Faster Than Light

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NoXion
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Faster Than Light

Post by NoXion »

Faster Than Light

"That's why they call me Mr Farenheit... "

FTL technologies use a variety of methods to enable macroscopic objects to beat a beam of light to a destination. None of them strictly speaking, actually allow an object to achieve superluminal speeds, but take advantage of various loopholes in physics or the conditions of different parts of the universe in order to do so. While FTL technologies can revolutionise interstellar civilisations, they can also play merry hell with their concepts of causality, as it only the fact that light has a speed limit that imposes a causal sequences on events. Certain vectors and trajectories through 4-dimensional spacetime, regardless of the FTL method used, can enable one to travel forwards or backwards in time as well as space.


Faster Than Light Drives

FTL Drives allow starships to go from one star system another without resorting to networks of wormholes, transgates, stargates etc, or having to undertake STL journeys lasting decades, centuries or even millennia. A starship equipped with and FTL drive has it's range, flexibility and combat effectiveness magnified by many orders of magnitude.


Distortion Drive

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Also known as the Warp Drive, the Distortion Drive enables FTL travel by using large amounts of gravitons and negative energy to warp and distort space, creating a travelling wave of spacetime which the starship "rides". Steering and acceleration/deceleration is achieved by appropriate manipulation of gravitational and negative energy fields. Due to the high energy requirements of the Distortion Drive, ships equipped with this type of FTL drive tend to be very large, but recent refinements have allowed Distortion Drive-equipped vessels to be significantly smaller. This technology scales upwards beautifully - starships massive enough to have an appreciable gravity field (such as Battlemoons, Civilisation Ships and mobile Megastructures) can use their natural gravity field as a source of power for their Distortion Drives.


Q-Drive

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The Quantum Tunneling Drive, or Q-Drive for short, enables FTL travel by magnifying a quantum phenomenon into the macroscale. The core of the Q-Drive consists of a hollow sphere of ultra-strong material enclosing a volumetric dodecahedral lattice of stabilised neutronium, with a preon hyperfluid filling the space within the lattice. The Q-Drive is in effect an enormous quark, experiencing and producing quantum effects on a macroscopic scale. The Q-Drive extends an "uncertainty field" when activated, encompassing itself and the vessel. Quantum uncertainty results in the Q-Drive core being inherently unstable, requiring the presence of specialised observation devices throughout the Q-Drive and the vessel to collapse the uncertainty field of the Q-Drive in a desired manner. These observation devices are also used to influence the Q-Drive core towards quantum tunneling in the intended direction of the navigator. In operation, the Q-Drive teleports itself and the ship in a series of instantaneous "hops" to a distance of roughly a light minute (approximately 18,000,000km) to a light hour (about a billion kilometres) in standard models. Precision limitations of the Q-Drive and a host of other factors mean that the longer the hop, the greater the navigational error. Due to the extremely dense composition of the Q-Drive, there is a rather fuzzily-defined upper limit to how large a ship with a Q-Drive can be - this can be offset somewhat by using an array of "synchronised" Q-Drives, but too many Q-Drives and effective synchronisation becomes impossible.


HyperDrive

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The Hyperdrive enables a starship to access Hyperspace and it's various levels, taking advantage of their different topologies and geographies in order to take a shortcut to the intended destination. HyperDrive effectiveness is determined by how much one knows about the geography of Hyperspace and it's various different levels and what changes if any occur on those levels (some levels of Hyperspace enable one to take very quick shortcuts, but only at certain times and places and/or under certain conditions).


HyperDistortion Drive

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With the discovery of at least one additional spatial dimension still "attached" to the three that we are familiar with, a successful attempt was made to extend Distortion Drives into that extra spatial dimension, resulting in the HyperDistortion Drive. Travelling through the extra spatial dimension can be likened to travelling in the extra spatial dimension around Flatland, with HyperDistortion Drive-equipped ships able to travel in extradimensional space "above" or "below" the skein of the standard three spatial dimensions that we are used to.


Transuniversal Drive

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The Transuniversal drive is one of the rarest FTL Drives in the known universe - it is also the most powerful. The Transuniversal Drive takes advantage of the fact that different universes do not line up spatially or temporally - one could leave our universe to enter another, take three steps to the right, and end up galaxies away. One could also end up far away in time as well as space. Time flows at different rates in different universes relative to our own, backwards or forwards, so a trip to another universe could mean that when on returns one could end up seconds, days, millennia or eons into the past or future of one's native universe. Effective use of Transuniversal Drives means a good knowledge of other universes and how they line up temporally and spatially with one's native universe. As there are a potentially infinite amount of universes, this is no mean feat. What this means is that Transuniversal Drives are the reserve of those with lots of memory storage and processing power - in other words, super-intelligent AIs. While rare, there are some Transuniversal Drives that are "friendly" to those without a brain the size of a planet.


Gates and Portals

Gates and portals enabling FTL travel were invented before FTL drives for starships, but even with the invention of FTL drives they still have tremendous value to the civilisations that posess them.


Transgates

Transgates take a material object (starship, person, cargo pod etc) and convert it into a stream of information that is sent through Cyberspace to a Transgate at or near it's destination, which converts it back into a material object. While the advent of dedicated wormhole networks means that one can beat a beam of light in this manner, it was not always so. Before the construction of wormholes, Transgates only enabled one to travel at the speed of light, not faster - but even then, it was still faster than even the fastest interstellar torchship. Multiple copies of the signal are sent in different directions and recombined at the destination in order to minimise data loss and ensure a successful transfer.


Krasnikov Tube

A Krasnikov Tube is a cylindrical area of space that that has been "compressed" meaning that travel within the Krasnikov Tube takes a much shorter time than without. The spatial compression is usually maintained an array of hyperdense negative matter nodules.


Wormholes

These are spacetime distortions which allow practically instantaneous travel between their mouths. They are typically mined from the "quantum foam" which permeates our universe, with one of the expanded wormhole mouths remaining in-system while the other is sent to the destination. Once the wormhole has reached the destination, a more or less permanent FTL link has now been established between the two star systems. However, wormholes can be destroyed (but not easily) so they are often quite heavily guarded in systems located in dangerous volumes. There are two types of wormhole, the spheroidal wormhole connecting up to two locations at once, while the polygonal wormhole connect as many locations as it has faces.


Hypergates

Hypergates connect normal space with Hyperspace and it's various different levels, enabling ships without a HyperDrive to take a shortcut through Hyperspace, and was the very first method of getting into Hyperspace.


Stargates

Stargates manipulate a dimension/space that collapsed at the instant of the Big Bang to create a gateway between locations lightyears apart. Unlike most other gates and portals, Stargates vary widely in size, from massive rings that Battlemoons can pass through to doorway-sized Stargates that can connect different rooms on different worlds. Some volumes make very heavy use of Stargates, meaning that one can travel many hundreds of lightyears simply through walking through Stargates.


Cosmic Gate

A hypermassive ring (which can be made of degenerate matter, a loop of cosmic string, or a toroidal black hole) that uses it's mass to hold open a hole in spacetime that leads to another universe. Also known as a Kerr Ring.


Teleportation

For the longest time, teleportation of macroscale objects was but a fantasy. But then along came Quantum Teleportation, and finally the art of teleportation was the subject science fact rather than science fiction. With the discovery of various new areas of physics, more methods of teleportation were discovered and put to use.


Quantum Teleportation

Used for bulk transportation of simple matter (IE nothing ordered below the nanoscale), and usually uses a direct physical connection, but laser connections (and other focused transmissions) can be used if signal loss is within acceptable values.


Hyperspace Grid

This piece of technology "shunts" an object from one normal space location to another via Hyperspace. Hyperspace Grids can also be used to move objects between normal space and the different levels of Hyperspace. Grid-to-Grid teleportation is easier and more reliable. Hyperspace Grid teleportation was a precursor to Hyperdrive technology.


Quantum Entanglement

Uses quantum entanglement to transmit matter instead of information/quantum states. Transmission is only possible between "synchronised" teleport machines.


Transrelativistic HyperDistortion

A spherical transrelativistic array, or Transphere for short, Bends an area of space through extra spatial dimensions at hyperluminal speeds to take a very quick shortcut to the destination. Transphere can only teleport objects from within themselves to anywhere else - they cannot teleport objects outside of the array.


Spacetime Exchange

Two equal but arbitrary volumes of spacetime are made to swap places instantly, all the way down to the Planck scale. Momentum and energy etc are conserved during this process. A remote Spacetime Exchange transciever can send distant objects to and from any location. The reactionless "Displacement Drive" is simply a Spacetime Exchanger configured to continually swap the location of the ship in the intended direction of travel.
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Magister Militum
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Re: Faster Than Light

Post by Magister Militum »

What program did you use to create the graphics?
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NoXion
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Re: Faster Than Light

Post by NoXion »

Magister Militum wrote:What program did you use to create the graphics?
MS Paint for the grids and general composition, IrfanView to resize the spaceship, and the GIMP to do the distortion effects.
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Ford Prefect
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Re: Faster Than Light

Post by Ford Prefect »

That is really cool. :D Do you reckon you'll add more such graphics?
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Magister Militum
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Re: Faster Than Light

Post by Magister Militum »

NoXion wrote:
Magister Militum wrote:What program did you use to create the graphics?
MS Paint for the grids and general composition, IrfanView to resize the spaceship, and the GIMP to do the distortion effects.
That's actually quite impressive, NoXion. It'll be nice to see what else you'll come up with.
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Germania your game is through, now you're gonna answer to... The Freestates! Fuck Yeah! Now lick my balls and suck on my cock! Freestates, Fuck Yeah! Coming in to save the motherfuckin' day! Rock and roll, fuck yeah! Television, fuck yeah! DVDs, fuck yeah! Militums, fuck yeah! - Shroomy
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