quote:Originally posted by TomDavidson: Especially since the lack of rotation (and their control of gravity) was a secret, originally.
That was actually one of the problems I had with the book. There didn't seem to be a legitimate reason for the IF to keep artificial gravity a secret, so why would they use centrifugal force on a rotating space station and then use artificial gravity in the Battle Room to counteract it? Especially when the whole point of having Battle School in space was to get the students used to thinking in gravity-less environments.
Switching it around and making the rest of the space station use artificial gravity and keeping the Battle Room itself in microgravity is a deviation from the book, but a deviation that makes no less sense than the book itself. Though that glass must be REALLY strong to withstand that much atmospheric pressure.
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quote:Originally posted by C3PO the Dragon Slayer: Though that glass must be REALLY strong to withstand that much atmospheric pressure.
That's a common misconception confusing high pressure with high vacuum. There is no reason the for the pressure inside the glass sphere to be higher than 1 atm. It doesn't really matter whether the pressure outside the glass sphere is one hundreth of an atm or 1 trillionth of an atm the force on the glass would be essentially the same.
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quote:Originally posted by TomDavidson: Especially since the lack of rotation (and their control of gravity) was a secret, originally.
It's been a long time since I've read it, but I thought that the Battle School did rotate and that it was the 2nd Battle School that used Bugger anti-gravity technology.
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quote:Originally posted by TomDavidson: Especially since the lack of rotation (and their control of gravity) was a secret, originally.
It's been a long time since I've read it, but I thought that the Battle School did rotate and that it was the 2nd Battle School that used Bugger anti-gravity technology.
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IIRC, Ender figures out that they have antigrav tech when he realizes that the weightless areas at the center of the Battle School aren't docking realistically. This is the first time it's confirmed for him that we're using stolen Bugger tech -- although I have no idea why those techs, ranging from antigrav to the ansible, are still kept secret from civilians decades after the Second Invasion.
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I would surmise that the principle reason is that revealing this tech might also reveal the actual strategic plans of the fleet, which might cause unforeseen problems.
Because it is implied in both Speaker for the Dead and Ender in Exile that the "Park Shift," is an exploitation of the strong nuclear force to break subatomic particles and consume their energy at basically 100% efficiency, or possibly above 100% efficiency as the exploitation may draw energy out of parallel universes, which was presented as a kind of sick feeling that Ender has.
But the Park Shift, the MD and Gravity manipulation are all implied in various places to be essentially the exploitation of one kind of tech:
quote: it was anybody's guess, since nobody understood why philotic effects worked anyway; the Ansible had been discovered half by accident, and along with it the park instantaneous principle.
And later it is revealed that the MD device is also based on an uncontrolled park shift that spreads the energy out randomly instead of directing it. WHich you might read as a contradiction, or an implication that gravity manipulation, the ansible, and the Park Shift are all applications of one theory.
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