OK, I've been reviewing some of the comments about FTL, and I am hoping to
stimulate some more.
Bearing in mind the ever-delicate balance between REAL science, PSB, and
story/game flavor, I have come up with the FLAVOR of FTL travel I want
for my game Universe, but not the exact PSB. I was hoping to get some input.
Here's the flavor:
There are two ways to do FTL jumps in my setting. One is to pilot an STL ship
through a fixed jump gate. The other is to pilot a FTL ship. In both cases,
you do not get accelerated to C, rather, you enter a sort of "Jump" stae,
which might be a fold, an artificial wormhole, something along those lines
(Help me get creative with this one). It takes a large device to create this
effect, which is why only large ships, usually warships or exploration
vessels, have them. it's much more economical to build one large one in the
system and let gobs of ships use it. Furthermore, because of the PSB, if you
jump from one system to another through a fixed gate, you can cross much
larger distances safely. jumps from a gate to an ungated
region of space, or in a self-jumping ship, get less accurate and more
risky the farther from the starting point you get (Please don't go into
arguements
about whether it should be this way - this is flavor, this is how I want
the flavor, please help me string together enough BS to make it plausible).
The reason for this is I want much of FTL travel to be long and arduous.
Suggestions?
2B^2
On Wednesday, February 06, 2002 11:51 AM, Brian Bilderback
> [SMTP:bbilderback@hotmail.com] wrote:
> There are two ways to do FTL jumps in my setting. One is to pilot an
> stae, which might be a fold, an artificial wormhole, something along
> lines (Help me get creative with this one). It takes a large device
> exploration vessels, have them. it's much more economical to build
The
> reason for this is I want much of FTL travel to be long and arduous.
It depends on what sort of time dilation you want to look at.
PSB mode on: Scientists of xxyy century postulated that mass could be
transmitted as
energy through a sub-dimension or "hyperspace fold".
Once technology caught up enough, a test ship was constructed, which worked;
after a fashion. It was found that although travel was instantaneous from an
outsiders point of view, those actually travelling suffered a time dilation of
one day per light year travelled. This meant that during travel, heavy
maintanance was required on the jump engines to maintain the energy output or
the ship would
often "mis-jump", sometimes hundeds of light years off course.
Further developments of the technology resulted in the development of
Point-to-Point Jumpgates, which guarenteed the ship would arrive at the
destination, as power was only required during the transmittion or reception
phase, resulting in a much smaller power requirement, as the travelling ship
would be able to coast through the "hyperspace fold" to the destination.
Although time dilation still occurred for the crew, it resulted in much more
reliable travel. In the end, large explorer ships would seek out new systems
using their own jump engines and construct destination gates before returning
home through the completed gate (as the destination was known). During war, it
was found that shutting down a gate prevented the transmitted ship from ever
coming out, so warfare developed where larger warships would use their own
jump
engines to capture a target jumpgate, before re-activating it so support
vessels could transit through.
Game Mechanics on: Jump Engines in this universe cost 20% mass & a Jumpgate
requires FTL tender drives of double normal to transmit ships through.