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Warp Drive

 
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orzel-w
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PostPosted: Fri Aug 24, 2018 5:35 pm    Post subject: Warp Drive Reply with quote

Back when I was toying with the notion of producing some sci-fi on Super 8 film (now I'm dating myself), I wanted to formalize how I thought warp drive (or FTL: Faster Than Light) would work, story-wise.

I didn't much care for the common visualization in movies and TV of stars streaking by while traveling in hyperspace. That was fine as an excuse to name your ship the "Starstreak", but that seemed like feeble rationale. I suppose I was influenced by the illustration of warp theory using a sheet of paper doubled over with a pencil stuck through the two layers. The two layers of paper were always flat against each other with no space between. Okay, so what was all this business of both time and stars passing by?

Wasn't the passage of time spent traveling below light speed adequate for storytelling purposes? So I set about to develop my own ideas of how this hyperjump stuff was supposed to play out.

My picture of a hyperspace jump was to be that the "jump" would be instantaneous. One instant you're in one place; "Ready, engage!"; FOOM! you're someplace else.

How do you determine how far the jump will take you? Well, that's a function of a combination of factors (it needs to be complicated). One factor is how fast you're traveling relative to light speed when you activate the jump. The faster you're traveling, the farther the jump will take you. Of course, the faster you travel, the more energy and time it takes to reach that speed. And the same applies after the jump. It will take a comparable amount of energy and time to slow down on the other end. (Plenty of opportunity for drama to unfold.)

Plus you have to take into consideration the speed and direction your destination is traveling relative to your point of origin. This involves the "art" of predicting where you'll end up. But that's all handled by computer, so it's not so artsy after all.

Another factor is how much energy you feed into the warp engine. The more energy, the farther the jump will take you. You can achieve a jump of a given distance by either accelerating to a higher speed and using less warp energy, or by settling for a lower speed and feeding more energy to the warp engine. Needless to say (but I will anyway), the energy required by the warp engine rises exponentially as speed at the time of the jump decreases. So if you want to spend less time getting up to speed (and back down at the other end), it'll cost you in energy expenditure. By the same token, accelerating at sub-light speeds becomes increasingly more difficult (read that as more energy required), due to the effects of relativity, as one draws closer to the speed of light; another trade-off.

Thus, the calculation of your jump parameters is a balancing act of time and energy and determining just where you'll end up.

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Last edited by orzel-w on Sat Aug 25, 2018 1:45 pm; edited 1 time in total
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Robert (Butch) Day
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PostPosted: Fri Aug 24, 2018 7:12 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Sounds suspiciously like the Alderson Drive.

The Alderson Drive is a type of Shortcut Drive used in some novels by Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven (The Mote In God's Eye and the CoDominium series). It's named for scientist Dan Alderson, who helped Pournelle work out the ramifications and plausibility of such a Star Drive.

The Alderson Drive is not technically an "FTL drive", but it achieves the same affects. As with any Shortcut Drive, movement in the local frame of reference does not exceed that of light. Instead, the Alderson Drive locates and utilizes a particular form of wormhole known as an Alderson Point. Two such points define an Alderson Tramline. These points (and the resulting "tramlines") occur naturally, connecting stars. So basically, to get to another star system, you "just" have to travel very close to our sun and find the wormhole connecting it to another star. Travel across the galaxy can thus be achieved by little hops from one system to another, followed by a few weeks of repositioning within a given stars system. Still, you've trimmed the transit time by a very large factor, making some sort of interstellar civilization a lot more feasible.

But getting to other worlds and stars still ain't easy. The Alderson Point wormholes are difficult to find, spaced far apart, utilize the Fifth Force, and only exist between points in space with the same thermodynamic potential. Within the novels, the Alderson Drive had an unfortunate side-effect of being very disorienting to human passengers and to automated systems. That delay and distraction, combined with the fact that each star system had only a handful of Alderson Points, meant it was entirely possible to ambush space craft as they came out of the Alderson Tramline.

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orzel-w
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PostPosted: Fri Aug 24, 2018 9:04 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Yeah, that's the same, except different.
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Robert (Butch) Day
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PostPosted: Fri Aug 24, 2018 9:50 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Check out the Alderson Disk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alderson_disk

Also I've revised and added to the Starship Troopers: Invasion post I made.

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orzel-w
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PostPosted: Sat Aug 25, 2018 1:49 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Robert (Butch) Day wrote:
Check out the Alderson Disk

The connection to warp drive operation escapes me, aside from the shared name. Confused
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orzel-w
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PostPosted: Sat Aug 25, 2018 1:35 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

It occurred to me that perhaps a better name for the drive I'm describing would be "jump drive", if only to differentiate it from the Star Trek model.

Another consideration for energy expenditure would be deflector shields. The faster you travel at sub-light speeds, the more energy you have to channel into your ship's shields to deflect space debris. So the sooner you can engage the jump drive, the less energy you'll be expending on shields.

Needless to say by now, although it would be nice, we don't have an inexhaustible energy source on our ship.

As touched on briefly above, navigation is also critical to the success of this operation. Whereas naturally occurring (and handily convenient) wormholes dump you out a given location, the jump drive's endpoint depends on a number of factors. So to control your exit point accurately you need very precise data on your starting location and speed, as well as the destination's location and speed relative to your origin.

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