Astrophage

Astrophage is approximately 300 feet long and teardrop-shaped in profile, though flat as a blade in cross-section. Its wide end is fashioned into a large hollow ring roughly one-third of the ship's overall length in diameter. This ring section contains counter-rotating rings that are very slightly eccentric — not perfect circles — which when spinning generate an ultra-dense gravitational field. The slight eccentricity causes the singularity's center to be unstable, forming a torus rather than a point. Stray particles caught in the field fall toward the center; the machine superheats the space inside the rings to maintain the singularity long enough for additional matter to fall in. If sufficient matter enters before the singularity collapses, it stabilizes. The ship is constructed almost entirely of adamant, a material rated for temperatures up to approximately five thousand degrees, enabling it to plunge directly into a star. Once inside, the singularity is surrounded by solar plasma and feeds on it, falling toward the star's center mass. This process hollows out the star and stimulates core collapse, resulting in a supernova, or a hypernova if the star is sufficiently massive. Astrophage is an unmanned vessel, operated remotely or autonomously.

Astrophage is intended for deployment by Hadrian Marlowe as a strategic weapon against the Cielcin fleet. Hadrian plans to fire it into the sun of the Gododdin system to destroy the Cielcin forces gathered there. At the time of its introduction, Hadrian has not yet deployed Astrophage; he previously tested a separate weapon, the Voidmaker, on asteroids in the Annica system.