Любят фантасты использовать газовых гигантов не по назначению.
Цитата
The next chamber is big. It contains several holeships – gigantic wingless dragonflies, dull grey spheres with linear accelerator tails, several kilometres long. The insides of the spheres are perfect reflectors: they are used to store black holes, keeping them stable with their own Hawking radiation – until it’s time to fire them. But it is the thing in the centre of the chamber that gives me pause. It looks vaguely like the head of a vast insect. There are two compound eyes, bulbous, globular arrays of transparent hexagons, joined at the waist. At the point where they meet, something rotates slowly, multiple silver spheres joined with spokes, like the model of a molecule – except that as it revolves, parts of it disappear and reappear in a disorienting fashion. ‘What is that?’ ‘My ekpyrotic gun,’ Chekhova says wearily. ‘It does not look that big.’ ‘This is just the main aperture. You need to drop it into a gas-giant-sized mass to fire it. After the Spike, those are in short supply.’ ‘And what does it do?’ ‘It generates a gravitational disturbance that makes our spacetime emit a brane into the higher dimensions of the bulk. It bounces off the Planck brane and collides with ours again. It creates a miniature Big Bang.’ Suddenly, it is easier to see things from the Great Game Zoku’s point of view. ‘Sounds like it would be quite difficult to aim.’
Двигаться по свои орбитам, метеориты и астероиды там ловить, что бы к более близким к солнцу планетам ничего не прилетело. Впрочем использовать их как патрон для бранной пушки это тоже весело.
