At a magnitude of 10^-27, you can imagine that most bodies would make extremely tiny black holes. The Earth's mass has a magnitude of 10^24, so its Schwarzschild radius would be measured in millimeters.

Sounds like they landed in the Ugly Americans universe...

Consider an object and a star.
When the object is far from the star's center of mass, gravity is weak.
When the object is near the star's center of mass, gravity is strong.
When an object is inside a star, center of mass is no longer an accurate model.
The mass "in front" pulls you inward, the mass "behind" pulls you outward.

Stars that are massive enough to become black holes are generally really big.
So you can't get very near their center of mass without going inside them.

Black holes, regardless of mass, are extremely tiny.
So you can get very near their center of mass without going inside them.
(Inside the black hole that is, you'd have to cross it's "event horizon")

Gravity's strength weakens exponentially as distance increases.
Phrasing that slightly differently, gravity's strength grows exponentially as distance decreases.

Light (photons, anyway) have mass and are effected by gravity.
When they cross the event horizon, they're close enough that they can't move away.

If you somehow exceeded the speed of light in a vacuum (which isn't physically possible, but lets pretend) then you still wouldn't be able to escape!
Gravity works by warping space, once it gets strong enough any direction you could orient yourself in points "towards" the black hole.

Also time stop past the black hole's event horizon? Or something.
Time moves slows down as gravity increases. I have no idea how that works. Ask a physicist, I guess.

>But with larger black holes the differences in gravity aren't so destructive. A few extra meters don't matter when you are still several thousand kilometers away from the center.
Swanky, I've learned something today.

>that entire calculation
Never going to happen. I appreciate the effort, but my brain can barely comprehend the calculation for G, let alone how to BEDMAS my way through that labyrinth. I'll just do what the other user suggested and check out large celestial bodies, then pick one at random that seems pretty big.

I really appreciate user, you didn't have to explain all that based on my rambling half-narrative. I have to explain deck building theory to people in /edh/ all the time, so I know how frustrating it can be.

You should team up with that other user and write a space travel physics textbook for science fiction writers. I bet you'd make a lot of money, unless I'm just incredibly ignorant and this is common knowledge.

In that case, you should team up with that other user to write a physics textbook for barely literate jackasses who want to sound smart for tabletop games.

>Black holes, regardless of mass, are extremely tiny.
Super massive black holes can be extremely large.

>>that entire calculation
>Never going to happen.
That's why I calculated it for you.
What you have to do is take the mass of your chosen object, multiply with 1.5 (for simplicity), and then reduce the number of zeroes by 27.
And that's the radius in meters.

>unless I'm just incredibly ignorant
Everybody who knows it didn't know it at some point.
>and this is common knowledge.
It's not exactly common knowledge, but it's far from uncommon knowledge.

Since your so into textbooks, here are some free ones.
Not the best around, but they're better than half the college level stuff.


openstax.org/subjects/science

>Super massive black holes can be extremely large.
Tiny relative to stars of similar mass, but point taken.

>That's why I calculated it for you.
>What you have to do is take the mass of your chosen object, multiply with 1.5 (for simplicity), and then reduce the number of zeroes by 27.
>And that's the radius in meters.
Thanks user, I'm so bad at math I honestly didn't realize that's what you did for me.

If you ever need something edited, or a long pretentious paper written about absolutely nothing, I'm your guy. Otherwise, my talents are limited to mashing my stubby fingers into a keyboard and turning it into a story.

>that textbook site
Well, I know what I'm doing all Christmas. I consistently buy old textbooks from the various second hand bookstores around here, and I was looking for some accessible science ones.

Here's a copy of The Naked Lunch. It's extremely confusing, but kind of neat in a pretentious way. Little known fact, it was meant so that you could read any of the chapters in any order you want for a different narrative effect each time. Should you do that? Probably not, but you sure can if you want to.

secret-satire-society.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/William-S-Burroughs-naked-lunch.pdf

Also, have this unrelated .pdf of my favorite 40k book. It's written from a Tau perspective, and it's absolutely fantastic, though I may have slight nostalgia goggles.

That's actually not a bad idea for minor setting locales.

Charlie and the Chocolate factory, and other high fantasy but real world otherwise settings should give you great plotlines honestly.
The Catholic Meat Packing Facility or something. Run entirely by altar boys.

Maybe not so hamfisted.

Here's a good read.
files.libertyfund.org/files/753/0416_Bk.pdf

It's mostly garbage analogies poking fun at Aristotelian physics, but it's a pretty phenomenal book
For context; Simplicio is Galileo when he first learned the Aristotelian model, Sagredo is Galileo when he first became skeptical of it, and Salviati is Galileo at time of writing.

A bigger black hole comes from a more massive star, not a more voluminous one.

A truly massive injection of iron (or heavier elements) would do the trick. Forcing iron to fuse consumes more energy than the reaction releases, sapping energy from the star's natural fusion process and impending productive hydrogen or helium fusion. Net result: the star can't hold itself up under the pull of gravity and collapses inwards until it's dense enough that the strong nuclear force kicks in.

Reaching the iron stage is generally what ushers a star into its terminal stage, which is either supernova and collapse into various exotic forms of neutron star/pulsar/black hole if massive enough, or ejecting it's mass into a shell nebula surrounding a cooling, largely inert dwarf.

That could work actually.

Riddle me this batman, how does one carry an amount of iron massive enough to collapse a star? That seems like multiple planets worth of solid material, which could more realistically be used to build more space ships.

Also, how do I shoot it at the star in a cool way? Right now I have some crazy ass laser beam that just "pops" the sun with an energy lance, but some sort of badass teleportation-based iron squirt gun could also be cool, and more scientifically accurate.