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Purty. Well described and i have to second Dossta on the girl who died w/o wishing for revenge idea being a refreshing one.

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I'm glad you like it, feel free to use the entire town built around it as well. http://strolen.com/viewing/Silver_Oak

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Anytime, if you could, please send me a pm about the changes and how it works out in your campaign, I'm curious how well your players like it. Go to Comment

Tragic.

Choosing her music above vengeance is also a nice addition.

Inspirational too, thank you Silveressa!

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Overall, a solid piece. Like Dossta,  I like the tragic yet positive ending to the bard's story that gives rise to the tree.

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Beautiful tree with evocative imagery.  I will definitely rip this out and put it into my own world, one day.  I like that the girl died *without* wishing for revenge -- how novel!

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I'm using this, and the town of Silver Oak, with some modifications, in my campaign. Thanks, Silv!

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Where is that Siren guy when we need him? I like this delicious evil thinking on such a cosmic scale, but there are two questions that need answering:

- how much iron is needed again? I find it hard to believe, that a random asteroid out of its orbit couldn't deliver the same dose of iron or more. Suns should be dieing left and right. Or is it in the method of delivery, that it has to reach the core of a star?

- how long does it really take? I would rather imagine it works in geological timescales... giving the fuse a duration of millions of years. Go to Comment

Thanks to Siren and Kassil.

Now, of course throwing lots of iron may be more effective when applied on a planet. But there may be other reasons. Maybe the attackers wish to make a truly lasting impression, destroying a whole solar system instead of just a planet. Or the planet is too well protected, but its beleaguered inhabitants don't protect the sun. Even if whole planets are hurtled into the star, this is still a fairly crude method of attacking, so it could be used against a more advanced civilization by a primitive race that doesn't mind the expense. So it is usable. Go to Comment

While the basic logic is sound - a sufficient mass of iron or higher elements will, indeed, cause the star to choke and die - the particulars are, as Siren pointed out far more effectively than I, a bit light. Considering the sheer size and mass of the stellar core of our own sun, 'several tons' will be about as effective in impacting the sun as a few nanograms of dust might be on us, if that much.

Essentially, it's a novel idea, but if I were to have enough mass available to me to have an effect on these multi-million-degree titan of a thermonuclear reactor that is a stellar core, I'd rather shear off pieces to use as relativistic kinetic weapons, if I needed to kill something. It's less prone to showering the local stellar region with murderous amounts of radiation, for one thing, and ELEs are just as good at convincing species to roll over and die.

White dwarf stars - the end point of our sun - consist of an earth-sized-or-larger lump of iron. The stars tend to survive through the accumulation of this mass until they run out of fuel in the fusion reaction. They also go through a process of accumulating multiple layers of 'ash' - helium being the first stage of such - that require greater pressures and temperatures than hydrogen does in order to undergo fusion. During this whole process, flukes of pressure and temperature will result in relatively trace amounts of heavier elements forming. Our star, far from being a generation-one star, has numerous elements contaminating the hydrogen already; the absorption lines of these elements are what produce the spectral lines astronomers use to determine the chemical makeup of a given stellar body. There are stars that have a fairly sizable iron content, enough to be observed across vast interstellar gulfs; they burn 'cool' compared to non-iron-heavy stars, but the reaction is hardly stifled.

One final detail, in passing - while a star is, indeed, a titanic mass of fusing gas, the pressures at the core are far from what we think of as gaseous - the nuclei are jammed at absurd densities. A slug of iron is likely to be sublimated and eroded by the pressure drafts long before it gets anywhere near the stellar core. Go to Comment

The Physics is complex, and it's Christmas. Even I have a family, Manfred.

To drop a supernova immediately requires approximately 1.44 solar masses of Iron - This is the Chandrasekhar limit, the "fuse" of a supernova.¹ Very, very large masses of iron (think Neptune/Jupiter+), however, will cause some very... uncomfortable immediate alterations of the stellar cycle. It will likely "pulse" in diameter over hundreds of years as it contracts from the loss of heat, then bursts outwards as the heat generated by contraction reignites fusion of the lighter elements, overcoming gravity until it cools enough to stop fusion, etc, etc, with the size of the pulse directly controlled by the relative proportion of iron added to the star. In time, the star will reach a comparatively stable phase. It will have shifted along its life span by a certain degree, by the relative increase in concentration of iron in the core - given the high temperature, and comparative availability of exothermic reactions available, the exothermic reactions will prevail, although they will be dampened by the iron. This is the normal condition inside an 'old' star. Initial pulses may be very large, enough to sweep up everything within a couple hundred million miles of the center of the star, if there is sufficient iron to initiate the death of the star. (It is expected that when Sol dies, Mars will be somewhat closer to the red-giant phase's surface than Mercury is now.)

Given sufficient iron, however, this could still be a highly effective weapon. Personally, if I had a hundred ton rock to fling, I would probably fling them at the target planets, but, that's just me - blowing holes the size of the Yucatan in ecospheres tends to make them uninhabitable too. Doesn't stop it from being a good idea.

1: For those who want the whole thing, the Chandrasekhar limit is the mass at which the gravitation over a dense body is capable of overcoming the repulsion between electrons, crushing the mass into a single body of continuous neutrally-charged nuclear mass, as the electrons join to the protons to form neutrons, and shed excess mass-energy, in a tremendous release - When it occurs in nature, it tears stars apart from the inside, shedding their outer layers with a massive burst of light and neutrinos, a supernova. If the remaining mass is beneath a certain critical limit, believed to be between 1.5 and 3 solar masses, the collapsing core will stabilize itself as the relevant quantum mechanical exclusion principles create an outwards pressure to keep the neutrons as separate entities, a neutron star. Theoretically, if a star is above that mass, yet beneath another, poorly understood limit, the neutrons can fuse into a single particle, a degenerate state referred to as 'strange matter', while this stellar corpse is tenetively dubbed a quark star. Above that unknown limit, gravity triumphs, and the object retreats behind a singularity, nature divides by zero, and we call it a black hole. Go to Comment

What a shiny happy submission to find on Christmas morning (okay, afternoon)

I don't know about the mechanics,or if it is actually feasible, but it looks solid and is pretty damned scary. Kudos Sil. Go to Comment

More deadly then the Death Star, this can destroy whole solar systems with one use. The ultimate WMD.Not much use if you want living subjects in your interplanetry empire though. Go to Comment

The science needed to make this work aside, I am by far an idiot when it comes to the true mechanics of it all, I think this is a wonderful sci-fi sub. I have read plenty of strange ideas in novels that while scientifically sound just seem to odd.

Agreed it would be easier to do it toward a singular planet to keep the system intact for future resource use or teraforming, but it is definately a "Mess with us and we take out your entire existance." Very brutal and cruel and typical of what a more brutal race of star faring egomaniacs would toss around.

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The scientific discussion is pretty interesting here, but more than that I like the idea of a simple ballistic weapon that can destroy solar systems. Brutally simple.

Supposing one had the proper technology, couldn't an asteroid belt be mined for sufficient minerals to create a Star Hammer? Or enough raw iron be created in some sort of fusion reaction of other, lighter elements? I ask as a pure amateur here; my working knowledge of advanced astrophysics is surpassingly light.

Well, all that aside, I really like the idea. Go to Comment

Nobody picked on the heat shield and the thrusters. That heat shield would have to be incredible to keep that iron stable as it moved towards the star.
Would the gravity pull it directly to the core or more in limiting orbit towards the core?

At any rate if Star Trek can have de-evolution, why can't another Sci-fi set up have a star hammer?

Excellent. Go to Comment

Apart from the energy needed to move such a piece of iron would be more effectively used directly as well, its an interesting idea.

Perhaps some means of catalyzing the reaction with some type of Unobtainium (compressed matter, etc)would allow for sub-planetary masses of iron to be used. Go to Comment

I so love Siren's explanation here.

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You would have to go far outside our system for an asteroid belt with sufficient mass. Apparently there is less then a planet's worth of mass in the astroid belt (4% of the moon)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_belt)
(^ a b Krasinsky, G. A.; Pitjeva, E. V.; Vasilyev, M. V.; Yagudina, and E. I. (July 2002). "Hidden Mass in the Asteroid Belt". Icarus 158 (1): 98–105. Bibcode 2002Icar..158...98K. doi:10.1006/icar.2002.6837.)

Though apparently the Outer Oort cloud has possibly 5x earth's mass, though that is probably no-where near iron density. Inner Oort cloud is unknown.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oort_cloud Go to Comment