Faster-than-Light Technology

Moderator: Blackwing

Post Reply
Blackwing
Posts: 160
Joined: Wed Nov 05, 2008 1:05 am

Faster-than-Light Technology

Post by Blackwing »

Timely and frequent communication and travel are the two most important things in an interstellar community.
If the various planets that make up a species' or faction's sphere of influence are not constantly in touch with what the leadership many light years away is thinking, then whole planets may drift steadily away from a centralized leadership and from the ideals that unify that faction or species into a coherent entity.
And likewise if the species and factions cannot stay in touch with each other, then there is no way to engage in diplomacy, trade or interaction of any other kind. Neighbours who only talk occasionally every ten years might as well not spend the energy needed to communicate at all and rivals who cannot keep track of each other never know when the other's going to decide to take one of their planets or worse launch a full scale invasion.

For this reason, Faster-than-light travel is essential to the daily operations of an effective interstellar state. FTL communications, sending signals to another solar system and getting a response within seconds is also useful, but secondary to actual travel as signal for help that reaches you within a minute is useless if it takes you ten years to get there and an order transmitted to the local administration of a system twenty light-years away is useless if you cannot check whether it was followed within your lifetime.

The various species and factions in the universe of Loaded Dice use a wide variety of methods to travel faster than light some of them use a method unique to them and some of them use a variety of methods within a single species or faction, often at the same time and some methods are used by multiple species or factions.

The following is a short list of the most widely used or prolific technologies used for FTL travel and communication in Loaded Dice.

Humanity:

Starting off, as usual, with the humans, we immediately see both a plethora of technologies, some unique, some widespread used within the same species.
In the humble beginnings of human space travel, before the invention of more flexible technologies, humanity as a whole, began colonizing space using naturally occurring phenomena as method to reach the distances required.

Watering Holes and the Camel, Bedouin and Wayfarer drives

Watering Holes, as humans call them, are points in our natural 'Praxis' (a technical term for an area of space-time with a single coherent set of the laws of physics) where it is fairly easy to 'punch' your way into another Praxis. Specifically the Praxis humans have termed the 'Desert wind Praxis'. In the Desert wind Praxis the laws of physics governing most matter are similar to our own, but the physics for momentum and kinetic energy are vastly different.
In the Desert wind, objects that are in motion stay in motion, but the further they get away from a Watering Hole (back to our Praxis), the more speed they gain and likewise the closer they get to a Watering Hole, the more speed they lose again, back to their original speed (they never, however, slow down to a halt even on top of a Watering Hole).
That said there is no actual navigation in the Desert wind. Objects that are not in motion cannot possibly get in motion in the Desert Wind, though the only way to actually stop is to collide with an object with the exact opposite momentum of the momentum your vessel has. In addition, Watering Holes seem to be the only object in the Desert wind with gravity and that gravity is considerable.
As a result, any object that enters the Desert wind that does not collide with an object going the exact opposite way will inevitably be drawn towards the nearest Watering Hole back to our Praxis along or close to the path it had when it entered.

Humanity first discovered a Watering Hole in our own system on a routine flight from Earth to Mars during the last months of it's botched terraforming procedure. The Sol Watering Hole orbits around the sun in the opposite direction from Earth and Mars at half the speed of earth, roughly between the two planets (actually, it's orbit is about fifty kilometres closer to that of Mars than it is to the orbit of Earth). The Sol Watering Hole is only moderately stable by the observed standards, in reality it's naturally stable enough to pass through only when it is either within 0.1 AU distance from Mars or within 3 AU distance from Earth and even then only if it is more than 12 AU distance away from Jupiter.
It took the original crew of the vessel a little under two months to get back to our Solar system, five weeks and four days more than their intended travel time and if they had not been carrying supplies of food for the crew of the ISS-5 and ISS-9 in orbit around Mars they would likely have starved (they were able to get oxygen and hydrogen fuel from a planet in one of the star systems they visited).
The crew brought back several 'riches' that made scientists and politicians alike consider further exploration of the Watering Holes worth further effort. Among them were images of a aggregation disk in the late stages of forming a star system (up close) and a number of samples from a world that had actual plant life similar, but unmistakably distinct from Earth's (the use of non-chlorophyll heat-based photosynthesis was a clear indicator).

The first 'drive' system using Watering Holes as a method or propulsion was the 'Camel' system. The Camel system was not actually a propulsion device in an of itself (none of the Watering Hole drives are), but rather a sophisticated set of active and passive sensors capable of detecting stable Watering Holes both in our Praxis and in the Desert wind. Standard operating procedure for using the Camel was to enter the Sol Watering Hole at a predetermined angle and then scanning for exits in the Desert wind near enough to the trajectory to be detected, but far enough away for the ship not to be pulled there immediately. This allowed early explorers to map out a large number of Watering Holes reachable from the solar system, but once that was done, there was little further use for the Camel.
During this time, no efforts were ever made to make a permanent colony on any of the reachable planets, because scientist realized that since the Sol Watering hole was unstable most of the time, this might also be the case for other Watering Holes (and indeed it was, during this early age of exploration, several ships were lost when the Watering Holes they'd entered became too unstable for them to return and several planned expeditions to discovered Watering Holes had to be cancelled because the exit that had previously been detected was simply gone.)

From the first days of this exploration until it's heyday years later however, there was one thing the 'Camel Jockeys' as the crews of the Camel vessels called themselves, noticed. Namely that in the Desert wind, ships would sometimes slow down back to their initial speed for no apparent reason, then speed up again pas a certain point. The theory was that these slowdowns occurred when a ship was passing over an unstable Watering Hole that could not be entered from the Desert wind, but that was nevertheless still active enough to exert it's gravitational pull.

In order to move further, research was done into what exactly was causing the Sol Watering Hole (and others) to become unstable. Initially it was assumed that this was a result of the gravity of the planets and that this was why Watering Holes were commonly found in orbit around stars. However further testing (bringing an asteroid nearby that should increase gravity just enough to stabilize the Sol Watering Hole half an hour early) showed this wasn't the case. The presence of the asteroid, rather than opening the anomaly early, actually delayed it's opening by two days.

This lead to the the discovery that rather than gravity, it was actually the radiated heat that caused the Watering Holes to become stable. Watering Holes store up radiated heat from nearby planets and when the stored energy hits a 'sweet spot' it opens. Too much heat will cause it to close again, however, which is why Jupiter's closeness causes the Sol Watering hole to close again (the other planets are either too far away to have an impact or are shielded too much by the Asteroid Belt, which Jupiter is close enough to to penetrate). This heat also seems to be converted by Watering Holes into Gravity in the Desert wind, resulting in Watering Holes being the only object in the Desert wind to have gravity (which is also why it is thankfully devoid of large objects to crash into).
Since no actual heat exists naturally in the Desert wind, it is thought that it is the generation of heat by ships in it that causes them to suffer no damage (only a change of momentum) when hitting another object. In fact collisions between low or zero temperature asteroids that have somehow entered the Desert wind usually result in the destruction of both objects, where as two ships colliding results in no damage at all and a collision between a ship and an asteroid tends to have no effect on the ship at all (while blowing the asteroid into atomic dust).

Eventually these discoveries led to the creation of the Bedouin drive. This consisted of a Camel sensor suite combined with a short range adjustable hot fusion heater and a sort of deployable shield that allowed a ship to temporarily shield a Watering Hole from excessive heat. In addition, a permanent mobile shield with a built in heater was constructed for the Sol Watering Hole, to allow it to continue functioning during 'Jupiter heavy' and 'Earth/Mars deficient' periods. Similar shields were constructed in parts and shipped to several key star systems 'close' to the Sol Watering Hole, determined by travel time. One of these was the first planet discovered to have plant life outside Earth. A planet later named Che.
The Bedouin system allowed ships to open Watering Holes from the outside, meaning that they could get into the Desert wind, however it did not allow them to get out unless their destination Watering Hole was either stable or actively opened from the outside.
As result, travel through the Desert wind was safer, since you could at the very least always get back to Earth and it was more practical, since certain areas were always accessible.

However, it did cause the original age of space exploration to finally fade away almost completely. With a viable method of keeping a stable connection to other star systems and the interesting business and science applications this presented, the governments, companies and science institutes of the solar system refocussed their efforts on cultivating those few systems that had turned out to be interesting. Provisional 'colony' space stations were built around the planets Che, Spindle, Kismet, Farthest Reach and the colourfully named 'Pallas Artemis' and efforts were made to colonize the planets themselves. Massive research was done into Che's plants, Pallas Artemis' strange alien animals and the unusual natural phenomena around Farthest Reach.
With the Watering Holes between Earth and it's colonies permanently open, a polymath scientist called Artephius Roserian designed and built the Sol Relay Hub, a device capable of transmitting signals through the Desert wind to other colonies.

However, ultimately, the companies grew restless for more profit, the scientists wanted more challenges and the governments wanted the greedy bastards and the eggheads to stop pestering them and further exploration was necessary.
An extremely high monetary reward was offered to anyone who could discover a method to open Watering Holes from inside the Desert wind (heat, it was already known, didn't work).
The discovery, eventually, was made by a woman called Justitia Borbo (née Rosekreutz), who found that to open a Watering Hole in either Praxis all one has to do is run a direct current through it. Justitia's 'Wayfarer drive' was an incredibly simple 'brute force' approach to the problem. A ship equipped with the 'Wayfarer drive' simply has two extrusions on the front connected to a heavy duty direct current generator. If these make contact with a Watering Hole, it is forced to open and stay stable for a short time, regardless of whether there is too much or not enough heat.
However, since one cannot patent shoving a prong on your ship and hooking it up to the power supply, Justitia also developed an improved sensor suite capable of detecting unstable and otherwise invisible Watering Holes in our Praxis. She did this mostly as a side project to her investigation into the properties of the strange asteroid field near her home planet of Furthest Reach. In honour of her new 'Wayfarer drive', Furthest Reach started calling itself 'The Wayfarer Colony', jokingly at first, but eventually it became the colony's official name.

With the new Wayfarer drive, Humanity could now start large scale colonisation, as no Watering Hole was closed to them. In addition, many groups on earth felt that they were 'losing their cultural identity'. This started the Theme World project, creating such worlds as Jarlsheim (nordic/germanic), 日本 新しい (japanese), Al Salahdin (middle eastern, arabic), Tribelands (Native American, planet consisting of many different islands, one for each tribe or tribal alliance), Americana (United States), Moira's Crossing (Gael) and many others. Most of the Theme Worlds relied on outside goods for their sustained survival and are assumed lost since no sign was found of them after the Dark Age.

The most interesting discovery that the Wayfarer drive allowed was the discovery of Mudhole. Mudhole is a planet which has a Watering Hole on it's surface. (Hence the name, it's a Watering Hole and a bunch of dirt.) This makes it the most stable Watering Hole in the known universe, as the planet's atmosphere regulates the temperature of the anomaly. Interestingly enough, the fact that the atmosphere isn't sucked off the planet by the Watering Hole raises some interesting questions about how this phenomenon works.

Of course, in modern times, Watering Holes and Camel, Bedouin and Wayfarer drives are all things of the past. It took a long time after the Dark Age for the Desert wind to become stable enough for travel again and today the Jarlsheim Protectorate uses it for easy shipping and the Calconite Alliance for transporting those members who can't travel on ships using Chaossence Ore Reactors.

More about Chaossence Ore Reactors, Roser Jump Engineers and the techs of the other species... later.
So Einstein was wrong when he said "God does not play dice". Consideration of black holes suggests, not only that God does play dice, but that He sometimes confuses us by throwing them where they can't be seen. ~ Stephen Hawking
Blackwing
Posts: 160
Joined: Wed Nov 05, 2008 1:05 am

Re: Faster-than-Light Technology

Post by Blackwing »

The period between Watering Hole travel and Chaossence Ore Reactors

The advent of truly unrestricted space travel for the human race came about on Wayfarer during the age of reconnection that followed after Melchior Roser restored the damaged Relay Hub and contact between the colonies and Earth was gradually restored.

The people of Wayfarer had long been investigating the unusually dense asteroid field in orbit around their star and found that the metals in these asteroids had very strange properties.
While only a relatively small part of the asteroid field consisted of metals, only a few billion tonnes, they were present in nearly every body in the field. More over, attempts to extract them as per standard procedure for extra-planetary resources had met with catastrophic failure.

Heat-based cutting equipment would regularly short out or even blow up during attempts to extract the minerals and many prospectors attempting to extract them through electrolysis completely disappeared altogether along with the asteroid they were trying to harvest. Navigation equipment in the field was unreliable at the best of times and at least one incident with an ionic thruster left the vessel using it encased in the rock it was moving away from at the time.

The Wayfarer government eventually denied all access to the field, going so far as to open fire on anyone approaching it, with the exception of a small research team led by Justitia Borbo. During this time Justitia initially developed the Wayfarer System in an attempt to create a sensor suite more reliable near the asteroids (and also because grant money on the project was running out and the reward offered for a reliable way to open Watering Holes would keep the project going for years).

For many years, work on the reclamation project progressed steadily as Justitia's team slowly began collecting samples of metallic ores from the rocks, chiselled off by hand.
Experiments on these ores were conducted mainly in shuttles converted to mobile labs far away from the ship used by the team as their bas of operations and this was just as well as they tended to get damaged quite a bit during the experiments.

After a few more years of research, Justitia concluded the following rules for handling 'Atypical Meteoric Metals' for the Wayfarer Colony board of Weaponry and Munitions, considering them to be the most likely to be interested in the results:
- Meteoric Gold Ore: Exposure to large amounts of electricity results in immediate atomic fission.
- Meteoric Iron Ore: Exposure to heat beyond 200 degrees Celsius results in massive Electro-Magnetic discharges.
- Meteoric Copper Ore: Exposure to gravity produces additional gravitational force equal to one order of magnitude of the original gravitational force for every five cubic feet of ore, approximately.
- Meteoric Composite ores: These are frequently too volatile to handle, however, Meteoric Galena (an ore containing Lead and Silver) is, interestingly enough, only one fifth the weight of regular Galena.
- Any Meteoric Ore rock containing both Gold and Iron Ore, obviously, self detonates immediately if exposed to heat, although sometimes the substance simply annihilates itself without trace.

Further studies... Which will require further funding, may produce further useful results.

Sincerely,
Justitia Borbo-Rosenkreuz,
Head of the Meteoric Ore Research Institute
Naturally, funding increases soon followed as the team started shipping small amounts of Meteoric Ore back to military production facilities, both around the Wayfarer Colony and Earth

At this point Arthephius Roserian, the designer of the Relay Hub and by that time head of the Earth-based Scientific Secret Service, sent his grand-nephew and Justitia's cousin to assist her. This man, called Lot Roser, was one of the famous 'Aleus doubles', referring to a tendency, every few generations, for a member of the family to resemble one of the original heroes of the family, Aleus Roserius. Other 'Aleus doubles' include Felix Rosenkreuz, Chance Roserian, Bonifacio DeLaRosa and Dice Roser.

Over time, the team experimented further with the ores until eventually they succeeded in discovering a procedure to separate the metallic contents from Meteoric Ore. To this day, the method for doing this is a well kept Wayfarer trade secret.
In honour of their discovery, the team forged a ring of 'liberated' Meteoric Gold and sent it to President Nguyen on Earth.
Before the present arrived however, terrorists detonated a powerful bomb inside the Sol Watering Hole as the President awaited the gift at it's mouth. This killed the President and disrupted the Desert wind for many centuries, starting the 'Losing Years' or Interstellar Dark Age.
Later investigation discovered Meteoric Ore residue near the origin of the blast, indicating the explosives made of Meteoric Ore were used in the assassination.
So Einstein was wrong when he said "God does not play dice". Consideration of black holes suggests, not only that God does play dice, but that He sometimes confuses us by throwing them where they can't be seen. ~ Stephen Hawking
Blackwing
Posts: 160
Joined: Wed Nov 05, 2008 1:05 am

Re: Faster-than-Light Technology

Post by Blackwing »

Writer's note: What really happened.

In the bit above (which I wrote over two years ago and damnit that's far too long because there was still more), the narrative ends at the disaster which disrupted the Desert Wind.

Now people who remember the previous iteration of Loaded Dice may remember that Wayfarer ships use Chaossence Reactors for Faster-than-Light travel. Or Meteoric Metal Reactors, as they were known in the testing phase, before the existence and implications of the 'strange' matter known as Chaossence was discovered.

They might also remember that ships with a Chaossence reactor that tried to 'jump' to a point in space with something in between their starting point and destination would get annihilated as if the ship and had impacted that object with whatever speed would be required to for the ship to travel to the destination in such a short time (even though the crew and ship would not be in any way affected by what would be super-luminal speed if there was nothing 'in the way').

Though the Wayfarers in universe don't contradict the story about a terrorist attack on the Sol Watering Hole, they know what really happened: Chaossence/Purified Meteoric Gold, when exposed to strong EM fields, will attempt to 'jump' to a point in space based on how it's affected by those EM fields. (Which is part of it's use in Chaossence Reactors).
Watering Holes... Are opened (by the Wayfarer system at least) by putting a direct current through where they are, which transforms that current into a stable EM field and an open Watering Hole.

When the Meteoric/Chaossence Gold ring the Wayfarers intended to give the President of Earth left the Wayfarer colony, it was kept in a theft-proof vault which kept the EM field of the opening of the Wayfarer Watering Hole from affecting it. By the time the ship was nearing the Sol Watering Hole through the Desert Wind, however the ring had been moved to a decorative pillow being protected by an armed guard.

So when the massive EM waves from the opened Sol Watering Hole hit the now unprotected Chaossence Gold Ring, the ring attempted to move instantly to a point in space somewhere a few light years away from the ship. And in the process intersected with an obstacle, specifically the captain's six year old daughter, who was carrying the pillow at the time. The resultant annihilation of the ring as if it had hit the little girl with a speed of several thousand times c blew up the ship, the station at the other end of the Watering Hole, the President of Earth and his vessel and, due to the way the Desert Wind works, anything near every open Watering Hole in the Orion arm. But not the little girl in question (though that's a different story). Nor Mudhole, which is special.

The resulting shock disrupted the Desert Wind not just in the Orion arm, but also the Galactic Core (but, again due to the way the Desert Wind works, not any other arms of our Galaxy). Except Mudhole... Which is still special.

The Wayfarers' secrecy on the matter is not surprising. No one wants to be known as the people who damned each human planet to several centuries of wondering whether they were the only humans left alive. Especially not since that would also make them the people who accidentally blew up the President.
And especially, especially not since the former ruling class of Wayfarer knows the people who sent that ring knew what would happen the next time the President set foot inside Earth's Magnetic Field with that ring on his finger. (But most modern day Wayfarers don't realise that part, they think the people of the time were just that naïve... And for the majority of the people, that is true).
So Einstein was wrong when he said "God does not play dice". Consideration of black holes suggests, not only that God does play dice, but that He sometimes confuses us by throwing them where they can't be seen. ~ Stephen Hawking
Post Reply