GURPS Space NOW - If FTL Was Discovered on Monday

[DoctorRomulus]

Had a thought I wanted to share here to see how I could develop a Space campaign. I'm calling it GURPS Space NOW. I Just wanted to discuss what would be the probable impact if a relatively inexpensive form of FTL travel were discovered say this coming Monday. It would have to be something that would use something like a high electrical surge to set off. I'm thinking some kind of shunting effect where each shunt could send a ship up several light years in an hour.

Thoughts??

[Jasonft]

First question is how widely known is the existence of the drive.

Second question is has it been field tested yet.

Third and fourth questions - How short a jump can be made, and how good is your ability to come out exactly where you planned on coming out.

So much depends on who finds out and when that you can't really guess until we know more. In rough outline it would be much like the race to get the first man on the moon, except that there are a lot more players now than just the US and the Soviet bloc.

After that it becomes a race to find and exploit the most valuable planets. Think the Oklahoma land rush with nobody around to see if you nuke the other guy's colony...

[RyanW]

And what does "relatively inexpensive" mean? Compared to current spacecraft designs, or within the reach of normal citizens?

Also, what conditions are required for operation? If it can't be used in atmosphere, the changes will be largely academic (exploration and research) for some time, since the first 7 minutes of the trip will still be astronomically (heh) expensive.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by DoctorRomulus

Had a thought I wanted to share here to see how I could develop a Space campaign. I'm calling it GURPS Space NOW. I Just wanted to discuss what would be the probable impact if a relatively inexpensive form of FTL travel were discovered say this coming Monday. It would have to be something that would use something like a high electrical surge to set off. I'm thinking some kind of shunting effect where each shunt could send a ship up several light years in an hour.

Thoughts??

The first question is actually if this has to be done in orbit.

If intiating FTL requires being beyond the atmosphere then FTL ships look like the smallish space capsules we can currently launch in one piece.

These will have limited endurance in space and makes mission length a critical factor.

Also, it you can't use FTL to take off from palents then there's no way we can do anything except orbit extra-solar planets and drop stuff onto them.

We could do something like re-starting the Shuttle program in a few years. That just gives you bigger ship though. It doesn't grant land and take off from alien planets tech.

Until you ease access to space, allowing access to other solar systems will be mostly of scientific interest and might be the sort of thing better done by unmanned probes anyway.

If I wanted to use emergent superscience to start an FTL Space race I'd use some sort of Warp drive that let you launch from Earth and land on alien planets. If you just go with a hyper or jump dirve there's probably still major components missing.

[lwcamp]

The first problem is that you wouldn't know where to go. Visits to the planets in our solar system are possible because we know the planets positions and trajectories to high accuracy. We need to plan very carefully for the various orbit-change burns because propellant is very limited. However, if you get to another star, you will not know where the planets are or their trajectories. So you will not have enough propellant to get to any of them.

The first step would be to launch a robot probe to a nearby star, which would return after a several month survey to give us information about planets relatively close to the star (it would probably be able to make out the alien equivalents of Mercury though Saturn. The smaller the planet and the farther away from the star the more difficult detection would be). The time-scale would be a few years after the magic gizmo's invention - this would involve the proposal to NASA (or ESA - at this point Russia and China are probably minor players but they might be willing to collaborate), wrangling over design (does Professor Jim-Bob get to put his magnetometer on the probe, or is that mass used for Dr. Dockey's spectrograph - that sort of thing), time for the budget to get through congress, time to assemble the probe and commission a launcher, and several cycles of cost over-runs, schedule delays, and congress cutting back the budget to fund various domestic programs only to increase it again later. Expect all the presidential candidates to propose sending astronauts to other stars, only to ignore that promise once in office.

This probe would be followed up by individual probes to particularly interesting planets which were discovered. Probes would be launched, spend several years orbiting their target planets, and then return to deliver their information. Because NASA's budget is tight, don't expect too many of these too soon. These probes would be competing with probes for initial maps to other stars. You might be able to re-use some of these initial mapping probes by re-supplying them with propellant from Earth.

For the next several decades, the enormous technical obstacles of human spaceflight will keep actual humans from visiting alien stars. All the probes will be robots. The only exception is if you find a planet with a shirt-sleeve environment. This is likely to spur the development of a manned space mission, but this would be an immense engineering undertaking, extremely costly and very difficult. Expect the crew to get very sick from microgravity and space radiation, and be in quite poor condition once they land on the alien planet.

After a few visits, people will start to get bored with the whole endeavor. They will wonder why we are spending so much to visit a dangerous wasteland, when the same money could be used to (cut taxes/balance the budget/support schools/etc.). Budgets will be cut, missions will be scaled back. In the meantime, we will have developed somewhat safer manned deep-space craft, which might include artificial gravity or magnetic radiation shields or just high-power nuclear electric thrusters so you can get there faster before astronaut's bodies start to degrade in space.

I would not expect any permanent base for at least fifty years, because of the difficulty of return flights. A launch from surface to orbit from an Earth-like body is quite an undertaking, requiring large expensive rockets. These are not the sort of thing you can take with you, you would need to develop an indigenous capability to make rockets at your destination. Only then could you start sending people back and forth on a regular basis.

Luke

[panton41]

I think the ability to get into orbit cheap would be bigger than FTL at this point. As others have said, it wouldn't be a big game changer. It's not unusual to use a million pound, half-billion dollar rocket to put something the size of a sub-compact car into orbit. FTL wouldn't change that underlying fact.

I've said for a while that even a small science fiction cargo ship like a Star Trek shuttle pod would be priceless in today's world.

[Refplace]

Assuming that it has to be from orbit (or farther) and that everyone learns about it on Monday (even if they do not have the actual tech) then there would be immediate super funding of NASA and other organizations world wide.
If the tech is a secret then there will be a lot of spy and such efforts made to acquire it. Even if a country cant use it they may sell it.

It will take time to build such a thing but I see a shuttle type program being restarted to put small unmanded capsules in orbit to launch them and then later to build larger spaceships that are designed for reuse.
However the landing problem noted by Fred will curb efforts and practical projects. So most will focus on research and possibly mining asteroids.
However it wont be long before landing vehicles are designed to allow placing of things on planets and possibly colonies established, especially once an earthlike or suitable planet is found.
getting stuff from another planet would be a long term project but you could supply a colony.

[Langy]

As others have said, the most important question is 'can this get you into orbit?' I'm fine with a jump drive doing that, even if it causes some issues in the meanwhile, so I'll just assume it can do so.

Further, I'm going to make some assumptions on how this all gets discovered and put together, and then create a little story. It goes like this:

On June 11, 2012, an electrical engineering student at CalTech - let's call him John - is experimenting with ways to protect electronics from powerful electrical surges, and thinks he's got something interesting. It's a special type of wiring mesh built in a shell surrounding the object he wants to protect - basically a special kind of Faraday cage. He tests the new shielding on normal electrical power and everything works fine, but he wants to test it in something actually powerful, like lightning. Not able to deliver lightning to order, he successfully uses one of his professor's connections to borrow PG&E's lightning strike test facility to see how his shielding stands up to a lightning strike.

John puts his shielding all over a battery-powered radio transmitter, and turns it on to broadcast Metallica's 'Ride the Lightning' on a loop to see if the lightning strike ever interrupts the broadcast. PG&E put the transmitter in place and switch on their lightning generator, striking the radio with low-power bolts a few times. Everything seems to be working fine, so they power it up a bit. When they strike the radio with a high-powered bolt of lightning, something completely unexpected happens.

For a few moments after the lightning hits the radio, electricity visibly crackles all over its skin rather than discharging into the ground like it should. Moments later, the radio explodes! Or, at least, that's what it looks like, but no debris is found. The lightning strike generator is damaged badly by the explosion, and John is severely reprimanded and goes home in tears after the local news runs the story.

A week or so later, a news report comes in about a radio telescope picking up a strange signal from somewhere in lunar orbit. It's a weak radio signal, transmitting a single pattern over and over - and when the radio astronomers put that pattern through a normal radio interpreter, they found out it was Metallica's 'Ride the Lightning' - a completely Earthly song. Nobody could figure out how it got out there. John, the PG&E engineers who helped with the test, and others in the area who heard the story about the student blowing up the expensive power company facility put two and two together, and the secret that some kind of teleportation has been accidentally invented is out.

Everyone starts clamoring for more tests of this type, and John is recruited by the US's DARPA to develop his invention for the US military. People call it a John Effect Drive, and the teleportation the John Effect. Being only a student who discovered all this by accident, John winds up being pretty much useless to the project of developing the John Effect Drive, and eventually quits science and takes up being a raging alcoholic.

Meanwhile, DARPA has created many more prototypes of the John Effect Drive and figures out how it all works. A very high-power electrical discharge into John's electricity-shielding skin makes it jump at FTL speeds to a new location and then orbit whatever massive object is closest; it can't be used to create relativistic bombs, thankfully, though the physics of that is a bit odd. John's skin winds up being rather cheap to make, but the shear amount of power that the device needs makes the drive impractical for normal people to make themselves. By tuning the amount of electricity and where the initial strike is, DARPA figures out how to control the device - and the longer the electricity flows, the farther the device goes. Within a year, DARPA is building small probes that they're launching into space using the John Effect. It takes a while longer - perhaps another six months - but soon other nations follow, to the cries of DARPA screaming about patent infringement, but nobody seems to care. A new cold war and space race begin.

In about five to ten years, the first actual spaceships are finishing construction. These are large vessels, because they need to be big enough to hold and power their own lightning generators. These ships are built as water craft first, because nobody wants to build them in orbit and it's easier to tow them out to a water launch than to have to evacuate the miles around the ships that would be needed, since on launch they'll explode almost like a nuclear bomb. Some environmentalists argue that this is a bad idea, but everybody else says they can shut up because it's too cool not to do.

The spaceships are towed out to their middle-of-the-ocean launch sites and start blowing up, launching into orbit via the John Effect. Since they have lightning generators inside their hulls, they're able to sustain the effect even past when they initially teleport, allowing them to travel at FTL speeds great distances. The spaceships start flying around, doing cool things, but mostly jump around on John Effect, because their basic maneuvering engines still suck.

For the most part, these ships are science-based, but some are armed, because, hey, it's easy enough to do. A lot of the less-space-experienced countries, like Iran, make serious mistakes with their John Effect ships, either blowing them up too close to populated areas or sending them into space when they aren't ready for it, making their crews die. All very sucky. A few wars eventually break out over accusations of spying and sabotage.

If the John Effect drives didn't auto-orbit the ships, things would get much worse, with relativity bombs being relatively easy to make. This would be very bad. You'd probably need to come up with a slightly different drive - perhaps much more technically challenging to make - so that 'rogue' nations couldn't easily make weapons that make nukes look like toys.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

If intiating FTL requires being beyond the atmosphere then FTL ships look like the smallish space capsules we can currently launch in one piece.

And if you can use the thing in atmosphere, the big effects may actually be for the teleport system you've just invented, the fact you can teleport somewhere off Earth being a minor issue.

Also, it you can't use FTL to take off from palents then there's no way we can do anything except orbit extra-solar planets and drop stuff onto them.

Until you can improve our space drives, you probably can't even *orbit* an extra-solar planet unless you are amazingly lucky about how the vectors line up, or the FTL drive pretty openly violates conservation of momentum and energy to compensate for them. The relative proper motion of stars and the burns on the same order of magnitude as the orbital velocities of planets you'd need to change orbital planes push the limits of the delta-v you can manage with reasonable chemical rockets.

You send some probes that zip through the target systems, jump home and radio data back to Earth - since between the Earth moving since the probe launched and the gravitational accelerations it's undergone, it can't match velocities with to come home either. Landing anywhere is going to be hard. Staging a sample return mission will be *very* hard.

The other issue for making this into an interesting campaign setting is that, well, there's not much reason to visit most planets. It's actually not expensive to visit Antarctica, or uninhabitted rocks in the middle of the oceans, and there is interesting science to be done at either of those. And yet not very many people do go, and it's tough to come up with many good rpg adventures there. In order to make this very attractive, you're going to need a draw on at least one extra-solar planet - an alien civilization or its ruins, an imaginary valuable resource, or at least an easily habitable biosphere, and a lot of those will tend to kick you over into space opera or science fantasy.

[Refplace]

Originally Posted by Langy

As others have said, the most important question is 'can this get you into orbit?' I'm fine with a jump drive doing that, even if it causes some issues in the meanwhile, so I'll just assume it can do so.



Meanwhile, DARPA has created many more prototypes of the John Effect Drive and figures out how it all works. A very high-power electrical discharge into John's electricity-shielding skin makes it jump at FTL speeds to a new location and then orbit whatever massive object is closest; it can't be used to create relativistic bombs, thankfully, though the physics of that is a bit odd.

Well you still will have weapons platforms in space with this.
I am not sure how big a deal the orbit thing since after your in orbit you could just maneuver the ship towards your target.
Since your drive drops you into orbit it must be getting some momentum but not all that much or you would escape orbit right away.
So are you really traveling fast enough to be a very effective weapon? I dont see how you could be anything like a relativistic speed so probably on the level of low yield nukes for a larger dense object being dumped into space.