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Other FTL engines / ideas
risian4
Member Posts: 3,711 Arc User
I was watching a youtube video the other day, on future predictions about human space flight. Some of the examples included more close to real life stuff such as the Alcubierre drive, others were more exotic such as propulsion through the formation of small black holes.
Anyway. Both in Star Trek in general as well as in the game, Warp Drive seems to be the centre of almost everything: not only is it the most important milestone for civilisations to be considered 'advanced' in that they are ready to join the interstellar community *, warp drive also seems to be THE solution of almost all civilisations we know of when dealing with huge distances (the only variation that I can think of now being transwarp, basically an instantaneous form of warp travel, and stuff like special corridors / vortices / worm holes or gateways that aren't all that different in principle).
I think it would be nice to see some stories with new types of faster than light engines. Something exotic perhaps, something that deals with current developments in science. I terms of lore, it doesn't have to have a huge impact on anything, but it could nicely tie in with real world developments and ideas. We've already seen these references to real world events like the post-Iconian war refugee crises or the current blogs' explanations for historical events. Maybe it's an idea to do the same thing with technologies, and possibly to think about other important things that could be used as measurement points of the level of development of different civilisations **.
In short: maybe having the warp drive as the centre of everything needs some reconsideration. I for one would not mind exploring some planets and cultures that don't have warp technology, but that we can still make contact with if their level of development were determined on something more than just their ability to travel with a certain speed.
* Even though, for example, humans already had colonies in the Alpha Centauri system before First Contact I think but correct me if I'm wrong here
** Such as the ability to terraform, which could lend itself for some fun episodes and which could also be more significant for 21st century Earth (where most players are currently located
). Or types of knowledge that don't deal with space travel at all, like the ability to clone (something that wasn't really explored that much in Star Trek so far). I imagine that a society that doesn't have any means of interstellar space travel could still be interesting to explore, while not necessarily being less developed if you use other criteria.
Anyway. Both in Star Trek in general as well as in the game, Warp Drive seems to be the centre of almost everything: not only is it the most important milestone for civilisations to be considered 'advanced' in that they are ready to join the interstellar community *, warp drive also seems to be THE solution of almost all civilisations we know of when dealing with huge distances (the only variation that I can think of now being transwarp, basically an instantaneous form of warp travel, and stuff like special corridors / vortices / worm holes or gateways that aren't all that different in principle).
I think it would be nice to see some stories with new types of faster than light engines. Something exotic perhaps, something that deals with current developments in science. I terms of lore, it doesn't have to have a huge impact on anything, but it could nicely tie in with real world developments and ideas. We've already seen these references to real world events like the post-Iconian war refugee crises or the current blogs' explanations for historical events. Maybe it's an idea to do the same thing with technologies, and possibly to think about other important things that could be used as measurement points of the level of development of different civilisations **.
In short: maybe having the warp drive as the centre of everything needs some reconsideration. I for one would not mind exploring some planets and cultures that don't have warp technology, but that we can still make contact with if their level of development were determined on something more than just their ability to travel with a certain speed.
* Even though, for example, humans already had colonies in the Alpha Centauri system before First Contact I think but correct me if I'm wrong here
** Such as the ability to terraform, which could lend itself for some fun episodes and which could also be more significant for 21st century Earth (where most players are currently located
). Or types of knowledge that don't deal with space travel at all, like the ability to clone (something that wasn't really explored that much in Star Trek so far). I imagine that a society that doesn't have any means of interstellar space travel could still be interesting to explore, while not necessarily being less developed if you use other criteria. 0
Comments
Well's there's warp, there's transwarp, there's timewarp...
You can have any color FTL you want as long as it's warp. -- Henry Cochrane-Ford.
I thought it was when some guy who doesn't believe in odds pushes a lever forward, and then the stars elongate.
Asimov used the "jump drive", which uses "hyperspace" to translocate the ship instantly from this place to that place. In his day, nobody cared how the FTL worked, they just wanted to get the story started.
Niven's Known Space stories have a quantized hyperdrive - Quantum I, the only sort known to most starfaring species, travels at a rate of three lightyears a day, while Quantum II, as seen in the short story "At the Core" and in the novel Ringworld, travels at the rate of one lightyear every 1.25 minutes (since hyperdrives can be destroyed by the near presence of a large mass while working, and the mass detector relies on a living brain to observe it, the Quantum II hyperdrive is impractical at best, especially as one approaches the galactic core). All other interstellar travel is sublight; the Outsiders, from whom humans purchased the design of the hyperdrive shunt, travel at sublight speeds on their pilgrimage from the galactic core to the edge and back because they regard FTL as "gauche".
Jerry Pournelle's CoDominium (and Empire of Man) stories use the Alderson Drive, named for the JPL physicist who helped him work out the principles. A ship travels through the starting system to the Alderson Point, then activates the drive; the ship then moves along one of the "tramlines", or lines of thermonuclear "flux", between that star and another (tramlines don't exist between every pair of stars, and something like a supernova or the collapse of a protostar into a full-fledged star can change the existing network) virtually instantaneously. Human nervous systems take a few moments to recover from the transit, while computers take longer (hence all ships employing human helmsmen and navigators). In the novel The Mote In God's Eye, we learned that the Moties, the only other sapient species discovered, suffer even more than computers do from an Alderson jump, one of the few edges held when it became necessary to quarantine the Mote system (the human-crewed ships outside the only Alderson point to the Mote are able to pick off the Motie ships as they emerge, before the Moties can recover from jump stress).
We haven't found a way in the real world yet. Our best bet so far seems to be Alcubierre-White warp theory; however, we have yet to prove that the theory is anything more than pretty mathematical equations. They are self-consistent, but may or may not be consistent with the universe as it exists.
Still, wouldn't hurt if we saw some more of this in the game
But I do love me some Battletech, nothing like a company of Warhammers spearheading an assault in the morning to get the blood pumping!!! DHG, lead the way!
I think reboot Battlestar Galactica's FTL is similar in the way that it is only capable of traversing a certain distance, but was shown to have a much faster recharge if I remember what I saw of one episode where the Cylons would attack the fleet pretty much every half hour or so.
Then we've got the Jump Drives from Wing Commander, which require ships to reach specific points in space to jump from one system to another. You can't just go from say, Earth to Kilrah. You gotta leapfrog from one system to another to get to your destination.
And then there's Babylon 5's interpretation of Hyperspace. In B5, Hyperspace is essentially an alternate dimension or something like that accessable via a wormhole like vortex created by either a Jump Gate or a jump capable ship, typically a capital ship. There is no special engine needed to travel in Hyperspace. You just need to access this realm and use standard sublight engines to actually travel through it. Also, the color of the vortex is different depending on if it is an entry to or exit from Hyperspace.
Warhammer 40,000 has a rather unusual form of FTL travel by use of The Warp. In a way I see it as similar to B5's Hyperspace, however it seems as though it is more of a psionically charged dimension that typically requires some strong psionic beacon to help navigate, lest you become lost in the Immaterium or even fall within the grasp of the powers of Chaos. I admit my knowledge of this particular universe is still rather limited to pretty much the Dawn of War games and some browsing of the wiki.
normal text = me speaking as fellow formite
colored text = mod mode
My favourites are probably the hyperdrive and portal spawner from Star Control II. Hyperspace and quasispace are both alternate dimensions that adjoin to truespace or hyperspace coordinates but in highly compressed distances compared to truespace (for hyperspace) and hyperspace (for quasispace).
The teraport drive can be defeated by setting up a Teraport Area Denial (TAD) field, which prevents micro-wormholes from forming. Most civilized systems have TAD fields protecting their inhabited planets. (Petey knows a way around the TAD. He's used it a couple of times, but doesn't want to do it too often for fear of the sophonts of the galaxy figuring out how it works.)