Extreme warp and light lag

[Joseph Paul]

Originally Posted by malloyd

The key difference is in how you define your target.

If you define your targets by "place", then teleport works pretty much like it does in most stories, when it works it takes you to that place in some narrative sense in survivable way. This is the power you are *paying for* with Warp, or the Teleport spell. If it doesn't do this, that's fine, but it needs to come with a limitation.

If you define it by direction and distance, then it can't fail to bring you to the correct star because you can't aim at stars (or any other particular "place") anyway. Only at a direction and distance. This version doesn't do stuff like match ground levels, or local velocities or anything else and is likely to kill you accidentally if you are a little bit out. It may very well kill you if you use it to teleport into an atmosphere, since lacking any way of determining what is at the other end it can't very well lock on what's there to swap it with you, so if there's any significant amount of matter there, you presumably interpenetrate with it and explode. You are also going to need to take into account all kinds of other stuff other than the proper motion of the target - momentum conservation, materializing inside occupied space, relativistic effects (what happens when you teleport somewhere in different gravity where *sizes* are not the same) all that other stuff that basically makes teleporting an exercise in physics you will probably never be able to capture all the possible consequences of. It's a lot of work to make the power into something nobody will use as anything other than a plot device.

And if you are going to have reliable workarounds that make the power useful, then in the end it just converts it back to the first useful form when those workarounds function. I'd think about just adding "Requires skill roll" and a rule that failure is one of the many possible lethal off target accidents and just skip the lot of work.

Wait a minute - RAW doesn't take anything away from Blind that you are stating the base Warp gives i.e. protection from conservation of momentum, intersecting solid or gaseous matter, etc. Those sort of protocols are baked into all the versions and any changes that have to be made would be done automatically as the power delivers the user to the destination. Otherwise there would be a large note with the Blind write up in Basic.

[Aldric]

Not sure why everyone is so worried about teleporting to a star 30k ly away and missing the target. I'd be a lot more worried about hitting dead center, where the key word is "dead".

I also think it makes a lot of sense to approach an unknown with a bit of caution, so you might not even want to appear inside the solar system, take a look from some light years away, then get closer

As for countermeasures to Warp, there may be some, maybe the Warp fails, maybe you fail to materialize or maybe you end somewhere else.

Maybe there is nothing, but you just need to ask your players "So, you really want to warp directly to that star 30k ly away?" for them to star working on other plans

[Lovewyrm]

Originally Posted by Joseph Paul

What I am getting at is that you have taken it upon yourself to declare the level of danger involved based on nothing I have presented and after I have already explicitly stated that I am not concerned with pursuing that at this time.

Ah well, okay.

I suppose if someone wants to warp into space with the desired location being an active, radiation emitting star just to die from star radiation when they succeed the warp, then they should be able to do it.

[Inky]

Bear in mind, Lovewyrm (and anyone else), the OP has explained very little about his setting or the nature of the characters who will be exploring it, and one of the few things he has said about it is a mention of "god-like beings" in connection with this Warp ability (it's in the first post of the thread). So the risk of suffocating in vacuum or being fried by a star may in fact be a non-issue. If the characters were ordinary humans not wearing any kind of protective gear, then you'd be absolutely right, but they may not be. (And given how casual the OP is being about any such risks, even after the point has been brought up many times, it seems very likely that they aren't!).

OP, can you clarify exactly what it is you're asking for? Are you asking for astronomical advice on how such a power might work in practice, or do you already know how the power will work and are actually just asking what the light-lag problem is worth as a Limitation on Warp, or something else? And, if it's that you already know how the power works, how does the power work? Sorry, I may be being dense and you've already explained this, but I've lost track and by the look of it some other posters may have too.

[maximara]

Originally Posted by Joseph Paul

Happened to read a power write up that gave an instant and reliable Warp to any point in the Milky Way galaxy. 600+ points. Seems legit...

The Warper looks into the night sky, picks a star that is 30,000 light years away (with his Telescopic vision....) and warps there. Does he end up occupying an empty stretch of space or finds himself at the wrong star because where he sees his target star is where it was 30,000 years ago?

I am tempted to temper even god-like capabilities with information lag induced by light speed. It is a handy explanation for why the still extant god-like beings haven't taken over all of the Universe - yet.

Now what would be necessary to get around that lack of information about where a stellar body is now?

Interestingly there was a EC comic story where the spaceship arrived at empty space because the star had blown up in the time between when the light left the star and the present day.

The Time lag is a problem as one would need to know a ridiculous amount of information to get to the target and if any of it has errors and you could get way off course.

[RyanW]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Are we trying for some kind of physical realism? Because if we are, there's a limit to how much angular resolution you can achieve. When your retinal neurons are closer together than half a wavelength of light, you're done. If you want more telescopic vision than that allows, you need to have a much bigger eyeball.

Or just use two eyeballs placed a large distance apart for interferometry.

[Joseph Paul]

Originally Posted by Inky

Bear in mind, Lovewyrm (and anyone else), the OP has explained very little about his setting or the nature of the characters who will be exploring it, and one of the few things he has said about it is a mention of "god-like beings" in connection with this Warp ability (it's in the first post of the thread). So the risk of suffocating in vacuum or being fried by a star may in fact be a non-issue. If the characters were ordinary humans not wearing any kind of protective gear, then you'd be absolutely right, but they may not be. (And given how casual the OP is being about any such risks, even after the point has been brought up many times, it seems very likely that they aren't!).

OP, can you clarify exactly what it is you're asking for? Are you asking for astronomical advice on how such a power might work in practice, or do you already know how the power will work and are actually just asking what the light-lag problem is worth as a Limitation on Warp, or something else? And, if it's that you already know how the power works, how does the power work? Sorry, I may be being dense and you've already explained this, but I've lost track and by the look of it some other posters may have too.

]

Thank you Inky for asking for clarification. You are correct about my concerns for character safety. That is an issue that is solved with a whole different set of CP. Threats to survival from the use of the power itself - conservation of momentum, manifesting in another body, etc. will be mitigated by the power as it is now in the write up of Warp. Visualizing your living room seems to pose no threat from occupying the same space as your couch even if your wife has moved it for cleaning....

I was seeking to leverage the Power building knowledge base of the forum for ideas on sensory or non-sensory Advantages that would be able to give information about the position of stellar bodies affected by the light lag problem. Light lag is consistently ignored or glossed over in most SF that uses FTL travel and the problem only gets more severe with instantaneous travel - either the author doesn't care to mention it, declares that space has been mapped and it is already factored in, or knows and just ignores the implications.
Hence the question: "Now what would be necessary to get around that lack of information about where a stellar body is now?"

The first reply, by whswhs, sets the basis for such a search, "Perception or knowledge not limited by the speed of light."


How does the power work? Two different things can be meant by this question.

1) What combination of Advantages, Enhancements, and Limitations will answer my question in GURPS terms.

2) What has to happen in our actual Universe to allow us to know where a thing is that is affected by light lag. Practical astronomy comes into play here but so too do far out ideas. I have mentioned that the universe in the setting is not what the PC's scientific understanding says it is - mechanistic, unwavering, uniform in the laws of physics through out -just like our Standard Model. I’ll flesh that out a bit -

Setting assumptions.
1) The Standard Model of physics is not immutable. This allows for a lot of the UT superscience to work.

2) Reality stabilization is in use by galactic civilizations to curb the excesses and dangers of superscience and to keep other emergent civilisations down.

These two things, GURPS rules and our Universe, intersect as ideally the answers to both complement one another and hang together for the players so they can make informed choices as to how to use powers and what to expect when they do.

Narrative use – this has been touted as way to ‘save my sanity’ the idea being that this power is just a way to get into and out of the adventure spot. First, my sanity isn’t at risk for wanting to nail down specifics of an expensive power. Second, it is so much more than that. The existence of such powers in a universe will create the need to cultivate and grow those abilities for whatever reasons various interstellar civilisations want to use light lag defying extreme warp for. Communications, trade, and war come to mind as does the need to be able to foil the use of that power. In GURPS we give great leeway to the players in decision making of the shared narrative. Dealing Death is an example. Deaths, of mooks to BBG, are all narrative events yet GURPS pays an exceeding amount of attention to the details of weapons and their capabilities in game terms. Players like to know that their tactical decisions matter. I see this as no different and would much rather define the workings of a power very well than argue at the table that the players aren’t using it in a proper narrative fashion.

Collecting the ideas thus far Anthony, Fred Brackin, and Winged Kagouti all have mentioned just doing the leg work in a survey. I see this as forming a Warp Corps that can take even modest telescopes (Carrying Capacity would need to be bought) with them for Extreme Base Line Interferometry at modest warps of tens of light years that would build a catalog providing the Reliable enhancement for the Blind use of Warp. Eventually you get enough data to keep mapping the proper motion of things over time and make longer Warps.

Fred Brackin - offered Detect with an Analyze and an FTL enhancement. For practical purposes what would be getting detected - Spectra? I am presuming the Analyze is for positional data and proper motion. FTL Enhancement is primarily for the user to send messages at FTL speeds. So how is this employed to defeat light lag? Just hand wave it? Or apply it as an Affliction to the star forcing an FTL response to get current info? Powers mentions using Afflictions on inanimate objects. The math isn't too good for this once SM of the target is added.

Varyon - Clairvoyance with Time-Spanning. - Literally a power that lets you see the past at any arbitrary point. This needs to have some severe limits to it so that it isn't a plot killer week after week.

Jumper(Time) – Found this myself. There is a Warp enhancement so that the Jumper can be anywhere in a time he jumps to. Figuring out how to nerf the time travel to “Now” and just have the positional data is a possibility.

Both Time-Spanning and Jumper(Time – modified to just data of current location) could be the result of the emergence of SpaceTime being massively quantum entangled with everything that was ever created from the quantum fields at the Big Bang. This could be most like the Universe having a feeling of itself and knowing what is going on in it in real time. Access to that for players and others with Warp could come by different routes.

Thank you all for your participation. I hope I have been able to add clarity to my initial post. I look forward to your further comments.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Joseph Paul

]
Fred Brackin - offered Detect with an Analyze and an FTL enhancement. For practical purposes what would be getting detected - Spectra? I am presuming the Analyze is for positional data and proper motion. FTL Enhancement is primarily for the user to send messages at FTL speeds.

What is to be Detected is the star you're concerned about. The FTL is to have the Detect work at the same speed as your Warp i.e. probably instantaneous. How does this work? Blatant superscience, just like Warp.

Luckily for your plans the longest distances so far detected are c. 30,000 ly but probably not for average stars. Radio sources or very bright stars maybe.

https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/...view%20by,2013).

Note that while these distances determined by parrallax may be "exact" by astronomical standards that radio source in the link above has a + or _ of .8 kiloparsecs. I think so anyway. it's been a log time since my college astronomy classes. It looks like a psosible error of 800 parsecs to me anyway.

These VLBI parallax measurements will very much be affected by light lag and proper motion will need to be measured also and this wil take some amount of time. The mathemtical compensation isn't hard though.

How long a baseline you need for really exact mesurements is a complicated question and I'm not qualified to answer it. However, I encourage you to use superscience because real science is likely to fall short of your needs.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Joseph Paul

]Varyon - Clairvoyance with Time-Spanning. - Literally a power that lets you see the past at any arbitrary point. This needs to have some severe limits to it so that it isn't a plot killer week after week.

Limit it to only work in a vacuum (that is, you can only project your viewpoint into a place that isn't occupied by anything), or perhaps not within a certain distance from a star (I'd go with the termination shock as the barrier, personally; basically, the solar wind interferes with forming the viewpoint). That makes it no more of a plot killer than Warp with sufficient Telescopic Vision - as I mentioned with the reference to Schlock Mercenary, with good enough Telescopic Vision and the ability to travel faster than the speed of light you can view, say, an hour into the past by just teleporting to a point in space a light hour away. With that possibility already in play, you'll need any such secrets to not be visible from space (or at least leave some ambiguity when viewed from space), so if your postcognitive clairvoyance can only have a viewpoint out in space, there should be no further issues.

Alternatively, rather than having the Time Spanning Enhancement mean you can view any point in time, you instead Limit it so it can only view things as they are now... but it actually views things as they are now, with light lag being a complete non-issue (so you see your destination's actual current position, not where it was when it generated the light that's just now reaching you). Maybe call the modified Enhancement something like True Positioning?

[Aldric]

Would a Scanning Sense work for this ? Sure, now you need something that travels 2x the distance you want to warp, but when you can already warp to the other side of the galaxy that seems a minor issue.
What's more troubling is that such a Sense also introduces FTL Comms that are detectable at 1.5x the desired distance.
Price would probably not be cheap, but FTL Telescopic Vision doesn't seem cheap either. Being a separate sense, you could also have a specific Obscure for it, for stuff you don't want to be "visible" right away, with or without Stealthy so you have either a big blob, or an area of space you can't directly sense. What's there ? Let's get close enough to see with our eyes.