Starships Powered by Black Holes

Funny you should mention this idea! I was just watching a serial of the Sarah Jane Adventures last night that featured a ship that uses a black hole for power (3.04, 'The Mad Woman in the Attic pt. 2').

I know almost nothing of the science behind it, or if it's even feasible, but I just wanted to point you toward that. It might be a direction to focus on. Sorry I couldn't be of more help!

Here are a couple of good hard science articles on FTL.

The second mentions black holes, but only as a wormhole gate, not something a ship would keep on board.

IMO the biggest problem with a black hole carried aboard ship as you suggest is they're so massive. What you're proposing seems to essentially be like theorizing a man could run faster than the speed of sound if only you loaded him down with a few thousand tons of lead.

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/glenn/technology/warp/warpstat.html

http://mkaku.org/home/?page_id=250

I'd be curious how you could contain and control a black hole so it simply wouldn't just crush the ship, imploding it into the black star's gravity.

Guess i"ll have to read Richard's link when I have time to get the answer.

I can't give any hints as to how one might use blacj holes to power a ship, but I have had trouble suspending disbelief that few times when I have run across that. I just can't see any reasonable way that one might manipulate them, and as others have mentioned that mass is huge. The only time when it was at all plausible was in Robert Forward's Dragon's Egg and/ or Starquake, but the characters that used them weren't human and had certain innate characteristics that helped.

RichardGarfinkle said:

The link is to a process that doesn't maintain the black hole.

For my book, I used a dispersed structure ship that consisted of multiple components in far orbit around the black hole. Move the hole, move the ship.

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Not distributed, but that's what Alan Dean Foster described in his Flinx & Pip series of novels. Humanx Commonwealth, I believed the series was called.

The problem with something like this is you'd have to come up with a plausible explanation which sounds reasonable to laypeople AND to science geeks, AND doesn't take pages and pages of explanation, AND which fits in with the plot restrictions of your story. I think it would take some wrangling to get from "black hole" (something we usually think of as huge, uncontrollable, and taking in energy) to "power source" (tightly controlled energy producer) without boring your audience.

My recommendation would be to make up something based on a harder-to-visualize field of science (string theory, quarks, antimatter, whatever) and do some blatant hand-waving. Then you can give a simplistic explanation ("the drive aligns the strings so they're all going in the same direction and you just slide through space!") and you don't have to go into tons of detail.

Brandon M Johnson said:

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As for my starships, I just need them to be able to fly from Earth to space and back to Earth, and I have a larger starship that transports them from Earth to Mars quickly. (I'm thinking a few minutes to an hour, but I can tweak that.)

Tomorrow I'll be looking into nuclear power some more. Thanks for the links, I'll definitely be checking them out in more details tomorrow.

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"A few minutes to an hour" to Mars is approaching or exceeding lightspeed, and even when it's below, the acceleration and decelleration needed to get there in such short times is much more than enough to squash people flat and dead. I think a reasonable time at 1g (where a person is comfortable in Earth gravity) is days between Earth and Mars.

wendymarlowe said:

The problem with something like this is you'd have to come up with a plausible explanation which sounds reasonable to laypeople AND to science geeks, AND doesn't take pages and pages of explanation, AND which fits in with the plot restrictions of your story. I think it would take some wrangling to get from "black hole" (something we usually think of as huge, uncontrollable, and taking in energy) to "power source" (tightly controlled energy producer) without boring your audience.

My recommendation would be to make up something based on a harder-to-visualize field of science (string theory, quarks, antimatter, whatever) and do some blatant hand-waving. Then you can give a simplistic explanation ("the drive aligns the strings so they're all going in the same direction and you just slide through space!") and you don't have to go into tons of detail.

Click to expand...

I have it. The ships and space station are all powered by devices that suck power out of the zero-point energy, the quantum fluctuations in the vacuum of space. I find this more believable than controlling black holes, even though Larry Niven wrote about them in such classics as "The Hole Man."

Black Hole power source? Not only is it feasible, but it's been done... theoretically, of course. That's how the TARDIS is powered. May I suggest, for your edification and entertainment the enlightening lecture delivered by esteemed British physicist Brian Cox (courtesy of the BBC).

http://www.bbcamerica.com/doctor-who/videos/the-science-of-doctor-who-with-brian-cox/

Enjoy...

There was a great little paper on this a while back... and apparently I bookmarked it! Here you go!

The basic principle is that you put a miniature black hole in a big reflector, like the bulb in a torch. The Hawking radiation streaming off the event horizon is redirected into a parallel beam behind the ship, giving you thrust. Now, you can't mount the black hole on anything because it'd eat the material, so instead you put a ring of particle accelerators somewhere in there, firing back up the mouth of the reflector at the black hole. This has two effects - first, you push the black hole along with you, and second, you feed the black hole so it doesn't evaporate away until you're done with it. It also means you can use pretty much any mass as fuel - just vaporise and feed into your mass accelerators. You can throttle it by controlling movable sections of reflector that alter how spread the beam is, and by splaying the beam out you can produce zero or even a little reverse thrust.

As well as being a very good engine, this also gives nice plot potential. First up, it's squarely in the realm of the Kzinti Lesson as coined by Larry Niven - "A reaction drive's efficiency as a weapon is in direct proportion to its efficiency as a drive." Not only does this engine use a cocktail of particle radiation as propellant, there's also the matter of what happens when you want to turn it off. Simply put, you stop feeding it with mass. What happens is that a) you accelerate gently away from the black hole because you're not pushing it along, and b) the black hole eventually bleeds enough mass into radiation to drop below the threshold for remaining a black hole... and explodes. Violently. Mostly into gamma rays, although there would be a bunch of other stuff in there. This could theoretically sterilise a couple of planets, so you'd want to either deposit your black hole into some sort of receptacle that could keep it fed on solar wind and solar-powered lasers, or just plan your trip so that you have something big between you and the black hole when it goes pop. What you could do is accelerate halfway to your destination, flip over, slow down for the second half (engine pointed ahead of you, being careful not to point that radiation beam at the people you're going to visit) and then when you turn off the accelerators the black hole will end up going faster than you, so if you do it right, it'd be fast enough to escape the system and come out the other side, but you'd be slow enough to drop into a wide orbit and come back around to hide behind the sun.

As well as the big explosion at the end, there's also the potential for hiccups with those accelerators - if one goes offline, or starts producing a different amount of force on the black hole (differing quantity or velocity of particles), or is even not aimed quite right, then the black hole will drift toward the fabric of your ship. Similarly, you'd have to alter the force produced by the accelerators when you steered, or the black hole might drift to one side. It's worth noting that it'd make most sense to design your ship with the black hole at its centre of mass, so you rotate around it. Imagine a shuttlecock, perhaps with a ring around it somewhere partway down to provide more space to live in.

Black holes suck.

caw

My car works by exploding the liquified and processed remains of fossilised dinosaur fish. Apparently. All I know is that I stick my right foot down to go faster and my left foot down to stop.

Would your fighter jet pilots know or care how their spacecraft worked?

For that matter, would your spaceships be fighter jet sized and shaped? I know that Star Wars borrowed heavily from WW2 airplane imagery which in turn influences how we think, but in space would it really be so important to make a craft that was (a) streamlined and (b) small?

For that matter, how did Luke go to the toilet or avoid DVT on the journey to Degobah in an X-wing?

One odd thought. The time taken to travel between two points might not be a linear relationship to the distance involved. That trip to Mars might take longer than you expect because of the need to spend time accelerating and decelerating without crushing your occupants. By contrast, a longer journey would involve less time in the acceleration and deceleration as a proportion of the journey as a whole.

I suggest you don't explain it.

The narrator would probably never undertsand the science Neither would the pilot, nor the antagonist.

"The singularity that drove the engines..."

Done.