Background Faction's Ships Brainstorm

[Draco18s]

Well, it's hard to imagine a scenario where a microscopic blackhole won't instakill its target within the local vicinity - however, there might be something fun to be refined out of it. What do people think about a warhead type as a minor faction bonus?

I can.
"It's called 'real life.'"
The smaller a black hole, the less mass it has, and the shorter it's lifetime.  A 100,000kg blackhole would last 0.08 seconds and have a radius of 1.484852 * 10^-22 meters (about the size of a quark).  The odds of it actually gobbling down any mater at all would be vanishingly small (ergo doesn't instakill anything).  And of course, moving it about would be just as difficult as moving about anything else that weighs 100,000kg (except it would also be the size of quark, so you'd have to use magnetic fields rather than a stick to push it).

(If you want "microscopic" as in "the size of a cell, visible under a microscope" you're starting to talk about "an object with the mas of a small moon." A black hole with a radius of 0.000001 would be half as massive as Charon, Pluto's largest moon.  Which would probably only instant-kill via blunt force trauma and require an insane amount of energy to push about).

[PokerChen]

 *chuckles*
 I do mean microscopic as in "of order 10^-6 metres". This firmly places them in warhead territory as the far future's equivalent of armor-piercing ammunition. The new and improved Spirecraft Ram, of sorts.

[Draco18s]

*chuckles*
 I do mean microscopic as in "of order 10^-6 metres". This firmly places them in warhead territory as the far future's equivalent of armor-piercing ammunition. The new and improved Spirecraft Ram, of sorts.

10^-6 metres is the "masses half of Charon" (10²⁰ kg).  It's also not going to collide with a whole lot (yeah, it'll punch through armor and keep going, but it's going to gobble up very little mass and not really warp material.  Might toss the target around a little bit, but we're talking on the order of 1/1000th the moon's gravity).

[PokerChen]

*chuckles*
 I do mean microscopic as in "of order 10^-6 metres". This firmly places them in warhead territory as the far future's equivalent of armor-piercing ammunition. The new and improved Spirecraft Ram, of sorts.

10^-6 metres is the "masses half of Charon" (10²⁰ kg).  It's also not going to collide with a whole lot (yeah, it'll punch through armor and keep going, but it's going to gobble up very little mass and not really warp material.  Might toss the target around a little bit, but we're talking on the order of 1/1000th the moon's gravity).

Gravity is exceeding weak as a force in RL, so even if one created the dark matter at the destination, it'll take a while to suck everything in. Like all those dark matter ammunition in classic that's going away. Maybe we can invent some phlebotinum to collapse the extra dimensions and increase its value arificially?

[Sestren]

Its just such a shockingly inefficient use of power. If you have enough energy available that you can go around making black hole weapons big enough to do something halfway noticeable you could probably have literally melted the target with that kind of energy and done it faster. If there was a ship that used black holes in such a manner, I would absolutely NOT expect it to be a human ship. Alien ships you can get kinda hand wavey about but if you have a power source good enough to create and subsequently fire black holes on a human ship, someone is going to ask why you don't just power an HBC with it instead...

[Draco18s]

Pretty much, Sestren.

Gravity is more of a fun side project than a weapon.
[insert link to XKCD: Neutron Star Bullet]

[kasnavada]

Its just such a shockingly inefficient use of power. If you have enough energy available that you can go around making black hole weapons big enough to do something halfway noticeable you could probably have literally melted the target with that kind of energy and done it faster. If there was a ship that used black holes in such a manner, I would absolutely NOT expect it to be a human ship. Alien ships you can get kinda hand wavey about but if you have a power source good enough to create and subsequently fire black holes on a human ship, someone is going to ask why you don't just power an HBC with it instead...

Unless you've got applied phlebotium galore. Example, finding 2 minerals, which, when used in an applied unobtainium machine, can generate wormholes-like effects (brief surge of gravity toward a single point)... but somehow no other kind of other useful energy is deployed. And it's called a blackhole in game despite not being one, because it sounds like what it does.

Ok... this makes no sense. Big Laser >> wormhole generation.