The mandated minimum reintegration distance from a solar mass is 50 solar diameters, as an edict of the Plyd. The current doctrine of the Goos is to target 80 SD for arrival in a solar system, formally referred to as Site 1.
Reintegration is the process of exiting MN speeds.
At MN speeds, radiation can not vector. Heat is not exchanged, virtual photons remain virtual. This means as a vessel slows below MN speeds, everything happens at once. Previously solid electronics with electricity still applied can immediately vaporize. Living subjects feel a wave of heat that they would have radiated during transit. Effects like that.
This radiation can also destabilize the local quantum foam. The effect is similar to theorized void collapse; matter outside the control of a short jump drive can disintegrate at a sub quark level. Mass propagates this effect; so you get nowhere near a star, so the whole thing isn’t subsumed.
Ships still in the northern cordon when another ship arrives will be protected by their own drives, as will cleaning probes and mail relays.
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Short jump drives are allowed within the 50 SD border at sub nutrino speeds – due to time dilation, 0.7c is a recommended maximum, but not enforced by the Plyd.
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A strange matter short jump drive, like what the Goo’s Pathlayer is built around, is not the only variation.
But the tidal forces aren’t the worst thing about stranglets. It’s the propagation. Matter that comes into contact with a stranglet … Becomes part of the stranglet. Which is not on periodic table, nor compatible with anything on the table. How fast does it propagate? Well, slower if its in a star… But that poisoned star is no longer main sequence. And planets get that black hole crumple effect. Mass isn’t created or destroyed, gravity effects are largely unchanged – but that not a thing that supports anything like life. In most solar masses, pressures and temperatures don’t reach the level to allow the feared conversion of “normal” matter into strangelet matter. Instead, in these low pressure stars, the weak interaction acts as a nuclear fusion catalyst. Not exactly on the “menthos and coke” level – any star is to large for that effect – but its no longer a main sequence star. Stellar evolution will happen at a notable faster pace.
A “seeded” gas giant may start undergoing nuclear fusion become a star.
A “seeded” rocky planet may not have a huge effect – but there would be an increase of heat at the core, eventually promoting tectonic activity as an iron nickel core refuses to fuse, acting as a giant heat sink.
It has been suggested that fragments of strange matter are captured by acellerating them out of gravitational wells after a release event (like neutron star collision). The numbers work out that, without assistance, all released strange matter would never exit the gravitional well otherwise, eventually falling back to the newly merged star or black hole, while measurable amounts of newly formed heavy metals can make the escape.
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