Great Aletia wrote:Isn't hyperspace usually depicted as a realm of pure energy? That's how I've always seen it. You're probably going to need to pay some form of energy toll to access something like that. It may be possible for you to use hyperspace to generate energy though. Before I decided on regular fusion, I considered using hypermatter, essentially a form of exotic antimatter, to power my ships. Hypermatter would be collected during hyperspace jumps, meaning FTL travel would actually refuel my ships. I never really considered how energy hungry a hyperdrive may be before now. I put ranges on my ships a long time ago, but never really came up with a reason for it. I think pegging FTL ranges to energy reserves would be a good reason. I imagine a hyperdrive would also need to cool down periodically, and that ships would need to periodically exit hyperspace to see where they are.
Has anyone ever put much thought into the mechanics surrounding hyperlanes? I want to rationalise why they go where they go. I've considered basing mine upon the intensity of gravity. Areas of high gravity, such as neighbouring systems, would connect to each other, creating a web of hyperlanes. Artificial hyperlanes could be created by embedding gravity generating satellites in hyperspace, but this would be extremely expensive. Huge investment would be required to create anything remotely transverseable. Artificial hyperlanes would thus come to resemble the "royal roads" of antiquity, with the construction of federal/royal/imperial hyperlanes being significant investments that take years to complete and partially function as a way of showing the wealth and power of the ruler.
So, I actually have a system of FTL travel that I've worked on for the FT Kassaran alien race. Long-story short, it isn't flashy, it isn't super cool, but it is effective in doing it's job. It's the difference between a belly-flop into a pool, and a dive into the same pool.
The long-story of it came from the idea of 'how do I develop a system that requires an analogy akin to penetrating an actual barrier, such as with sound?'
My thought process had to start at what the Lightspeed boundary actually is, and that is causality. The Reality/Causality Barrier cannot in effect be broken lest it generate a paradox, so how would something correct itself if it did somehow break through this barrier? Well how does sound correct itself when an object slips past it? It creates a 'shockwave'. The stress this causes eventually imparts enough resistance on a supersonic object to push it back into regular limits. How can this be- in effect- recreated by looking at causality? Well the obvious answer would be to create a shockwave of light to symbolize a ship 'breaking light-speed' and then another when it drops below it, but I immediately threw out that idea for perhaps something a bit more new.
When a ship needs to break causality, it can't be rendered in reality, or more accurately the changes to it can't be rendered. You effectively have to 'remove' the point from observation, which implies perhaps something regarding Schrodinger and feline abuse, but in reality just means the point never actually 'updates'. If you remove any and all causation that is to effect an object, it's perhaps more accurate to say nothing happens to it at all. The ship, simply stops. The lore I wrote behind this effect is the Mass-Lock Effect, or what was known to early FTL-travelers as the 'Dead-Man's Lock'. The absolutely massive surge in all forms of radiation on the ship creates the flashing effect most FTL systems aesthetically create, is actually a sign of trying to Mass-Lock a point rather than a ship, which generates the gateway and is notably less energy efficient.
The Kassaran in the Nobis Pacem canon eventually determined how to travel faster than causality by Mass-Locking themselves instead. Instead of creating a gateway, which is akin to creating a slide or a chute to travel through, you retain your local position in space. As you build up inertial resistance to slowing down, you generate a constant power-draw which eventually reaches critical and snaps. This snap creates the stasis effect often seen by ships that witness a Kassaran vessel jump into FTL. It will first seem like the ship grows briefly more bright (as energy builds up observably), before suddenly becoming dark, cold, and technically lifeless. Attempted observation at close ranges of Kassaran ships at full Mass-Lock is highly dangerous as these ships create highly turbulent gravitic ripples in response to this phenomena. In fact, the strength of these tidal forces can signify the proximity of the ship in zero-space, to a point in the observable universe.
Entering Mass-Lock, the ship outwardly appears to suddenly stop moving, or becomes static as the Theory of Relative speeds would state. All radiation that comes from the vessel slowly gets shifted blue externally until the ship simply darkens and fades from view. How do you know if the ship completes it's jump? It simply begins to fade and the gravity turbulence ceases. If the ship is still visible or has a notable tidal forces originating from it, it hasn't completed the jump as being able to observe the ship in one location prevents it from appearing somewhere else in equal amounts. Of course re-entry into reality is something far more interesting as the ship will often begin appearing at great lengths of time before it ever actually 'arrives'. Much like how a craft that travels at supersonic speeds can still be viewed before it passes you, but cannot be heard, a ship travelling at 'superluminal' speeds could be seen if an observer was in the correct place to do so at the correct time, but that ship cannot be interacted with as it has yet to fall back into Causality. In this way, I address the shockwave problem as not being a flashy visual show which needs to be made, but a distinction in observations which needs to be made.
A ship that is observed travelling at superluminal speeds in the Kassaran canon, does not appear in some bright flash of light unless it is suddenly dispelling a massive buildup of energy from having self-bridged the gap between it's original location and a newer location. If the ship can afford to take on that load of heat or background radiation, it likely is travelling a very short distance or is needless large for its payload. Most ships cannot travel in this way and suffer strong penalties for this inefficient method of travel. On the other hand, a ship that shifts in and out of causality is able to do so with high degrees of efficiency over a comparable amount of time for less energy spent overall. While this doesn't aesthetically
look as cool, the implications of an armada of Kassaran warships that simply fade in from the depths of space over a time enable most energy built up to be shed quietly. You can look at it as the difference between diving into a pool and belly-flopping. One imparts less resistance as it shows excellent understanding of hydrodynamic shaping while the other imparts high resistance, usually at high cost to the user, in showing less understanding of hydrodynamic shaping.
Now, there is something to be said on 'Warp' in the Nobis Pacem Universe, the FT universe I've set the Kassaran in. It is rarely used as it actually is incredibly dangerous without an extremely well-developed array of lighthouse arrays. Is it used? Yes. How often? Not often. Mostly people developed warp-travel for interplanetary travel within a system as it is easy to track items moving around within a star system, but beyond that, even the Kassaran have problems tracking most objects. Because Lighthouse arrays often take up a lot of energy to broadcast a signal into Warp-space, they usually are only used in and around documented stars with a significant buildup of infrastructure on the scale of Dyson clusters or rings.
End Rant/Tangent.
Posted: Tue Dec 11, 2018 6:04 pm
If a star-state happened to find, for example, a traversable wormhole with its paired mouth on the other side happening to open-up sixty parsecs "down-the-line" toward their destination, it would make sense to install infrastructure that helps stabilize the wormhole (if the player goes with the idea that wormholes dissipate over-time through evaporation or some other means) or otherwise assist with flight control, customs and security enforcement, etc. and incorporate it into the lane network.