“However, if the structure inside sphere were to placed even slightly off center, then the gravitational pull in one direction of the ship would be greater than in the opposite direction. This would induce shearing stress within the ship that might tax and test even the considerable amount of structural strength of this Goliath ship. It would also mean that the ship would have a net accelerating force in one direction and would start moving in that direction.
“While this basic principle can be used to drive the ship in any direction, this is not a very desirable way to do it. One half of your ship is trying to fall in one direction, and the other half of your ship is trying to fall in the opposite direction. It is only the amount of imbalance in force that is providing acceleration. Even worse is the fact that the shearing force introduced due to the imbalance in forces is putting stress on the ship’s structural integrity and trying to tear it apart.
“This is exactly what had happened when our brave Marines cut the support cables of the structure inside the sphere. The structure could no longer be accurately positioned at the center of the sphere, it pushed the Goliath ship out of its orbit in an uncontrollable fashion. The only way to stop the ship from accelerating out of control was to extinguish the micro blackhole. This is exactly what the demons did. With the micro blackhole extinguished however, there was no longer a source of antimatter and hence power to this ship.
“There is however, a better way to harness the gravity of the micro blackhole for acceleration. This is the technique that this sphere mechanism is designed for. This is also the use of those hollow tubes inside those massive pillars. When this Goliath ship needs to engage its gravity drive, the structure at the center of the sphere is slid through one of the tubes out of the ship! The surveying engineers have confirmed that the tubes open on the outside through ports.
“The ports hadn’t been discovered earlier because like all ports in this Goliath ship, they had been covered with massive sliding plates of iron. Outside the Goliath ship, the structure would have to stretch out a bit further for it to be safe to provide high acceleration. My mental calculations tell me that the structure would have to move tens of even a few hundred meters away depending on how much structural stress this Goliath ship can take.
“Once outside, the micro blackhole would still generate antimatter, which can be pumped back to the ship and harnessed for power. The gravitational effects of the micro blackhole though could now be used for generating accelerating force. The entire ship would literally ‘fall’ towards the tear. To increase the rate of acceleration, the size of the micro blackhole can be increased using power from the antimatter being generated. The size and hence the effective mass of the micro blackhole could be increased ten or hundred times to provide increased acceleration of similar magnitude.
“The size of the event horizon would probably still be smaller than the size of a proton. The increased amount of antimatter and radiation produced would not be of major consequence, since the radiation is being produced outside the ship, and this Goliath ship is radiation protected with its massive twenty-meter-thick iron skin. The excess antimatter would probably be simply dumped in space. It is amply clear that even the smallest of micro blackhole created during normal operations is more than sufficient to generate all the antimatter this ship requires.
“The beauty of the design is that the entire ship experiences the gravitational pull rather than only the drives as would be the case in ion propulsion or reactionless drives. Every atom inside that ship, be it of a demon or a building structure experiences almost the same acceleration as the rest of the ship. As a result, even though the entire ship may be accelerating at 50 G, the demons and the structures inside experience almost no G forces at all!
“The largest structures within the ship like the ship itself do experience a bit of a distorting shear force because parts of those structures experience slightly different G forces depending on their distance from the micro blackhole, but individuals like a demon are small enough that they do not feel anything at all! The massive amount of support structures by my reckoning are designed to take such distorting shear stresses to the ship when it is accelerating at max speed.
“For the time being, I would like to conclude that this sphere represents the greatest advancement in human knowledge that we have seen in a long time, and if we humans can harness this technology, we are looking at a leap into the stars and beyond. Conversely, this is such an advanced technology, that if we fail to master it, we simply have no hope against the next demon ship that comes to our backyard.”
Game Reserve: Earth (Shaitan Wars Book 5) Page 43