Dilvish wrote:labgnome wrote:The "energy" can be harnessed from a black hole is what is called Hawking radiation.
Hawking radiation may be the only EM energy directly released by a black hole at/across it's event horizon, but its gravity field of course extends well beyond that and triggers a significant amount energy release from the infalling matter. Of course, you'd think that anyone who could harvest that energy could come up with a more efficient fission/fusion/whatever method to extract energy from matter without throwing it into a black hole. But maybe you put two black holes into a dual orbit and harvest energy from the gravity waves. Or, just maybe, it's something you and I haven't thought of yet
True that is a much quicker (and dirtier) way to get energy out of a black hole. However as most black holes encountered in FO are of the solitary variety, and not with companion stars, you would still have to deliberately facilitate the infalling matter approach, and you'd still need a way to harvest that energy. Mind you orbiting planets and space stations could do this by just launching their garbage into the black hole, but you'd still need a petty elaborate setup to make that work in a way you could actually get a net return in energy on. Any station or planet orbiting far enough not to fall into the black hole, would need to expend energy to launch matter into it, and any energy released is going to have to be from much closer, or basically build a Dyson sphere around it.
Also given the way the technologies and building work in game even, I'm still inclined to think they should be in opposite places in the tech tree.
Hmm, normally reflection of EM waves stems from dynamically inducing dipoles (or polarizing existing ones) in the reflective material. Although the quark composition of a neutron suggests it presumably does have some kind of electric dipole, it's my understanding that it is smaller than we are able to measure, surely has an orientation fluctuating far more rapidly than the frequency of visible light and the available energy levels for changing its polarization probably start out with some pretty significant jumps, such that only extremely high energy photons would have a chance of reflection. Whether that would leave neutronium transparent to visible light or essentially perfect black body absorbance at visible wavelengths is apparently a matter of debate, but I would be inclined to say essentially perfect black body absorbance.
It's been a few years since it was explained to me, but if I remember correctly neutronium would be a reflector like a metal, not like glass, with the neutrons all acting like free electrons. Neutrons do also have a detectable magnetic dipole moment that EM waves might interact with. Because of its extremely high density, it would reflect pretty much any form of radiation. Mind you that explanation might be incorrect, but we also don't have any actual neutronium to study to see how it interacts with light.
I do think we could go round and round for ages as to what mechanism a hypothetical advanced civilization might use to get energy or resources out of either of these types of objects. However, I do also think it would be an improvement for later game play to have neutronium earlier, as it's at least useful for ships. It's honestly one thing that does annoy me about a lot of 4x games. You get these cool things that don't happen until the end of the tech tree, but since they are so late game before you can even put them to use, the game is over. I think better gemeplay would be to have the really cool stuff, neutronum armor, artificial planets ect, at the cusp of the mid and late stages of the game, and the big production and research boosters, like singularity generators and the collective thought network for the late game. That way the cool things happen early enough to get them into your production chains, and then the other stuff allows you to make that final push to whatever victory condition you are trying for.
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