Mention planetary defenses?

[stabbydemonhorses]

Pretty sure the planets have defenses that automatically blast apart anything approaching too quickly, so long as they are approaching at less than, say, 3/4 the the speed of light relative to the planet (otherwise they wouldn't be able to see it coming), and since faster-than-light travel doesn't exist for humanity at the time period of this story, that's not a problem.

Not sure "blast apart" is what the defenses do. That could just result in shards pummeling the planet. But they have to have something to protect them; otherwise, a ship traveling at full speed crashing into the planet could cause quite a large amount of devastation.

But it also doesn't necessarily matter exactly what happens to the approaching object: if Leanne doesn't really know, the phrase "blast apart" could be good enough, even if something else equivalent enough may actually happen.

Given the crazy amounts of energy available to the society, something laser-based might actually be best. However, their defense needs to both disrupt what it hits and slow it down. Not sure.

Granted, there are also issues of what happens to a spaceship if a piece of dust hits it. These ships go very fast, so this is a real concern.

It almost necessitates some form of shielding, but that shielding is also what would make a spaceship more dangerous to a planet, unless the planet as well could have shields.

Then there's the question of how the planet decides what to fire upon: does it fire upon things only in relation to their velocity? Or just anything approaching that it doesn't think ought to be? If the latter, that's its own issue: how does an illegal pilot like Leanne get permission to land?

[stabbydemonhorses]

This society can manipulate gravity. That's gotta count for something.

[dcporter]

Manipulating gravity — how well and at what distance?

[stabbydemonhorses]

@dcporter a large backpack can generate the force (or compensate for forces) of a few times earth gravity.

Larger field generators are found in ships, and can compensate for similar amounts of gravity, but at a larger scale (but only within a few feet or meters from the ship's hull itself).

That being said, the society has the ability to (on a planet, not on a ship) generate extreme amounts of energy (many many times the energy output of the sun, probably). So they could probably affect a larger field, but larger fields probably require exponentially more energy as well, so that's not unlimited either.

Still, with that much energy, there are probably several options for planetary defense. Can't you impart force with lasers (in addition to just heating things up)? That could let the planet shove incoming things away (possibly ships too) if they could see those things (but that's another issue, because I don't want the planets to be able to see small ships incoming for other story reasons)

[stabbydemonhorses]

@dcporter that energy-generating thing is actually what the story is named after (it's called the "Exploit", because they're exploiting what seems like a bug or quirk in the universe)

[dcporter]

Ships move between orbits in ways that are very sensitive to gravity. If a ship wants to go into orbit around a planet, starting from an intercept orbit around the sun, it needs to fire off a given amount of change-in-velocity (delta-v, or km/s). If the planet can fuck with gravity, it can change the delta-v needs to enter the right orbit, maybe to the point where a ship doesn't have enough to recover, and either ends up in the wrong orbit or misses entirely and gets flung off into space (ends up back in orbit around the star). It's probably a slow process so the planet would need to see the ship coming, so that could be an interesting cat-and-mouse thing with your stealthy ships.

[stabbydemonhorses]

These are mentioned in Chapter 2, but maybe not enough. Have to think more on this.