[Space] FTL Ideas/Thoughts
 

OK, I've been playing around with an FTL idea that is, I believe, rather unique and I want to bounce the idea off the forums head before for usability before I go using it ton plan a campaign, and some parts I could do with some advice on.

First this a hyperspace-based setup, but hyperspace isn't somewhere where matter is allowed to exist normally (I thinking along the lines of the conservation of energy, which offers some very interesting options at a level beyond that which GURPS Spaceships offers), so you not only need to enter hyperspace somehow, you need someway to stay there as well. And the two aren't the same thing.

So, the way I thinking, you need a hyperdrive to 'weaken' part of the local space/time so that a ship can 'dive' through a 'window' into hyperspace, once there you need some kind of shields to keep you there. The important bit is that the ship doesn't need to actually mount the hyperdrive doing to work, it could be generated by another, bigger ship (Think PT boats escorting something) or a stationary gate, but the ship does need to mount the special shields.

Currently I thinking that the maximum speed (Assuming a ships has the shields to handle it) is equal to 5^X where X is the FTL rating, and you can't use multiple drives to boost the number. Note that this is a speed multiplier. Now I figure that any ship that mounts a FTL drive gets enough shields to handle it's FTL speed for free, it's part of the cost of the drive. A ship that doesn't mount FTL can pay a construction premium to mount the needed shields. (This is, I think, a very good thing for someone using the Spaceships series, many of the ships in that lack a Stardrive and this is a good way around having to design extra ships).

Now my minimum thought for the campaign is that FTL-1 and FTL-2 drives are available to spaceships, and portal stations mount FTL-3 gear, enabling a FTL-2 equipped to save a good deal of travel time, if of, course it pays the transit fee. Not all planets/systems have a protal but.

Re: [Space] FTL Ideas/Thoughts
 

5^X is really steep!

The shields idea is cool -- from its description I'm hearing 'Hyperspace stabalizer', but 'shields' work too.

Re: [Space] FTL Ideas/Thoughts
 

Sounds interesting. Some questions/thoughts.

First off, how does one get out of hyperspace? Does it happen automatically when you drop your shields, or do you need to make use of a hyperdrive? Additionally, if you need a hyperdrive, does it need to have the same FTL rating as the one that sent you into the hyperspace to start with? If so, that's going to result in a ship that enters through a portal being unable to exit except through another portal.

Secondly, how much of the mass of a hyperdrive is the necessary shielding - and can you make a hyperdrive without it? Portal devices probably aren't going to be going through hyperspace under their own power and thus could save mass and cost by not mounting the shields. This will also be good for figuring out how much the shielding system(s) weigh (or are they just expensive Design Features?).

Thirdly, is combat in hyperspace possible? If so, how does it differ from normal combat? Forcing a ship out of hyperspace by taking out its shields (or stranding it in hyperspace by taking out its drive) could be an interesting strategy.

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Speed is in pc/day, as in the general hyperspace description in SS?

The speed is determined by the rating of the initial stargate, rather than the ship shields? (Why ever have more than shields-1? My first assumption was that the speed is limited by both systems; either the gate can't fling you through hyperspace fast enough, or if it can, your shields couldn't take it, so you ask them not to throw you so hard.)

Since you say "hyperspace" rather than "jump drive", I assume the ships can maneuver freely once they enter through the window. Do you exit hyperspace just by dropping your shields? Or do you have to create an exit window?

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That's awfully fast. Comparing to ST:TNG:

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<shrug>How fast it is effectively depends almost entirely on the frequency of interesting worlds. When I did a brute force work-up of the results of the randpm system in Space 1e I got words that were vaguely teraaformable every 20 parsecs and really Earth-like ones every 30.

That level of frequency would result in FTL-1 needing about a week for average travel. That's a popular interval.

It's effectively impossible to determine what he actual average distance "should" be in a realistic galaxy but we can rule out some very short distances like Traveler's assumption of long chains of habitable worlds averaging only 1 parsec across. ST:TNG's "nearby star" at 5 ly is basically just as bad. The right kind of stars are nowhere near that common.

Re: [Space] FTL Ideas/Thoughts
 

Here's how I handled FTL in my space pirate game:

Faster-than-light travel consists of shunting the craft into a sidereal aspect of the universe commonly known as hyperspace. Hyperspace exists alongside "RealSpace" in a manner that is best modeled using the analogy of an onion. RealSpace is the "skin" of the onion, with hyperspace existing in layers "beneath" the "skin." The "deeper" into hyperspace one travels, the shorter the distance between two points in RealSpace becomes. This happens because space, according to Einsteinian physics, is curved; by cutting through hyperspace, the curve becomes closer to a straight line.

There is a drawback. In theory hyperspace should permit instantaneous travel between two points; in practice, however, the most common speed for a hyperdrive is 6 lightyears per week. The effective maximum speed at which organic life can survive is five lightyears per day (35 lightyears per week). This is because the physical nature of hyperspace puts a strain on one's body and mind; the strain gets worse the deeper into hyperspace one goes. Those who travel through hyperspace report nausea, dizziness, headaches, vomiting, and an inability to concentrate – and those are the milder side effects from short trips at slow speeds. A number of travelers have fallen unconscious, and a few, notably the elderly and severely ill, have fallen into comas or died.

The physical nature of hyperspace is also unsettling to biological minds when viewed directly while in transit. Information dating back for the last few centuries have reported people becoming insane when visually exposed to hyperspace. Because those who have viewed recordings of hyperspace do not exhibit any tendency towards insanity, even when making the transit at the time, it can be inferred there are elements of hyperspace which cannot be recorded and yet are picked up by one's subconscious when viewed directly.

Travel through hyperspace is best performed along one of the well-mapped trade routes that cover the Sol Sector. Outside the Sol Sector sit a number of regions that are not that well charted. Gravitational anomalies, particularly unmapped brown dwarfs and rogue planets, have been known to drop a ship out of hyperspace without warning. A Navigation (Hyperspace) roll is required to successfully plot a course, with the Sol Sector gaining a +4 to the skill due to being well-charted.

While faster-than-light transportation has become commonplace, the secret to efficient faster-than-light communications remains elusive. At present, real-time hyperspace communications are limited to a range of 500 A.U.s, and even this requires massive relay stations on both ends.



I also ended up with a lot of habitable or at least terraformable worlds around the K-, G- and F-class stars, which comes to like 14 suitable stars in a 20 lightyear radius around Sol, five of which were homeworlds (including Earth itself): Sol, Alpha Centauri A, Tau Ceti, 61 Cygni A, and Sigma Draconis all had homeworlds. This doesn't include the glut of space stations (O'Neill Colonies and Stanford Toruses... toruses, tora, torii... what's the plural on that?).

Re: [Space] FTL Ideas/Thoughts
 

It sounds to me like you're basically requiring jumpgates AND hyperdrives for FTL travel which is fine and I can't see any problem with it.

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Wow, lots of stuff I need to answer. Feels like I've forgot to say something but
Maybe, but my initial thought where that 5 * X would be too shallow.

Well I was thinking that force screens might double as extra shields, it makes things interesting.

Yep, the shields are the only thing keeping you in hyperspace, drop them and you drop out. This means it's impossible to get stuck in hyperspace. Of course if you have a malfunction in the shields and don't have a hyperdrive, your kinda stuck where you came out.

If using Spaceships a hyperdrive comes with shields sufficient for it's rating for free, while the portals are Jump Gates. Things obviously change if using vehicles

I theory, yes. There's just of problem of actually meeting up. I'm also thinking that military ships can use their force screens as extra shields, so if you take damage to the screens, you slow down.

No, the speed produced by the hyperddrives is a velocity multiplier, so to go 1ly/year you need a velocity of at least .2C with FTL-1 or .04 with FTL-2

It's a mixture of both, the rating on the FTL systems is a maximum speed multiplier it can impart, but it's also limited by your shields. I'm thinking that many early adopter ships from when FTL-3 was introduced would be limited a velocity multiplier of 100, that was a lot cheaper then 125 when refiting, at least back then.

Yes, just drop the shields. Many interstellar freighters are retro-fitted in-systems designers because of this.

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Its a real speed multiplier? that's an interesting detail. Now I see why you thought 5^X was too shallow-- you want to be able to get where you are going!

I suggest moving up another notch, and making the permanent portals FTL-4 or even FTL-5.

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My primaly planning puts the most well traveled parts of human space a bubble 15 light years radius, this is pretty much the extent of the portal network. That works out to 0.12 ly or 7,600 AU once you treat the velocity multiplier as a distance contractor, so things aren't TOO dire. Now, there's colonies out for something like another 5 ly which are only serviced by FTL-2 equipped ships, now that's .2 ly or something like 13,000 AU to the nearest portal

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I knew there was something I was forgetting, the costs to re-fit in-system ships for FTL via portal. Tentative price list is: 10% for FTL-1/5 times speed multiplier, 20% for FTL-2/25 times speed multiplier, 30% for FTL-3/100 times speed multiplier and 40% for FTL-3/125 times speed multiplier. There may be FTL-4 developed during the campaign, in which case that will be 80% for FTL-4/625 times speed multiplier.

New thought, interstellar trade.

Due to a desire not to introduce invasive species if possible there's a limit on what plants and animals can be imported, so staple crops (Grains and cotton top the list) along with similar animals (Probably dairy cows, possibly pigs and chickens) and things like dogs and cats are pretty much all that can be brought with colonists. This leads to an interesting situation where a lot of interstellar freight is actually foodstuffs, admittedly foodstuffs that are classified as luxury. So if you want a steak dinner chances are that it came from Earth, or in more established systems, a space colony built just to raise them.

Interestingly growing something like cannabis in your house doesn't fall under this rule, it's kinda hard for people to buy that it might cause environmental damage

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It's often hard to know ahead of time what invasive species spell disaster. For alien planets, I would put money on microorganisms like yeasts, bacteria and of course archea.
But who wants to play Andromeda Strain every time they dock in Low Orbit?

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Which is why it's white-listed to species that are needed (Pretty much all food ones) or that the government isn't going to be able to get away with banning (Comfort animals)

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Is FTL communication possible? What options would a ship that drops out of hyperspace without a hyperdrive have (other than setting a course the nearest system so the crew's remains can be buried in a few centuries)?

And what about ships that have shields but lack hyperdrives? Or ships with shields for a higher rating than their hyperdrives? Your other responses imply these shields might be Force Screens - if so, what dictates how fast your shields allow you to go?

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Sounds like a cozy little corner of space. I'd expect that most settlements are in habitats in oort clouds and asteroid rings, not on planets (or at least not anything more hospitable than Titan). How many native ecosystems do you really have in a 15ly radius?

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Assuming one habitable world in each K-, G-, or F-class star* that is far enough away from a companion to have planets in the habitable zone?

Alpha Centauri A (4.39 ly)
Alpha Centauri B (4.39 ly)
Epsilon Eridani (10.5 ly)
Procyon (11.4 ly)
61 Cygni A (11.4 ly)
61 Cygni B (11.4 ly)
Epsilon Indi (11.8 ly)
Tau Ceti (11.9 ly)**
Groombridge 1618 (15.9 ly)

That's 9 possibles on a very optimistic scale; reality is probably limited to about half those.


* I don't consider M-class red dwarfs suitable due to the high probabilities of tide-locking and flares frying most planets that would be in the life zone.

K-class = orange dwarf
G-class = yellow dwarf
F-class = yellow-white

** It is possible that Tau Ceti has two planets in its habitable zone, but I only counted it once above.

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No FTL comms, at least not yet. And given travel times suspended animation is pretty much a must and the ship is already on course for it's original destination, they just arrive REALLY late.

You pay extra, as a percentage of the ship, for the extra shields. And how fast the shields allow you to go is determined by how much you paid for them and what's aviable

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Is there any way to communicate with ships in hyperspace from real space? Some sort of distress beacon would be useful for contacting ships going through hyperspace near your position (those with hyperdrives can jump out and render assistance, those without can report your position to relevant authorities who can come help you; if someone is expecting you at the destination, they could also arrange for search and rescue with at least some chance of success). Failing that, unless the shields are extremely reliable, I'd expect nearly every ship to have at least an FTL-1 hyperdrive.

Ah, design feature, then.

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Alternatively, merchant lanes are patrolled by rescue ships that pop out of hyperspace and back every so often to listen for stranded merchants. Going off the patrolled lanes with a portal incapable ship is pure stupidity though.

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That's going to depend heavily on how long the lanes are, and how many patrol ships you can afford to spend on them. With one hour stops to listen for distress signals (allowing you to detect signals from up to 1 light-hour away), you have to make a stop every 2 light-hours or so to ensure you don't miss something. Ignoring transit time, that means one ship would take a year to patrol two light-years of space. If the maximum acceptable time for a ship to be stranded is about a week (~1/50th of a year), that means you need about 25 patrol ships working 24/7 for every light year of distance. Assuming I've done the math right, that is. You can cut that down to 6 ships per light-year if a month is an acceptable time to be stranded.

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The length of the lanes, the traffic on the lanes, the cost of the traffic, and how frequent mishaps are.

If stasis pods are a viable technology, as seems to be indicated by the OP in an earlier statement, then wait times of a year or two to be rescued are perfectly acceptable.

Of course, you only have the year/two light years ratio if you are relying on a single distress beacon burst. If the ship gives out a burst every ten minutes, you only have to wait in place for 10 minutes for each stretch of the detection range. Which then means you need to know how far away you can detect the distress call, and how much power the distress call takes.

Given that the alpha-centauri to earth jaunt takes two months at FTL-3, I'm going to guess a month stranded is fine.

Actually, given that stasis pods are confirmed by the OP to be available, There's a cheaper (relatively) tactic: send a few tight beam transmissions to places you know to have people listening, climb into your pods, and wake up a year or two later when you get picked up (most routes should have viable radio targets within a light-year). Yeah, you wake up a year behind, but you did kind of a multi-month break out of you life in the first place. Its a lot better than a couple of decades.

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I sort of assume that the first wave of colonization was conducted with FTL-1 and it's 5 times multiplier at best and colony ships aren't normally speedsters, so that puts even Alpha Centauri several years travel away. Also I thinking portals came first, so to a certain extent the colony ships were one way

Why aren't you putting out a continuous signal? And remember FTL-3 can only be used until the first hop. Chances are a SAR group isn't going to be dispatched until they think a ship missing

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Sorry for the late reply,n but if it helps I've got a system built with Space with two habitable around a F9 and three each around a G0 and a G4

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NASA does crazy, crazy things to it's spacecraft to sanitize them before it launches them, doubly so if they're going to another planet (because they don't want to "find life" on Mars only to discover it's because some tech sneezed on the sensor), and large numbers of micro-organisms get through anyway.

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I'm morbidly curious as to how this happened, as I've never gotten that kind of system built....

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I once randomly rolled a trinary star system with four habitable planets using Brett's charts. Naturally my computer crashed and I can't remember the set numbers to recreate it.

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Hard Sci Fi idea, something a bit like Firefly (Or at least too early for FTL) so the results were massaged a bit to get that many habitables, all the physical parameters are valid, but the whole thing falls into the category of possible but highly improbable

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If your willing to "cheat" a bit, you can always put a gas giant(s) in the habitable zone and then max out on planet-sized moons.

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I've done this in my space pirate game in the past. It's not unheard of in fiction, either, so it probably won't strain anyone's suspension of disbelief (for example, the fourth moon of the gas giant Yavin in Star Wars was habitable, though whether it came by it naturally or was terraformed to such in the ancient past is up to debate).

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You're playing with a much less connected setting than I was figuring on -- each colony will be very much its own place, and I suspect the main cargo will be people and supplies leaving the home system for good -- emigration, not trade.

The reason you aren't sending out a constant distress call is to preserve power -- you don't want to leave your reactor running with everyone in the stasis pods, and solar panels in interstellar space can't be providing that much power.

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Solar powers are generally considered useless beyond the orbit of Jupiter if not sooner. At Jupiter (5x as far as Earth) solar panels are delivering only 1/25th as much energy.

At 1000 AU it's only 1/1,000,000th as much and that still a distance measured in light _days_ rather than years.

If your emergency power is rtgs (such as deep space probes normally use) you'll have a constant power output for decades.

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Yeah, and considering that current fusion power research is stuck at solving the more power out then in problem, it's probably best to just leave a fusion reactor going, epically with an on going drain like life support. Plus the whole issue of the SAR vessel not knowing how long it needs to wait.

And you're right about increasing the speed, at FTL-3 with a single tank of Advanced Fusion Pulse fuel Alpha Centauri is 18 years travel time away (Which is much better then in real life

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You learn something every day. This is awesome. Any idea how this fits into power points in spaceships?

------------------------------------------

With leaving the fusion plant on -- leaving a fusion power pant running without supervision sounds quite scary. Particuarly if I'm counting on it running in order to survive. I suppose if you have a good enough automated system you could wake the tech's up if there is a problem, but still --- I'd prefer to find a way to turn the thing off.

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Power Points in Spaceships aren't realistic. Most non-nuclear plant should give at most 1/10 PPs, while Solar should give 1/100 PPs.

There are ways to squeeze out efficiency from RTGs, but you'll never get more than half the thermal output of the radioactives, about 0.5 kW/kg for Pu 238. But Plutonium 238's half life of 87.7 years gives a nice long usefulness.

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Shouldn't FTL anything go faster than light? Alpha Centauri is 4.37 light years away.

Regardless of what a society's ground based technology could get away with, spaceships will certainly be more streamlined with compromises made for mass and volume.
Even minor malfunctions could "just" lead to horrible overheating and cooking the crew. Better to have auto shutdowns, and emergency backup power for hibernation tubes / nanostasis / freeze suites / etc.

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Solar panels are also huge and fragile under the best of circumstances. You don't need to have space pirates or cinematic meteor showers to care about long term upkeep and repair costs.

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FTL here is a speed multiplier, if the multiplier is too low and your not going fast enough your effective velocity isn't FTL.

There might be backup power for the hibernation tubes, but not for years/centenaries

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I stand by my question. Perhaps SM would make more sense than slower than light faster than light travel.

Edit: Not a criticism of the concept or science fiction-iness, just naming convention.

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Well for one thing SM is already taken in GURPS meanings. And the reason I've been using FTL numbers up until now is that that's how Spaceships rates Stardrive units

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It's just a name, but I have trouble seeing how players wouldn't scrunch their faces up to the idea that FTL drives aren't really FTL drives.
You can call the power level of drive anything you want. Warp Drive is nice and perfectly vague as heck. Individual companies may use their own names.
Sure Federation Limited calls theirs FTL 1, 2, 3, but their drives happen to be slightly slower than Hegemony Incorporated's Warp 1, 2, 3. With Warp 1 = FTL 0.9 or something.

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Flyndaran, the FTL-x system is a GAME MECHANICS one, if two ships have the same FTL number they go at the same speed

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Spaceships can be tricky to work with. It trades flexibility for simplicity. Still working with Ve2 numbers for TL7 RTGs are roughly 6 x massive as comparable Fission reactors for the same output. A ratio of 5 or 6 to 1 tends to remain between RTGs and comparable nuclear power plants at higher TLs.

This would have RTGs producing less than 1 pp per 5% of ship's mass in Spaceships if being fully realistic (which Spaceships isn't always about marginal power plants and drives).

Refreshing my memory the Ve2 rule of thumb was that a RTG's power output dropped 10% per period of 14 years. Old Ve2 hands tended to install RTGs large enough to power the life support systems as emergency/back up power plants.

Not only can rtgs run for long times but they have no moving parts or even much in the way of weakpoints in their structure. They are ideal for long term/emergency uses that don't have high power requirements.

I once gave the PCs a ship that had an RTG that was 120% of what was needed for life support when new. That meant it produced enough power for 42 years. Their ship was older than that though and the back up RTG was only capable of powering 90% of life support. :)

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It's not real or written in stone. But that would make it fall back on the silliness of Faster Than Light drives being much slower than light.
It would be like making jets that travel in units of 100 MPH but each MPH is really Miles Per Day.

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Only the very inefficient bottom line forms have no moving parts. Some of the more advanced versions are Stirling radioisotope generators that produce 4 times the energy of basic RTGs.
I do love bulkier petering out generators bought on the cheap for those not willing to process its purity back up.

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From what I understand of the drive, FTL-1 DOES enable FTL travel. Travel at .25c will give you speed that's truely faster than light. FTL-1 technically enables just under 5 times the speed of light.

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This part makes no sense. "Travel at a quarter of the speed of light is faster than light"... wut?

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Normal-space travel that would be .25c, but with an FTL-1 drive, means to multiply the speed by 5, so net speed is 1.25 c. It's the Fast Forward drive; everything just speeds up.

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Because the FTL drive system I proposed is like the one in David Weber's Honorverse, a velocity multiplier, it doesn't impart speed.

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That's still worse than fission/fusion at the same TL and a _lot_ less reliable than the ones with no moving parts. Appears like a solution looking for a problem to me.

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Fission/fusion require huge minimum sizes, and waste heat that would be a problem in any vaguely realistic ship. Of course, FTL isn't super realistic either, but I prefer to keep my super sciences to a minimum.

But true, chasing high efficiency can lead to over designing an old technology making it less effective in the one niche it out performs newer techs.

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One thing I've got to work out is how fast the original colony ships went. Depending upon how much boost I give them (Which is partly dependent upon TL) I'm getting figures ranging from 550 years at the high end, right down to 37 years at the low end

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Well, if your definition of "huge" includes objects that are cylinders some 22 cm in diameter and 40 cm long, weighing about 300 kg. It doesn't really take much demand for electricity before fission reactors are more efficient than RTGs.

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Tiny for a fission reactor and really not awesome compared to RTGs of similar outputs. So I will adjust my statement to that of, "...with safety shielding, nuclear reactors are rather large."

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The entire satellite containing the shielded version was maybe twice the size of a human. Tiny, indeed, which was exactly my point, correcting the assertion that "fission/fusion require huge minimum sizes". Apparently we're now in agreement on the point that fission reactors can be small.

SNAP-10 was an experiment. The Soviets did a lot more with fission reactors in space, with 3 kW and 5 kW models (ten times the power for three times the weight of SNAP-10). They have current plans for ones up to a megawatt. RTGs are used for spacecraft with more modest power requirements.

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He avoids confusion by calling them "bands" of hyperspace. Even that would clearer if he called them levels.

So lets say that you have a "level one hyperspnace shunt".
You can only reach level of hyperspace without aid. Level one of hyperspace is what's called a "co-ordinate" dimension where every point in one dimension has a corresponding point in normal space. Only in H1 those points are much closer together. Higher levels of hyperspace are even "smaller" compared to normal space.

So what you have on your ship is a "hypershunt" that enables you reach a specified level of hyperspace (and probably lower ones too). You still need to the same propulsion system you use in normal space to cover distance. Weber's starships 8se their "gravitic impeller wedges" in both normal and
hyperspace (yes, I'm skipping over Warshawski sails and grav waves as unhelpful additional sources of confusion).

So I think this is basically what you men but phrased in what other people might find less confusing verbiage.