A singular pure fractal made in Apophysis 2.09
“And the above is why we did not use a full-sized starship to run my tests, and I'm glad to know the Mhaantarae had just that much sense too in attempting to take on the limits of physics.”
“Well, it just looks like a 35-car wreck to me colorized for the late 23rd century. I'm waiting on these youngsters to read up enough to know physics is undefeated, Ben!”
“Keep waiting, Almira. It's called 'job security.' ”
Admiral Benjamin Banneker, my uncle, had married his Academy-era friend Captain Almira Jackson, and now, the Banneker-Jacksons were just walking through the high-status life their combined achievements deserved and finding it hilarious. Every physics-breaking attempt from friends of humanity found its way to my uncle's desk, and if it wasn't classified and no one was hurt, he and Aunt Almira enjoyed the carnage together.
It was not exactly a secret that our fleet needed to prevent an accident like that which had pulled both my uncle and myself back into the fleet from happening again – just how my uncle was going about it was top secret at the time. But meanwhile, other sentient space-going species had data from the accident and were working on it for their own purposes. The Mhaantarae had been interested in the anti-gravitational effects of going to trans-warp backwards in a star's gravitational vortex, and had wondered if hyper-gravitational effects could be a useful corollary.
The problem was old physics gone wild: the two-body problem vs. the three-body problem. Two objects in space will tend to settle into a stable orbit at sufficient distance, and we can model that mathematically, but it is impossible to predict what three objects or more will do in orbit. We can only approximate it mathematically, or set up modeling to observe.
Now, it is theoretically possible for multiple objects of varying sizes to settle into stable orbits provided they are set up just right in terms of speed and distance from each other. The Solar System is an excellent example. Yet the Solar System, with the Sun where it is and Jupiter, the second largest object, being where it is, can also be thought of as a “complex two-body system” – the main interactions are between the Sun and Jupiter, and the stability of their orbit assures the relative stability of every other orbit in the system.
So there is some wiggle room inside the orbits of two sufficiently large objects that are stably orbiting to put other objects in that are sufficiently smaller without wrecking the general stability of the system. The only issue with experimenting with high gravity – not yet even hyper-gravity – is that when you get close to the limit, you find out quick that either stability disappears or reasserts itself dramatically. Newton's observation that bodies in motion tend to remain in motion in the direction they are already going also is undefeated!
Two over-powered gravity buoys, a bunch of drone ships, and the flipping of a switch, and all observers witnessed that what happens in a two-body system that has two equal and very deep gravity wells is that the two bodies will essentially slide almost all sufficiently smaller objects down their gravity wells and maintain the stability of their orbit around their common center of gravity with each other. I say almost all because two drone ships made it to orbit said common center of gravity as well while everything else was crashing into the gravity buoys.
What made it visually interesting was that gravity buoys are nowhere near the size of planets.
“Well,” Uncle Benjamin said, “at least now we won't need to fly a fleet of shuttles into a binary star system that is now two black holes or neutron stars. We already know what that looks like.”
“Right – like a 35-car pileup!” Aunt Almira said.