December 1, 2025 at 12:16 PM

Someone was talking about using portals in portal fiction as a chokepoint to make stories more challenging to a realistic portrayal of the earth's modern military might.

So I accidentally dove into a cool story idea diatribe: ''' You could make the portal work like the tron legacy laser if you wanted which apparently had gas canisters for the elements that it captured from the people it holographically deatomized.

But by that I mean, it would be like water displacement.

Each ammount of mass to go through the portal consumes a reserve of portal~energy, so if you carry 1000 pounds through one way, and it has a 2000 pound mass limit, then, to get 3000 pounds all the way through, you have to displace mass the other way as well to balance it.

Meaning that traveling through it would be like a puzzle game.

Also maybe only mass from the earth can balance it or fantasy world matter has a completely different structure.

There's a lot of ways to turn a portal into a chokepoint.

You can also make portals act like lightbulbs, so that their permeativity is related to the energy going into them, and also their coherence is a seperate factor so if you try to force one open from only one side, you can only adjust one of the factors and not the other meaning that walking through one by force might be like microwaving yourself.

Or alternatively trying to access a portal you own both sides of, but which does not have adequete power to allow mass to travel across the threshold of, might be more like scrying through a magic mirror than like actually being able to step through that mirror '''