Recently several different concepts for means of FTL travel have been batted
about, and I must admity I've enjoyed it. At least 2 different methods struck
me as at least plausible, whether or not they're actually attainable. For that
I thank the list's resident science whizzes. Just a quick observation &
question:
Most Science Fiction backgrounds takes one of these methods of FTL travel and
base an entire naval & commerce culture on it. Has anyone ever cotemplated a
fictional background where 2 or more of these different
methods are ALL available? Each method has it's own particular
technological requirements, benefits, drawbacks, etc. How would this variety
of choices be viewed by ship designers? I'm guessing that different methods
might be attractive for ships designed for different purposes
(Naval, commercial, private/luxury, pirates, raiders, smugglers, etc.).
There's the ball. Run, list, run!
3B^2
> On 22-Mar-02 at 14:52, Brian Bilderback (bbilderback@hotmail.com) wrote:
> Most Science Fiction backgrounds takes one of these methods of FTL
Well, you can start with the HH Universe, where they have two methods of FTL.
Warp points and shorter distance alternate place.
> Roger Books <books@jumpspace.net> wrote:
> Well, you can start with the HH Universe, where they have two methods
And how are the two different methods applied in that universe? Are there
specific reasons to prefer one or the other in any given situation?
3B^2
> Brian Bilderback wrote:
The 'Wormhole Junctions' are limited by requiring an actual natural
phenomenon. One of DW's justifications for the wealth of the Manticore system
is that Manticore controls a wormhole terminus that leads off to X endpoints
(where X is a number that escapes me at the moment), and since travel through
a wormhole junction is instantaneous, you can cover hundreds of lightyears
very quickly. The control of the junction is even more important because, the
junction wormhole is the only part of the system that lets you get to any
endpoint i.e. if you enter at any endpoint, you appear at the junction
terminus, always. If you enter at the junction terminus, you can end up at any
of the end points, depending on your entry vector and other things that aren't
really explained.
However, wormhole junctions are really rare, and most ships travel through
hyperspace using their grav drives. There, though, you can take advantage of
'terrain' effects, and, by configuring your drive in certain ways, you can
boost your effective speed many times over.
So, in general, commerce travels by the junctions whenever possible to get as
close as they can, then they proceed on normal drives the rest of the way.
From a Manticorian military standpoint, protecting the Junction and its
terminals is a key part of Manticoran foreign policy since, if ships can leave
Manticoran space instantaneously, ships can enter Manticoran space just as
quickly, without warning; and having an enemy battlefleet in your home system
(in a universe which allows high speed ballistic attack) is essentially a
death sentence.
JGH
Some clairfications and additions:
Manticore controls a "junction" that goes to 6(?) terminal wormholes. You can
travel from the junction to any of the termini, but not straight from termini
to termini.
Another important point - entering the wormhole disrupts the field. The
degree of disruption is based on the mass of ships entering - 4 megatons
creates more disruption than 2 megatons. The greater the disruption, the
longer it takes for the wormhole to "reset". This places the Manticore
junction at a strategic disadvantage since it can only send a limited mass
outward in a given time, but theorhetically an invading fleet could use all 6
termini simultaneously and be able to transport in multiple times the tonnage.
For normal FTL there is the grav drive or "impeller wedge" which creates
a super-high gravity field which draws the ship forward and has the
secondary property of being impenetrable by physical and energy based weapons.
The energy requirement for this is huge and the ships are dependent on
"Warshawski sails" to draw energy from "grav waves." Hyperspace is achieved by
accelerating to a significant fraction of the speed of light (0.3C) using the
grav drive, then engaging the Warshawski sails. The sails propel the ship FTL
into "hyper bands" named after
greek letters - alpha, beta, gamma, delta etc. with higher bands
producing faster speeds, but requiring more energy to enter and better
shielding to survive the radiation. Merchant ships can usually only make the
Delta band which provides an apparent velocity of 1,000C with a true velocity
of 0.5C. Military ships can shift up one or two more bands increasing the
apparent velocity by twice or four times that.
Wormholes allow areas that are thousands or tens of thousands of LY apart to
essentially be neighbors and drops the energy requirement to ship stuff to
practically nil.
--Binhan
> -----Original Message-----
In message <F88HJXEE8fsTkkP44O9000180f5@hotmail.com>
> "Brian Bilderback" <bbilderback@hotmail.com> wrote:
> Recently several different concepts for means of FTL travel have been
Well, I thought up a far future setting which used both the Alcubier
'warp-surfing' travel for ships and artificial wormholes for direct
system to system travel.
Essentially, exploration was by the 'warp surfers' once a system was
established, a wormhole connection was made.
Most systems were paranoid about having either ships or wormholes to close to
their habitable worlds (for numerous reasons).
FTL drives tended to be rather large - so warships were often 'battle
rider' types for fleet ships, with long endurance warp cruisers for patrol
details.
Comms was by sending 'message packets' through wormholes, or quantum
entanglement, although the latter tended to be unreliable over interstellar
distances.
I had lots of other ideas, involving genetically engineered humanity
(or _post_humanity), cyber-intelligances, _alien_ aliens etc.
Sometime I'll get round to writing it all down :-)
Here's an online paper I found a few years ago (probably back in 97) about
traversable wormholes, mostly about the implications they would have on a
civilization and such.
http://www.aleph.se/Trans/Tech/Space-Time/wormholes.html
It's not too technical, at least there are no spacetime metrics given in this
one. I've actually based an entire game universe around this article.
Wormholes are pretty interesting to me because the guy who came up with the
specifics of how to make a traversable wormhole is at my school, Matt Viser.
He's pretty cool, from New Zealand even. He has an entire book out on the
subject, although its apparently out of print.
Actually the page where I found the above article has lots of links to ideas
for different methods of FTL:
http://www.aleph.se/Trans/Tech/Space-Time/index.html
It's part of a bigger website devoted to Transhumanism. Lots of neat ideas
throughout the entire site.
There is also the Uplift Series by David Brin that has several of the
different species using different methods to achieve FTL travel. One of them
involves some sort of probability drive that had some interesting effects (but
I can't remember any of the details.)
[quoted original message omitted]
On Fri, 22 Mar 2002 11:51:59 -0800 Brian Bilderback
> <bbilderback@hotmail.com> wrote:
> Most Science Fiction backgrounds takes one of these methods of FTL
This sounds very like Brian Stableford's Hooded Swan universe, in which there
are multiple varieties of FTL drive. All of the names escape me,
but "phase-shift" and "mass relaxation" are two that come to mind;
there are at least 2 others -- and that's just human tech. It is
implied that aliens may do things differently.
Why does a ship have one and not another drive? Tech level is one
reason -- one method was discovered first (duh!) and the others came
later.
Perceived capability is another: some drives are considered to be better
suited for certain jobs (e.g., small or large transports, working in distorted
space, etc.); what makes the Swan revolutionary is that by combining alien
Khormon knowledge with human technology, they have come up with the fastest
ship yet built using a drive normally thought best for big, slow liners.
And, of course, there's cost. The hero of the books spends a certain amount of
time flying the equivalent of tramp steamers, where the drive you have is what
the owners can afford or care to pay to put into a hull. This is obviously
related to the previous points as well.
Stableford doesn't spend too much time going into societal ramifications of
this arrangement; he has bigger fish to fry, in his opinion, and the method(s)
used to travel between stars are only important as a mechanism for moving
stuff around. The only space combat scene in all 6 books is short and requires
no action from the good guys (the bad guys shoot at a bad time and blow
themselves up). Still, there's plenty of stuff to build on there.
Phil
----
"I think... I think I am! Therefore I am... I think?"
-- The Moody Blues
> Recently several different concepts for means of FTL travel have been
The only novels I've ever read with this sort of background were Brian
Stableford's "Hooded Swan" books (aimed, IIRC, at the juvenile SF market
-
I read them as a kid many moons ago....). There were (IIRC again) at least
three, four or more different FTL drives in use, but the only one I
remember the name of was the P-shifter (Probability Shifter) drive....
the books themselves were neither very good nor memorable.