If you’re wondering what’s going on, why not jump back to the beginning of this short story and read it all in one sitting? Complete at 15 pages of Sci-Fi goodness!
That wraps it up for our little detour into the past on the Pathfinder! Hope you enjoyed it. Next up: well, my original schedule had me posting new pages from Chapter Three right away, but since we’re so close to the holidays I think I’ll hold off until the New Year. That seems more auspicious to me, to begin again at the beginning of the year. I’m hope you’re not all too cheesed off? I’ve got some fun stuff planned for the next three weeks, while I try my hand at Galaxion-style strip comics. (That’s “strip” as in “newspaper strip”, the classic 4 panel stuff, in case your mind started off in some other, um, unnecessary direction.) And then to kick off the New Year I’ll post my multi-page “Story So Far” featurette, hosted by Fusella, and we’ll get back to normal pages as of Tuesday, Jan 6th. Sound like a good plan?
And, lest you think I’ve been ignoring the recent comments… OK, folks, you got me! I have no proper answer right now about how their old propulsion method relates to the new Jump Engine, nor how long it takes them to get home. See, this is all stuff I used to know, until I started messing about with details of my universe here and there, and now I’m desperately trying to make it all fit neatly back together again on the fly (so to speak). I spent what free time I had over the weekend trying to figure it out, but I’m going to need a little more time to work on it. Plus, I expect a lot of you people know a lot more about the workings of the real universe than I do! So anyone who’s interested, maybe we can all have a discussion about relative distances and such on the forum (seems like the proper place for it)? I’ll post a link once I’ve got the basics straight in my head, and start off the conversation. Then with your help I can, hopefully, avoid looking like an idiot in the future! (Yeah, unlikely, I know, but we should always set our goals high!) 
Wait, what? Five parsecs? The “long way” better be some kind of faster-than-light drive, or they’ll be travelling for 20 years even at close to light speed!
Yeah, I’m sorry, but ‘five parsecs’ is not an exciting distance if you have any kind of star-faring civilisation with FTL ( Alpha Centauri is one parsec away; so five parsecs is five times the distance to the *very closest star*). It’s still ‘on the block’, not even out of the suburb.
If you *don’t* have FTL, five parsecs is an eternity, and you have a civilisation that never leaves their solar system, ie, never meets any aliens, never does any kind of planetary exploring.
On the other hand, Wikipedia says even with a cosy five-parsec distance (so across a diameter of 10 parsecs), there’s still 50 stars. I did not know that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nearest_stars
The odds of any of them having habitable planets, though… I wouldn’t put it very high myself.
That’s like saying that a cross-Atlantic flight isn’t exciting once you have airplanes. I’m sure the Wright Brothers and Lindbergh would disagree!
I suppose we’ll have to wait until Tara starts up the FTL discussion in the forum before the issue can be “put to bed”, but my thinking is that star-travel in the Galaxioverse has been time-consuming and costly up until now – i.e. you can get to the nearer stars faster than Einstein says you can, but hopping across the Galaxy on your lunchbreak is impossible. Just because you have FTL doesn’t mean that star-travel suddenly becomes easy.
Looking forward to the Return of Chapter 3…
My point is that five parsecs is not, in itself, a trans-Atlantic kind of distance. The Milky Way Galaxy is (very roughly) around 30,000 parsecs across and 300 parsecs thick. The closest nearby galaxy, the Large Magellenic Cloud, is around 54,000 parsecs away.
It all comes down to how ‘fast’ you can make that kind of jump and how much in the way of resources it takes.
But if you’ve already got a ‘space merchant navy’ kind of operation like TeRSA and IP apparently is, with small ships crewed by a few dozen people that don’t use anything fancy in the way of life-extension and that can travel to multiple star systems on the order of days or even hours, that means existing FTL tech can make multiple, single-digit-parsec-distance kind of jumps on that order already.
Getting to *any* star means making at least a 1 parsec trip – most will be much further – so given the trips we’ve seen in the short stories already, with no particular limitations of ‘oh now it will take us a hundred years to get there’, I’d have to say an average, run of the mill IP/TeRSA ship would have to be able to pull at least, oh, ten or twenty parsecs in a couple of weeks.
I mean, it’s possible that all the human colonies and the Myradi are located with that 50-star five-parsec volume from Earth. But most of those stars are very dim dwarfs, not at all Sunlike.
Sorry, interrupting the story for science, I know. But this stuff is just a Wikipedia click away now.
Interesting. My impression was that it’s not “a trans-Atlantic kind of distance” in the sense that the distance isn’t all that important — Lindbergh did that on a piston engine, after all. The impressive bit was that they made that distance in 20 seconds, on an engine that was actively exploding out from under them. It’s more like the development of the jet engine. And they’ve just figured out how to maybe make it not explode out from under them.
Oooh, debate in the comments! I love it!
I can give you some facts in brief: the Galaxion universe (meaning, the entire distance the human race has traveled) is not all that big. They can’t cross the galaxy or anything. Nor is my universe full of Earth-like worlds: you can count the number of life-supporting planets they’ve encountered so far on one hand, and you don’t even have to use all your fingers. The rest of the colonies out there have all been terraformed. My one alien civilization, on Myrad, is about as far as anyone has ever gone, and the Pathfinder did not go that far (also, in another direction).
I’m still amenable to changing the distances, though. We’ll talk about it soon!
“…an average, run of the mill IP/TeRSA ship would have to be able to pull at least, oh, ten or twenty parsecs in a couple of weeks.”
Assume that the standard drive covers 20 parsecs in a week. Then covering five in twenty seconds in a jump engine makes for an improvement factor of 7560.
This would be like comparing walking to suddenly going ~10 km/sec, which are comparable to the speeds of our space ships. Now you could get to the moon in 10 hours, and get anywhere on the earth in something like a half-hour. It’s also just about the escape velocity of earth. Improving human speeds from walking to escape velocity took thousands of years of history, so doing it again over the course of one experiment will not be laughed away.
So, it’s not like the new drive would let you get anywhere you haven’t already SEEN, just that now you can GET there. The human sphere of “places you can get reasonably travel to, in maybe a month or so on ship” would become 7500 times larger in radius! It’s a nice compromise, I think, getting humans off the little island of the known without handing them the entire universe all at once.
I can’t agree with you Doss, 20 parsecs a week? That’s 3375 times the speed of light!
Those speeds are unattainable even for Starfleet! Using http://www.anycalculator.com/warpcalculator.htm that’s warp 15 in TOS scale and since TNG established that warp 10 is the upper limit, it would take Picard 15 days at warp 9.
The General seems damn impressed with five parsecs. So I can’t see anything except the new jump drive in Galaxion that puts their space travel tech beyond anything in the Star Trek Univ. Tara has stated that the Galaxion Univ. is still pretty small.
Leaving the science behind for a moment. This is science fiction not science function.
I would vote for an analogy to 18th century sea travel, and declare that it would take about 2 weeks to arrive at Senesta, and just over a month to return to earth.
Edit: So I can’t see anything in Galaxion that puts their space travel tech beyond anything in the Star Trek Univ.
I did some commentary on this on the previous page; rereading showed me it was really 3.5 parsecs in 20 seconds, which works out to 2054.8 light years per hour; this is the diameter of the Milky Way galaxy in less than 48.7 hours.
Also, it being a “jump engine”, it might be able to go much further in (about) the same time.
As for their current FTL, even if they currently can go 50 times the speed of light (which seems plenty fast to me, honestly), they’d need 11 weeks and 6 days to get back to Earth.
Plus the 3 weeks Chief Anderson is saying he needs to rebuild the engine system….
And if they really had gone 5 parsecs, it would take 17 weeks at the same speed. Again plus repair.
Also at this speed, a trip of 1 parsec (3.26 ly) would take 3.4 weeks. Certainly doable, without excessive effort, but hardly something you do just on a whim.
In comparison, if my calculations are correct, for this trip they went at an equivalent of 18012262.5 times the speed of light. Yes, that’s 18 million. (The calculation is 3.5 parsec/(20sec) * 3.26163626 ly/parsec * 3 (20sec)/minute * 60 min/hour * 24 hour/day * 365.242199 days/year = 18M ly/year = 18M times C (all done with google calc))
In light of this, I’d say the trip is quite exciting… and while the distance itself might not be “exciting” per se, it’s certainly nothing to look down at – and getting home could be a problem, depending on what supplies they have on board.
I feel I should say, though, that none of this detracts from my enjoyment of this comic…
And another point is, this story does not take place in our universe (assuming the writer isn’t a time-traveler anyway), so who’s to say that the laws of physics aren’t slightly different there? Besides, it’s not like we know all the laws of physics in our universe either…
Hmm, thats something i not really thought about: That humans seem to have left the solar system already up to this point of story…
But i like the analogy from Baxter. Now we go from 18th century sea travel to (hypersonic) passenger plains. That is, in terms of trade, information value, touristic/private traveling, warfare!, interstellar politics and culture, a real paradigma change…
But I, as old scifi fanboy and rolegamer, could think of a limitation: perhaps the new jump drive lets you travel faster, but i guess that he can´t be run forever. Perhaps the energy source or other things must recharge for a longer time, or something like that. Sou you could not cross the milky way in just two earth day lengths…
And to answer Nate: the nearest extrasolar planet which is probably habitable, is orbiting Gliese 581. And thats about 6 parsec from earth…
*waves to space*
Rule one about warp drive travel in Star Trek still – after four decades – adds up to this: It moves at the speed of plot requirements.
Trekkers – like me – have done a lot of arguing and handwaving over the years about what the warp factors really mean in terms of “effective multiples of ‘C’” but it always ends up varying in accord with the needs of the script or novel or comics or audioplay writer.
So don’t worry about comparing Galaxion to the hero ships of Trek. Ever.