Save it. I don’t have anything currently that I would want to use a portal gun on given that I can only use it once. I might use it to get myself out of a sticky situation, or wait to see if I ever move into a relatively permanent home and I could make a portal from my house to another location for convenience.
Take a portal to a black hole, keep the portal open for funsies.
I would contact NASA and tell them to launch a robot to mars that can shoot it. I’d shoot it at the ground, then put it on the robot, then have a portal to mars.
Watching the atmospheres of Earth and Mars try to reach equilibrium right when the portal opened up would be pretty interesting!
Best use would be to get two steel plates or something, of apropriate dimensions for portals and shoot them there. Now I have two portals I can move as I please and where I please
Smartest answer by far.
Make a drain hole at the bottom of a lake, that comes out above it. Put in a water wheel, free energy.
Never thought about it before, but I guess this makes portal guns impossible, since scenarios like this break conservation of energy.
But you know it’s possible from firsthand experience. Whomsth’n’t reached terminal velocity by shooting the ceiling & floor and jumping in?
The trick would be finding the tallest vertical line of sight you can. Just making portable plates and flying one would be hard to beat, but failing that maybe a mineshaft.
Does it fire through water in the game?
No. The only water in the game is toxic (i.e. you die if you fall in) and you can’t fire the gun through it.
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Nobody went with sending trump and musk to mars?
Take advantage of the free energy and build a power plant around it.
Moon.
How fast would this suck up all of our atmosphere? Hours? Days?
Probably years, if not more. XKCD’s “What If?” has a nice explanation on a similar question, but in that case it was a portal at the bottom of the mariana trench and the question was about draining the oceans. The answer is that you probably wouldn’t notice in all your lifetime.
I remember that video, but I‘m not sure it is comparable — air might flow faster than water [citation needed] and there might be less of it [citation needed].
I’m pretty sure there is much more air. At least volume wise. Sphere volume goes up by radius cubed.
Unless the pressure differential causes it to escape the moons gravity well it would probably stabilize at some point before dumping the whole atmosphere, right?
Easy solution for that, you fire the earth portal on a wall inside some sort of specially constructed airlock.
That hard part would be getting the moon portal in a useful place, you’d probably need to go up there and find a good solid cliff face or something. On the plus side having done that you could be home again in a few seconds.
As long as I’m the first one through, the rest is set dressing.
I’ve always wanted to fuck my own ass.
Won’t work, as you thrust your ass will pull away. Only way I could think of is having the portals on platforms that would move with you.
Or potentially, you could just move one of the portals relative to the other.
Maybe it would just double the friction.
Assuming there is only one, sell my single use for ludicrous amounts of money to some Corp that has merchandise to move.
Like, I can only shoot two portals ever? Single-use would imply only being able to shoot one portal, but that doesn’t seem very useful.
Also wasn’t portal travel hella toxic? To the point that it killed Cave Johnson? I sure as hell won’t be using it to save time on my commute or anything.
I think I’d have to use it for violence, like sending a war criminal off a large building, but you couldn’t even really have fun with it. Everyone fantasizes about launching a billionaire straight into space, but you’d need multiple portals to get them into a situation where they’re building momentum first.
Also, if there’s no material emancipation grids, are the portals just there forever? The portal gun doesn’t have an off switch or a way to deactivate existing portals.
Portal travel isn’t toxic. However, ground up moon rocks, which are an almost perfect portal conductor, are very bad for you.
The dust is actually really sharp irl, afaik. It never has been ground down by weather or wind. So it actually is terrible for equipment and people, lol.
“The bean counters told me we literally didn’t have $7 to buy moon rocks with, let alone $70 million. Bought 'em anyway! Ground them up, mixed them into a gel. And guess what? Ground up moon rocks are pure poison!”
I didn’t think it was portal travel that killed him, it was breathing in the moon dust
I would think about buying a house out in the middle of nowhere and link up a closet with one in my house. Free extra square feet in my house.
Realistically, I’d link up my house with a family member’s house that we need to fly to.
Your houses would become an extremely valuable trade route.
Reverse-engineer it and build an unlimited-use portal gun, of course!
Upon receiving it I would spend the first god knows how many hours trying to convince myself not to use it for sex things.
Beyond that, I think I’d definitely have to consider permanently renting a storage room in a country I want to visit often, and storing a portal in there.
