Does warp drive render space warfare obsolete?

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by seasalt

These are good points, but aren't most sci-fi settings with FTL pretty "confined" anyway?

No.

It's true that the action of a given story may only take place on a few worlds, but the existence of the larger background still affects things.

Most stories set in the real world present take place in a single town or city, or the like, too. But that doesn't mean the absence of the larger world around them wouldn't affect the story!

I'm thinking of good old Star Wars. When a little robot probe spots the hidden Rebel base on some remote uninhabited planet, a gigantic Imperial fleet is hyperspacing into orbit within a matter of hours.

They've been searching for the Rebel HQ for months or years, there are many many probe droids out looking, and the only reason they recognized the particular one on Hoth as 'the' one they sought was that Vader sensed it through the Force. Otherwise they'd have had to check out each 'possible' laboriously.

Yeah, they got there in a short time once they knew they had their quarry, but Star Wars drives are very fast. That wouldn't have helped them if Vader had not been able to short-cut the identification, though. Also, when the Empire did strike, there were still lots of places for escaping Rebels to run to, it's a great big galaxy.

Confine a story to a single system and suddenly a lot of story possibilities just evaporate.

I'd argue that an outer system planet or planetoid with an eccentric orbit without FTL is about as remote as any star system in an FTL setting gets. I can't actually think of a major sci-fi setting that DOESN'T have ftl communications. People in Star Trek have casual video chats with admirals a bajillion lightyears away all the time.

But there are almost always limits on what they can and can't do. Range, power requirements, something. Sometimes they are FTL but not instantaneous.

As for multiple inhabited planets being unlikely, a TL10 civilization should have no problem terraforming marginal planets into habitability with a bit of elbow grease. Mars and Venus could be made almost earthlike with that level of tech, nevermind the crazy crap that TL11+ has available to them.

But a civilization with that kind of power has implications all its own, which a GM or writer might not want to deal with. Terraforming is hard, and a civilization that can do it can do a whole bunch of other stuff, too.

You do make a good point about sensing, though. Communications is one thing but one of the problems with a one-system sci fi setting is that whenever you're out in space, billions of people can easily see what you're doing. But I don't think that's enough to stop smugglers and criminals. An unmarked, unidentified spacecraft might be easily seen from an inhabited planet or telescope and known to be doing something shady, but good luck intercepting it before it reaches its destination if you don't already know its flight-path in advance.

You might not be able to intercept it, but odds are good you can destroy it, especially if it's a civilization that can engage in mass terraforming.

Plus, even if you can't stop them right now, you can probably identify them and catch up with them later. It's the same issue as the Rebels escaping from Hoth, there needs to be someplace to run to.

Realistically, most smuggling in such a setting would be done inside legit ships. Space piracy...well, it's just very hard to come up with a one-system setting that permits it plausibly. There are ways, yes, but all of them have big problems.

Also, a one-system setting with fast interplanetary travel tends to fall back into the same MAD scenario we live under on Earth today: all-out war suddenly starts to look setting-ending.

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by RyanW

And how many planets does the Star Wars universe really have? About two dozen or so? They say there are more, but there's very little evidence of that to be seen. I suspect most of the worlds claimed to exist are essentially rotten boroughs created to stuff the Senate with political allies.

If that was the case, there would be no Death Stars, no Star Destroyers, etc. Coruscant would not be a world-city, and the destruction of Alderaan would likely have shattered political cohesion forever.

(Imagine the difference between the Federal Government destroying a village in the process of suppressing an armed revolt, and wiping out California, Oregon, Washington State, and Nevada in the process of same. And wiping out means not what happened to the Confederacy but 'nuked into glass with 100% kill rate'. Same difference with Alderaan. If it's 1/24 of the total it's a very different thing than if it's 1/1000000 of the total.)

Likewise, if we assume the Empire somehow has those ships and resources in such a tiny society, then there's suddenly no Rebellion. When the Empire came for them on Hoth, they would have nowhere to run to and no resources to draw on to rebel in the first place.

In the story the Rebellion was secretly supported by quite a few of the planetary governments, that's how they had ships, personnel, weapons, etc.

The big background affects the story, even if the characters occupy only a small place in the total.

You could have, say, a police procedural set entirely in present-day Chicago, the story never leaves the city and never involves more than a few members of the CPD and the civilians they associate with, and the criminals. But that background of the State of Illinois, the USA, and the world all still affect and underlie the story. If those things don't exist, neither does Chicago as we know it.

[Anaraxes]

Originally Posted by seasalt

I can't actually think of a major sci-fi setting that DOESN'T have ftl communications.

Traveller pointedly has interstellar comms no faster than ships carrying messages. The Pournelle/Niven CoDominium setting is similiar, likely an inspiration (as with the jump drive and black globes).

Hm... Scalzi's Old Man's War, Heinlein's Lazarus Long stories, Haldeman's Forever War, Weber's Honorverse books ("Space is an Ocean", indeed; how else could it be Horatio Hornblower in space?), Cherryh's Alliance/Union novels (including the Chanur series), Herbert's Dune series, Poul Anderson's Flandry and van Rijn series, Piper's Terro-Human Future History books, Bujold's Vorkosigan books, Firefly, Battlestar Galactica, Alien (has FTL comms, but they're slow, weeks to reach the planet in Aliens).

It's a popular restriction for exactly the reason Star Trek started out that way. It puts the protagonists in a position of having to make the decisions and reliant on their own actions.

People in Star Trek have casual video chats with admirals a bajillion lightyears away all the time.

In TOS, Kirk was routinely out of effective contact with Star Fleet. He'd tell Uhura to transmit them subspace messages to let them know what he was up to, but it'd be weeks before they got the message from The Final Frontier. In TNG, Picard would routinely have real-time chats with admirals back at Starfleet. Evidently the subspace tech got better and speeded up the propagation rate of comms signals in a century. Voyager promptly tossed the ship way out of subspace comms range.

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by Anaraxes

Traveller pointedly has interstellar comms no faster than ships carrying messages. The Pournelle/Niven CoDominium setting is similiar, likely an inspiration (as with the jump drive and black globes).

Hm... Scalzi's Old Man's War, Heinlein's Lazarus Long stories,

It always struck me that Heinlein created a very interesting background setting as presented in Time Enough For Love, in the introduction...and then never used it for anything in the book, and later books got into the 'world as myth' crap and made the backstory irrelevant anyway.

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2

A star with that many Earth-like worlds needs a huge 'Goldilocks zone' which in turn implies a big, hot monster star.

Even then, observation of exosystems and the physics of orbital perturbations each seems to suggest that the spacing of planets in a orbital system will be geometrical. So you probably get at most three planetary orbits into a Goldilocks zone regardless of its width. You can try putting a gas giant with multiple habitable moons into each orbit, but you get problems with tidal kneading of inner moons, the Hill sphere radius being small, radiation belts stripping atmosphere, a possible limit on the total mass of a gas giant's moons, et tedious cetera. It's all a bit disappointing.

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by seasalt

It's perfectly scientifically plausible for humans to colonize a large swathe of local galactic space just by slow-boating there. All they need is generation ships or some cryogenic freezing (which is MUCH more scientifically plausible than FTL travel) and very efficient fusion engines that can get you to 1/10c cruising speed.

To cruise at 0.1 c you need a delta-vee of 0.2c or space brakes. Fusion fuels only contain enough energy per unit mass to produce an effective exhaust velocity of about 0.1 c as a limit-in-principle; problems with directing neutrons for a rocket exhaust without using an inert propellant mean that the practical limit on fusion-rocket exhaust speed will be less than 0.03c. ∆v/v[sub]ex[/sub] = 0.2 c / 0.03 c = 6.67. That implies a mass ratio of e^6.67 = 787. Ack!

[maximara]

Originally Posted by Anaraxes

In TOS, Kirk was routinely out of effective contact with Star Fleet. He'd tell Uhura to transmit them subspace messages to let them know what he was up to, but it'd be weeks before they got the message from The Final Frontier. In TNG, Picard would routinely have real-time chats with admirals back at Starfleet. Evidently the subspace tech got better and speeded up the propagation rate of comms signals in a century. Voyager promptly tossed the ship way out of subspace comms range.

Like distances, this varied wildly depending on the episode. The most blatant of these is "The Alternative Factor" where Starfleet Command (Earth) knew of something that effected "every quadrant of the galaxy and far beyond". IF there were speed limits on communications how could they have known that within an hour?

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Agemegos

To cruise at 0.1 c you need a delta-vee of 0.2c or space brakes. !

A mag sall might fill the role of "space brakes". That should leave only half the problem. Still rather "Ack!".

Another way to look at the problem is the statement that with a power system that turned matter into energy with 100% efficiency and a drive that turned energy into velocity with 100% efficiency you could reach near c (disregarding relativity) with a fuel load of 50% of your ship.

When dealing with power systems and drives of lower efficiency you have to increase your fuel load or lower your target speed.

Lowering your target speed to .1 C helps of course but a fusion power plant would probably only turn 1% of the mass of fuel consumed into energy (and thats probably generous). Those numbers will require more fuel than ship.

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by maximara

Like distances, this varied wildly depending on the episode. The most blatant of these is "The Alternative Factor" where Starfleet Command (Earth) knew of something that effected "every quadrant of the galaxy and far beyond". IF there were speed limits on communications how could they have known that within an hour?

That might vary with conditions. Conventional real-world radio can vary widely in range depending on weather, time of day, etc.

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

A mag sall might fill the role of "space brakes". That should leave only half the problem. Still rather "Ack!".

Another way to look at the problem is the statement that with a power system that turned matter into energy with 100% efficiency and a drive that turned energy into velocity with 100% efficiency you could reach near c (disregarding relativity) with a fuel load of 50% of your ship.

When dealing with power systems and drives of lower efficiency you have to increase your fuel load or lower your target speed.

Lowering your target speed to .1 C helps of course but a fusion power plant would probably only turn 1% of the mass of fuel consumed into energy (and thats probably generous). Those numbers will require more fuel than ship.

This above is one of the reasons that I have said before that Star Trek TOS is actually more believable than the stuff that tries to use too much real-world tech projected forward. It's more believable because it does posit the existence of superscience tech like warp drives that would make interstellar travel a practical proposition.

Attempts to posit star flight with so-called 'realistic' tech gets you things like the Venture Star from the movie Avatar. Which is closer to what we currently think is possible, but which I doubt anyone would ever actually build.