Hello all - I was watching this weeks stream and the topic on the black holes came up with Paul and Adam...
I really think it would be cool if the black holes did in fact suck in ships. I am not sure on the best way they can achieve this but somehow the event horizon could be incorporated into the gameplay/tiles.
With this said, I feel the black holes can be an early game exploration game mechanic. The majority of the black holes on the map should be 'dark'. They can keep the same animation and look but just be dark black/grey perhaps, dull blue and more subtle. More importantly they should not show up on the star map (at least initially in unexplored space) and should most definitely be invisible to the player waiting to suck in early explorers. These dark black holes would mainly be useless and would only serve as a dynamic map object/hindrance players would need to avoid.
The colorful black holes currently in the game are beautiful though and I think their color can serve a purpose in game. Paul said himself that they would only be colorful if they were next to a star or absorbing a star - I think this could work as any black hole with the antimatter resource could simply be devouring something in its ring - thus giving it the color and making it special on the map.
I love the idea of varying size black holes and hope they go forward with that idea as well. In game - the size of the black hole could directly relate to its influence on the surrounding tiles (i.e how many tiles are in the event horizon). These could really help shape how the civilizations grow. Starbases could be constructed next to them as 'lighthouses' to prevent ships from accidentally wandering in on autopilot.
I do agree they they 'seem' too prevalent on the map but perhaps with them being visually subdued it won't seem as much.
Anyway though I'd pass my thoughts along.
If sucking in can not work then how about loosing movements. The longer one is withing x hexes of the corona the movements are reduced by % so if left around too long then "-" movements. ie stuck.
There's so much that can be done with black holes. For one thing, I'd make them much rarer. Also create a way to build research starbases that could reap great rewards from studying them. Maybe even make them slowly pull in all nearby galaxy object, planets, suns, asteroids, everything. Maybe one hex every 50 turn or so.
Slightly off topic but... after watching Interstellar and this video, can we have black holes that look like this-
Also worlds that are colonizable that are near black holes are harder to setup...
I was also thinking about the black holes after the stream.
What if the accretion disk would replenish movement points at the cost of ship health?
This way the black holes are actually strategically useful, and not something that is just evaded by ships. The pulling force of the black hole speeds things up the closer they get to the center, so it would be possible for a ship to use this as a slingshot and gain speed/movement points. The gravitational pull would ofcourse take its toll on the ship, and therefore there is a trade: health/hitpoints for speed/movement. This could be implemented per tile, or per layer/ring of the black hole.
Black holes don't "slowly" pull things in. They're indistinguishable from a star of the same mass. Gravity is gravity.
Even a supermassive black hole of 4 billion solar masses anchoring a galaxy with a huge central bulge (and lighting up as a quasar when it's feeding) doesn't pull its own galaxy in. In fact, quite the opposite: its jets are so overpowering that it blasts away all available gas from the galactic interior, which kills off star formation. Every quasar (that we know of) turns itself off because it disperses its own gas supply (or heats it up to the point that it no longer can fall inward). Anyways, most of the galaxy simply orbits the central bulge forever, without caring how it's concentrated.
There are still plenty of fun real-physics things we could do with black holes. Some of them are simply Outside GC* Design, tho.
Sticking solely to the outsides of black holes:
This seems to get away from GC3's focus on galactic domination, tho. It might make for a swell solitaire game, maybe like space trader but with science instead of money.
Just to Clarify, I believe Paul made a comment that there is no proof or that Astronomers still are on the fence about black Holes.
ahem...
They are a fact of our Universe. They exist. We have observational proof that one exists in the center of our Galaxy.
On that note, I would prefer if there were only 4 to 5 at MOST per HUGE galaxy. They really seem to clutter up the void spaces of the map.
+2 Cents.
@Gilmoy that's nuts for this game.
I say make them a impassable object for a two tile radius. One tile ring is available to move in and build. I guess some effects are needed to make them cool as well, because interacting with objects is boring unless something happens.
@Gilmoy
Galciv3 isn't trying to be a real simulator of anything, much less black holes, so a lot of what your saying doesn't apply to a game like this. Same reason why there's wormholes yet there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that wormholes even exist.
Anyhow, my suggestion for black holes is fluctuating bonuses/deficits for any planet/starbase near a black hole. I literally can't see how sucking ships will work in a turn based game, as Paul himself stated. The only other thing that could work is any ship near a black hole has its movement reduced severely until it gets away from its influence. Any player or AI that wishes to make a shortcut can go through its influence but at the cost of speed.
I also considered the idea of black holes disappearing and reappearing in regions of space at random, which is a very fun idea in itself but suffers from one major obstruction and that is the anti-matter bonus. If you have a starbase mining that bonus, well, its going to be useless if the black hole suddenly vanishes, and that's not fun! One way around that is to have the black hole essentially 'anchored' if a mining starbase gets put in its radius, and it will do its vanishing act once again if the starbase ever gets destroyed. This makes the black holes dynamic and 'interesting' instead of the current boring visual effect of just having them sit there with antimatter on their sides. *yawn*
We have overwhelming evidence that something exists that is as heavy, compact, and dense as a black hole.
So our options today are:
In other words, whatever the "something else" is, it must behave very very much just like a black hole does. Spock says: "A different that makes no difference is no difference". Most scientists today accept #1, by Occam's Razor if nothing else. They are black holes, until we get more (or any) data that disproves it (and good luck with that).
It's debatable-but-true that we have no proof that black holes exist, to the same standard that we have photographic proof of other stellar phenomena. But by that reasoning, we also have no visual photographic proof of most extrasolar planets, except the 1 or 2 that do actually show up as 1 pixel of light in an image. If we accept that the wobble in the spectral lines of a star, or the periodic 0.5% dip in its light curve, proves that it's in mutual orbit around something that weighs a tiny fraction of it, then consistency forces us to accept that X-ray-hot rotating gas disks and giant stars plunging like comets implies the existence of heavy compact objects far denser than neutron stars. They must be whatever you get after a neutron star collapses. Of all the theories we have today that go there and say something falsifiable, GR is by far the champion in surviving experimental tests. (Similarly, evolution is universally accepted among dozens of branches of science because anything that replaces it and still fits the overwhelming empirical data would necessarily end up looking just like it.)
N.B. this line of reasoning is eerily similar to the reasoning that forced the acceptance of neutron stars in the first place. IIRC, we observed a binary system, measured its mutual orbit and its mutual light curve, deduced both masses, and also computed both surface temperatures. From that, we could estimate the average surface brightness of the heavier companion (which gets eclipsed, so already we knew it's the smaller of the two). Comparing it to the actual dimness, we deduced that it must be very very small -- thousands of times denser than iron. That caused -- consternation for decades, with a great deal of hand-wringing, number-crunching, alternative conjectures bandied about, and surely two entrenched camps, believers vs. non. That debate raged, spurred a great deal of useful theorizing, and sparked much interest in searching for more. And ... we gradually found lots more, dozens of them. Furthermore, astronomers had not just one anomaly to deal with, but two: (1) how can this star be so dense? and (2) a known and nagging incompleteness: if a dwarf is a burnt-out cinder that is too light to overpower electron shell repulsion, so that atoms remain as atoms ... what the heck happens if it's bigger than that (or two of them merge), and it does overpower? Gosh, it'd ... fall down, right? The second anomaly you can't answer might almost make you throw your hands up and scream -- until you realize, gee, maybe they are each the other one's solution. Could it possibly dovetail that elegantly????
... why yes, work out the math and -- it does Sigh of relief! They're merely neutron stars, which is a collapsed dwarf that is too light to overpower Pauli exclusion (of neutrons). Now .... what the heck happens if ---?
Science is beautiful Nowadays, pulsars in the sky are just a tool that we use, e.g. Air Force bombers have stellar sextants that can auto-triangulate among a catalog of known pulsars, which is how B-2s can fly from Kansas to Afghanistan and back in the dark.
And yes, I don't expect any of this to appear in GC*. This is just geek fun among fellow geeks.
For game purposes, we happily suspend disbelief and grant the designers a great deal of artistic license. I don't mind the way GC3 black holes look and behave now. Maybe they're a bit too frequent, but that requires just a tweak to the map generator.
As a game mechanism, it so happens that a GC3 black hole vortex is the only kind of impassable terrain. So if you want to use impassability as a primitive to define pockets, fences, mazes, or other path structures in space, interlocking black hole vortices is the only tool at your disposal. (Maybe that's what the random map generator is doing when it lays all those black holes down.)
It'd be a hoot to envision a Completely Different Game whose premise is to start with a GR engine, whose basic gameplay requires that the player skims past black holes. That would be maybe a ray-tracing engine to generate each frame-per-second from background stars (and competing ships), passing through the GR equations to accurately compute the actual light paths. Genre TBD! It could be racing with lightsails (you try to block him in your shade), trading across wormhole routes, flashlight-tag (or combat) where you both must compute GR light-path bending to aim your laser shots ... or, heck, maybe just a GR flight simulator. You'd guarantee sales to every physics grad student in the world ... and a shortage thereafter of physics Ph.D.s who actually graduate ...
I like the look the Devs did for them. i imagine that is what the super-massive ones look like if you could safely view one at that angle and distance. The jets are great.
I would like them fewer and placed a bit better. i have not problem with one parked next to or just 'yonder' on my home system as long as there are no more for a bit.
Games become alive with uniqueness when there are dynamic element. If there was a galactic achievement that allowed passage through black holes, that would make the game more fun 10x.
"Games become alive with uniqueness. If there was a galactic achievement that allowed passage through black holes, that would make the game more fun 10x."
Nah, it has to be somewhat grounded in reality. Why not include space dragons for more uniqueness.
"Black holes don't "slowly" pull things in. They're indistinguishable from a star of the same mass. Gravity is gravity."
I'm not entirely sure this is true, why do black holes not allow light to escape? I believe the compactness of the mass is a factor. (Mind you, I'm no scientist).
Gravity is gravity. Gravitational strength can be elegantly summarized by the amount that it redshifts light, which is equivalent to the energy it subtracts from a photon escaping (N.B. that's exactly what "redshift" means), which is equivalent to the escape velocity needed to escape to infinity. (For everyday matter that moves slower than c, we must multiply the energy-per-unit-mass by the mass, which is awkward -- so we divide out the mass, which leaves an acceleration. That's why 1G means 10 m/s^2, in Newtonian units. Ultimately, all of these representations of gravity boil down to the same thing: it's a down, against which energy / velocity / acceleration push upward.)
WLOG, imagine a point mass source, with no radius of its own. Escape velocity at a certain radius is proportional to the mass, and inversely(-square?) proportional to distance from the center. GR's beautiful equations showed the sensational (at that time) result that escape velocity has no limit. Add more mass, and the escape velocity can reach c. Add even more mass, and escape velocity can exceed c. Nothing funky happens to the point mass when the escape velocity hits c. There is (apparently) no law of the universe that caps the velocity-needed-to-escape.
But we also have the theory of SR (special relativity), which states that "nothing can move faster than c", i.e. there is a law of the universe that caps the velocity-you-can-attain. Satisfy both of those theories at the same time, and -- every kind of beautiful funkiness emerges. To satisfy both theories simultaneously, you simply plug-and-chug to find the (finite) radius at which the escape velocity is exactly c, and then ... that's the Schwarzschild radius of the GR solution. Nowadays, we call it the "event horizon" of a "black hole" (although both buzzwords are much more modern than the original GR papers).
With a bit of gedanken-checking (gedanken = thought), you can easily see how this makes sense: a photon moving at c, orbiting exactly at the event horizon, will exactly stay in orbit forever, and neither fall in nor get out. Such an orbit arises whenever a photon exactly skims the event horizon on a tangent vector, and neither misses wide, nor intersects it like a soda straw pushed through a potato. (We think today that every black hole is absolutely buried under mattresses of such trapped photons, comprising a photon shell -- but you'll never see them, because (boomp-chh!) none of them will ever come out to your retina. If you pass through the event horizon, you might get blasted by a photon wall going sideways to you, and maybe reflect some of them inward with you.)
Ergo, a photon 1 femtometer farther away will slowly spiral out (and redshift to almost nothing), because it's faster than the escape velocity thereat. Those slightly inside must slowly spiral inward. Photons moving radially away from the center suffer the same fate: from just-outside the event horizon, they'll escape, but leave most of their energy behind, which for a photon means they become deeeeeep-infrared. Photons from inside the event horizon, moving radially outward, lose all of their energy before they make it out, and so ... they attenuate down to 0 quanta of energy, at which point they kind of just wink out of existence and cease to ripple the electromagnetic field. So photons inside don't make it out, and nothing else does, either.
There's actually nothing special about a "black hole" that gives it anything like "supergravity". GR actually says that mass causes curvature, and curvature deflects motion (and absorbs energy -- or by absorbing energy, haha). Newtonian gravitation is a very elegant approximation of the motions you get when masses move in curved space -- so they're both correct, but GR is "more" correct because it can usefully describe what happens under extreme conditions such as two black holes spiraling around each other. Anyways, curvature (of spacetime) is all the same; it makes no difference what shape the mass is in. Put a huge curtain around the galactic center, so that it hides whatever's inside. The center could be a diffuse cloud of cold dark gas of 4.3 million solar masses, or 4.3 million hot suns of 1 solar mass each, or 7000 dead neutron stars of the same total mass, or 1 black hole of that mass, or whatever else. It matters not; all will create (seen from far enough away) identical curvature in spacetime, and therefore everything around it will orbit that curvature without even noticing any difference. If they would fall into a black hole, they would have fallen into the cold dark gas cloud along exactly the same path. Nothing about "black hole" makes it any more attractive than any other arrangement of the same total mass.
Hence, most galaxies don't fall into their galactic centers. Think about it: for 10 billion years they've been in orbit around something . If they were falling in, they'd have already reached the bottom long ago. So whatever hasn't already fallen, probably won't for at least another 10-20 billion years. Orbits (in space, without friction) are like that. Ergo, even in the case of two galaxies colliding, and their two supermassive central black holes hunting each other down and spiraling into each other (which happens due to friction), after a few billion years the merged center bulge has stabilized into the two-hole tango in a tight-and-decaying orbit ... and the rest of the stuff just sees a center of X+Y total mass, and orbits that. Thereafter, nobody cares what those two monsters do. Eventually they'll merge into a bigger monster of mass X+Y ... but this has virtually no effect on anything in orbit. Mass is mass, gravity is gravity, orbits don't change (much).
A black hole formed from core collapse is actually the remnant of a ginormous explosion (supernova). You may need a 30-solar-mass supergiant blowing its guts and outer shells off to leave behind a 5-solar-mass black hole. The remaining 25 solar masses of stuff become a lovely "planetary" nebula around it (anachronism, from before we had modern optics) -- which means they're falling outward, not inward. (We have decades-old time-lapse photos of some planetary nebulas, and we can measure them getting wider.) The black hole is thus much, much lighter (less massive) than what used to be there before -- so nearby stuff that was previously in orbit can, and does, get gravitationally ejected after a supernova (or, less violently, they just kind of drift away, like unmoored boats in a gentle tide). From far enough away, the nebula + hole still look like the same total mass -- but then maybe from those distances you weren't orbiting it anyways. If you haven't already fallen into the star while it was a 30, it's very likely that you missed your chance forever.
GR also works in the other direction! Every mass has its own Schwarzschild radius, which is easily computed by plug-and-chug. Everyday matter is way too porous, being mostly the empty gaping chasms of space between electron shells and the nuclei they orbit, so we're far bigger than our own Schwarzschild radii. But if we take any mass of any shape or size and somehow (e.g. with an Age of Non-Expansion tech ) forcibly squeeze it down to its Schwarzschild radius, then poof, it will and must collapse into a (mini-)black hole. For Earth (or any Earth-mass of any stuff), IIRC this radius is on the order of millimeters. It's only a whimsy for us in this century, but someday it could have practical applications. In fact, some of the (wacky) protests against the Large Hadron Collider are based on the far-fetched notion that it could create stable microscopic or quantum black holes. In theory, this could happen whenever you attain any energy density in a space more compact than its own Schwarzschild radius. (Remember that energy is the same as mass, hehe -- both SR and GR say that, with overwhelming evidence.) Fortunately, we've computed that LHC is too wimpy to create even the smallest allowable black hole, that black holes of that size would (1) first of all depart Earth at very nearly c, and (2) promptly blow up via Hawking radiation, and finally that cosmic rays bombard Earth's atmosphere every day with energies greater than LHC's max, and they haven't created daily showers of black holes for the last 5 billion years. So whew, we're saved by our own low tech?
Indeed, this is correct. Compactness lets you get close without being already inside. It doesn't change the "total strength" of the gravity (curvature, in GR), but it does let you get closer to it and still feel the full "local strength" (slope of the curvature, at that radius). Black holes (and neutron stars, to a lesser extent) do indeed produce ginormous close-in gravitational pulls at very short radii, which you cannot experience even in a gas giant because you'd be inside the gas.
Newton elegantly proved that the gravity you feel from a sphere below you is identical to that of a point mass at the center of the sphere. So we can just simplify away all details of the sphere, and pretend it's all concentrated at the center point. (This fails for the Moon because it's lumpy, with mass concentrations frozen asymmetrically in it, so spacecraft in low orbit around the Moon's center-of-gravity will eventually intersect the surface.) Newton also proved that if you're inside a hollow shell of any thickness, the gravity you feel is precisely zero: it all cancels out. (And he did it without having first invented volume integral calculus!!) Ergo, if you're halfway inside a planet (or 5 miles underground on Earth), you simply partition Earth into two shells, the outside-shell above you and the inside-sphere below you. The outside-shell's contribution vanishes, and you're effectively standing on a smaller planet of less mass, so you feel weaker gravity. This is simple enough to measure.
GR extends and completes this by giving the exact curvature of gravity induced by a point-mass. It's a smooth funnel shape, where "depth" indicates gravitational strength at that radius. If there were a solid surface at a given radius, then the slope of the funnel at that radius is exactly the "surface gravity" you'd feel if you stood there. Every mass of the same mass creates the same curvature, regardless of its density. It's just that if the object is compact, you can get very close to it, where the funnel is very steep. If the object is diffuse, you can't; you'll encounter the surface, and thereafter Newton's shell game will take over instead.
Hence, compactness doesn't matter for things far away. If you're a Pluto-radius away from the center, it makes no difference to you whether the mass in the middle is a point (Newton), a hole, a sun, a red supergiant with radius engulfing Mars (yes this will happen), or the Drengi giga-fleet vs. the Yor peta-fleet. If it's below you, it's as if it was all a point mass. In this sense, a black hole does not have "super-duper-gravity" that changes the behavior of things-previously-in-orbit. The black-hole-plus-stuff in the center is either roughly of constant total mass, or it's actually less mass than the star that was there before. So a black hole exerts no extra pull, compared to a star. There's nothing special about a black hole.
Compactness does matter greatly for getting close to the gravitational-funnel. The surface gravity of the sun is (only) about 28 G. (Yes, only 28.) That's because the sun is quite diffuse: it's very accurately modeled as an ideal gas, and PV = nRT. After the sun goes red supergiant, runs out of helium, and fizzles out, it will cool off to a white dwarf. It won't supernova (not big enough), so it will keep about half of its mass, but it will crush down to be about the size of Earth, held up by Pauli exclusion of electrons. Its gravity then, at one (today-)Sun radius, will still be 14(?) G (half as strong for half the mass). But its surface gravity will be way higher if you were to get that much closer and stand on it, maybe hundreds of thousands of Gs, because its surface is so much closer to the axis of the funnel.
If it were heavier, say 2-3 solar masses (and didn't blow up first while getting there), then it would overpower electron degeneracy, stop at neutron degeneracy, and be a neutron star about 10 km in radius, with a surface gravity of billions of Gs. It's the same funnel, we're just that much closer to it. If it were heavier than that, about 5 solar masses, then it would overpower neutron degeneracy and be a black hole, with an event horizon maybe a few dozen meters in radius. At that point, the surface gravity would (by definition) be whatever it must be to exactly trap light.
So yes, compactness is ultimately what prevents light from escaping -- and the Schwarzschild radius is exactly the target radius you must achieve to be "compact enough". (Equivalently, it's the size of the cage within which light is trapped. Any photons outside that radius feel a gravity that is not strong enough to stop them, and so they'll escape.) However, strong gravity very close to a compact object does not, by itself, mean strong gravity at normal stellar distances. So things far from a black hole won't notice much difference. The hole gets deeper in the middle, but it doesn't get wider on the periphery.
For GC3 gameplay, a black hole vortex is about 1/3 the radius of a solar system. Anything outside the vortex (like your mining starbase ) is far enough away from the center that it will just orbit it as if it were a star (or a point mass). We can't even get close enough to a black hole to have any GR fun Heck, you're in way more danger from being 1 hex adjacent to a star than you are from being 5 hexes away from a black hole of smaller total mass. That star will be pulling you in not-slowly.
Learning...
and I edited my previous post...
Gilmoy, why is it that black holes have such immense gravity that even light cannot escape it once it gets close. Normal stars don't do that, isn't the gravity of BH's far more than normal stars?
Once a star collapses in on itself and becomes a black hole, doesn't the gravity greatly increase?
No, the black hole's gravity does not suddenly increase just because the mass got concentrated. Same mass, same gravity. If you were in orbit around the star that used to be there, and the star became a black hole with no loss of mass, you'll stay tranquilly in the same orbit around the black hole without even a bump.
The "surface" gravity of a black hole is much greater than the surface gravity of a star of the same mass because ... the surface is closer. That's all. (Actually there is no surface to stand on, so for the black hole I mean the gravity at the event horizon.) Mathematically, you're plugging a much tinier value of r into Newton's equation G = Mm / r^2 (which still holds for the outside of a black hole ). Hold Mm constant (you don't change, the star's mass all becomes black hole mass), but now r' = 10^-6 r or less: a big star can collapse by more than a factor of 1 million to get to its Schwarzschild radius. Square that (yes, square it!!), and G can increase by 10^12 or more -- but only at that radius. It's not a function of the masses, or their shapes, but solely due to decreasing radius r. Corollary: Far from the star / black hole, you still plug in your m into G = Mm / (big r)^2, and you'll find that you can't even tell the difference. Same mass, same equation, same gravity that far out, same orbit.
Normal stars (and rocks, and planets) don't do this because they're (far) larger than their Schwarzschild radii, so their surfaces eventually get in the way (and then their interiors get in the way). Thereafter, decreasing r actually decreases mass as the cube of r, so you're just losing that race, and G decreases the deeper you go in. Hence, gravitational strength of a non-point mass, as a function of radius from its center, is a nice peak function, which achieves its maximum value at the object's surface.
Dwarfs and neutron stars do exhibit fantastically strong surface gravities, for the same reason: their surfaces are closer to the center of mass, so they get to play with a tiny r and then square its tininess. (They remain visible because their surfaces are still way outside their Schwarzschild radii.)
Imagine you're falling toward some stellar object, but you're blind. All you know is that you're accelerating at a rate consistent with 1 solar mass pulling you (from a standstill). Here's how you can deduce what it is.
If you're outside (above) the surface of a mass, then the "slope" of the gravity induced by that mass is indistinguishable regardless of the mass's shape. So you can't tell what it is, only what it isn't (by process of elimination). The more compacted objects simply stay out of your way for a little while longer.
Put another way, suppose at Age of Victory tech we have the ability to build a Schwarzing Ski Resort. This is a large asteroid or other body, which is wired up so that it can oscillate its size, like one of those big folding/unfolding mechanical spheres in the Smithsonian Institute and some department store food courts. This special body can somehow compact itself down to its own Schwarzschild radius (plus epsilon, so that it never quite becomes a black hole), then expand itself back to its original asteroid-size. It can also pause at any size in between, if enough visitors request it.
What happens to the people orbiting it? Nothing. It could go through ten entire shrink-and-grow cycles, and picnic tables in orbit around it would just orbit wherever they are and enjoy the show. Now, while it's shrunken all the way down, the more daring visitors can power-dive down the "funnel" and cavort in "highly-curved space" (the GR way of saying you feel extreme gravities), then escape back to the asteroid-radius orbit and relax. Obviously, when the resort is fully expanded, they can't, because the walls would smack them in the windshield.
The point is that the existence of extremely high gravities very close to a compact object is not intrinsic or magical about the object, but is only a byproduct of the close radii. Ergo, any asteroid is equally good for this. You could look at every comet, rock, asteroid, pile of dust, or small moon, and envision its "extreme-gravity-very-fun" zone in a tiny band very close to its center. That's like a potential fun, which is hidden in every rock (or planet, or star). "All" you have to do is get the rock out of the way (i.e. shrink it down to whatever radius) to reveal that fun zone. If the rock ever springs back to full size, no more fun zone. Take any mass and shrink it down enough, and hey, fun zone. But the rest of the universe outside its original radius won't notice the difference.
So it's a bit of a misnomer to say that "the gravity greatly increases". The gravitational field doesn't increased in magnitude (field strength). It's just that you're closer to the same parabolic funnel that was always there. Hence, far away from the (new) black hole you won't notice any change in gravity at all, because G = Mm/r^2, and the masses didn't change, and your (very large) radius didn't change. Close to the black hole, you wouldn't notice any difference between this-hole's strength and that-hole's strength (if they're the same mass). The only thing that changed is that you're physically able to get closer.
Hence, in GC3 terms, a black hole should affect ships the same way that a star of the same mass affects ships. If stars pull ships in, black holes should do the same, to be consistent. If stars don't, then black holes shouldn't either, to be consistent.
Briefly:
That's exactly how the Schwarzschild radius is defined: For any object with mass m, it is defined to be the (tiny tiny) radius at which mass m would have surface gravity equal to c (i.e. the escape velocity is c). It's easily computed by plug-and-chug.
This is both an answer, a non-answer, and a bigger picture that unravels the implicit causality in the way you've phrased the question. When you ask why?, you're kind of pre-assigning to black holes some special property that normal matter doesn't have. But actually, any matter or mass has a Schwarzschild radius, and if it's compacted below that radius, it will become a black hole. So it's not that black holes are somehow special and do this weird thing that only they can do, by some weird process that only they have. The (bigger) truth is that every bit of matter or energy is a potential black hole -- if only they could somehow be squeezed or compacted down. Anything that has gravity that strong is, by definition, a black hole. They're black holes because they have this property, not the other way around.
Every grain of sand has mass. It therefore exerts gravity (on every other atom in the universe, but we can ignore most of those contributions). So it has an escape velocity, which is very small. Take that same mass and compact it down to tinier and tinier radii, and ... its escape velocity would go up. Without limit. Squeeze it tiny enough, and the escape velocity will reach c. That's its Schwarzschild radius, and poof it is now a black hole. (Fortunately, this does not happen through everyday processes.) For a nano-hole the mass of a grain of sand, its event horizon might be much tinier than one electron -- so it could orbit inside a star for billions of years and maybe eat 1 electron every thousand years. Hence we've calculated that such nano-holes are no risk to the Earth, because in the lifetime of the universe they would eat maybe less than 1 ton of stuff. (Look for rocks with a miniscule positive charge )
It's perhaps more interesting to ponder how any (normal) matter actually gets compacted this much. We know of at least two ways, and theorize many others.
Human tech is not yet at the needed level; our max energy densities are still too light (or so most of us think). Someday we might get there.
What do you do for a living Gimoy?
And charron, so you don't keep asking gilmoy. Here http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/hframe.html this is how i learned. :3
DARCA ;- )
I'm a CS geek, of course Currently a grad student, finishing up.
I'm also an amateur astronomer (which means I own a telescope and actually look at stars with my eyes). (Astro)physics is a niche part of the hobby.
Gilmoy, thanks for the lesson.
Luckily, in a science fiction PC game, we don't need perfect physics simulated.
I have found something interesting.
https://forums.galciv3.com/459334/page/1/#3506617
amazing actually.
I thought that generally, galaxies had super massive black holes at their center, and it was more common to find a singular black hole or dual black hole in a galaxy, not multiples. I also heard that super massive black holes go through periods of active and quite. When quite, they are not sucking in anything unless it was unlucky enough to get within the event horizon (?), but when active, they start sucking in anything in their neighborhood, and not necessarily right next door.
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