I disagree. That's the fun thing about scifi. As long as your idea could theoretically work (which you seem to agree), you can decide whether the theoretical risks manifest or not, or handwave uninvented solutions to those.
Scifi is about dreaming within our universe beyond our current knowledge or limitations.
At least that's my two cents.
Edit: Not familiar with this specific book, but just in general terms.
Well no their are a host of issues beyond safety and energy requirements. You’re not going to be able to contain that much virtual mass moving at near light speed. We also don’t know if virtual mass produces gravity, etc etc.
Yes we do. It does.
Gravity is produced by energy, of which mass is only one type.
Unless you have a citation?
Basically any other answer would be a violation of a whole bunch of conservation laws. In short: It's easy to convert velocity energy to rest energy, rest energy obviously has gravity, so velocity energy must as well.
Which is completely ok as long as there is some experimental support.
> It really breaks relativity for all forms of energy to produce gravity.
It does not, quite the opposite: It's a fundamental feature of it.
> Which is completely ok as long as there is some experimental support.
There is no experimental support for black holes either, it breaks physics far less for black holes not to exist. (Note black holes are not the same as super massive objects, which do have experimental support. An event horizon has never been observed, just assumed.)
I don’t mean this as an appeal to authority, just a suggestion you likely have some fundamental misunderstandings. Especially if you never worked through the actual equations.
Yes it is, but the lack of understanding of black holes is also part of general understanding. Physicists know quite well they don't fully understand what happens in every black hole situation.
> It’s fine to suggest they don’t exist, just realize you’re disagreeing with the vast majority of physicists and evidence we have.
We don't have any evidence, only conjecture and [incomplete] math.
Two things that might prevent black holes: Quark degeneracy pressure (unknown, not even the magnitude is known), and time dilation, which leads to "frozen stars" which hover just before becoming black holes, but never do because that last bit of mass that takes them over the edge takes an infinite time to arrive.
Neither of those two are "fringe" theories mind you, they have both been discussed by prominent theorists (I also get to appeal to authority :)
First, a quark degeneracy pressure is irrelevant for the existence of black holes as they have lower density requirements the larger the event horizon. A large enough uniform density sphere of say styrofoam would form an event horizon.
In terms of evidence, “Frozen stars” don’t match up with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory’s observations that suggest a collision between a black hole and a neutron star.
That said, the Messier 87 black hole image is the closest thing to a direct observation we have. It’s possible that some mistakes where made, but many would argue it’s solid evidence on it’s own.
PS: Anyway, I am not suggesting this as some statement from on high. I am saying if most people that take serious time and effort looking into something all come to the same conclusion it’s prudent to dig deep before coming to a different conclusion. That’s especially true of physics where actually understanding the math behind existing models is difficult. Essentially you should be able to point to some math and say see this, this is wrong and then justify that statement.
I like hard science fiction that's based in known physics, but I can still enjoy science fiction that's not totally realistic as long as it's at least consistent with itself and doesn't contradict known physics out of pure laziness or ignorance.
I think it's a better solution than just saying "Mars is at full gravity because of magic we won't explain."
Similarly, you get a lot of knock on effects from the other hand waves.
Creating enough mass from energy to hit ~2/3 earths total mass is several orders of magnitude larger than the Death Stars main weapon. And as you point out if basically anything fails all that energy gets released on Mars.