Creates a massive gravitational field around a specific object, causing it to implode, other objects to move towards it at heavy speeds, and increase density and mass while decreasing volume.
Application
How it Works
By removing the gravitons via an artificial, simulated black hole within the gun itself. This black hole attracts the gravitons in normal matter (generally something widely available such as atmosphere, or high density/high mass/graviton supersolutions), accelerates the matter to near the speed of light (at which point they separate from the matter they are associated with via a direct matter-energy conversion, which fuels the weapon, the gravitons have no mass and so are retained), then phases out of existence (the magnetic field which stabilizes it switches off). Unfortunately, the gravitons fuse with the first thing they hit, and so in an atmosphere a magnetic tube which keeps the gravitons moving in a straight line and is powerful enough to rearrange the air molecules to create a vacuum in the line. When the gravitons hit the target, they create matter supersaturated with gravitons, which in turn causes mass to go up exponentially. This weapon requires a massive amount of energy. To start the reaction (release one burst of gravitons) requires a fusion or fission reactor to charge a capacitor up to several gigajoules. This energy is used to create the magnetic field, which both creates and stabilizes the artificial black hole. After the initial cycle, sustained firing is facilitated by the energy from the direct mass to energy conversion (through rapid fusion/fission) used to separate the gravitons from the matter. The excess energy charges the capacitor, which can only hold a charge for about a minute before diffusing the energy, generally by forming unstable molecules from stable ones, such as converting N2 to a less stable NH3. Reversing radioactive decay is also a popular method. Gravity drives neutralize a black hole gun by absorbing the gravitons. This will eventually cause the drive to fail, as the anti-gravity created is in effect neutralized by the added gravitons. More extreme, in the case of extended exposure, the gravity drive implodes into a black hole because of the excess of gravitons, in addition to the gravitons generated by the field itself.
Unfortunately, or perhaps very fortunately, the Black Hole Gun is extremely dangerous. In the case of a magnetic field failure at the wrong time could create a reaction, which would create a very real black hole from the artificial one. During extended firings, if the timing of any part is compromised by heat or another variable, the gun will implode at best, explode, or worst, create a black hole. Using a Black Hole Gun is generally a last resort or a suicide mission.
Civilian guns are for this reason immense objects, with extremely powerful computers connected to them and innumerable safety precautions. In general, they are used to shrink materials such as pure elements to maximize the mass-volume ratio. After being shrunk, they are placed into special containers designed to withstand extreme pressure. The extra gravitons are extracted by placing matter unsaturated with gravitons in contact with the matter.
Normally laser communication (lascom) is considered secure because it travels in a coherent line from sender to receiver, not broadcast in all directions. Therefore, often, lascom is not encoded because the sender believes the message will not be intercepted.
The eye-spy device allows interception of laser communication signals. By emitting a stream of various subatomic particles (called the "chaff") that react with photons at the standard frequencies used by lascoms, and then by monitoring the bounce-back reflections that occur when the chaff is disturbed as it passes through a lascom beam, the eye-spy can locate a lascom beam, and then monitor which particles are affected by the lascom. By analysing variations over time (usually at the microsecond level) in the disturbances of the particles, the information carried by the lascom can be copied into the eye-spy's databank for analysis. Even if the message is encoded, the user of the eye-spy at least knows that a message has been sent and the approximate amount of information it contains, and has a chance to decode it.
Distance between eye-spy and lascom reduces the quality of wave-disturbance analysis, according to the inverse-square law.
The main drawback of the eye-spy beam is that some minor degradation of the lascom can occur, perhaps tipping off the receiver that there has been interference and possible interception, especially when analog signals are used instead of digital for the lascom. However, normal sources of interference other than eye-spy can degrade a lascom, so the receiver's notice of lascom signal degradation is not always an indication of eye-spy interception.
Careful calibration and parameterization is necessary for the user of an eye-spy, to ensure that (1) particles harmful to himself are not produced in hazardous quantity, (2) overpowering fields are not generated, which can obscure the eye-spy's own detection equipment, and (3) chaff is not generated in such quantity that the lascom communicants detect the use of an eye-spy.
The first eye-spies built in the 4th millennium were large devices, mostly due to the clunky nature of particle generation and subsequent detection. Great strides have been made since then in subatomic technology. Now, eye-spies are available on the micro-level, as small as one-inch spheres in some cases (sometimes used in artificial eyeballs), though the smaller an eye-spy is built the less effective it becomes at various lascom frequencies. Research and development of nano-eye-spies has been frustrated by the nature of the device: it is difficult to build nano-devices that operate at the subatomic level. Perhaps one day a nano-eye-spy will be built.