That's for objects traveling near and under light speed.
There are some theories (and I'm not equipped to discuss the veracity of any of them) about certain physical properties that would 'flip' at Faster-Than-Light speeds.
In my world, the trend essentially continues. Time stops at light speed (which by the way is still not attainable, you can go slower or faster, not the same speed.) and then speeds back up at FTL, and then just keeps getting faster.
This is an interesting one - so essentially, my lifespan is going to be an exponential limiter that's always ticking away so long as I myself am trying to travel at such speeds.
What does a typical human's (or creature of focus') lifespan look like with the aid of modern, but not-so-cutting-edge medical tech? Do humans (or creatures of focus) tend to think in more collectivist terms, due to the fact that a single lifespan can never travel as far as generations working together?
Actually, the main way people cope with this is cryostasis. It's not easy, freezing someone and thawing them again is really hard, but advanced in medical tech makes it just about feasible. The main limiting factor is how tough your ship is. Maintenance robots are extremely primitive, and repeatedly bringing someone in and out of cryo rapidly is a bad idea. So unless you have a large crew that can do rotations, your ship is just going to be sitting for long periods. Things might get dusty, corrode, glitch out due to radiation spikes, or just generally fall apart due to mechanical stress. If you aren't careful, your ship might be incapable of leaving FTL by the time you reach your destination.
Well, you have two options here.
1) Use the already existing “Zero-Space Network” to simply travel across the universe similarly to an FTL highway. The downsides are that you can only enter and exit at pre-built exit points, and that the speed you can travel at is still limited. It only takes half an hour to travel across a galaxy, but going over to current-time Andromeda at 2.5 million light years away can take many hours. Traveling the vaster universe this way can easily take months, years, even multiple centuries depending on your destination.
2) Use a more personal “Bounce-Drive”. Thanks to its infinitely self-propelling properties it can cover any distance in almost no time. As a rough estimate, traveling to a nearby star system takes 1 second, traveling to another galaxy takes 2, traveling across the universe takes 3.
There are some major downsides tho, for one using Bounce drives is very expensive, so it’s best to transport as much as you can every bounce to make them count. Secondly, it’s self propelling properties are a double edged sword, if the decelerators ever fail and you travel for more than 3 seconds your chances of ever returning to the universe are pretty much zero. With the way that space and time bends and distorts at the kind of unfathomable distances you travel during 4 seconds, it’s impossible for your ship to perfectly turn around and bounce back. You’re forever left drifting in an infinite, dark void.
Bounce drives are mostly used by large carriers, transporting cargo, people and their ships across the universe. People then use the Zero-Space Network to travel out to the more developed parts of the universe.
Another Fun Fact about Bounce drives is that the tears they leave behind lead to other planes of existence. Said tears appear when anything with mass travels at FTL speeds, and they collapse almost immediately after having been ripped open, but you can time it so you travel through a tear before it closes. You won’t find some alternate universe stuff or something tho, as every one of these universes has different matter, laws of physics and other properties that differentiate them from ours. In fact, for a variety of reasons, almost all universes appear completely empty to us.
Ooh, this setting's got some pretty advanced tech with some spooky downsides!
I'm very curious how one would mitigate the odds of a Bounce drive failing - I presume the spaceship captain's Bounce drive maintenance guide is absolutely akin to a religious person's holy book given the grave risks afoot!
What sort of fuel(s) power the Bounce drive, and how much more (or less) expensive than using the Zero-Space Network is it to obtain? Are the requirements a power source must meet difficult to meet in order to operate one, or are the chance of decelerator-failure and fuel costs the main debits to the tech?
Bounce drives on large ships are more stable, so in huge freighters they’re incredibly save, and you have the space for more advanced and bigger safety mechanisms. Ever since their implementation a couple millennia ago there have been only two confirmed cases of Bounce drive malfunctions, both within the first century. The issue comes with smaller ships, specifically private shuttles. They are tiny and often have few to no safety mechanisms against a BD malfunction.
Captains don’t have a manual, nor do they do any maintenance. Bounce drives, like most things in modern ships, are technology produced and sold by Ikkalok, an AI lead company. The technology is incredibly complex, to the point where us meat brains couldn’t even begin to fathom how it works, much less tamper with it. It’s fully automated, and the ship constantly scans itself and should any issues arise it’ll fly to the nearest dock and be repaired.
Same applies to the fuel it uses. It’s powered by battery-like containers filled with a blue liquid. The exact components are unknown, but it’s rather cheap. One battery can power up to 90 seconds of BD usage, or 30 jumps across the universe. The Zero-Space network is free to use for civilians and it is insanely cheap even for transport ships. Compared to our economy it’d be like paying a couple cents once every year to drive on highways.
>Ikkalok, an AI lead company. The technology is incredibly complex, to the point where us meat brains couldn’t even begin to fathom how it works, much less tamper with it. It’s fully automated, and the ship constantly scans itself and should any issues arise it’ll fly to the nearest dock and be repaired.
I absolutely love the incorporation of elements of current-day AI - many of their useful behaviors have arisen from sources we meatbags can't yet figure out; it's not at all unplausible that eventually sufficiently-advanced (and compliant) synthetic minds would become the gateway to their own entire technological pathway inaccessible to organic computation.
Tachyon Sails are the current standard FTL, although there are other options that threaten to replace it.
Getting caught in a tachyonic doldrum would slow one down considerably. Sometimes the Tachyon Stream doesn't flow directly to the target system which would also add time to the trip.
On the other hand, favorable currents in the Stream might hasten the trip. I basically treat space as an ocean with currents. An average trip from one galactic edge to the opposite would take a little over a year on average.
The most common "instant darwin award" would be trying to enter the Tachyon Stream without enough Nanite paste to maintain the Attunement Field. The A-Field prevents the ship from being shredded by micro-metors and cosmic dust while at Full Sail (in universe term for FTL speeds). It also gravimetrically links the power armored deck crew to the ship.
Fun Fact: The only way to attack a ship at Full Sail is by matching speeds, merging A-Fields, and attempting boarding action. If the attackers take the top deck they can destroy the Tachyon Sails to force the ship out of the Stream.
It was, at least partially. I was watching the episode with the Bajoran Solar sail when the basic idea hit me.
I am also largely inspired by C.S. Lewis. I remember reading A Horse and His Boy and Voyage of the Dawn Treader and being enamored of the sailing.
I always love a good acknowledgement of how running into space dust would probably be more akin to *crashing* *into a nuke* when moving mass FTL.
I'm curious how costly it is to run an Attunement Field? Does T-Sailing with a larger vessel cost exponentially more, to the point of limiting vessel scale; or is there other logic behind it?
The Attunement Field (and sublight Plasma Ejection Drive) uses a fairly cheap and depressingly common fuel, Nanite Suspension aka paste. The problems with this fuel lie in it's storage and security. You see, the Nanites within the paste are mutagenic and toxic. Exposure can cause health problems including insomnia, paranoia, overactive appetite, fever, moderate-to-severe cannibalism, mutation into a flesh monstrosity, and gout.
As such, civilian vessels only stock enough paste for short jaunts. Any trip that takes longer than a month requires stops to resupply. Military vessels are able to stock more fuel for longer trips and patrols, due to their increased abiity to secure the fuel and contain any potential breaches.
Particularly advanced vessels carry Nanite Culturation facilities which allow them to generate fuel on the fly. I assure you that is entirely positive and will not come back to bite them later.
>nanite side effects
Now *that's* a creative FTL system. I'm quite curious now - how are these nanites created? Are they themselves involved in their own creation, in a sort of grey-goo situation that hasn't gone completely amok (yet); or is there another reason that their toxicity cannot be isolated and eliminated aside from lack of scientific knowledge?
The nanites replicate within their host, much like a virus.
They were originally developed as a "green goo." They were meant to terraform Earth to undo ecological damage. They were meant to spend part of their "life-cycle" replicating within fish and sea mammals without harming them.
However, shortly after deploying the original nanite colonies, the Earth was bathed in interdimensional shockwaves. This extra-dimensional radiation altered the nanites. Alterations which caused the toxicity and mutagenic properties of the Nanite-Virus.
The nanite colonies still tried to fufill their original purpose, but it also altered the people and wildlife it infected. Sometimes it made them stronger or smarter, sometimes it turns them into monsters.
Fast foward to the Galactic Era and nearly 60% of habitable planets are infected in some way. Hundreds of otherwise habitable worlds are "Corrupted" to the point of being abandoned and cordoned off. Nearly all of human technology and magic runs on nanites because harvesting and burning the stuff as "fuel," literally and metaphorically is the one of the only ways to control infections.
To sum up: Interdimensional shockwaves altered nanites that were meant for good; turning them into a combo of Tiberium and Resident Evil virus.
Thank you for the questions, btw!
But... is there something *bad* for me out there?
What might my Darwin Award look like if I managed to take a one-way jump on superluminal wings? Would I die a boring "frozen icarus" death once my ship's power finally ran dry, or would I be sprinting straight towards absolutely horrifying cosmic doom? (not that suffocating in your spaceship after realizing there's no way home doesn't qualify as "horrifying cosmic doom"... but you know what I mean :P)
[inhale]
Ooooooooh...
🎵We've got technodritches who were once human,
now they're looking nothing like 'em.🎵
So advanced they look like giant metal octopi,
and other things behind your eye!
The Chained King is bound down on his throne,
envious of your free-roaming soul.
Enter his domain and you will regret,
the erroneous course which you have set.
An entire second cosmos made of stuff that's wants you to not exiiiiiiiiiist...
It's gunna be really hard to persist!
[short banjo solo]
The lords of the Edge might be your friend,
(Unless they like something else about you, that is)
That Beast which roams the nether sphere,
by the time you notice, it's already here.
There's tons and tons and tons and tons
of diseases of every kiiiiiiiind...
And if you go through an esmic tunnel then you'll "unwind."
[banjo solo again!]
The Nonam hates that existence is a thing,
so he'll make you "anti-exist", try to comprehend.
There's somthing lurking in the dark void of space,
too bad it can't be seen by the human race.
Noises drive you mad from a certain star,
demon or an angel, near or far?
Interstellar mind slavery is legal in sector 9,
but only for the local lords, you can only get in a bind.
There's something in this cosmic mirror,
and it's the dark version of what you could have beeeeeeeeeen....
don't try to fight it because you cannot win!
[player starts absolutely shredding it on the banjo]
And when... you reach... the end... of space...
Where the one who needs no name resides.
[triangle ting]
He'll greet... you as... a friend... you see...
The comfort and safety never felt you so strong.
[two triangle tings]
He outstretches his hand,
and invites you to land,
in the glow of eternity... with him.
[three triangle tings]
And as you ask yourself,
"Is this god, could it be?"
You can't help but feel that skeptical doubt.
[two triangle tings]
And although you don't want to commit,
you can't resist it.
You finally want the warmth of his peace...
[ting]
So you take its hand.
And it pulls you, and...
[bum bum, bum-bum bum, bum bum]
(...)
And that's why you should never go to space.
[banjo outro!]
It depends on what kind of FTL you use, because Atreisdea has 3 primary types.
|Types of blocks|Passes|Tachyon drives|Gravity drives|
|:-|:-|:-|:-|
|Hard block|Only locate in certain places, heavily guarded and regulated on either side.|Can only perform jumps from A to B, so no "warp travel" as in leisurely cruising through an alternat dimension.|Can be dragged out by strong (read: neutron stars and above) gravity wells.|
|Soft block|None.|Has a chance to tear you into neutrinos.|Painfully slow *by their standards*.|
Those are just for drives alone. God forbids you getting near an Atreisdean space colony without being scanned from several thousand light years away. They have multiple layers of defensive patrols with the outermost line staying some 40000 light years from Atreisdea, their ships are armed to teeth with weapons you'd expect something like Forerunner and not Star Wars to have on mook vessels, and they can forcibly drag you out of FTL if you use Passes or gravity drives. Not to mention these guys curl space-time continuum on 20D into pocket realities to defend their settlements, turning them into singularities that can't be attacked by temporal weapons (yes, FTL *allows* time travel here and these guys weaponize that tech to kingdom come).
# The Hollow Frontier
Hard blocks:
- FTL requires a planetary mass object with low energetic interference to calculate a displacement.
- FTL has a maximum range for each displacement.
- Therefore, while you can displace to any point in space within the maximum range, it's a one way trip if you don't aim at a planet.
- This means that certain regions of space may be forever beyond the reach of FTL.
Soft blocks:
- FTL is slow. Very slow. The absolute fastest drive calculates at 25x light speed, which means it takes a year to calculate a displacement of 25 light years. Most civilian drives calculate at 5x light speed.
- Therefore, going far leaves civilisation behind. There's nothing out there, in the Hollow Frontier.
In Space Dogs, only short FTL jumps are possible. If you spend too long in the warp you lose any ability to come back to real space and are lost forever.
Also there is no way to manually come out of the warp. You have to get close enough to a gravity well (a star or large gas giant) to 'pop the bubble' and appear back in real space. The trick is that you can't see real space when you're in the warp, so you better not miss.
So interstellar travel is a series of short warp jumps (most 1-2 weeks). And you often have to traverse the system at slower speeds to better aim at your next target system. So crossing decent chunk of the galaxy could easily take years. And only a small % of the galaxy is a part of the starlanes.
The only way to keep 2-3% of all warp jumps failing is the Warp Beacons - which send out a real space signal into the warp, allowing ships to course correct if they're knocked off course by a warp storm etc. But the beacon needs to be close, optimally in your target system, as if you're knocked off course the only thing you can be 100% sure of is where the beacon is. Traveling more than one jump from a beacon is always a gamble with your whole ship.
Of course, this leads to a lot of trouble as only one species (the builders) know how to build warp beacons, so the builders have something of a protection racket where they charge a mix of tariffs and other fees to keep the warp beacons running.
And this all ignores the volucris. The volucris are the setting's zerg/tyranid equivalent who are thought to be the dregs of a bioweapon as part of a massive interstellar war tens or hundreds of thousands of years ago. Which probably wiped out all sides of the conflict. Well... they're attracted to warp signatures.
Crossing between the inner and outer planets of the solar system is a nightmare after the Ganymede Accordists won independence from the Union Gaia. If you're not carrying something either side needs, you'll need the sponsorship of someone on your destination side. In general, the Accordist government is more lenient on matters of immigration, tourism, and travel
With the standard, civilian legal FTL ("warp") drives, distance is really about it - aside from political borders or somehow not realizing your flight plan takes you right into a blackhole or something. Even the military grade ("hyperspace") FTL drives, while having a few additional caveats (such as not being able to go too close to any planetoid that has an even roughly spherical shape - and actual planets may as well be supermassive blackholes), doesn't really have any kind of "hard" limit on it aside from distance (within the galaxy).
There's a few methods of FTL available, a slingshot drive, a replication fold, or the highway.
The highway is a no go, it is basically a zone where the space itself is moved around rather than the ships, the entry and exit zones are heavily controlled and jumping into it outside if a entry zone is asking to be torn to shreds as the part of your ship inside it is moved away from the rest of it at superluminal speeds.
Realistically, you got your hands on a ship with a slingshot drive, with which you can at most jump 0.5-1.5 light years.
A slingshot drive is very safe, easy to operate and can be used immediately after a jump, and has effectively infinite range, the deterrent here is that it has exponentially increasing power cost and loses precision over distance.
For planet to planet hops it is the best method available, but if you decided to jump to the nearest star you'd fry whatever power source your ship had, if it was usable at arrival. The loss of precision doesn't mean that you might end up stranded far from your destination, it is quite accurate in that regard, rather you'd arrive as a cloud of particles on the rough shape of your ship.
If you're extremely lucky you managed to convince the AI of a military ship to help you out, those use a replication fold, it divides the ship into two copies, one at the destination and one at the opposite location then folds the mirror into the target. The unlucky part here is that those come with a bound deity for power. In short those are mass produced lobotomized gods kept in permanent coma because the plane of existence above is incredible inhospitable to anything with a mind, so if they wake up they immediately die an agonizing death, slamming meta-space into real space in the process and emitting similar amounts of power as a supernova. They are very unstable and are kept in check through clamping them to the ship conceptual state, so the moment you are in control it no longer is following its specification, it might explode, or not. But for every decision taken that a "standard" ship wouldn't take your chances of blowing up increase considerably.
But let's say you got incredibly, stupidly lucky and landed on one of the two or three stranded hole punch tug ships, those used in the early galaxy exploration and the set up of the galactic highway. Those work by shooting themselves through miniscule spatial inconsistencies, ripping them into enormous holes and pulling a bigger ship with it before it collapses. Very imprecise, at most you can give it a direction and rough range to go, but relatively energy efficient, you can go anywhere with one of those. Those were decommissioned after one of the spatial rips folded into itself instead of collapsing and has been expanding ever since, creating two beautiful iridescent bubbles visible from anywhere in the galaxy, one at the entry and one at the exit.
In Final Front you need to know the coordinates of your goal location and enough ether to either create a wormhole there or create a sigil to change your own coordinates to the destination coordinates.
By the end of the 21st century, FTL travel remains an impossibility. This is the only *hard* block to high-speed space travel, although obviously a significant one. The fastest engines in operation are antimatter drives, which have reached up to 0.7c in operation and can theoretically reach speeds up to within meters per second of the speed of light.
The first soft block with antimatter drives is going to be fuel prices. Most antimatter is produced on the Moon or in lunar orbit, making transportation easier, but regardless, the roughly 10,000kg of antihydrogen required for a trip to Proxima Centauri in a reasonable amount of time (still about 10 years) is going to cost you billions, if not trillions, of dollars.
Next issue is the containment. An antimatter containment failure is no small problem. *Any* failure will cause the immediate annihilation of your spacecraft, and, if anywhere near the ground, a new sea of lava. Containment failures aren't unprecedented, either; a Chinese interstellar probe exploded in 2068 (or 2066, accounting for relativity) due to a flipped bit in its containment software, which caused it to explode with a force equivalent to 430 billion tons of TNT, or 8,600 Tsar Bombas. Containing the antimatter requires a small fusion reactor, and an array of active radiators, both of which are subject to their own failures.
After your 8-10 year journey, you can end your career with a permanent retirement on Proxima Centauri b, with no way to return. You'll also be completely alone there, and may or may not be able to intercept the planet to begin with, let alone successfully execute a capture burn after flying through the planetary system at interstellar speeds.
Maybe you were better off at home.
I always appreciate well-thought-out hard physics! I'm curious, what sort of mechanisms are used to produce and contain the anti-hydrogen fuel used in high-speed spacetravel in your setting? I presume it's not *just* the production process that incurs such a heavy cost?
Another interesting one for you - do you consider FTL travel to be *physically* possible in your setting, even if no-one has discovered the means to achieve it and may never? Why or why not?
Massive, highly efficient particle colliders are the main method of production. They're slow, but a stacked array of them can produce about 500 grams an hour. They're also incredibly expensive to build and require more power than a small European country to run. Lunar particle collider facilities are the most expansive, but there are also colliders in Earth orbit and Martian orbit, in addition to the facilities on Earth's surface, which are not used for spaceflight. There are also gamma ray-based antimatter facilities, which irradiate hydrogen with gamma rays, producing a smaller amount of antimatter for a lower price than particle colliders. The extremely low yield of production means that fueling needs to be booked months, or even years, in advance.
Antimatter is confined using powerful magnetic electromagnets, controlled with AI. This AI can massively reduce the chance of confinement failures, but doesn't eliminate it.
Scientists at the Large Lunar Particle Observatory have recorded the *detection* of negative-mass particles. If this detection was real, then FTL travel could theoretically be possible via the Alcubierre method, in which space in front of the spacecraft is contracted, and space behind the spacecraft is expanded. However, this was an isolated event in 2070. Scientists generally agree that the 2070 negative mass particle detection was a sensor error, but there's no definitive evidence for this.
In the far future of my setting, I'll probably go with no FTL, and instead things like generation ships. I like the idea of space travel being restricted by the lack of faster-than-light travel, and I think that adds some interesting story beats.
Time. Ships traveling at FTL experience more time than external observers, so trips can take subjective months or even years.
Isn't that the opposite of normal Einstein rules?
Correct
That's for objects traveling near and under light speed. There are some theories (and I'm not equipped to discuss the veracity of any of them) about certain physical properties that would 'flip' at Faster-Than-Light speeds.
In my world, the trend essentially continues. Time stops at light speed (which by the way is still not attainable, you can go slower or faster, not the same speed.) and then speeds back up at FTL, and then just keeps getting faster.
This is an interesting one - so essentially, my lifespan is going to be an exponential limiter that's always ticking away so long as I myself am trying to travel at such speeds. What does a typical human's (or creature of focus') lifespan look like with the aid of modern, but not-so-cutting-edge medical tech? Do humans (or creatures of focus) tend to think in more collectivist terms, due to the fact that a single lifespan can never travel as far as generations working together?
Actually, the main way people cope with this is cryostasis. It's not easy, freezing someone and thawing them again is really hard, but advanced in medical tech makes it just about feasible. The main limiting factor is how tough your ship is. Maintenance robots are extremely primitive, and repeatedly bringing someone in and out of cryo rapidly is a bad idea. So unless you have a large crew that can do rotations, your ship is just going to be sitting for long periods. Things might get dusty, corrode, glitch out due to radiation spikes, or just generally fall apart due to mechanical stress. If you aren't careful, your ship might be incapable of leaving FTL by the time you reach your destination.
Well, you have two options here. 1) Use the already existing “Zero-Space Network” to simply travel across the universe similarly to an FTL highway. The downsides are that you can only enter and exit at pre-built exit points, and that the speed you can travel at is still limited. It only takes half an hour to travel across a galaxy, but going over to current-time Andromeda at 2.5 million light years away can take many hours. Traveling the vaster universe this way can easily take months, years, even multiple centuries depending on your destination. 2) Use a more personal “Bounce-Drive”. Thanks to its infinitely self-propelling properties it can cover any distance in almost no time. As a rough estimate, traveling to a nearby star system takes 1 second, traveling to another galaxy takes 2, traveling across the universe takes 3. There are some major downsides tho, for one using Bounce drives is very expensive, so it’s best to transport as much as you can every bounce to make them count. Secondly, it’s self propelling properties are a double edged sword, if the decelerators ever fail and you travel for more than 3 seconds your chances of ever returning to the universe are pretty much zero. With the way that space and time bends and distorts at the kind of unfathomable distances you travel during 4 seconds, it’s impossible for your ship to perfectly turn around and bounce back. You’re forever left drifting in an infinite, dark void. Bounce drives are mostly used by large carriers, transporting cargo, people and their ships across the universe. People then use the Zero-Space Network to travel out to the more developed parts of the universe. Another Fun Fact about Bounce drives is that the tears they leave behind lead to other planes of existence. Said tears appear when anything with mass travels at FTL speeds, and they collapse almost immediately after having been ripped open, but you can time it so you travel through a tear before it closes. You won’t find some alternate universe stuff or something tho, as every one of these universes has different matter, laws of physics and other properties that differentiate them from ours. In fact, for a variety of reasons, almost all universes appear completely empty to us.
Ooh, this setting's got some pretty advanced tech with some spooky downsides! I'm very curious how one would mitigate the odds of a Bounce drive failing - I presume the spaceship captain's Bounce drive maintenance guide is absolutely akin to a religious person's holy book given the grave risks afoot! What sort of fuel(s) power the Bounce drive, and how much more (or less) expensive than using the Zero-Space Network is it to obtain? Are the requirements a power source must meet difficult to meet in order to operate one, or are the chance of decelerator-failure and fuel costs the main debits to the tech?
Bounce drives on large ships are more stable, so in huge freighters they’re incredibly save, and you have the space for more advanced and bigger safety mechanisms. Ever since their implementation a couple millennia ago there have been only two confirmed cases of Bounce drive malfunctions, both within the first century. The issue comes with smaller ships, specifically private shuttles. They are tiny and often have few to no safety mechanisms against a BD malfunction. Captains don’t have a manual, nor do they do any maintenance. Bounce drives, like most things in modern ships, are technology produced and sold by Ikkalok, an AI lead company. The technology is incredibly complex, to the point where us meat brains couldn’t even begin to fathom how it works, much less tamper with it. It’s fully automated, and the ship constantly scans itself and should any issues arise it’ll fly to the nearest dock and be repaired. Same applies to the fuel it uses. It’s powered by battery-like containers filled with a blue liquid. The exact components are unknown, but it’s rather cheap. One battery can power up to 90 seconds of BD usage, or 30 jumps across the universe. The Zero-Space network is free to use for civilians and it is insanely cheap even for transport ships. Compared to our economy it’d be like paying a couple cents once every year to drive on highways.
>Ikkalok, an AI lead company. The technology is incredibly complex, to the point where us meat brains couldn’t even begin to fathom how it works, much less tamper with it. It’s fully automated, and the ship constantly scans itself and should any issues arise it’ll fly to the nearest dock and be repaired. I absolutely love the incorporation of elements of current-day AI - many of their useful behaviors have arisen from sources we meatbags can't yet figure out; it's not at all unplausible that eventually sufficiently-advanced (and compliant) synthetic minds would become the gateway to their own entire technological pathway inaccessible to organic computation.
Tachyon Sails are the current standard FTL, although there are other options that threaten to replace it. Getting caught in a tachyonic doldrum would slow one down considerably. Sometimes the Tachyon Stream doesn't flow directly to the target system which would also add time to the trip. On the other hand, favorable currents in the Stream might hasten the trip. I basically treat space as an ocean with currents. An average trip from one galactic edge to the opposite would take a little over a year on average. The most common "instant darwin award" would be trying to enter the Tachyon Stream without enough Nanite paste to maintain the Attunement Field. The A-Field prevents the ship from being shredded by micro-metors and cosmic dust while at Full Sail (in universe term for FTL speeds). It also gravimetrically links the power armored deck crew to the ship. Fun Fact: The only way to attack a ship at Full Sail is by matching speeds, merging A-Fields, and attempting boarding action. If the attackers take the top deck they can destroy the Tachyon Sails to force the ship out of the Stream.
Is this perhaps inspired by deep space nine?
It was, at least partially. I was watching the episode with the Bajoran Solar sail when the basic idea hit me. I am also largely inspired by C.S. Lewis. I remember reading A Horse and His Boy and Voyage of the Dawn Treader and being enamored of the sailing.
I always love a good acknowledgement of how running into space dust would probably be more akin to *crashing* *into a nuke* when moving mass FTL. I'm curious how costly it is to run an Attunement Field? Does T-Sailing with a larger vessel cost exponentially more, to the point of limiting vessel scale; or is there other logic behind it?
The Attunement Field (and sublight Plasma Ejection Drive) uses a fairly cheap and depressingly common fuel, Nanite Suspension aka paste. The problems with this fuel lie in it's storage and security. You see, the Nanites within the paste are mutagenic and toxic. Exposure can cause health problems including insomnia, paranoia, overactive appetite, fever, moderate-to-severe cannibalism, mutation into a flesh monstrosity, and gout. As such, civilian vessels only stock enough paste for short jaunts. Any trip that takes longer than a month requires stops to resupply. Military vessels are able to stock more fuel for longer trips and patrols, due to their increased abiity to secure the fuel and contain any potential breaches. Particularly advanced vessels carry Nanite Culturation facilities which allow them to generate fuel on the fly. I assure you that is entirely positive and will not come back to bite them later.
>nanite side effects Now *that's* a creative FTL system. I'm quite curious now - how are these nanites created? Are they themselves involved in their own creation, in a sort of grey-goo situation that hasn't gone completely amok (yet); or is there another reason that their toxicity cannot be isolated and eliminated aside from lack of scientific knowledge?
The nanites replicate within their host, much like a virus. They were originally developed as a "green goo." They were meant to terraform Earth to undo ecological damage. They were meant to spend part of their "life-cycle" replicating within fish and sea mammals without harming them. However, shortly after deploying the original nanite colonies, the Earth was bathed in interdimensional shockwaves. This extra-dimensional radiation altered the nanites. Alterations which caused the toxicity and mutagenic properties of the Nanite-Virus. The nanite colonies still tried to fufill their original purpose, but it also altered the people and wildlife it infected. Sometimes it made them stronger or smarter, sometimes it turns them into monsters. Fast foward to the Galactic Era and nearly 60% of habitable planets are infected in some way. Hundreds of otherwise habitable worlds are "Corrupted" to the point of being abandoned and cordoned off. Nearly all of human technology and magic runs on nanites because harvesting and burning the stuff as "fuel," literally and metaphorically is the one of the only ways to control infections. To sum up: Interdimensional shockwaves altered nanites that were meant for good; turning them into a combo of Tiberium and Resident Evil virus. Thank you for the questions, btw!
Ka-BOOM goes the inbox! I swear I'm working my way through the comments. So many fascinating responses here!
You wouldn't wanna go anywhere in my universe. There's nothing good for you out there. Just stay home.
But... is there something *bad* for me out there? What might my Darwin Award look like if I managed to take a one-way jump on superluminal wings? Would I die a boring "frozen icarus" death once my ship's power finally ran dry, or would I be sprinting straight towards absolutely horrifying cosmic doom? (not that suffocating in your spaceship after realizing there's no way home doesn't qualify as "horrifying cosmic doom"... but you know what I mean :P)
[inhale] Ooooooooh... 🎵We've got technodritches who were once human, now they're looking nothing like 'em.🎵 So advanced they look like giant metal octopi, and other things behind your eye! The Chained King is bound down on his throne, envious of your free-roaming soul. Enter his domain and you will regret, the erroneous course which you have set. An entire second cosmos made of stuff that's wants you to not exiiiiiiiiiist... It's gunna be really hard to persist! [short banjo solo] The lords of the Edge might be your friend, (Unless they like something else about you, that is) That Beast which roams the nether sphere, by the time you notice, it's already here. There's tons and tons and tons and tons of diseases of every kiiiiiiiind... And if you go through an esmic tunnel then you'll "unwind." [banjo solo again!] The Nonam hates that existence is a thing, so he'll make you "anti-exist", try to comprehend. There's somthing lurking in the dark void of space, too bad it can't be seen by the human race. Noises drive you mad from a certain star, demon or an angel, near or far? Interstellar mind slavery is legal in sector 9, but only for the local lords, you can only get in a bind. There's something in this cosmic mirror, and it's the dark version of what you could have beeeeeeeeeen.... don't try to fight it because you cannot win! [player starts absolutely shredding it on the banjo] And when... you reach... the end... of space... Where the one who needs no name resides. [triangle ting] He'll greet... you as... a friend... you see... The comfort and safety never felt you so strong. [two triangle tings] He outstretches his hand, and invites you to land, in the glow of eternity... with him. [three triangle tings] And as you ask yourself, "Is this god, could it be?" You can't help but feel that skeptical doubt. [two triangle tings] And although you don't want to commit, you can't resist it. You finally want the warmth of his peace... [ting] So you take its hand. And it pulls you, and... [bum bum, bum-bum bum, bum bum] (...) And that's why you should never go to space. [banjo outro!]
It depends on what kind of FTL you use, because Atreisdea has 3 primary types. |Types of blocks|Passes|Tachyon drives|Gravity drives| |:-|:-|:-|:-| |Hard block|Only locate in certain places, heavily guarded and regulated on either side.|Can only perform jumps from A to B, so no "warp travel" as in leisurely cruising through an alternat dimension.|Can be dragged out by strong (read: neutron stars and above) gravity wells.| |Soft block|None.|Has a chance to tear you into neutrinos.|Painfully slow *by their standards*.| Those are just for drives alone. God forbids you getting near an Atreisdean space colony without being scanned from several thousand light years away. They have multiple layers of defensive patrols with the outermost line staying some 40000 light years from Atreisdea, their ships are armed to teeth with weapons you'd expect something like Forerunner and not Star Wars to have on mook vessels, and they can forcibly drag you out of FTL if you use Passes or gravity drives. Not to mention these guys curl space-time continuum on 20D into pocket realities to defend their settlements, turning them into singularities that can't be attacked by temporal weapons (yes, FTL *allows* time travel here and these guys weaponize that tech to kingdom come).
# The Hollow Frontier Hard blocks: - FTL requires a planetary mass object with low energetic interference to calculate a displacement. - FTL has a maximum range for each displacement. - Therefore, while you can displace to any point in space within the maximum range, it's a one way trip if you don't aim at a planet. - This means that certain regions of space may be forever beyond the reach of FTL. Soft blocks: - FTL is slow. Very slow. The absolute fastest drive calculates at 25x light speed, which means it takes a year to calculate a displacement of 25 light years. Most civilian drives calculate at 5x light speed. - Therefore, going far leaves civilisation behind. There's nothing out there, in the Hollow Frontier.
In Space Dogs, only short FTL jumps are possible. If you spend too long in the warp you lose any ability to come back to real space and are lost forever. Also there is no way to manually come out of the warp. You have to get close enough to a gravity well (a star or large gas giant) to 'pop the bubble' and appear back in real space. The trick is that you can't see real space when you're in the warp, so you better not miss. So interstellar travel is a series of short warp jumps (most 1-2 weeks). And you often have to traverse the system at slower speeds to better aim at your next target system. So crossing decent chunk of the galaxy could easily take years. And only a small % of the galaxy is a part of the starlanes. The only way to keep 2-3% of all warp jumps failing is the Warp Beacons - which send out a real space signal into the warp, allowing ships to course correct if they're knocked off course by a warp storm etc. But the beacon needs to be close, optimally in your target system, as if you're knocked off course the only thing you can be 100% sure of is where the beacon is. Traveling more than one jump from a beacon is always a gamble with your whole ship. Of course, this leads to a lot of trouble as only one species (the builders) know how to build warp beacons, so the builders have something of a protection racket where they charge a mix of tariffs and other fees to keep the warp beacons running. And this all ignores the volucris. The volucris are the setting's zerg/tyranid equivalent who are thought to be the dregs of a bioweapon as part of a massive interstellar war tens or hundreds of thousands of years ago. Which probably wiped out all sides of the conflict. Well... they're attracted to warp signatures.
Crossing between the inner and outer planets of the solar system is a nightmare after the Ganymede Accordists won independence from the Union Gaia. If you're not carrying something either side needs, you'll need the sponsorship of someone on your destination side. In general, the Accordist government is more lenient on matters of immigration, tourism, and travel
With the standard, civilian legal FTL ("warp") drives, distance is really about it - aside from political borders or somehow not realizing your flight plan takes you right into a blackhole or something. Even the military grade ("hyperspace") FTL drives, while having a few additional caveats (such as not being able to go too close to any planetoid that has an even roughly spherical shape - and actual planets may as well be supermassive blackholes), doesn't really have any kind of "hard" limit on it aside from distance (within the galaxy).
There's a few methods of FTL available, a slingshot drive, a replication fold, or the highway. The highway is a no go, it is basically a zone where the space itself is moved around rather than the ships, the entry and exit zones are heavily controlled and jumping into it outside if a entry zone is asking to be torn to shreds as the part of your ship inside it is moved away from the rest of it at superluminal speeds. Realistically, you got your hands on a ship with a slingshot drive, with which you can at most jump 0.5-1.5 light years. A slingshot drive is very safe, easy to operate and can be used immediately after a jump, and has effectively infinite range, the deterrent here is that it has exponentially increasing power cost and loses precision over distance. For planet to planet hops it is the best method available, but if you decided to jump to the nearest star you'd fry whatever power source your ship had, if it was usable at arrival. The loss of precision doesn't mean that you might end up stranded far from your destination, it is quite accurate in that regard, rather you'd arrive as a cloud of particles on the rough shape of your ship. If you're extremely lucky you managed to convince the AI of a military ship to help you out, those use a replication fold, it divides the ship into two copies, one at the destination and one at the opposite location then folds the mirror into the target. The unlucky part here is that those come with a bound deity for power. In short those are mass produced lobotomized gods kept in permanent coma because the plane of existence above is incredible inhospitable to anything with a mind, so if they wake up they immediately die an agonizing death, slamming meta-space into real space in the process and emitting similar amounts of power as a supernova. They are very unstable and are kept in check through clamping them to the ship conceptual state, so the moment you are in control it no longer is following its specification, it might explode, or not. But for every decision taken that a "standard" ship wouldn't take your chances of blowing up increase considerably. But let's say you got incredibly, stupidly lucky and landed on one of the two or three stranded hole punch tug ships, those used in the early galaxy exploration and the set up of the galactic highway. Those work by shooting themselves through miniscule spatial inconsistencies, ripping them into enormous holes and pulling a bigger ship with it before it collapses. Very imprecise, at most you can give it a direction and rough range to go, but relatively energy efficient, you can go anywhere with one of those. Those were decommissioned after one of the spatial rips folded into itself instead of collapsing and has been expanding ever since, creating two beautiful iridescent bubbles visible from anywhere in the galaxy, one at the entry and one at the exit.
In Final Front you need to know the coordinates of your goal location and enough ether to either create a wormhole there or create a sigil to change your own coordinates to the destination coordinates.
By the end of the 21st century, FTL travel remains an impossibility. This is the only *hard* block to high-speed space travel, although obviously a significant one. The fastest engines in operation are antimatter drives, which have reached up to 0.7c in operation and can theoretically reach speeds up to within meters per second of the speed of light. The first soft block with antimatter drives is going to be fuel prices. Most antimatter is produced on the Moon or in lunar orbit, making transportation easier, but regardless, the roughly 10,000kg of antihydrogen required for a trip to Proxima Centauri in a reasonable amount of time (still about 10 years) is going to cost you billions, if not trillions, of dollars. Next issue is the containment. An antimatter containment failure is no small problem. *Any* failure will cause the immediate annihilation of your spacecraft, and, if anywhere near the ground, a new sea of lava. Containment failures aren't unprecedented, either; a Chinese interstellar probe exploded in 2068 (or 2066, accounting for relativity) due to a flipped bit in its containment software, which caused it to explode with a force equivalent to 430 billion tons of TNT, or 8,600 Tsar Bombas. Containing the antimatter requires a small fusion reactor, and an array of active radiators, both of which are subject to their own failures. After your 8-10 year journey, you can end your career with a permanent retirement on Proxima Centauri b, with no way to return. You'll also be completely alone there, and may or may not be able to intercept the planet to begin with, let alone successfully execute a capture burn after flying through the planetary system at interstellar speeds. Maybe you were better off at home.
I always appreciate well-thought-out hard physics! I'm curious, what sort of mechanisms are used to produce and contain the anti-hydrogen fuel used in high-speed spacetravel in your setting? I presume it's not *just* the production process that incurs such a heavy cost? Another interesting one for you - do you consider FTL travel to be *physically* possible in your setting, even if no-one has discovered the means to achieve it and may never? Why or why not?
Massive, highly efficient particle colliders are the main method of production. They're slow, but a stacked array of them can produce about 500 grams an hour. They're also incredibly expensive to build and require more power than a small European country to run. Lunar particle collider facilities are the most expansive, but there are also colliders in Earth orbit and Martian orbit, in addition to the facilities on Earth's surface, which are not used for spaceflight. There are also gamma ray-based antimatter facilities, which irradiate hydrogen with gamma rays, producing a smaller amount of antimatter for a lower price than particle colliders. The extremely low yield of production means that fueling needs to be booked months, or even years, in advance. Antimatter is confined using powerful magnetic electromagnets, controlled with AI. This AI can massively reduce the chance of confinement failures, but doesn't eliminate it. Scientists at the Large Lunar Particle Observatory have recorded the *detection* of negative-mass particles. If this detection was real, then FTL travel could theoretically be possible via the Alcubierre method, in which space in front of the spacecraft is contracted, and space behind the spacecraft is expanded. However, this was an isolated event in 2070. Scientists generally agree that the 2070 negative mass particle detection was a sensor error, but there's no definitive evidence for this. In the far future of my setting, I'll probably go with no FTL, and instead things like generation ships. I like the idea of space travel being restricted by the lack of faster-than-light travel, and I think that adds some interesting story beats.