Why don't the Loa build orbital power collectors?

[Galwail]

I don't like that book. They made Prague the capitol of some backwater totalitarian planet

[Mekan1k]

Hold the phone- how do the Loa transmit this energy? Just keep in mind, the inverse square law, and the amount of energy that the Loa must be able to harvest from stars... I mean, they have to contend with the lightspeed barrier if they want to be able to deal with lasing the energy, and if they want to send energy through the gates it would need to be contained in their patented smart-clay....

[Galwail]

How about good old fashioned batteries? Or lasers for short distances like from orbit to planet?

[vaccum_pony]

Hold the phone- how do the Loa transmit this energy?

Anti-matter. AM is power storage, not a power source. The energy gained from the solar collectors is used to generate anti-matter which is then stored and transported in some manner.

[Mekan1k]

Hold a different phone- If they used antimatter the containment bottles would be unable to pass through the FTL gates.
Solution: FTL Communication!
Matter = Energy = Information.
Energy and matter have set maximum speeds, but information does not. This might allow for quantum-entangled particles to act as a 'fuel line' between large communication stations, allowing the planets to use their data-transmission system to act as a large-scale power line system as well.

All races probably use this, now that I come to think of it...

[vaccum_pony]

Hold a different phone- If they used antimatter the containment bottles would be unable to pass through the FTL gates.

Neither Mecron or Erinys has discussed the details of how Wise Clay works (as far as I'm aware). By implication the total information state of a physical system must be recorded, the system converted to Wise Clay and then re-imprinted at will. I would guess the information is stored in another dimension or universe. There are at least three other "dimensions" or "universes" in SotS (Node Space, the Anti-matter universe and where ever the Puppetmaster came from).
Of course I could be way off base here and it works in a completely different manner.

Energy and matter have set maximum speeds, but information does not.

Where do you get that idea?

[BlueTemplar]

How could you transmit information without transmitting the matter and/or energy that stores it?

[vaccum_pony]

How could you transmit information without transmitting the matter and/or energy that stores it?

You don't. That's why I suggested the information is stored in another universe and then re-imprinted on the Wise Clay.

[Azrael Ultima]

Hold a different phone- If they used antimatter the containment bottles would be unable to pass through the FTL gates.

Loa have freighters. Just saying. You're right that there's(at least, to our knowledge) a maximum speed for matter, but not for energy, as energy is not a physical object and therefore does not have a speed at all. Information is subject to the same limit as matter(again, to our knowledge), as we've yet to find any method of transmitting information without manipulating matter.

As for the wise clay, they didn't get down to the nitty-gritty, but they told us enough to figure that what pony says is definitely not how it works. As for where the informations go, that's easy. Wise clay can store data and even Loa conciousnesses. It's not really a material, but rather a conglomerate of nanobots, microbots, larger scale but still largely solid state objects and other supplies and tools necessary to assemble a Loa fleet on the spot. There's no space magic involved here, just high level engineering.

[vaccum_pony]

As for the wise clay, they didn't get down to the nitty-gritty, but they told us enough to figure that what pony says is definitely not how it works. As for where the informations go, that's easy. Wise clay can store data and even Loa conciousnesses. It's not really a material, but rather a conglomerate of nanobots, microbots, larger scale but still largely solid state objects and other supplies and tools necessary to assemble a Loa fleet on the spot. There's no space magic involved here, just high level engineering.

Wise Clay that is transported through a NPG does not contain the information needed to recreate anything. To quote:

Pulse Gates cannot scan for the trillions of unique quantum states which make up a Hiver fleet with all its cargo and crew. Instead, matter which enters a Pulse Gate must do so as a smooth, dense and undifferentiated solid, without articulated parts or any internal space larger than a micron in diameter.

As I said, the implication is that the state of the material is stored somewhere else (for values of somewhere else that are equal to another universe) and then retrieved once the Wise Clay drops out of FTL. How it does that has not been described.

[ZedF]

You're mistaken, Pony. Just because the Wise Clay can't store and the Pulse Gate can't scan for the quantum states of hundreds or thousands of Hiver crew members, does not mean they cannot store and scan for the quantum state of the singular Loa consciousness that controls the fleet.

[vaccum_pony]

If the Wise Clay is undifferentiated, then how does it support a consciousness?

[theSmallerFish]

Matter = Energy = Information.
Energy and matter have set maximum speeds, but information does not.

No... just no, in several different ways .

There is (theoretically) a bare minimum amount of energy you'd need to store a given amount of information, but you cannot convert information into energy. You can burn a book to keep warm, but a blank book will stave of the cold just as long as an encyclopedia that's the same size (note: please don't burn books).

'Pure information' is like 'pure energy' it's not a thing that exists or even a concept that makes any kind of sense. It's like building a car out of solid 'fast' or an oven that's fuelled by crystaline 'hot'. Like referring to lightyears as a unit of time, this is one of the things that makes physicists actually wince when they hear it.

Since information only exists as patterns in the arrangement and characteristics of particles, it is bound by the exact same speed limits as the particles that store it, a speed limit that all the major races in SOTS have learned to break. In fact there are cases where particles can travel faster than the theoretical limits for some of the information they carry, quantum tunneling for example appears to take no time at all, but it scrambles some of the tunneling particles quantum numbers (p.s. an expert in quantum physics could probably give you a much more precise description, but I think I got the basics about right).

As for information passing through a NPG, a huge amount of information that can be stored in a "smooth, dense and undifferentiated solid, without articulated parts or internal space" without an external recording of its quantum state. Just because the gate doesn't scan for some information doesn't mean it's not there. In fact the ability to send a solid undifferentiated mass implies that the pulse gate can transmit an immense ammount of information, after all, the information about a solid can be gleaned by examining it, and the exact state of every particle is a separate piece of information, even if they're all the same. (Atom 1 temperature 3K, atom 2 also 3K, atom 3 3K again, atom 4 surprisingly 3K ..... atom 3.125937*10^47 3K, just like the rest of them). Regardless of whether the gate is capable of scanning and recording all of that (deeply boring) information, it still sent it. The difficulty sending complex objects through seems to be technical, not theoretical.

I'd guess that in order to make sure something complex got through an NPG in one piece the gate would have to keep track of every object that comprises it (if you go down to the micron scale, imagine how many objects comprise a human being, and most of them are going in slightly different directions). Ensuring everything enters the gate as just one 'object' means that the gate doesn't have so much to handle, and depending on what exactly is meant by smooth and undifferentiated, that object could be very complex indeed.

If nothing else, the fact that internal spaces less than a micron are apparently fine for transport, means that you could at least store information on a nanometer scale punch card (and yes that's something you can build). In fact there could be all sorts of complex structures and behaviour going on below the micron level, and storing information there wouldn't be hard. The neutrino pulse gate apparently doesn't need to worry about things occuring at that scale, to the gate it's all one 'object'.

As for sending antimatter through the gate, antimatter is in almost every way identical to regular matter, so a dense and undifferentiated solid could include a dense and undifferentiated chunk of solid antimatter. Of course it would tend to explode on contact with regular matter, but for a fundamental particle, a 2nm gap (500 times smaller than the biggest gaps an NPG can handle) might as well be the Grand Canyon. There is easily enough complexity going on below the micron scale to make a magnetic bottle which could maintain that gap.

[theSmallerFish]

If the Wise Clay is undifferentiated, then how does it support a consciousness?

I'd suspect what is and isn't 'smooth and undifferentiated' depends on the scale you examine it at. Even a surface smoothed to the last atom looks profoundly lumpy at the Angstrom scale. Given the NPG can handle gaps below about a micrometre, you can probably make the wise clay as complex and differentiated as you like at the nanometre scale.

[BlueTemplar]

Sorry, instead of "energy" I should have said light (or maybe even variations of other fields than electromagnetic).