Very very informative Pfarland, insightful stuff! As you said a sun just not wake up one day go 'You know what...screw you' *MICHALEBAYSPLOSION* in the build up to a nova or supernova a sun will go through a lot of fairly easily detectable turmoil, shedding outer layers, growing and probably flaring violently to boot, this is a process that takes a very long time and if a sun was already at that stage it would pritty much be a no go for anyone trying to colonise it due to radiation and the crap being thrown off the sun as it sheds outer layers.
The only bit that's blindingly fast is when the core collapses, that takes a millisecond (thereabouts) and then its a few seconds for the sun to realize its core is gone and it blows itself apart as the implosion at the core reaches the surface and blows the star apart.
I doubt the supernova would be that bad yes it would probably be unpleasant for systems within about 10 light years as they are now part of a nebulae but that will still take a massive amount of time for that dust to spread out. Unless it happened in a densely clustered group of systems a Supernova would be more a troublesome but amazing to watch event rather than some Inner Sphere destroying event. A Hypernova however...
Thank you! And yes you would know when said star was getting close (at least in stellar time). We can tell from here when some stars are getting close to dieing. And while yes, the collapse itself is VERY quick, the explosion take a while to propagate through the star. We know this from the burst of neutrinos we get a couple of hours ahead of the light from a supernova.
Hypernovea are more powerful, but mostly to the upper end of the spectrum, Gamma and X-rays. Somewhere up to a maximum of about 100 times. Realistically, this still wouldn't be that much of an issue, but hypers are believed to leave singularities. And if the pole of that black hole is aligned with any inhabited systems, well kiss them goodbye once the focused gamma rays reach it. And THAT WILL travel quite far before dispersing enough to become non-dangerous.
pfarland, I have two questions and please forgive my ignorance:
1. Assuming the "jump" is a kind of exchange of matter, would it matter how large "bubble" the K-F drive creates around it? Would the diameter of this "bubble" be able to determine whether the jump destination ( the star) is about to change to supernova or not?
2. Assuming Your "exchange of matter" logic (and I perfectly understand this is pure fantasy speculation here), what do You think would happen on the other side of the jump (initial jumping point)? Is it possible that the energy, or some chunk of star's core, would materialize there?
Actually those are good questions and not ignorant in the least bit. I assumed (and we know how THAT always turns out, lol) that a jump was an envelope around the ship as opposed to a bubble. It would certainly change the details of my story a bit, but the outcome would be close to the same. A larger 'bubble' would just cause greater instability and a more dynamic implosion-explosion event. As for number two, if it is a "matter swap" (I can't see it being anything else but), you would end up with a VERY small, EXTREMELY brief star at the origin point of the jump. Fusion would stop almost instantaneously and you would have a nice little micro nebula expand outward. It would be a very pretty site really.
We've no real idea on how big the jump bubble of a jumpship is, the only real hint is when the Ancestral Home destroyed a Leviathan Prime by engaging its jump drive or doing something with it. The jump bubble from that flattened the Home and crushed and tore the front off the Leviathan as it collapsed and they were not quite in spitting range, so if it was that big a bubble of several thousand kilometers..well Mr Pfarland knows more about this than I ever could..but I'd assume it would be supremely bad. If it was the size of the ship then less so but still probably along the lines of what our learned colleague said.
And going of Mr Pfarland's idea of a matter swap (which makes sense) then dumping something on the order of a few million tonnes of stellar plasma in cold space would i'd assume have little effect, it might flood local space with a blast of radiation but i'd assume it would cool and dissipate rather than do something nasty.
Several thousand kilometers would be a quite nasty event to do to a star, at that point I would be betting on a supernova event as the entire star (if you did it to one small than a giant) destabilized. And yes you would have a quick blast of radiation (not much, but certainly detectable) and the above scenario.
Anything is possible given that K-F field physics is fictional. But practically, a jumpship's K-F field is miniscule compared to a stellar core. We would need to erect millions, maybe billions, of jumpship-sized K-F fields at the same time to induce anything approaching a nova-like effect on a star.
There are easier ways to exterminate a planet.
It's some fraction of 27 kilometers, which is the exclusion zone for an entering jumpship, IIRC.
Again, that's puny compared to a stellar core. The Sun's core has a diameter of ~280,000 kilometers, or 10,000x larger. A red-/blue-giant star near collapse will have a much larger core than that.
Size wise, yes, the drive 'field' is even smaller than minuscule compared to the size of a star. Just the after effects of the jump into it could end up with a much greater affect than it's initial size would imply. For all intents and purposes a star has 'weather' inside it with colder stuff falling and hotter stuff rising, convection currents. All this would be disrupted in a sizable area as the shock wave propagated through the star. The immediate effects of this would be iffy. You might range anywhere from nothing, to the star momentarily flickering in it's fusion processes, to a nova event. And really if you were shooting for the most 'bang' for your buck the core might not be the best bet to make the jump. Depending on the size and type of star, you would want to hit either the core or the convective zone. Also a larger star usually has more instability to it, so while your 'area of effect' is percentage wise smaller, it would most likely have greater impact on the star.
And yes, there are MUCH easier (and cheaper) ways to exterminate a planet. I'll go into that in a follow up post.
One planet yes, but I understood the possibilities here are to exterminate several star systems. That kind of outcome would justify the investments... ;)
Really, even if you caused a supernova, you might at best affect 4 to 5 other systems. (Ignoring the chance for an aligned singularity with a good accretion disk.) Even then, the Gamma ray wave still travels only a light speed and you would give people somewhere around 4 years to figure out what you did and to prepare. As I said above, you want to kill off mass numbers of people, I'll explain it in the follow up.
I doubt a star would react kindly to having (at least) a 27 km square bubble of stellar matter torn from it, thats got to be on the order of several billion cubic tonnes of matter replaced with cold vaccume all of a sudden. We'd get Pfarland's implosion/explosion on a worryingly large scale as he worked it out on just the volume of the ship being displaced so if you ripped a 27km wide sphere of stellar plasma out of a sun its not going to shrug it off. its likely to do the solar equivalent of throwing a screaming raging fit.
A lot closer to dynamite fishing! If you want an idea of what will happen in the jump location, look at what happens when you drop something frozen into a deep fat fryer or something hot into a container of liquid nitrogen. And then toss an implosion-explosion event into the mix. Comparatively the area is small next to the size of a star, but the effects will be massive. Whether they would be massive enough, well, I'm unsure of that.
Depending on the size/type of star and where you jumped into it would make all the difference. If the jump is enough to cause an event, your best shot would most likely be the core. This is where (for most stars) the fusion is taking place and would have the most impact on the star's 'life'. If the jump is not enough to cause a SN, your best bet would be to jump into the convection zone (again, for most stars). This would most likely cause the universe's largest coronal mass ejection and flare event ever. In a high tech and populated system, this would be catastrophic in completely different ways. Almost certainly creating one massive EMP pulse and pretty much killing anything technological in the whole system.
