Hi everyone! I have to say, you guys took me a little by surprise by expressing so much interest in the details of engine speed and distances traveled! Here’s little old me writing what is unabashedly a “soft sci-fi” story, but the moment the word “parsec” threatens to bring a little astronomical substance into the picture, the comments page springs to life! But honestly, I’m not complaining. Reader involvement is the best thing ever! **happy dance**
My writerly instincts have been to leave as much of the fine details of How Things Actually Work as I can get away with behind the curtain. I mean, I knew from the outset that I’m breaking all kinds of (currently) fundamental laws of physics with FTL drives and artificial gravity and probably lots of other things, too—I consider these to be part of the necessary suspension of disbelief which we all must engage in to enjoy our science fiction space operas. And given those assumptions, almost any explanations I try to give will sound like technobabble. Or else they’ll sound flawed and dated within ten years, as our real life scientific discoveries continue.
Of course, it’s exactly those world-building details that lend a story weight and solidity, and make it the kind of place you want to spend some time in. So enough of my wishy-washing and let’s get to the details! Well, I call them details, but right now what I’ve got is sort of a general sense of things. But since many of you have added your insightful thoughts on the matter in the comments on both the Girlamatic site and the Galaxion site, I’m hoping that together we can turn my rough ideas into something a) more detailed and b) sensible.
~deep breath~
I think of the Terran Sphere of Influence (a term I just whipped up for the occasion) as being separated in two parts: the inner sphere and the outer sphere. The inner sphere contains the inner colony worlds, and obviously a bunch of them are right in our own solar system, terraformed planets and moons. I had imagined there would be one or two more systems (such as around Alpha Centauri), each with several colonized worlds, within a few weeks travel from Earth.
The outer sphere is less well traveled, but contains some vital colonies and outposts. To get to the nearest of these is a couple of months travel. The farthest colonies are about 3 months out.
At the outer limits of the outer sphere sits Myrad, living on which is my one race of intelligent aliens, who have been alluded to but have not yet appeared. Myrad is roughly 4 months out, but not lined directly up with the outer colonies—it is a bit more than a month’s travel to get from Myrad to the nearest colony.
The Pathfinder probably ended up 3 months away from home, but not terribly near any of the colonies. And then add on the 3 weeks of repairs, so you’re looking at close to 4 months to get home.
Within these spheres, there is a lot of unexplored space. Overall the total number of established colonies is not enormous—my current thinking is around 2 dozen, maybe a few more. Most of these will be in the inner sphere, and most will be grouped, so one star will account for several. This does not include outposts. I’m guessing TerSA maintains maybe another dozen of these.
So by extension… if 3 months travel gets you 5 parsecs, then Myrad, at 4 months away, is about 6.67 parsecs. Is this big enough to encompass all my colonies?
I grant you, even five months of travel doesn’t sound like much compared to the several years NASA is currently considering for a trip to Mars. My original travel analogy of regular engines vs. the Jump engine was traveling around the world on a sea-going ship vs. making the same journey by plane. Airplanes revolutionized the way we see the planet, and I expect Jump engines would do the same for space.
So… any thoughts or suggestions? From a story point of view it’s the time spent traveling that’s the important thing—the actual distance, bizarre as it might sound, is flexible. I could even go smaller in the size of my spheres, for example, if that would make the FTL speeds less outrageous… though I calculate their average FTL speed to be the Star Trek equivalent of Warp 3.5, by that Warp Speed Calculator which Baxter pointed out.
Bleah! I have now run to the end of my brain power. Your turn!
Just a quick note – at those travel speeds (5 parsecs over 3 months) Alpha and Proxima Centauri (our closest neighbours) are about 3 weeks out, rather than one week.
If you want to look at all the stars within 3 months travel (about 40 of them), I’ve found this link:
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/Hbase/starlog/strclos.html#c2
Also, found this as a possible candidate for your alien homeworld:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2007/apr/25/starsgalaxiesandplanets.spaceexploration
It’s about 20 lightyears out, which is just a smidge less than 4 months travel.
Eight years onward, and even more attention being paid to Gliese 581′s collection of worlds! Four of them so far detected, plus a debris disk!
“And given those assumptions, almost any explanations I try to give will sound like technobabble. Or else they’ll sound flawed and dated within ten years, as our real life scientific discoveries continue.”
One way to include plausible and a kind of “soft” technobabble, is to refer to an ‘effect’ or phenomenon named after a fictional scienticist, while not actually giving out much details. You know, stuff like the Zeeman effect, DeValle phenomenon, etc. As in: “We can materialize basically anything thanks to the Komans effect.”
Maybe that helps?
“So… any thoughts or suggestions? From a story point of view it’s the time spent traveling that’s the important thing—the actual distance, bizarre as it might sound, is flexible. I could even go smaller in the size of my spheres, for example, if that would make the FTL speeds less outrageous…”
Space is HUGE! Even at speeds like 30 times the speed of light, traveling is still going to take some serious time. Outrageous speeds is what you need in a space age.
It sounds to me like some real world physics might come to the rescue here. Being a closet sci-fi writer wannabe myself, I’ve been reading up on the work of Miguel Alcubierre and those that followed up his findings. Alcubierre was the guy who, back in 1994, found a solution in Einstein’s theory of General Relativity that allowed for a kind of FTL travel. The bad news was that his “warp drive” would require more energy than existed in our universe to make it work.
Flash forward to 2000 and a scientist named Van Der Broek figured out a way to reduce the energy requirements to “manageable” levels (hint: make the warp “bubble” very, very, small and make the inside bigger than the outside). Here we get to some real numbers: VDB figured that to push a 100 metre (on the inside) bubble and whatever it contains to 10 x lightspeed would need about 0.06 grams of mass-energy (or: .03 grams of matter mixed with .03 grams of antimatter – collecting the energy from the mixing is an exercise I’ll leave to others ^_^). Pushing the same sized bubble to 100x lightspeed, however, requires ~60 kilograms of mass-energy – roughly a millionfold increase needed for a tenfold increase in speed! I did a BOTE conversion of the mass into energy and realized that no existing form of power generation could do the work: only a matter-antimatter reaction could get you the energy needed to reach those speeds. And you’ll need to manufacture the antimatter – an expensive proposition no matter how you slice it.
This should fit into the Galaxioverse with no changes in anything we’ve seen to date – it sets an upper limit on existing FTL travel (even at 100 c, five parsecs is still a Big Deal), and makes going even faster so expensive that TerSA and the IP would both love to have something that can go faster but without the huge energy expenditure.
Okay, I’m coming to the end of my coffee break, but I hope this gives some food for thought.
By the way, if you want to have a close star with planets, Barnard’s Star (5.9 ly, or just over a month’s travel away) is thought to have them. That might make a good candidate for part of the Inner Sphere.
Argh! What I meant to include (but completely forgot like the ditz that I am) that if you want to have the Inner Sphere be a little more tightly bound together than the numbers would suggest at the moment (so they *are* about one week apart), you could have some sort of pushers in each of the relevant solar systems that can accelerate ships to go, say, four times faster than they would otherwise go. If they’re fairly resource intensive, then they could be set up in the relatively well developed Inner Sphere, allowing relatively fast travel there, whilst at the same time isolating the relatively frontier of the Outer Sphere. Does this strike you as an interesting idea?
Concerning Gliese 581 and Myrad – there is a wealth of information on Gliese 581 at solstation.com: http://www.solstation.com/stars/gl581.htm
Personal opinion is that this world would not be a good candidate for a civilization – the chances of this being a “heavy Venus” are pretty high. A few other possible candidate suns might be: 107 Piscium (a type K sun 7.4 pc away), Beta Hydri (type G, though hotter than our sun, also 7.4 pc away), and Xi Bootis (binary star system 6.7 pc away).
I am a little surprised that the Myradi are so close – and that they’re the only race that humanity has encountered thus far if they are so close. Assuming that the distance seperating Sol and Myrad is typical of suns sheltering native civilizations, then we get a possible number of 5 billion civilizations in our galaxy. That’s a lot – and far too many to assume that they *all* stayed home. Of course, the Myradi may be *unusually* close and other races may be much farther away…
I am also guessing that the Myradi are not overly expansive since it appears that our sphere of influence envelops their homeworld (or perhaps they, like we, have not exploited their sphere of influence sufficiently to start “rubbing shoulders” with us). Perhaps their homeworld has special requirements that are even rarer than Earthlike planets? Perhaps they’re just happy where they are and only go elsewhere just to look around? Or maybe they’re so old that they’re pulling back to their homeworld to do the galactic equivilent of “rocking on the front porch”?
It will be interesting to see how the Myradi take to humanity developing a much faster stardrive…
Just a note, to Andrew and others: it seems to me that the jump drive needs *more* energy than the “standard” drive, since the power circuits for the standard drive couldn’t take the load of the jump drive.
However, this /could/ be an effect of needing all that power *right now* instead of spread out over the time in transit, which is much longer with the standard drive; in other words, it could still be equal or less total energy requirement(in e.g. MWh), just more amps in less time (so more MW, but fewer h).
Still something to think about if we’re going to come up with a technobabble piece for it.
As a sidenote: fun to hear that some actual science is based on making the inside of something bigger than the outside of it.
Morning!
I usually follow the link from Belfry Comics to the girlamatic site (tha link *could* be changed, if this is better), but ah. The forums.
Ahem.
My personal favorite habitable planet is Tau Ceti. 11.9 light years away, it’s just slightly colder than our sun. No earth-like planets are found there yet, but the planets found so far by astronomers are pretty much lucky coincidence so there’s no reason to give up yet.
Both earth-like planets and big moons surrounding gas giants could be candidates. Also, of course, we should be able to survive on less hospitable planets than we were born from.
I’m sometimes an amateur writer too, and though *my* heroes have little more than a fission engine to help themselves with (as any substantial collection of antimatter is a disaster waiting to happen), having to survive and thrive for more than a hundred years on a relatively small ship is part of the story. It’s hardcore sci-fi in a way, I wanted to do something realistic. A tenth of the speed of light in a «salad spinner». Maintaining a small ecosystem, etcetera. (If I only knew how to draw readers. Or comments…)
I wouldn’t go for Alpha Centari. Close, yes, but with two red dwarves cricling each other like Halleys Comet is circling the Sun, it isn’t the easiest thing to survive. There’d be a very limited choice of stable orbits, for one. When the two planets comes close, it gets much hotter, for another.
An intelligent species this close is *close*, but perhaps the came there to explore. There could be many reasons for peaceful coexistence, as long as we don’t compete too mach for the same resources. Humanity has lived well with other species here on earth, as far as we fill different niches in the ecosystem. There’s life at ten thousand meter’s depth of seawater, and if living off sulphur from deep sea volcanoes is plentiful living somewhere, it could develop into intelligent life. We *humans* wouldn’t be so interested, so we’d probably let them live in peace. What would *they* need air for?
There could be a ton of other explanations of course. Perhaps it’s an embassy for some big, old civilisation, keeping just outside of human interest spheres?
I always figured if «battle of civilisations» would be travelling two thousend years to attack someone, then waiting two thousand years for the others to retaliate, then they’d be *really* grouchy.
Wikipedia has a rather solid article on faster-than-light travel, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light . It isn’t that easy.
However, the theory of relativity is a lot about relativity, regarding from where you observe from, and if you see things from inside the ship you’re travelling in, you could well travel five parsecs in the matter of a second. It’s just, other people, on earth for example, wouldn’t see it that way.
If Pathfinder accellerated to the speed of light (as seen from earth), they’d disappear from sight (getting a red shift then just disappear from any non-faster-than-light method of observation as they accelerated), then disappear for a lot of years. If Pathfinder slowed down again (to stop, say after having travelled a hundred light years of distance)), they could be observed again from earth. But the light would take a hundred years to travel from Pathfinders new location to earth. So if you observe from earth it would take a hundred years, plus the time the people on Pathfinder observed as travelling, for Pathfinder to arrive at their new location.
If the folks at pathfinder found they used five days to travel a hundred light years (which is entirely possible within the theory of relativity), the observers at earth would find it to be a hundred years and five days (or possibly die waiting).
The people at earth would say time had slowed down for the travellers, so the hundred years and five days happened in five days for them.
This is Einsteins theory of relativity. If they found ways to travel five parsecs in a few seconds, then back again in some months, they’d be pretty much the same. People they’d meet back at Sol, however, would be a lot older.
If they’d been able to beat that, the staff of Pathfinder would have to travel backwards in time. They’d have to arrive at their destination before they left, so the light from their new destination started towards earth earlier. Add that (negative time) to the hundred years light would need to trave to earth, *then* the observers at earth would find that Pathfinder had used less than a hundred years to travel.
So, then. Enough words for a day, I believe.
If we start worrying about the proximity of the Myradi, that brings the spectre of Fermi’s paradox which is somewhere we probably don’t want to go. In their particular case, I guess it depends on the state of their tech. If they didn’t manage to develop FTL before contact, then there’s not a problem about whether or not they’re expansionist.
Edorfaus: yeah, I had to grin when I read that about Van Der Broek’s work (though maybe he’s a Gallifreyian in disguise?)
Also, though I am not a card-carrying physicist (so take this with a grain of salt) but it looks to me like Alcubierre’s fields (and their variants) are almost a “cook-it-yourself” FTL system – you might be able to tweak the parameters to squeeze more speed per energy or do something else with it. In the case of storytelling this means we might be able to posit some future scientist who was “building on the work of Alcubierre and Van Der Broek back in the 20th century” to come up with the stardrive used in the Galaxioverse. Bottom line is – even if there’s something in particular about Alcubierre’s work that doesn’t fit Tara’s vision for the Galaxioverse, it can still serve as a good enough connection between the real and made-up science, and allow for both the stated distances and travel-times to work.
The Jump Drive, however, need not use the same basic physics as the exisiting drive – there might have been some theoretical physicist who dreamed up a new model to supplant General Relativity that allowed instantaneous jumps and then John Nelson took that theory and actually made it useful. (Heck, Alcubierre’s work would be in the same idea – after all, if you asked any physicist in 1993 if you could use Relativity to go Faster Than Light, the consensus answer would have been “no”…)
Hey! The talks have stopped!
I didn’t mean to do that, if I did so.
First, I’m not saying antimatter would be so dangerous *always*. It can’t be held by any kind of matter, as even the tiniest speck of antimatter would burn a hole in it. Particles with the same electrical charge (such as in nuclear kernels) *can* be stored in a magnetic field, which is what they do now. But I have feeling they need electronics to hold such a field and lose that for a millisecond… Boom!
Particles with the same electrical charge have tendency to flee from each others too, which makes a pressure in the container. It can’t be stored densely or the particles would overpower the magnetic field.
Parhaps they *could* store a minor black hole in their ship. That would do it, technically, but it wouldn’t be the safest thing in the world either…
If they could somehow forego their mass for a little while, it would be easier for them to accelerate ro near light speed. Physicist have the theory that mass is kept in some special little particles, so if you could keep those particles outside of the ship for some while? It’d make accelerating very easy. That’d explain their being able to stop after their journey too, their mass would come back to them and they’d get back to the speed they already had. Plus, getting rid of mass, they could use that enormous energy to push forward, too.
But that’s a loose theory, even less researched than the ones above I think.
And it’s not FTL either…
Feh. What about going back to calling it a plot device? Semi-believable so it wouldn’t take too much away from the story, but… Hollywood has seen worse plot holes and survived, haven’t they?
I agree that the «holy grail» of being able to explain this is exciting, but this story has other qualities, don’t you think?
Back to the semi-believable stuff we’re not going to explain too much. (The Pathfinder has battery compartments included (according to one of Taras efforts at an explanatation on Girlamatic). When are we going to see to see the children’s toys?)
One thing: If Pathfinder could trust the station they were going to, to catch them and slow them down (so they wouldn’t just pass them by and sail into unknown space…), they could use all their energy to accelerate. That would help them a lot, especially if a majority of their weight is fuel.
Have a ship meet them, attach to them and help them slow down. It’d look realistic.
Another idea: Have the Myrads not compete for the same resources that we humans do. It’d explain their relative peace, and I think it’d be a fun experience. What about a relatively light moon, or a non-poisonous (to them) gas giant (like a warmer variant of Mercury) where their way of fighting gravity is being natural swimmers? Choices aplenty!
Just make good, fun reading out of it. Okay?
I suspect the talks “stopped” either due to holidays or due to what I call “internet attention drift” (I’m sure there’s an official term for it – I’m just too lazy to look it up right now ^_^). Probably both.
Anyway, leaving the nature of what is the “conventional” drive aside for a moment and going back to distances, colonies, etc, I do have a question for Tara: just what do you mean by “colony”? Are we talking 1 colony = 1 settled world (planet, moon, asteroid) or 1 colony = 1 discrete settlement from a given sponsor or culture?
@Andrew and Harald, yes, you are right, the talks stopped mainly due to the approach of the holidays!
And whew, I can hardly keep up with all the ideas you guys are pitching!
Let’s see: usually when I talk about a colony I am referring to a colonized world. Many of the colonized worlds would have more than one settlement, especially the nearer worlds.
The Myradi, I admit, have not been fully developed. That is to say, they were fully developed at one time– they used to look a lot like Cait, there– but I ditched the idea. I have some mostly vague notions, now. The idea that they use different resources is a good one; I’ll think about that one for a while!
Anyway, I’ve got more post-holiday stuff to attend to now, but I’ll get back to this soon (I hope)!
I like the idea about ‘pushers’ on inhabited worlds. A lot of thoughtful post-Star Trek space-opera-y SF tends to pick this option (I’m thinking of Babylon 5 and its ‘jump gates’) because it gives you ‘trade routes’ and choke points which are very useful for setting up space battles and explaining how you can have an ‘urban’ central core which is mostly civilised and a ‘rural’ hinterlands where it’s slower to get places and there are less facilities because there aren’t ‘highways’, but you can still set stories in both types of places and slip from one to the other fairly quickly.
If everyone can just warp everywhere in a mostly empty 3D volume, space wars become less about defending ‘ports’ or routes and more about defending all that empty space, which seems difficult; so there probably wouldn’t really be any ‘defense’ as such and just a Cold War-ish balance of terror: I can drop a relativistic or FTL missile on your planet anytime, you can drop one on ours, so all the rest is diplomacy. Realistic, perhaps, but not really as much fun as going all Horatio Hornblower or even Pacific 1942 and having grand fleet actions.
Of course, that assumes that the Galaxioverse *is* your garden-variety space opera, where battles and epic struggles are the norm. One thing that attracted me to Galaxion was that it did not have the “E.E. Doc Smith” or “Legend of Galactic Heroes” feel to the story.
If I had to compare Galaxion to anything in existing science fiction, it would have to be the generic “flavour” of science fiction stories that were published in Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact during the 1980s and 1990s, under the tenure of Analog’s current editor, Dr. Stanley Schmidt. The stories there – based in space or not, based in the future or the near-present – gave worlds that felt real, and tales and characters that felt human. More often than not, these were people you could meet at work, or while walking down the street. They were mostly people you’d like to chat to. While space stories and even far-future stories were published in that era, the old-style “Space Opera” was not. Nor were “fantasy-disguised-as-science-fiction” (e.g. computers that could grant wishes), though a few “science fiction disguised as fantasy” stories made the grade.
That said, aspects of science were still important to the stories – as Schmidt himself put it in a recent editorial, if it’s set in the future, but everyone behaves like they’re in the 19th century, it’s not science fiction. Unfortunately, in too much “science fiction” these days, the Hornblower-style space opera is returning, arm-in-arm with the “We-Can’t-Understand-A-Thing-The-Characters-Are-Doing-So-It-Must-Be-SF” style, and I think it will weaken the genre to irrelevance, if not kill it outright.
*ahem* Bottom line is that so far, Galaxion has – for me – found that wonderful middle ground where I’ve found the best SF stories growing. I hope for a stronger science element, yes, but to have that stronger element and retain the human feel of the story would be the best of all worlds.
Okay, I kinda got a little polemic and off topic there, so let’s get to some technical speculation about the colonies.
Given Tara’s definition of one colony = one settled world, and given that the rough size of the Terran Inner Sphere of Influence would likely extend out to Alpha Centuari and not much farther, let’s take a look at the neighborhood (excluding Sol).
The Alpha Centauri trinary system presents some opportunities and problems for settled worlds, depending on what you’re looking for. Solstation.com has the details, but the basic break-down is as follows: Alpha Centauri A is a G0 main sequence star, pretty sunlike but more massive and hence brighter than our Sun. Orbiting it (okay, both stars orbit each other) is B, a K2 main sequence star – cooler and dimmer than our sun, and outputting less UV. The two suns have a close approach of 11 AU – and this suggests that the “safe zone” around each star for planets is 2.2 AU (any further out from either star and a planet either assumes a figure eight orbit, freezing at certain spots in its orbit, or gets flung outsystem). Lastly, C (also known as Proxima Centauri), is a M2 red dwarf almost a tenth of a lightyear away. Red dwarfs are not good candidates for liveable planets, but domed colonies, or O’Niell-type space colonies would certainly be feasable.
There’s been some debate over whether or not Alpha Centauri A and B could even form an Earth-sized planet, with the rough answer being “not very likely”. So our worst-case scenario are a few small worlds the size of our Moon, or even asteroid belts. That said, A or B might luck out and have one or two Mars-sized worlds orbiting them; probably not liveable “right out of the tin”, but certainly good “fixer-uppers”. Such worlds would likely be dry, even drier than what Mars is looking like now – A and B would have swept away a lot more comets and ice-rock asteroids than what existed to help give Earth her oceans. (Still, we know that humanity in the Galaxioverse is terraforming Pluto, of all places, so the dryness of these worlds might not even be a problem worth mentioning…)
So I would gauge Alpha Centauri as a good site for two, maybe three colonies, with a possible one or two fully-artificial colonies at Proxima.
While nobody’s found any yet, there is a small possibility of a dim brown dwarf at a closer distance to us than Alpha Centauri. Brown dwarfs are a locale that don’t get much use in science fiction (yet!), but there may be more of them than there are of “ordinary stars” and they may even have worlds that could be made liveable. Picture a brown dwarf with a world like Europa, only larger, orbiting it. Tidal heating would give us an ocean under an ice-sheath, and if this world orbited close enough to the brown dwarf, it might get enough heat from the dwarf to transform part of that ice-sheath into an ocean as we know of it, and a surface temperature at this ocean similar to what we can see at our artic and antartic locations. A hardy location, with only a dim red natural light source, and you’d still have to get an atmosphere that won’t permanently freeze out, but you might see cities carved into the ice shores of such an ocean.
One or two of these brown dwarfs at a 2 to 3 lightyear distance from Sol might give us a couple of extra colony spots in the Inner Sphere, with some interesting local colour for whoever grows up there.
While it is ultimately Tara’s decision which of these wonderful ideas get incorporated in any form into the “Galaxioverse” (a term I LOVE, by the way – who coined that?), we both thought it worthwhile for me to put in my two bits.
I like Seanna’s idea of “pushers” that give ships a boost in whatever direction they’re going. In my mind, these pushers would likely be expensive to build and maintain, so having these in place should in no way change the desire of both TerSA and IP to have a faster way of “getting there,” wherever “there” might be. Certainly, if “there” is someplace new, on the “outer rim” to borrow a Bab5 phrase, then there wouldn’t be a quick way of getting back home once they got “there”- and hence the lure of the Nelson Drive, which, theoretically, /should/ work in both directions (although it hasn’t yet!). As we haven’t progressed far enough in the story for the characters to have figured out just what’s happened, I won’t speculate on this thread any further. As Tara’s original post said, though, there iare the Inner Colonies, and the Outer Colonies. I like the potential created by pushers for giving the Inner Colonies a more cosmopolitan, important feeling, because it’s quicker to travel between them and to Earth, than it is for those in the Outer Colonies. While the Outer Colonies are important for the resources they contribute to the whole, they are far newer, less established, by comparison to the Inner Colonies, and having the wherewithal to build a pusher in the right place to entice more traffic out their way would be difficult to come by. Those in the Outer Colonies are much like the frontiersmen exploring the wild west, and life often is not easy.
I love all the suggestions for possible habitable planets. Makes me want to figure out how to do a 3D map hanging from my ceiling to figure out where everything is! I think in my conversations with Tara, we figured there may be only one or two worlds that Terrans have happened upon in their explorations that were deemed colony-ready without any terraforming. Well, one colony in particular, and it’s pretty far out from Earth, but we allowed that it /might/ not be unique in our Galaxioverse. Most colonies had to have some sort of terraforming done to make them human friendly. And while they are doing terraforming on Pluto, I don’t believe Vessa said it was /easy/ work. Each location would have its own particular challenges, and the process would need to be tweaked to accomodate it. I could certainly see a terraformed colony on a world that does not have easy access to a water supply, which creates unique struggles for the colonists – so Andrew’s suggestions for small moons in the Centauris, or a brown dwarf here or there, are appealing to me. There would have to be a valuable resource there to make the struggle worthwhile for TerSA to pursue having an established colony. A chance to make a big buck, if you will. I guess my point here is that I wouldn’t rule out any particular star or location based on what we know about them today, because once we, as a human species, actually get there, we could find things to be very different than what we can see from Earth, or find other potential.
As for the current conventional drive, I would say there has to be a certain suspension of disbelief for this all to work. We need to assume that the drive is “safe” to use, however it works. If it’s a miniature black hole, well, then, we’ve come up with a way of harnessing it (Hello Dr Future Scientist), and it’s been in use so long with no mishaps that it’s considered safe. The new, unknown, in this story is the Nelson Drive and in order for the contrast to work, the way they’ve always travelled has got to be comfortable and familiar to those using it.
The Myradi, well, since we have only had veiled references to them and what they meant to our character’s notions of the universe, I don’t really want to comment on. Anything I say could be changed by Tara at any time, and be made null and void, so I’ll leave them for another discussion thread.
I love the speculation here too.
Now I am wondering exactly what the roles of TerSA and Interplanetary Patrol are. My guess is that TerSA is the rough equivalent of NASA (because of the soundalike name) while IP, the bigger and more ‘military’ type organisation, is the rough equivalent of the US Dod (perhaps specifically the Navy or Air Force) – but other than the Myradi who don’t appear to be an immediate military threat, I’m wondering why there’d be a big quasi-military space force without any hostile neighbours? And if they’re both ‘civilian’, then what are the distinctives between them?
Are they backed by different countries, governments, corporate consortia, or political philosophies? Is IP the ‘patrol’ in the sense of being an ‘interstate domestic police force’? If so – why is it so big? Is there a really bad ‘space crime’ problem? Are there armed insurrections or terrorists or pirates that need to be put down? Is there a cold war going on between the colony worlds that most people don’t like to think about? Or are there a lot of natural disasters, or food shortages, with IP something like a space Red Cross or Salvation Army – or a non-military but socialist government in human space that believes in pooling resources? We know TerSA does ‘science’ of a kind and is the ‘underdog’, but IP does science too, and has a bigger budget… and both organisations have military-sounding ranks… so what’s going on behind the scenes?
The reason why I ask is that things like ‘starfleets’ or ‘standing armies’ are extremely expensive and so their existence tends to drive politics and character conflict. From what little history I’ve learned it seems the British Navy and Empire grew out of the need to protect merchant shipping and trade monopolies from 1) pirates, and 2) other competing colonial nations – and the 1) often turned out to be agents of 2). (‘Privateers’ and ‘Letters of marque’ and other such fun things). But space doesn’t have a 2) yet, unless we bring that conflict with us.
Well, all you guys have got me a little worried that there aren’t enough stars in our 5 (ish) parsec sphere that could possibly produce terraformable planets, but there are clearly some, and I tend to agree that we really won’t know what it’s like until we get there. Humanity’s vision of the universe is constantly changing anyway, so I don’t mind taking a few liberties. Within reason.
About the “pushers” concept– does it make sense to use that kind of thing in conjunction with some sort of FTL drive? I think I’d always had the idea that it was one technology or the other. Having those kind of things to defend would indeed make for a more interesting space battle, but just my luck, I’m not planning to write any big space battles! I guess with writing stuff like this you never know until it’s over, but right now it’s not on my agenda.
@Nate, to answer your question about TerSA and IP, TerSA is a very large corporation that has similarities to NASA, but they are private sector. They are technically not a monopoly, but in practice they might as well be. Nearly all the colonies were founded with TerSA capital and are supplied by TerSA ships. I wouldn’t call them an evil corporation, but as with any overly large company that supplies a necessary service, there are… problems.
IP, on the other hand, is public sector, and their function is something like the Coast Guard. When ships get into trouble, they are sent to help. You could also think of them like the International Rescue team of Thunderbirds fame. They probably do deal with space crimes, but it’s not like there’s any big organized crime out there.
Re: pushers. I think it depends on the underlying physics of your world as well as the needs of the story and the society within it.
From the story/society angle, based on what has been said before, it seems to me that the existence of pushers/stargates would be a political/funding problem for the Nelson Project. After all, why develop a new stardrive when you already have gates that let you do the same thing in practice? Just keep building gates at whatever stars you want to open for development and relocate exploration ships to use said stars as bases. As long as you’re not looking to fill up the Galaxy in a tearing hurry, there’s no need to develop anything faster.
Plus, one might not need fast speeds to maintain a more developed feel to the Inner Terran Sphere – just lots and lots of traffic. Trade routes between Sol and Alpha Centauri, for example, might see ships entering and leaving several times a week. It might still take you three weeks to go from one to the other, but if you miss one ship, you still won’t have to wait long for another ship to show up.
From the physics angle… we’re still very much In The Dark on how conventional FTL travel works in the Galaxioverse beyond a set speed. The mechanics of FTL might make or break the stargate concept.
Does conventional FTL operate by shifting a vessel into a “hyperspace”, travelling to the destination using ordinary engines, and then shifting back into normal space? This might be gate-friendly as you could have fixed stations that shift vessels to and from hyperspace without difficulty. It might also allow for a unified FTL physics, where the Nelson Jump Drive simply goes to a level of hyperspace that until now was only talked about by theorists.
Or does conventional FTL employ some form of warp field or bubble a la Star Trek / Alcubierre fields? This is less pusher-friendly (though not impossible), and may require even larger amounts of power than simply fitting a ship with a drive and keeping it fuelled.
Re: habitable stars. I think the issue is that the Inner Sphere has very little “real estate” compared to the entire Terran Sphere (1 parsec radius versus a 5 parsec radius) The outer sphere does have a lot of stars that could be suitable homes for humanity either with already liveable worlds or easily terraformable ones (by easy I mean “liveable after a century of concerted effort”).
Within 20 light-years of Sol (almost 7 parsecs) there are 2 A-type stars, 1 F-type star, 6 G-type stars, 16 K-type stars and 88 M-type stars. Any one of these could house liveable worlds but the F, G, and K type stars have the best chance of possessing same. M-type stars have the problem – some might say challenge ^_^ – of being so dim that a world warmed to Earth-level temperatures would also be tidally locked. Not a showstopper per-se, but beware the near and far poles on those worlds. Most M-type stars are also flare stars, with radiaton bursts that put our Sun’s activity to shame. Again, not a show-stopper, but colonies on worlds like these will likely have to be built underground, to keep people from suffering skyrocketing cancer rates every time their sun burps.
A-type stars, conversely, produce enough UV that you’d need one heck of an ozone layer to keep it to a bearable level. They are also fairly short-lived stars; with an average of only a couple hundred million years before they run out of fuel. Again, terraformable worlds are possible there, but native life would be extremely unlikely. One might find a “scumworld” there – bacteria present in deep oceans or in cracks going deep underground, but nothing more complex than a jellyfish…
That, of course, assumes natural evolution similar to what we’ve seen here. Some things might jump-start the process from seeding the world (panspermia) to truly fast-and-fierce evolution (Harlan Ellison’s Medea, or the planet Isis from Robert Charles Wilson’s book Bios). Or perhaps past terraforming attempts by others. Who knows who was in our galactic neighborhood a million years ago?
I was reading over the comments (all very good) and pondering some ideas they led me to…
First, the “pushers” (aka star gates). The simple solution is to make it a requirement that in order to send a vessel through a gate, you need a receiving gate at the far end. If that is the case, a starship must still be dispatched from Earth or one of her daughter systems via slower than light travel to the destination system. Such an expedition will take generations to arrive, but once the gate is deployed future travel is for all practical purposes instantaneous, and limited mainly by the energy costs to send vessels through. It’s possible that gate travel does take some time (since there is nothing that says that the trip has to be appear instantaneous to the rest of the universe) in which case a gate may be “tied up” while ships are in travel from one system to the next. In that case, Earth would need to look into building multiple gates in each solar system, and at coordinating a very careful schedule of transits to make travel possible.
At any rate, development of a truly faster-than-light drive, such as the one being tested on the Galaxion, would remain a very high priority since it would allow people to expand the gate network faster. Additionally, if a war broke out, either between competing Human factions or with another race, gates are both a strategic asset and a liability. Should the enemy destroy your only/last gate in a given system, you now need to spend generations sending another vessel to open a new gate before you can return to that system. With a FTL-capable ship, you now have a way to resume contact much sooner.
As for colonies, most people mistakenly assume that colony worlds would be like what we live on here on Earth, or planets that we can readily “terraform” to meet our needs. I frankly think most colonies would be enclosed stations, either orbiting a body such as a moon or inhospitable planet where we are extracting needed resources, or built directly onto (or inside) the surface of such a body. Why try to completely recreate a new environment planetwide, especially when the planet’s natural environment will be “fighting back” against the changes, when it is far cheaper to build a contained colony with the environment you desire? With a bit of work, it would be possible to build a large colony that provides the illusion of an open, Earthlike environment even under these circumstances, and it would still require far less time and resources to setup and maintain that trying to force a planet’s environment to completely change to our demands.
As for an energy source to power all of this, perhaps Humanity has finally developed a way to build fusion power reactors? They would likely require large amounts of hydrogen for fuel, but that might be harvested from gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn. The majority of planets that we have found in our search for extra-solar planetary bodies have been actually larger than these planets. mostly because our limited techniques for finding planets can only locates ones that are large enough to produce a noticable impact upon their host system either by causing the star to slightly shift in it’s orbit or the planet actually occludes/dims the star’s light briefly as we observe it.
In any event, robotic craft should be able to skim the upper atmosphere of these gas giants to bring back load after load of both the hydrogen needed for fueling mankind’s power needs, and other complex chemicals we would want for industrial and even medical uses. We would also want to harvest metals and other minerals from asteroids or moons/planets to provide raw materials. We may even be using these colonies to produce industrial goods or materials that are too dangerous or polluting to produce here on Earth, allowing mankind to try to rebuild the planet’s ecosystem when we can draw upon offworld resources and production to meet our needs.
As for the Myradi, we really do not know very much about them or their relations with Earth as yet. They may be peaceful and trade openly with us, or reclusive and want little to do with us. Or they may even view us as potential competitors (remember, just because we may have completely different biologies doesn’t mean that we won’t want to establish enclosed colonies I mentioned above in the same areas to recover the same resources). It may be that Earth needs the new drive system because it is worried about a possible threat, real or imagined, from the Myradi. It’s also quite possible the Myradi have several colonies of their own, and the one system we’ve encountered them in is NOT their home.
I’d go for the “reclusive/not-yet-understood” theory myself: as Fusella mentioned, TerSA only has a handful of people who know the Myradi language (or dominant language, assuming they have more than one…) and if there’s going to be any meaningful trade, knowing the language is essential.
Wow… I was away for a bit, figuring that with weekly updates I could let a few build up & working on my own, not scifi, project (although we could…)
Anyway. Had some time so I thought I’d jump in.
I really think you’ve nailed it with the inner/outer sphere concept and your travel distances and times sound fine. I agree that the travel times should be long and arduous. I’m also going to agree with tero on the fictional scientist explanation:
Pioneer Jim – “Dad gum Cap’n. Y’all surely did gets yerseves out heres in some big all-fired rush.”
Captain Daring – “Well Jim, thanks to the proper application of the Gambolputty principle and our Himbleeisen Inverter, you’re not as cut off from the civilized worlds as you thought.”
Number One – “Mmmmm that right. Mean big heap surprise for Myradi too.”
Pioneer Billy – “Golly Captain Daring, what does a Himblee… Humbly… Himblebee?”
Pioneer Jim – “Dag nabbit boy. Don’t go askin’ the man your idjit questins. It don’t make no lick a sense ta me neither, and it ain’t has ta. Just so long as it works.”
Number One – “Mmmmm It do that.”
And as far as terraform-able planets and their orbits… Don’t worry about it. Fifteen years ago, who would have said that super-Jupiters could even exist inside the water belt?
It’s the story and the characters we’re here for, not the tech.
I’m staying. (and probably listing to too much otr Lone Ranger)
Baxter
[/lurk]
Okay, I’ll add my two cents because I love sci-fi, and I love Galaxion (can’t access the forum boards for some reason, but that’s another thing entirely).
I don’t think a colony has to be a moon or a planet. Torii, bernal spheres, cylinders, and all manner of other shapes have been tossed around as potential space colonies. In terms of that, there are probably a huge number of colonies that are just mining outposts, like the old mining towns of Nevada. When the sector is used up, they move on. Also, do you have any idea how many people a moon or planetary colony can support? We’ve got 7 billion on Earth thus far, and while I think we’ve reached capacity, I am overruled by the gene pool. So don’t worry about colonies, Tara, there is plenty of room and to spare for them.
I also think that IP has plenty of work for it to do, considering. Chew on this for a while: how does one truly recognize a pirate ship? It’s not as easy as it looks, especially if the ship launches fighters or smaller ships, and hides in an asteroid belt while the small ships strip the target. Also, in terms of organized crime, I’d think there’d be plenty. It would be underground, as on Earth, but black markets and trafficking in drugs and people would still be profitable. Think Mafiosi, not “Pirate King”. Nor is this something that we ever need to see or know about. How much does your average citizen know about the Russian Mafia?
Engines. Ah, engines, the bane of any sci-fi writer’s existence. For me, I’d say that big ships have a primitive form of FTL that takes weeks to months between systems, and smaller ships use jump gates built by larger construction ships. That makes it suitably limiting, in terms of speed, and means that a faster, more efficient form of travel, like this newfangled engine, will make many, many people interested. As the man said, I don’t need to know how it works, as long as you say it does, I’m fine.
As for story. This is quite possibly one of the best Sci-fi’s that I’ve ever read, because it’s something different. I’ve met these people in the real world before. I’m even friends with some of them. (Whereas I’ve never met someone even remotely like Han Solo or Jean Luc Picard) They don’t fly around blowing up pirates or fighting a war, and they aren’t strapped to a gun at all times. The women don’t have more skin showing than a burlesque dancer, and the men aren’t all tall, dark and handsome. Their problems and adventures are more or less mundane (except for the obvious “Whoops, we just jumped into another reality” and that could happen to anybody who tries to go through the fabric of the universe a speed so fast it boggles the mind). The adventure is the vehicle, but the characters are the story, and that’s something really rare, both in modern fiction in general, and in science fiction in particular. Kind of makes me wish I’d thought of it.
[lurk]