The shuttle landed gently in the bay. Kiru stepped off and was promptly greeted by Megumi’s hologram materializing before her. “Welcome aboard. Don’t worry about unloading the shuttle. I have some drones on the way to do that for you.”
Tiredly, she thanked Megumi. Who replied, “You four deserve a nice rest. I’ll wake you when we reach Nekuri.”
She nodded, and the four tiredly scrambled out of the shuttle bay. At the same moment, the ship came about, breaking orbit. In a few minutes, she would be underway to the planet Nekuri.
Hours later, the ship silently came out of warp over a lovely world. Second from her sun, with four moons. One of which also had an atmosphere. Nekuri had nine continents, but one of those nine was a supercontinent. It was a massive world but its core wasn’t very dense giving Nekuri a gravity of two-point-zero-seven. However, while the homeworld was mineralogically poor, one of its moons, specifically the one with an atmosphere, was rather rich in minerals and featured a gravity of two-point-three.
Megumi discreetly took several scans of the alien worlds and noted that between the planet, and the habitable moon, the system had a population of twenty-three billion Neku. She did however notice a sizable number of life signs that were not Neku. Exactly what they were, she knew not. As no entity in her database was an exact match. The closest she could find in the database was seventy-three percent genetic match. She made a note to acquire a specimen. They might prove interesting to study at the very least, but given someone was manipulating the Neku from the shadows, these unknowns might very well be that party. At the very least they were likely to be connected to the issue in some fashion.
While making plans to acquire a specimen, she began focusing her sensors on the ocean floor. The depths of Nekuri’s vast oceans could reach crushing pressures, and there were regions no Neku had visited before. They lacked the technology to plunge to those depths. As such, the ocean floor would make a great place to hide a stargate complex. She already had a few more criteria in mind for that. It needed to be a certain depth, and she wanted it in a geologically stable region. Thankfully, she had sensors that could easily scan the ocean depths without disrupting her cloak or revealing her position to the locals. It helped that she had toys and tricks at her disposal beyond the current understanding of the Neku. The Neku couldn’t even detect the psionic sweeps she was using, or any of the other sensors she was currently using to actively scan their planet. In fact, it was a bit of a rush to know that she was silently hovering over their world with the entire populace none the wiser to her presence. If any of them knew she was here, there would be mass panic.
No doubt or argument about it. Her arsenal contained countless weapons with which she could annihilate the civilization below. Not to mention as a battleship, she was designed to evoke that kind of fear.
Megumi stretched, and her avatar slipped out of the command chair on the bridge. It was technically ship’s night, but it was almost morning. She had timed her arrival so that it would be close to ship’s morning. Giving her a little time to conduct scans before her growing crew started to wake. She glanced around her bridge. Solean bridge design had changed little in the millennia since they first reached the stars. Like any traditional Solean bridge it was split into two levels. The upper command level overlooked the lower control level. Banks of consoles were arranged around the lower level which was circular in shape. The walls of the dome-shaped bridge made up a single massive view screen that provided a panoramic view of everything around the ship. With the exception of below the ship, but the screen could be flipped to show that. There was also a strategic display in the center of the bridge. It occurred to her, now that it was rebuilt, she should probably train a few bridge officers. While she could operate without a crew, there were benefits to having a trained crew.
She pushed the thought to the back of her priority list. As she made her way down to wake Kiru personally, her mind wandered to another subject. Nekuri’s defenses. From her perspective, they were nothing to write home about. The planet and moon colony were both protected by planetary shields, but their strength left quite a bit to be desired. Although it would take a significant fleet at the same tech level as the Neku or the Erali to breach those shields. For her, however, those shields weren’t going to hold up for very long. Although they would last longer than any ship shield. Having access to the planetary power grid and the massive amount of space a planet could provide meant that the shields wouldn’t fail from a single hit from her guns. However, they wouldn’t exactly block the beams either. Only reduce the yield... slightly.
Nekuri was also protected by a number of orbital bases, floating gun platforms, a large garrison of patrolling warships, and planetary ground-to-space batteries. It made her well-fortified like any major world would be expected to be. However, those defenses meant little to her and her plans. That didn’t mean she was ignoring them entirely. Already she had a subroutine dedicated to remotely hacking the defense network, while another was hacking the civil net, and a third was hacking into the communications grid. Every computer system she could find, she had a subroutine already dedicated to hacking into it. In fact, she already had low-level access to every system on the planet. She could have had full access already, but she was trying to be low-key about it. Regardless she expected to have full access within the next minute at the most. Their systems just weren’t equipped to really stop a computer as powerful as she was. Of course, even with their primitive computer hardware, there were computers she could not break into, but that was because of the simple fact that they were completely isolated from the networks. It was a remarkably simple method of security but one that worked quite well. Technically she could hack into it regardless, but that was tricky. Not to mention quite detectable.
Doing so wouldn’t reveal her position, but it would alert anyone looking that someone was hacking into their secure computers. As for why, well that method was well known for seriously disrupting any targeted computing systems and every computer system nearby. Of course, nearby being relative. It would be a five-kilometer radius. Naturally, it would be quieter if a physical asset went down there and stealthy created a downlink. Something she was going to do eventually, as she wanted to know what was on the secure planetary servers.
While most of what data was stored on those servers was likely to be junk. I.E useless to her, some of it might be interesting. Not to mention those servers likely would contain the most useful hints on what was going on here. Assuming the puppeteers allowed anything of interest to be stored on a computer. She already knew from her captured Neku that they were quite through with their memory wiping. While they didn’t wipe everything, key memories were thoroughly obliterated. She couldn’t even recover them, as there was nothing to recover. As for why, she had a couple of theories based on the evidence. She just wasn’t going to speculate, as it served no purpose.
Megumi’s attention was quickly drawn back to the planet as her subroutines started to process new data from the planetary data net. Her subroutines had achieved full access to the data net and were now sifting through exabytes of data. The civilian net alone would take her a while to go through and analyze. Since she was going through it all with a fine-tooth comb so to speak. Her subroutines weren’t going to be done until tomorrow at the earliest. The preliminary data wasn’t all that interesting. At least on the civilian net. As for the defense net, that was a little more interesting, but nothing groundbreaking, yet.
Another subroutine report drew her attention elsewhere on the planet. Her scans had located a perfect site for a new stargate complex. Megumi started launching the specialized drones and noted the site. It was deep, very deep in the darkest depths of Nekuri’s ocean, where the crushing pressures were the greatest dangers. It was too deep for all but the strangest lifeforms to live. To be specific, the site was just over 16000 meters below sea level. Despite the significant depth, it wasn’t the deepest region of the planet’s oceans. It was however geologically stable with a very thick and rocky seafloor. It was deep enough that any Neku submersible would be crushed trying to reach the site, but her own craft could easily withstand those pressures. Shield or no shield, modern Solean ships had the structural integrity to withstand immense pressures far in excess of what that ocean could subject.
Her mind then switched tracks to consider what style of gate complex she wanted to build. The most common and mundane style was the pressure dome style complex. It had its advantages, and was the lowest tech solution to the intense pressures exerted by the sheer weight of the water at that depth. Especially given the planetary gravity levels. However that style did present a few drawbacks, and forced certain limitations. A more advanced style was the Atlantis style. This style got rid of the pressure dome entirely in favor of an energy shield projected around the complex. The use of a shield over physical matter removed most of the limitations and would let her build pretty much however she wanted. However that shield did require a continuous supply of energy, and was harder to conceal. Not impossible to conceal, just harder. She was honestly leaning towards Atlantis style.
A massive central structure, connected to five docking hubs was soon projected into her mind’s eye. She added lodgings, storage areas, vehicle repair bays, automated factories. Each of the six hubs was given its own shield generator in addition to the primary shield generator in the central hub. She added a series of phased plasma batteries for defense, along with drone launchers. By the time she was done setting up her template she had what amounted to a small underwater city. The architecture she had chosen was distinctly Terran, but that style was common for Solean use as well.
With its construction already underway, and everything she needed taken care of, she finally reached her destination. Kiru’s quarters. As Megumi’s biomech avatar approached the door, it automatically opened to reveal a scene she hadn’t quite been expecting. Then again she had not been paying any attention to these quarters. Megumi wasn’t sure what to do, and called up the surveillance footage for the quarters. Her significant processing power allowing her to review it in mere seconds. Now that she knew what happened, the question became what does she do about it?
must be one hot encounter for her to even think of what to do about it
Slime. It has to be the naughty slime incident.
God damn cliff.
Its just a small one, and the next chapter is already on Patreon, along with a few more
The planet and largest moon having similar gravities means this is a double planet system very similar to Pluto and Charon in which both orbit a point in space between them where their center of gravity lies. They are likely to be tidally locked to each other like Pluto/Charon and the moon should probably be the primary planet since it's heavier.
The high gravity would have made it extremely difficult for the nekuri civilisation to move out in to space, exponentially more expensive then it will be for humanity.
It does make it a double alright, but while heavier the moon is smaller.
Indeed it would have made it far more expensive for them to move out into space. Something that likely would have delayed their move out into space. Although the lack of mineral resources on their homeworld would have likely been a driver towards local space exploration, especially since they had a minerally rich moon right there, sharing their orbit around the star.
The most interesting factor to consider is how the two heavy bodies affect the other moons around Nekuri.
@JCountry pluto and charon have four other moons so i guess orbital stability isn't an issue, but they are likely to be orbiting much further away from the two planets then the planets are from each other.
@Yil That does seem to be the strongest orbital configuration.
the void steals energy I have already experienced it myself the 2 times I was on the verge of death totally disconnected from the body I experienced what the void is I could feel and touch it, it is indeed a feeling fence the redundancy emptiness, extreme loneliness, sad blackness in all directions, desperate screaming for help but you won't hear your voice, you can't hear anything, gradually forgetting who you are, where you are, disappearing time doesn't exist, years or months will pass strangely, 10 minutes can be 50 years in a vacuum or more .
I don't know about that experience I'm happy just to be here hehe hear noise see light that this body moves at my will "you never know what you have until you've lost everything" before I was worried about normal nonsense like everyone else but now I just see that everything that was idiotic.
That's why I currently treat everything as a joke and only laugh at the difficulties or the pain.
It is this or that darkness.
Its cool thinking about all the ins and outs necessary for something like an underwater city, especially when you have something equivalent to infinite resources. Thanks for the chapter.
Not to mention lots of fun!!!
She did ALL THAT while walking from the bridge to Kiru’s room?
yep!
I have wondered why no human being has considered that gravity also exponentially affects the weight of water the closer it is to the core of the planet. This also applies to Lava, so it stays liquid
Meanwhile, elementary school children continue to learn that gravity is constant, even all humans are wrong. if gravity were constant lunar tides would not happen.
Well it depends on the context, gravity is not a universal constant, but it is a local one. Newtonian physics which we learn first deals with well-known LOCAL constants.
However, the moment we start a colony on Luna or Mars we will have to toss that book out the window since a whole new set of local constants and rule would have to be determined. Something I clearly remembered with the above chapter.
@JCountry on other topics in the local news then the appearance of the nudist terrorist niku army with obscene body paint breaks into the government headquarters and will take the facilities together with the rulers.
@Dreckons lol!
Gravity is constant in the sense that any given pair of objects with constant mass at a constant distance will have a constant gravitational attraction. The pull varies when you change the variables but only when you change them and always the same way. We do make an abstraction on Earth and say that our local 1G is just short of 10m/s/s (it's like 9.97 or something?) because for most purposes it's close enough, even at LEO you're only talking a fractional difference because the distance is so small compared to the planetary radius. Curiously, for things where it matters, there is a whole "Earth geodesic" thingy pioneered by a pretty awesome lady to map the variation in Earth's gravitational field... variations in crust composition and the presence of mountains are two of obvious culprits. Turns out these tiny variations do really annoying things to satellite orbits over time.
Fun (stupid) fact: it's only lava after it leaves the ground, before that it's magma. Because that is apparently important to geologists or something. Anyway, magma being liquid is mostly a byproduct rather than because gravity makes it heavier. Part of the reason is that the compression of rock makes it hotter, eventually to the point it can melt, gravity acting on the magma is less important than gravity acting on all the stuff above the magma. The other part is the planet's magnetic dynamo, my memory is sketchy but the process that gives Earth a magnetic field also heats the inner core. Conversely, the dynamo only works if the core is hot enough for there to be magma. The mantle and crust provide quite a bit of insulation to help. Weird stuff. I don't remember how much which effects contribute, only that celestial bodies with cooled cores are dead rocks.
So, back to water... at 16km depth water will indeed weigh slightly more, it should be negligible though, a difference of hundredths or thousandths when talking about a planet with a radius of thousands of kilometers. What isn't negligible is the column of water 16km tall, if you want to talk weight and pressure at that depth then really you're talking about lifting the whole column, not just a small volume at the bottom.
Math becomes really depressing when you try to express human scale numbers (16km ocean depth or 100km altitude) in relation to planetary or orbital scales ... they turn into rounding errors.
@kaithar
haa yes, all that was the theory that I learned in school but you know what is the wrong factor in all that is simple in fact it is something that contradicts all that and it is so simple and obvious at a glance. "the denser a material is, when the atomic weight is greater, the gravity that it creates around it, the closer you are to that gravity well, the gravity increases exponentially" the earth, the moon, the sun, black hole, jupiter , the milky way and many other things gravity increases exponentially the closer you are to the gravity well it is stronger (WASP B12 egg planet ♡w♡)
it can even demonstrate the origin of time and shows that our universe is not infinite "knowing that"
haha that's why all that theory is going to waste today sorry but it's not constant as the guy JCountry said gravity changes locally. that is true.
another truth, you wonder why the empty void is cold? dark matter steals energy constantly, so gravity decreases the farther away from the central gravity well, meanwhile, you find constant solar bombardment as if the universe were trying to defend itself from dark matter, working to prevent accumulations of dark matter from appearing of dark matter clusters or also named black holes marks the end of our universe in reality so... we currently live in a time a little far from the end the intermediate more or less.
the real enemy is dark matter or like religious idiots said darkness is the real true enemy but religious people try to find divine meaning or hidden messages in messages that are obvious haha I laugh at their nonsense and madness looking for mystical meanings in direct sentences and direct words!! of the little book that has been placed on a giant pedestal.
the madness of the religious is funny and terrifying haha "please god bless us with your fire of glory and purify our sins and sanctify all the sinners of this world" WtF you know what I hear?? We pray that God descends and creates a massacre burning everyone on the planet alive? Damn crazy!!
@Dreckons Unfortunately its not just the religious who have gone mad. Its the world, which is why we prefer the worlds of fiction.
@Dreckons Ooooh, okie..
"the denser a material is, when the atomic weight is greater
You're already in problems... the atomic weight does matter but it's not the factor I'd pay most attention to when it comes to density. Instead, you need to worry about molecular structure. Water and ice have the same molecular weight but different densities because the crystal structure of the ice isn't efficient. Similarly, charcoal and diamond can both be 100% carbon yet have significantly different densities. But moving on...
the earth, the moon, the sun, black hole, jupiter , the milky way and many other things gravity increases exponentially the closer you are to the gravity well it is stronger
It's not exactly that gravity is stronger, it's that there's more of it. Assuming you're talking about an observer with essential no mass worth calculating (a person, satellite, spaceship, etc) the gravity well has a pull that you can think of as mass multiplied by 1 over distance squared. That math holds no matter what is making the gravity well. Per the standard example, a black hole with the same mass as the sun would have the same pull as the sun, meaning you could replace the sun and orbits would be the same.
Jupiter has a stronger gravity well than Earth because it's got more mass than the Earth. The pull of each gram of either planet is exactly the same, Jupiter just has way more grams pulling than Earth.
it can even demonstrate the origin of time and shows that our universe is not infinite "knowing that"
Unless you want to go into some seriously deep questions relating to philosophy, pure mathematics, theory unification and semantics ... I'd strongly suggest not trying to think too much about the actual nature of time. If nothing else, you'll go insane trying to rationalise the fact physics as a whole just ceases to apply when you get close enough to the big bang. Kinda does inside black holes too.
What I will say is that, as far as such things are meaningful, the universe is infinite in size but should be finite in content. A finite volume requires an edge, which requires an outside ... an infinite content has the opposite issue, it would produce issues of diffusing an infinite amount of energy in the earliest moments of inflation, with all the problems that suggests. If you want to say anything more useful than that, good luck.
haha that's why all that theory is going to waste today sorry but it's not constant as the guy said gravity changes locally.
I hate to bring it up ... Einstein's GR gravity, Newtonian gravity and quantum gravity are all incompatible with each other. We don't actually have a useable theory for the last one. In Newton's world, gravity is a force that acts on things, good luck trying to balance the energy conservation equations to explain where the momentum comes from. They all have force constants though.
another truth, you wonder why the empty void is cold? dark matter steals energy constantly, so gravity decreases the farther away from the central gravity well
Uh... no.
1/ a true vacuum is not cold... in theory it has no temperature because it has no content to have temperature. In practice, true vacuums don't exist, instead you have something so low pressure that it has a nonsense thermal mass so you can't call it hot or cold. Things in space certainly have temperature, just not pleasant ones. Things seem cold because the low pressure forces anything that can boil or sublimate to do so, a process that steals heat from the thing. Since most things have some moisture or liquid that can be exposed, they freeze in a vacuum. On the other hand, a vacuum is a really good insulator because there's no convection to speak of, so any object that makes heat tends to get hot. Astronauts, satellites and probes all have this problem. The operational life time of hardware in space is often determined by how much coolant and giant radiators you gave it. Unfortunately the issue of heat conducting on contact is a problem on many levels.
2/ dark matter doesn't steal energy in any fashion I'm aware of. Actually, it is defined in a way that excludes that possibility: Dark matter is matter that doesn't interact with normal matter and energy in any way other than some esoteric gravitational fashion. If it absorbed energy in some way then we could directly observe it in that way. We can't because it doesn't. Not to mention all the thermodynamic headaches from such magical dark matter needing to some how emit energy as well.
3/ If you're thinking on this level, gravity doesn't "decrease", it's better to think of it as diffusing or diluting. Haaaa, how to explain in few words.
Ok, so gravity is fundamentally a radiation type in the way electromagnetic radiation is. What that means is that you can imagine them as something "sending out" discrete amounts of the force that have to travel to the thing being acted on. If you could see it, it would look like an expanding bubble, the force being the outer surface. As the radius of the bubble increases, the surface increases as inverse distance squared, but the total amount of "stuff" making up the surface can't change. The result is that as the force gets further away it has to stretch and spread out. Just imagine inflating an infinitely stretchy balloon.
Unfortunately there's all kinds of problems with this analogy, for one we haven't figured out gravitons are a real thing, but it's good enough. Incidentally, magnetism is a volumetric type force, that's why it falls off as inverse distance cubed, and these two types are one of the ways to prove we live in 3 spacial dimensions and not 4
4/ the concept of a gravity well hides a really weird quirk... there's not really a single well for any non-trivial bit of matter. Every bit of stuff exerts gravitational pull on every other bit of stuff. If you were magically able to stand at the center of gravity for the Earth you would feel an effective gravitational pull of zero. Since the mass of the Earth is equally distributed around you it will pull equally in all directions. That's why (finite) gravity wells are depicted as flat gradients at the center with a curve. It's also why easy logic only applies outside the physical volume of the mass.
you find constant solar bombardment as if the universe were trying to defend itself from dark matter, working to prevent accumulations of dark matter from appearing of dark matter clusters
There is so much wrong with this that I'm not even going to try to explain. Basically everything wrong, sorry.
also named black holes marks the end of our universe in reality so... we currently live in a time a little far from the end the intermediate more or less.
Ah, the end of the universe. Last I checked the expansion of the universe was thought to be speeding up, so unfortunately black holes won't get the job done. Most likely they will all eventually evaporate or get ripped apart by space-time stretch, anything not eaten will eventually decay to photons which will suffuse all of reality in an ever increasing thermal wavelength. Nobody escapes the inevitable entropy and heat death.
On the plus side, we have tons of time left before that happens. I don't think we're even a quarter of the way through the life of the universe, no matter how pessimistic you are about which endgame theory you support for the poor thing. It's certainly not anything any of us will have to worry about.
[Citation Needed]
@JCountry although in reality the fictional worlds are created based on humans and in my case I use the novels to deepen my understanding of the human psyche and its behavior. Understanding is the root of the true strength of the soul. Each race curiously represents a human aspect.