Glaring flaw just ocurred to me about Generations

[Deimos Anomaly]

Shutting down all the nuclear fusion in a star and causing it to implode would affect its gravity not a whit.

All its mass is still there it's just not fusing any more. Even if it collapsed into a black hole it would still have the same mass, and gravity, as the star it had been.

Therefore the premise of steering the nexus by knocking out stars to remove their gravitational influence does not make sense.

 

[M'Sharak]

Glaring flaw just ocurred to me about Generations

Only one?

 

[SonicRanger]

It might not change the total amount of gravity, but it could change the nearby shape of the gravitational field -- a "shape" of the gravitational field of a black hole will be different than that of a supernova that has exploded and blown away most of its outer mass from its core, even if their total mass is the same. That could make a difference in the trajectory of a nearby object.

 

[Guartho]

You're forgetting about fusion's effect on gravity in subspace.

 

[Timo]

It probably wouldn't have to be a big change, as the Nexus seems extremely sensitive to gravity. Far away from stars, it seems to move at very high warp, so that it can get out of the galaxy and back in 40 years. Next to stars, the movement drops to a crawl. What else could be the reason besides gravity (or some other, comparable property inherent in stars and altered by nova-bombing them)?

So moving or altering the point mass (the point subspace source?) might not be necessary, as long as the gradients changed a little. And no doubt Soran had carefully calculated the minimum required change, so that only two stars would need to be blown up, and not too long in advance of the arrival (so as not to give the Feds or others time to react).

Probably it was just this desire for minimum interference that made Soran choose an inhabited star system for his second detonation. Had he had the luxury of being able to blow up dozens of stars uninterrupted, across several decades, he might have chosen stars of no consequence for shepherding the Nexus to its meeting with a suitable (preferably Class M) uninhabited planet.

Timo Saloniemi