From: B Lin <lin@r...>
Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2005 15:25:40 -0700
Subject: [VV} FTL discussion was RE: [VV] Vectorverse
FTL Travel:I like the multiple method of FTL travel for a universe as it adds more possibilities, rather than being limited to distinct trade routes (wormholes) or slow travel (small space-fold jumps or hyperspace travel) and thus you can mix and match as needed. At the top level should be the "instantaneous" FTL such as wormholes and artificial wormholes. They would allow instaneous transportation between two points, but could be limited by size (only a certain mass may pass through), direction (it only works one way) or have a delay between transits (gravitational disturbances disrupt the wormhole) At the next level will be jump gates that "boost" ships faster than their normal drive rates, so that the inital jump is longer or the transition to hyperspace is faster, so that short or intermediate ranges are cheaply accessible. The advantage of jump gates would be that they could be used for a range of directions for outgoing traffic and it might be possible to send non-FTL ships through, but would be limited in that they only help on the inital move outward, and don't necessarily make it easier for inbound traffic. The lowest level of FTL is the "plain-vanilla" hyperspace or space-fold technology. Depending on which you choose, ships may or may not be vulnerable during transit. You could PSB that ships can be intercepted in hyperspace or that a space-fold technology causes a measureable gravitational response at the far-end before the ship transits which can be used to determine where a ship will appear. Otherwise, ships in FTL will essentially only be vulnerable when the drop to sub-light or are in-between jumps. Colonization: would definitely depend on the FTL technology available. If travel is instananeous (hours) then colonization would be similar to modern day air travel where you have a highly mobile population that fluxes around.Or if FTl takes weeks or months then it will be similar to ship-borne passenger travel in the 19th century (think Australia). If travel takes years, then you are looking at more of an 15th-16th century travel model where mass transportation of people was unusual. Economy - Interstellar trade is completely dependent on travel cost - if transport is instananeous and practically free, then even shipping cheap bulk items like food protein is viable. If FTL travel is expensive (1000000 Cr per LY per ton) then only high value items will be transported. Otherwise commerce will be mostly financial with money or information being the main commodity moved between stars. Expansion: The main drive will economic and/or political - for instance, governments will want to push the frontiers with new colonies to gain more resources and a larger tax base (think 19th century colonialism). Individual mega-coporations will expand for similar reasons (to gain more control of resources vital to that company). I don't imagine population will be not be a driving issue for colonization. In previous history most colonization was a social relief valve that allowed malcontents or social miscreants to be ejected from society (Think US colonies or Australia). In the future I think there will be similar situation where some colonization is caused by social discontents trying to find a place where they are free to enact their wishes. Expansion is also limited by the method for claiming a planet/system. Can a planetary government or mega-corp own a planet? Or are all planets the property of the galactic society and planets are "leased" to governments and corporations. Are there "interstellar space limits" that allow governments or corporations to control an area of space around their possessions? Or is all space free to all and anyone can travel wherever they wish whenever they want. Automation is solely dependent on the reliability of your automation. In the early 20th century many multi-engined planes had access to their engines for in-flight repair by an engineer (Flight engineer) because the engines were not tremendously reliable enough to make 6 hour flights without maintenance. Under current standards, passenger planes fly up to 18 hours at a time without maintenance and no one worries about engine failure. Extrapolating to the future, a large cargo space ship might only have a crew of 5 - Pilot, Co-pilot, Navigator, Flight Engineer, and Purser/Cargo master. Systems will be mostly automated with redundancy so most minor problems are automatically fixed or a redundant system kicks in and operates until the ship can make port. Passengers will increase crew size, since people will always need some type of human service to be happy and might increase the crew size by one crew member per 100 passengers for regular passage and maybe as high as one cr! ew per 10 passengers for luxury ships. As for warships, it again comes down to redundancy, backup systems and general maintenance. It actually doesn't take that many crew to "run" a ship as it does to keep it maintained to a proper level. One similar case is Russian MBT's vs. Western tanks. Most Russian MBT's have an auto-loader and reduce the crew to 3, a commander, gunner and driver allowing a smaller turret and decreased profile. Most western MBT's have a crew of 4, commander, gunner, loader, and driver. Although the sole role of the loader during battle is to load the round requested by the commander into the main gun, his impact is much larger in terms of the overall efficiency of the tank as you have 25% more hands to run maintenance on the tank when it is not in battle, so it is more likely to "battle-ready" when the time comes. American naval ships are run in a similar fashion where you have extra and overlapping crew so that if there are casualties, you have some backup of skills and hands to step! in and continue the fight. Different navies will have different views as to the value and efficiency of crew and that will help determine the overall crew size. For instance a high-tech, high-life value military might only have a crew of 5 in a destroyer with fully automated systems, while a similar mass destroyer from a lower-life value or lower-tech military would use 30 crew. Some thoughts, --Binhan [quoted original message omitted]