[Discussion] Year 2016 Revision on FTL thematics

[Fred]

Last month, we begun a discussion to address FTL speeds, to try and address the discontent, disconnects and narrative hurdles some members of our community felt about it. Though the most participants supported a revision (hyperspace speed being by hour, rather than minute, CDD speeds being divided by 10), our Setting Admin Wes was firm in the opinion that he did not find it either desirable or worth the workload to make the revision itself - he was content: hyperspace was the way he wanted it portrayed in SARP.

Essentially, our site narrative is apparently in support of movie-style FTL travel. Think of a movie like the 2009 StarTrek reboot. It takes minutes to get to places. We will hopefully get to rationalizing that later.

However, one thing that became clear during our discussion was that the thematics for hyperspace was vague at best. Wes was inclined to the idea of giving the whole matter a hard look, and he himself expressed he wished a few things changed: the ability for power armor to go at Faster-than-Light speeds, and phasing out CDD propulsion in favor of Hyperspace.

I'm going to paraphrase some of the things Khasidel mentioned in the previous thread to start us off. (because copying is a form of flattery, and there's only so much writing I can think up on the fly while doing remote technical support at work)

1. How quickly can FTL drives be used?
Currently there are no set limits/rules for how long any form of FTL drives needs to charge up/cool down prior to reuse or how long it takes to plot their trip via computer, etc. There are some self-imposed limitations on a few versions of FTL drives (Nashoba seems fond on putting range and charging time limits for his submissions), but these appear to follow no official rules and were seemingly put together on the spot by each article creator for flavour.

For dramatic purposes it can be a useful RP element if starships aren't always ready to escape into hyperspace or flee a system at a moments notice. It also adds opportunities for things to happen en route to a destination if a ship needs to periodically drop out of FTL -- freighters can be attacked by pirates rather than coasting all the way to their destinations safely in hyperspace.

2. How accurate are the drives?
A useful RP mechanic is that FTL travel need not always be perfectly accurate in getting a ship to its destination. We generally have ships always dropping out of FTL right on the perfect edge of the FTL limit for a given planet -- but what if getting close to a planets gravity well were dangerous for ships in FTL so they usually drop out a little early? Or coming out on the edge is a difficult feat for pilots or technology to perform so generally only military ships can do it? Having the possibility that -- depending on the tech level of a ship or the skills of its helmsman -- a ship might be forced to travel by STL for a longer period may add tension in RP situations where time is a valuable commodity.

3. Hyperspace.
Hyperspace itself is poorly described on the wiki -- there is little-to-no information available on the wiki about how it appears for individuals travelling through it, limitations for ships while operating there, possible side-effects for being there? Are there exotic particles? Navigation hazards? 'Currents' and 'eddies' caused by the shadow masses of planets and nebulae, influencing a ships course as they travel through it, requiring navigators to take those into consideration as they plot courses? Putting that sort of info and perhaps adding a more fleshed out visual description of hyperspace in the hyperspace travel article might be a good thing.

And a few more points from me...

4. FTL Limits
Currently , we have the Hill spheres of planets being the delimitation of where ships can travel at FTL speed, and then they have to go in it the slow STL way. It's been critiqued that this is not a good/accurate metric.

Years ago, we had an interdiction field concept to trap ships in, but it was proven not to do its job well. But we still wanted to avoid the notion of ships being able to hyperspace out of a fight nilly-willy all the time just because it was possible. The whole point of using the Hill Spheres like that was having zones where, once entered, ships would be commited to travelling at sublight - interdiction and Hill Spheres both dealt in shadow masses of stellar bodies (or mimicking thier influence in the former case) so this seemed a feasible transition.

But apparently, it's not so great, so we may want to revise that.

5. Our Starmap is in 2D
We have a limitation with our StarMap being in 2D while space being a 3d medium.

Admittedly, this isn't really easy to get around. It's been discussed, but it's so far infeasible to get a 3d presentation of the starmap, and perhaps not worth the bother. We could remain content to just gloss over it.

Or we could embrace it. Is our hyperspace technology, somehow, based on having things in two-dimensions and then traveling through space that way, such as Planespace in Banner/Crest of the Stars, or hyperspace in Star Control 2?

6. What are the cinematic visuals that we want FTL travel to have?
Wes has a fairly clear notion of hyperspace fold: it's the exactly same as the old Macross anime had in the 1980s; a big shimmers and disappears... and minutes later, it shimmers and reappears in another system. It's... effectively delayed teleportation.

I'm of the mind that this concept hasn't aged well. Even the Macross IP changed these visuals to something else in the Macross Frontier/Delta anime.

If hyperspace technology is going to be re-examined and advanced to cover the advantages a translation-based CDD propulsion system offered (usually compared to Star Trek warp speed), this might be worth re-examining.

7. How exactly do pirates survive in a setting where travel from system to system is so short that the military/police can be everywhere in no time?
Considering how underdogs can operate to do thier misdeeds is important from a storytelling narrative, and the high FTL speeds/inability to intercept during transit greatly help the defensive side, enough so that it makes it hard to build these stories from the perspective of the dramatic narrative. Tha tit makes it hard to have bad things happen when some things are just too good.

8. With ships so fast, why haven't we gone farther than we have?
The distances of our current sphere of influence is ridiculously small compared to the speed our starship possess. What exactly stopped us from flying one hour in a direction and just flying off the face of the starmap and into the great beyond?

We could hatch justifications like "we haven't, our region of space of dense with star systems", but I don't really buy into that. It seems weak. Hyperspace travel itself is amazingly powerful technology, especially with speeds we have, but does it have limitations never before covered?

Is having an established starmap/hyperspace coordinates important for hyperspace-capable ships to be able to plot their jumps? Is it important for survey ships to go at the edge of known territory and chart neighboring systems so that then other vessels with that knowledge can make those hyperspace jumps? Is exploration in this fashion actually important? Does this mean that if you know the location of a star system and others don't that it can be advantageous to keep as an hideout/secret spot for a mining colony/something of the like?

I just figured that if you need to map where you go with what is currently established as a point-to-point FTL travel method, maybe that's why we can't go to the opposite end of the galaxy yet.

This can also bring about the question: what happens if we go in hyperspace to a location we've insufficient information on. Do we just end up in deep space? (is it okay to end up in deep space?) Or are there other consequences to these potential "misjumps"?

9. Supporting certain narrative uses of hyperspace:
I've seen a few concepts crop up through the years, and I figured it might be a good idea to address how they would work and why.
One is the microfold, something I remember seeing the Plumeria-class Elfin Princess do, which basically seemed like it could just have been a very short STL jump (0.3c is 100 000km/s covers a pretty long distance in just an eyeblink, which would have been suitable to the distances involved in ship-to-ship combat back then).
Another is the Emergency Hyperspace Fold, a term which implicates that trying to jump into hyperspace too quick can have unfortunate consequences. It's called Emegency because it's not usually done. Question is, why? Maintenance issues? Possibilities for catastrophic failure? Misjumping meaning dire consequences for the ship itself? Does this tie in to how often an FTL can be used, charge times/cooldown periods and so forth?

 

[Zack]

A quick response, because I care.

1. How quickly can FTL drives be used?

This is stupidly important, and there is a critical tipping point around the ~30 minute mark.

And this is not just because of the combat implications either.

Consider if you're leaving the hill sphere of the local star. If your destination is on the other side of the star it may be faster to travel the shorter distance to the edge of the hill sphere, FTL off to the side, then FTL to your destination. Consider the art below.
View attachment 5922
Path 1 is the least direct path imaginable! But if FTL charge time is less than a minute, the fastest way to get to another star system is to head directly away from the hill sphere, FTL until the Hill Sphere is no longer in the way of your destination, and then FTL to your destination.

However, if FTL charge time is ~30 minutes or more then it may be faster to go directly towards your destination and go through the hill sphere the long way then just make 1 FTL jump to your destination.

--

Of course, this also begs the question of why don't ships have their FTL drives charged all the time? We may want to make it offical that doing so is bad for the engines. We also may want to make it offical that storing that much energy is going to cause your ship to explode massively if you take too much damage.

--

And one more thing, you'll probably notice that this means the travel time between star systems changes wildly based on the time of year which is a great explanation for why we're so fuzzy about travel time!

2. How accurate are the drives?

Pretty much super-duper accurate. I think we've established that well in RP and we may not want to really change that.

3. Hyperspace.

I think we've also established in RP that hyperspace is very safe. As much as people would love to add in some hazards the trend in the past has so far been to get rid of them and I think for the better. SARP is about what happens at the destination not what happens while we wait to get there.

It may also get in the way of Hyperspace being point to point only.

And finally, I don't think there would be much to see... the crazy amount of folded space would either make everything look completely black, or it would look like you are in a house of mirrors.

4. FTL Limits / Pirates

Removing interdiction fields made piracy completely non-viable. Going forward I think it would be better to just have no pirates at all. I would love a hard number for the size of the hill spheres around stars, even an 'X light-hours in size' would be fantastic for getting a general idea of the travel time.

5. Our Starmap is in 2D

As much as a 3d map sounds nice, it doesn't work well for the medium. There is also a decent excuse for the map being flat in the galactic plane, namely that there isn't much variation in 'height' between stars because of how the Kyoto sector formed.

6. What are the cinematic visuals that we want FTL travel to have?

I think the 'blink in, blink out' visual works well, and I would he happy to stick with that. Battlestar Galactica does it wonderfully! I also think we should move ahead with getting rid of CDD and other FTL methods to make the setting feel a bit more uniform and less like we're in a comic book world where anything goes.

That being said, I think the best thing that could come from this is to standardize the FTL visual rather than to have 'the right' FTL visual. I think the setting as a whole benefits when we're all on the same page.

7. How exactly do pirates survive in a setting where travel from system to system is so short that the military/police can be everywhere in no time?

Space-pirates shouldn't be a thing. There is really no viable way of pirating a ship in the setting. I am far more interested in seeing what happens because of how the setting is setup rather than trying to shoehorn in things to the setting that don't really fit.

8. With ships so fast, why haven't we gone farther than we have?

Because no one cares to go that far / political pressure. The nepleslians did this with the big land grab a while back and they got a lot of shit for it on the international stage.

Sure that's kinda weaksauce, but it fits very well with the types of governments in the Kyoto sector. I don't think we really need more of a reason than that for why no one has really done a lot of exploring. As much as we all love star-trek this setting is really more about the pew pew and the politics than it is about exploration.

9. Supporting certain narrative uses of hyperspace:

I'm not a huge fan of the emergency fold, since it seems more like an excuse to quickly get characters out of trouble than anything else.

That being said, Hyperspace has a ton of tactical applications and nothing is going to change that. The ability to move distances instantly is absurdly powerful regardless of what limits you put on it. Rather than seeing ways of limiting its use, I'd rather see people just making use of hyperspace jumps more often.

The one thing I would like to address is teleportation. The mindy teleport packs are cool, but they are also stupidly powerful. I think a good balancing mechanic is that we don't have teleportation pads... if you want to teleport you have to bring your teleport device with you. Even as it is, the teleporter already threatens to move the entire setting up a notch in terms of how powerful the starships in the setting are.

 

[Dumont]

I looked up 'hyperspace' on the wiki, and what I read didn't quite seem to match up with what I'm reading on this thread.

How fast does it take to use?
According to the 'Hyperspace Travel' page, it says it takes 1 to 20 minutes to charge up a hyperspace drive.

How accurate are they?
Presumably they know when to stop at least, but that same page says that you can only travel in straight lines, and that you can't hyperspace fold through solid objects. It would presumably mean that you're going to be about as accurate as you can be within your own sensor range. I assume most civilised areas of space have sensor bouys or something to aid navigation, but outside it you need to plan your jumps.

2D starmap problems?
Add layers giving approximate elevations within a set range of X number of lightyears or whatever. Kikyo sector elevation range 0, kikyo sector elevation range -1, etc.

Pirates?
According to the Hyperspace Travel page, you can't hyperspace through a nebula. So presumably they hide in those, I guess? I'm not thinking too hard on this, but I assume it's something like get in, shoot a ship to disable its engines, then tow it out. Stealth in space sounds more like tricky navigation than fancy flying.

Why not further?
If you need to worry about hitting things and can only travel in straight lines, then I assume it's because you need to navigate enormous amounts of space in tiny tiny chunks based on your sensor range (I don't care how superawesome your sensors are, space will ALWAYS BE BIGGER). It's easier to sit down on your settled planets and use observatories to map out closer star systems before moving in on them.

 

[Moogle]

4. FTL Limits / Pirates

Removing interdiction fields made piracy completely non-viable. Going forward I think it would be better to just have no pirates at all. I would love a hard number for the size of the hill spheres around stars, even an 'X light-hours in size' would be fantastic for getting a general idea of the travel time.

7. How exactly do pirates survive in a setting where travel from system to system is so short that the military/police can be everywhere in no time?

Space-pirates shouldn't be a thing. There is really no viable way of pirating a ship in the setting. I am far more interested in seeing what happens because of how the setting is setup rather than trying to shoehorn in things to the setting that don't really fit.

Given how I am the person who runs the only technically active pirate faction left in the site, I feel I need to respond to this.

Piracy is not non-viable. Crime evolves, and there is such a thing as communications jammers, and luring ploys, and sick duck ploys, and false flag operations. It isn't shoehorning to have a criminal element that takes advantage of cracks in the system, and while it isn't necessarily a thing that'll happen on Yamatai, it could very well still happen.

That being said, it's an incredibly boring approach you're taking, thematically.

 

[raz]

1. How quickly can FTL drives be used?
This should be codified. Like a lot of points here, I think it should depend on the faction's tech level and implementation. For Yamatai, something quick. If the community is comfortable with minutes, maybe 5 or 10 for SAoY ships, since that's an eternity in actual RP and provides sufficient suspense.

2. How accurate are the drives?
Very accurate but, again, it depends on the faction's tech level and implementation. A navigation officer on a low tech ship might be able to chart a course just as accurately as one on a state-of-the-art ship, but it'll require a lot more work on their part.

3. Hyperspace.
No opinion on this. Space hazards are cool but are more the realm of STL travel in real space. I don't think putting weird things into canon about Hyperspace hazards would be good. Some sort of note on the wiki that allows GMs to write the currents and shadows you talked about would be good, but GMs should retain the power to include them.

4. FTL Limits
What we have now is good. You have to jump from outside of the system's magical field. It's like Stellaris and very sci-fi. Perfect.

5. Our Starmap is in 2D
I like the idea of explaining the map by saying it's because of Hyperspace. A 3D map is impossible without a dedicated programmer to design and subsequently keep it updated.

6. What are the cinematic visuals that we want FTL travel to have?
Depends on the faction's tech level and implementation. Wes doesn't want new FTL methods every time a new species is created. Still, you can probably access Hyperspace in multiple ways. Let the FMs come up with the FTL animation for their tech.

7. How exactly do pirates survive in a setting where travel from system to system is so short that the military/police can be everywhere in no time?
They survive because criminal capability doesn't stop scaling up alongside crime fighting capability. I'm sure pirates are effective. And it's not like the Star Army is going to instantaneously roll up a squadron every time they get a sensor hit or distress signal.

Logistical considerations are always important when dealing with military and police stuff. Just like FTL transit times themselves, I think people should remember the time it takes to organize people and equipment. We have readiness conditions in the Star Army, just like real militaries, and thus most assets (other than QRFs) aren't ready to go at a moment's notice.

8. With ships so fast, why haven't we gone farther than we have?
Again, this can be explained by logistics. Even the all powerful Yamatai doesn't have enough resources to immediately populate all of its claimed worlds. Wes has also, in the past, seemed interested in cutting down on the number of worlds Yamatai claims (KFY disintegration idea). Just a matter of organization and resources.

9. Supporting certain narrative uses of hyperspace:
I'm pretty sure emergency folds are just uncharted jumps, which is obviously very dangerous.

Opinion on this is to not codify too much. One of the best things about SARP is that it's both detailed and very flexible as it stands. If we start detailing too many things that fall into "narrative uses," we'll prevent GMs from telling good stories. Let showrunners think up cool gimmicks instead of providing them with a set of things they can do.

 

[Khasidel]

1. FTL Recharge Rate
A little different from my recommendations back in the speed discussion thread. If we're going to keep things 1-20 minutes so as to avoid retconning what's already written in the hyperspace travel article, I would suggest:

Very advanced civilizations; 6.25 ly per minute charging time and a maximum hyperspace hop range of 125 LY
Advanced civilizations; 5 ly per minute charging time and a maximum jump range of 100 LY
Standard civilizations; 3.75 ly per minute charging time and a maximum jump range of 75 LY

With these values, it would take about 20 minutes for each civilization level to attain the maximum hyperspace hop range I've suggested. Of course, one could also perform much shorter trips with considerably less charge time and perform the same-old 'micro-jump's previously depicted in RP without any problems.

2. FTL Accuracy
Across interstellar distances I believe missing your target destination by a few thousand (or even a few hundred thousand) kilometers is well within the realm of believability even for very advanced civilizations. Even the slightest misalignment or miscalculation for how long you should be in hyperspace could have you missing your target by a surprisingly large margin, especially if the hyperspace trip is over a particularly long distance or toward a system where you have less than up-to-date sensor data regarding planet positions and the like.

Admittedly, most of my inspiration for suggesting an inaccuracy RP mechanic comes from reading Honor Harrington sci-fi novels written by David Weber; there, being able to navigate ships out of hyperspace close to the hyper limit of a star is a significant navigational feat and can provide significant advantage or disadvantage to military fleets during engagements.

3. Hyperspace
I'm fine with/or without any changes or additions to hyperspace regarding hazards, navigational anomalies and the like. Mostly, what I would like is a more fleshed out visual description of what travelling through hyperspace is like in general.

4. FTL Limits
I'm now a little bit confused by which hill sphere (star or planet) is currently considered to be the overall FTL limit in a given area. I've generally been operating under the impression that the hill sphere's of planets were the FTL limit and that the hill spheres of stars were generally ignored; but what Wes (toward the end of the previous speed discussion thread) and some others in this thread have suggested is that its the stars hill sphere which determines when and where FTL can be used. Some clarification here would be nice

Regardless though, I'd personally be fine with it being some property of each star that determines how far into a system a ship can come into or out of FTL -- its easier than calculating an FTL limit for each individual planet at least. However, I'd like a clearer and more easily determined method for determining the FTL for each star than using hill spheres (The precise value or which would be a pain in the butt to determine). Something easy like the basic equation, FTL Limit Radius = The Stars Mass (In multiples of stellar masses) x 5.2 Astronomical Units or the like.

5. 2D/3D Starmap
Depicting 3-dimensional space in a 2D format can be a pain true. As far as I'm concerned, the simplest method to solving the dilemma of realism would be to add XYZ co-ordinates to a variant of the existing 2D map.

Something kinda like this:



The X and Y coordinates would essentially be the positions shown for each star with the existing map grid. We just choose some random positive or negative Z value to represent how far the star is above or below the 2D plane depicted by the map.

Having precise coordinates is also useful for determining exact travel times, rather then guestimating them.

To find the distance between two stars when using three-dimensional coordinates, one need only apply the Pythagorean formula: D = Square Root of (X squared + Y squared + Z squared)

Here, D is the total distance between two stars in lightyears, while X, Y and Z are the distance between them along each of the three axes.

IE, using the co-ordinates in the map sample above, the precise distance between Anisa and Kennewes would equal; the square root of (21.4 squared + 1.7 squared + 2.1 squared).

Essentially, 21.569 Lightyears.

6. FTL Cinematic Visuals

I'm fine with the simple, jump-flash we're in hyperspace thingy we've got going currently. I would just like a better visual description, or at least a clear description of what hyperspace appears like as you are travelling through it to your destination. Is it all reddish and black shadows, Babylon 5 style? A bluish-white conduit you pass through like subspace travel in the game Freespace 2? Can you see anything at all beyond the fold bubble protecting your ship in hyperspace, or is it just a black void or nothingness?

7. Piracy
I wasn't around when FTL-interdicting tech got the axe, so I'm not entirely sure why it was ultimately removed from the setting. Personally, I'm under the impression that it would still be a useful RP tool -- so long as it has precisely set limits that can't be heavily abused.

8. Ships so fast, yadda, yadda
This bugs the heck out of me, personally. I could accept logistics as an explanation for lack of long-distance exploration if I actually saw any sign that logistics was an actual thing in SARP -- IE fuel use for FTL/reactors/STL drives, routine equipment maintenance instead of self-repairing systems, ammo/life support limitations, etc.

However, the Star Army has essentially got magical handwavium nodal fabrication tech that can make virtually anything out of aether or elemental hydrogen, and pretty much all its starship tech makes physics and known science its bitch. The use of aether drives/CFS means the STL travel need no fuel. Aether reactors need no fuel. FTL drives need no fuel. Life-support can effectively last forever when you can fabricate/recycle food/water/air with ease. Maintenance is a non-issue when most of your tech lasts practically forever and is self-repairing. Heck, the Star Army can even fabricate new crew as well if they need to.

Admittedly, with Yamatai's relatively small population size and sparsely populated planets mean there would be little drive for colonization beyond currently explored space -- but that wouldn't stop them from exploring and identifying other species/potential threats beyond their immediate area. If you had the tech depicted for Yamatai you could probably just mass produce FTL survey drones and do quick surveys of every system -- no matter how many thousands of stars there. Then there's also the fact with FTL comms, you'd probably hear other space-faring civilizations long before you physically ran into them.

If we're keeping the current speed values, I'd tentatively suggest opening up the entire galaxy as potential RP territory rather than restricting things to the Kikyo sector, as well as consider creating a larger-scale, star-wars universe-style galaxy map for when we run into stuff out there during RP.

9. Narrative use of hyperspace
I'm actually more leery of the current self-teleporting power armor than I would be of star trek-style pad-to-pad teleportation. If teleportation was restricted between a projecting device and a receiving device (no teleporting without a receiving pad or device present), with appropriate limitations to keep it from abuse (Ie, no teleporting through shields. Teleport jammers, etc), I don't see why it couldn't be added to the setting in a larger scale.

... my brain is melting... I'm done for tonight

 

[Fred]

My stance on technological level
I don't care. I don't think it's ultimately applicable because having 'lower' tech is something I've seen enforced by FMs that, frankly, it usually doesn't last and they catch up to Yamatai soon enough. So, I'm just going to stick my conjecture to Yamatai standards.

FTL Drive start-up/cooldown
I'm of the mind that FTL needs time to start-up and time to recover/wind-down. I hardly have exact figures, but there are two sci-fi points of reference I can bring up.

In the PC game Elite Dangerous, it kind of feels right. Normally, if my ship is far enough away from any object of significant mass (outposts, etc...), it takes something like 10 seconds for the frameshift drive to hurtle me up to intraplanetary FTL. If I happen to have pursuers gunning at me and that the odds aren't in my favor, I can turn tail and run... but the closest they are, the more "nearby mass" my frameshift drive has to deal with and my charge time to hurtle away is multiplied significantly. If three interceptors are after me and that my shields are down by the time I decide to bug out, I might not be able to survive a 40-50 second wait of afterburning and lateral jukes hoping my frameshift drive will engage in time for me not to get blown up.

Once in intraplanetary FTL, probably closest to our CDD, the closer to a planetary body I am, the lower c I can muster out of my engine, but the farther I get, the more my speed increases until I'm cruising at 2000c through the star system.

It's usually once I'm in planetary FTL that I can actually engage in intrastellar FTL travel. Same windup time of roughly 10 seconds while at top speed, and then BAM, I'm away and in the next minutes, I'll be in the next system. Once there, my engine heat will have spiked, so I'll need to give it a breather before plotting course to another system and blasting off again. It usually takes about half-a-minute to cool down, unless some mishap with the sun happens >_>;

The other reference is the latest Macross Delta anime. At some point near the end of the first season, Macross Elysion is folding out to another system to engage an enemy before it gets to a world they mean to defend. But the enemy outmaneuvers them, fold out just as the Elysion folds in, and the Elysion is stuck waiting 40 minutes for its fold drive to cooldown (actually, it was "can't use the fold drive for 40 minutes, so it might not have been to cooldown, maybe recharge) - and that struck me as quite cool that they introduced that limit.

It forced them to equip fold boosters on a squadron of Valkyrie fighter to have them try to catch up and be the first line of defense until it could refold back.

Accuracy of the FTL Drives.
I also have the feeling that the FTL drives are accurate enough for being thrown off-course to not be a problem, unless there was some problem plotting the course in the first place.

The looks of Hyperspace
I really dislike the win-out/wink-in fold/defold that was inspired from the first Macross because I find it narratively weak. We have this super-fast way of travel the stars, but it's essentially portrayed as teleportation. The cinematic language for it doesn't feel fast.

This setting actually has two mainstream methods of intrastellar travel. The Hyperspace Fold (as described above) and Hyperpulse travel... which Nepleslians use, likely comes from the NDI, and that I've seen mostly described like hyperspace is in Starwars.

Since Macross Frontier, the Macross IP has been describing its folds with visual language implicating formation of some gate, ship crosses through, and then there's travel in this energy tunnel for some length of time until the eventual defold, which is another portal opening.

I think the portal opening is mostly unneeded, especially considering how Macross Fronter/Delta have then with fancy artful man-made patterns rather than more natural-looking phenomenon (Babylon-5 jump portals coming to mind).

If the looks of the hyperspace fold was left up to me in my plot, but that I'd try to respect at least the way it functions as a point-to-point FTL method, I'd likely go for Startrek(2009) hurtle out into nothingness/be shown traveling in some tunnel.

...

Another facet I thought might be worth exploring is having the newer hyperspace drives behave in a fashion similar to the Elite Dangerous frameshift drive. Within a star system, the hyperspace drive would achieve CDD-level FTL speed, and when ideal conditions are reached, it would actually be able to fold out. You'd go fast, and then reach the conditions to go faster.

I refer to Elite Dangerous, but honestly, my visual inspiration is more Back to the Future, where the DeLorean needed to reach 88mph before KraKRA-BOOSH! and lightning, flametracks and gone! It was all about "go fast enough and you'll time travel" - though in our case it'd be "go fast enough and you'll be able to travel even faster through the cosmos".

The Zenith and Nadir of Star Systems as FTL entry points
Remember how I mentioned in Macross Delta that two forces folding in/out came across each other passed by each other?

Just how probably is this in SARP to happen? Not very, right? It was still an awesome moment, though, which begs the question of if the use of chokepoints would be useful.

In Battletech, jumpships can only jump to the nadir or zenith of a star (where gravity won't muck up the process) and then the launch dropships to travel in the star system proper while the jumpship stay there.

In new fold drives can only fold safely/reliably to the zenith/nadir of systems and then travel to where they want to go in a star system using translation-based FLT like the Delorean example (basically, when you go fast enough, you only transit to fold at the proper sweetspots), it would create two possible chokepoints in a system where you could have raiders lurk for unsuspecting merchants defolding out.

But then again, it'd make it easy for mililaties to just park squadrons at those two spots and see everything coming in, so, I'm not sure of how good that actually would be.

Elite Dangerous does it semi-diferently: intrastellar frameshifting ALWAYS makes you arrive in a system next to the stars (which can be dangerous if you're not alert on system entry and drift closer to the star while your ship already runs hot from frameshifting).

Hyperspace on a 2d plane
If we could bend SARP to making the hyperspace system work on 2-dimensions, it'd be really convenient. But... it'd probably be too hard of a change too.

Even though I admit that to myself, I still like the notion of basing it on a 2d plane better than just slapping coordinates under system. It's going to add clutter, for one; it likely won't be paid much attention to; and it's going to be more work for each system... which makes it a non-negligible overhaul of the Star Map.

I find myself dismayed to see that the most convenient solution is to just keep glossing over it.

Piracy/Raiding
Zack made a helpfully constructive post, but I don't agree with all of it. This part, especially. Giving up on that? That's robbing SARP of a fairly strong storytelling tool. Ironically, it'd be a retcon too. Surely we can do better.

The hyperspace chokepoints I mentioned earlier seemed like it could make piracy possible, but probably only in more far-out star systes with less military presence.

The way charging a frameshift drive really slows down if you've got other ships nearby not generating their own FTL could also play in preventing vessels to make an handy escape and perhaps be a passive way of interdicting/making sure that people cannot conveniently FTL out of fights?

Actually, maybe this could be patterned after the process of ships trying to fold with another vessel (while towing, or a Plumeria folding for its Chiaki squadron) as far as charge time would be handled too.

Fast travel speed vs why haven't we gone farther
I'm reluctant to dismiss it. Some of my ideas are fanciful, but this feels like an important consideration. Yamatai has the SSS, which is meant for exploration. Years back, while Wes' plotship was relatively empty of players, he made Hanako go chart starts south-west of the Great Southern Nebula. Somehow, this feels like it could be meaningful, and why despite our huge travel speeds we can go places nilly-willy.

 

[Zack]

There is a lot to discuss here, so if I skip over something it is in the interest of trying to narrow myself to a few topics.

Why we haven't gone further / Aether Reactors>

A lot of this could be addressed with a minor retcon regarding Aether Power.

Aether reactors put out nearly limitless energy, and with perfect energy to mass conversion there is really no reason why you shouldn't be able to just plug one of these things in and have all the clothing, food, whatever you need come out.

We could change that to saying that it isn't easy to get usable matter out of aether reactors. You certainly could if you wanted (that wouldn't change) but it would be far easier to just go mine the gold you need, or convert existing rock into gold, than it would be to sit down for a few days and let your aether reactor pump out a few pounds of gold.

This leaves everything super-high-tech as it is but still gives a decent reason for an economy to be going on behind the scenes. It also gives a bit of a reason for why Yamatai stays close to home (easier to grow food there, easier to mine on a developed world than it is to send everyone into space on starships).



Looks of Hyperspace >

Hyperspace is supposed to be point to point travel where ships take a shortcut through a universe that is 'smaller' than our own. This neatly sidesteps the problem of accelerating/decelerating and turning or crews to mush in the process. As such the 2009 star trek 'slam on the breaks' doesn't really fit with what we're trying to do.

This also helps us confine our battles to STL speeds a bit, which can be nice for making the story 'look' nice.

Of course this also means it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to be traveling in a tunnel either.

This then begs the question 'What does it look like while we're in hyperspace?'


1: Nothingness,

We have no real reason to think anything would be in our tiny adjacent travel universe (or universes, we're traveling through higher dimensions here so universe may not even be a good word to describe it). In this case it would just be pitch black, nothing going on, nothing to see here until you return to regular space.


2: It's full of stars.

Consider this 'unlikely, hard to approve, but maybe an interesting storyline'. There could be stuff in those higher travel dimensions. Like regular space I'd imagine it'd be a whole lot of nothingness and it would be virtually impossible to accidentally run into something here because of the orders of magnitudes more nothingness than regular space. But I don't see why there couldn't be planets and stars there to explore.


3: It's REALLY full of stars

And we have plenty of reasons for thinking this. We have that aether universe sitting so close to SARP's realspace, pretty much all FTL drives involve some level of 'massive explosion' and any kind of space twisting shenanigans is going to take up a lot of power. Hyperspace could be so overwhelmingly bright that you can't do anything besides put your shields to maximum (Full Black) and ride it out to avoid getting your ship burnt to a crisp. Of course, this may also be a good excuse for why ships can only stay in hyperspace for so long, which may be another answer to why ships don't travel super far away from home?





Pirates >

I think a long time ago SARP decided to be about SARP rather than being about everything. What we do include in the setting is just as important as what we don't.

IRL, pirates work because a number of things come together to make piracy viable. Help can't get there in time, governments are encouraging piracy, merchant ships are heavily loaded and slow so they can't escape, ect, ect.

Without interdiction fields the only time you can catch a ship is when it is approaching or leaving a star system. Everyone in that system has strong, FTL, sensors that will be able to watch the ship depart. Everyone in the other system has similarly strong FTL sensors that can see it arrive. Communication between point A and point B is basically instant.

But that isn't all!

Your ship is moving at full speed this entire time, pirates have to be infront of you to catch you so if they want to do the good ol 'fire cannons and board the ship' they have to be out infront of the target ship with enough capable and accurate fire power to disable their target without destroying it.

Of course THAT means they are very visible. Any competent military is going to blow them up very quickly.

So who would want to be a pirate? If you have a ship with weapons you can probably get better, safer, and far more profitable work. If you really want to steal something, you're better off being a smart pirate and stealing from the docks where it is easy rather than the ships where it is super hard.



Of course, there may be some political situations where pirates are just destroying ships outright or whathaveyou, but I think that is my point: Pirates don't make sense in the setting unless there are some serious shenanigans going on.

 

[Fred]

Why we haven't gone further / Aether Reactors>

Going by economy is still not good enough.
No one is going to experience life support failure, run out of supplies, or run out of power while traveling across the starmap, an exercise which would take, side-to-side, 4 hours on a Plumeria.
In an entire day, the same ship would cover 6 times that - totalling 1440 light years.
Emergency supplies typically last two weeks for a crew on most KFY ships... so, the ship's crew and essentials would last 10 080 light years just in that time - 84 times our starmap.
A fully supplied ship would be able to go even further.
Even if there's a charge and cooldown limit, following Khasidel's suggested guideline, the cooldown between jumps would only require chainjumping resting ~20 minutes between jumps every ~2 hours for a Plumeria. You'd lose 3 hours daily at most.

And the Plumeria is a fast response interception-style vessel, not even some long-range explorer with extra endurance/cargo reserves for long trips.

So, our limitation is not fuel. It's not political. It's not based on how long a ship can last while traveling.

So, it's something else.
Sensors/charting seemed good to me.
Zack's suggestions of hyperspace being hostile and requiring shield seems like it has potential... but not all FTL-capable ships have shields.

Looks of Hyperspace >
I don't see the problem of generating somekind of tunnel environment for visuals. Consider how you can just open an apperture that tunnels from one point to another in the process of folding space between two locations. I mean, the people that made up the visuals for fold pretty much went for that when their budget went up.


Fold-capable ship triggers its fold drive to travel from Tatiana to Anisa.

It darts forward and crosses through an apperture - no MacrossD-style visible portal, so it'd look like StarTrek2009's warp out.
Alternatively, more like slipstream in Andromeda?

Then it's in the 'fold environment'. I'd go for the hyperspace tunnel similar to StarTrek2009's warp tunnel or Macross Frontier/Delta (see above video link).

Then minutes later, it'd defold in Anisa.

Piracy >
Couldn't we try to find reason to make piracy work rather than the opposite?

GMs have used piracy and will keep using piracy. Ways must be found to empower that narrative need.

* * *

@Wes @Nashoba I'd appreciate your input, while the brainstorm remains a brainstorm - and before we get too set on personnal preferences.

 

[Zack]

Lol, I was actually looking for a youtube version of the Macross Delta thing to post earlier and couldn't find one. Google was just sending me to all kinds of other watch anime sites.

Why we haven't gone further / Aether Reactors>

Going by economy certainly isn't good enough. On the other hand I don't think we're going to be able to find a silver bullet to solve this problem.

The solution may be to pile on a bunch of half reasons (politics, supplies, evil aliens, ect) that all contribute to why we haven't gone outside of the star map.

 

[Nashoba]

Fred,

While I love SARP, I have always felt that SARP Space Travel is TOO Safe. It goes beyond banal. Ships can travel at the maximum velocity for however long they need and no consequence. There are no hazards. And even since I joined it was made even more safe. FTL Deadzones which had been around since before I came to SARP miraculously vanished. Hand waved by saying that the problems with them were resolved. Except there was no 'new' technology to explain this, and older vessels wouldn't have that technology. But POOF they went away.

In most SciFi and in the Real World this makes no sense.

Star Wars - Hans Solo speaking to Luke, "Traveling through hyperspace ain't like dusting crops, boy! Without precise calculations we could fly right through a star, or bounce too close to a supernova and that'd end your trip real quick, wouldn't it."

Star Trek - Hikaru Sulu
Captain Hikaru Sulu: In range?
Helmsman Lojur: Not yet sir.
Captain Hikaru Sulu: Come on, come on.
Helmsman Lojur: She'll fly apart!
Captain Hikaru Sulu: *Fly her apart then!*

Star Trek - James T Kirk
"Risk! Risk is our business. That's what this starship is all about. That's why we're aboard her."

Stat Trek - Montgomery Scott
"I've giv'n her all she's got captain, an' I canna give her no more."

Real world, operating anything at its upper limit puts stress and strain, and eventually it will fail. Flying a jet a maximum speed puts a strain on the engines, the structure, not to mention the pilot.

This is why most of my ship designs where possible include a "Cruising speed" vs "Maximum speed" Not that it matters because in the SARPVerse nothing breaks.

 

[Fred]

Still waiting for input from @Wes

 

[Fred]

I'm not exactly sure on how we can place stress on a ship for going faster on a wink-out/wink-in kind of point to point transportation.

Also, paging @Wes again so he can provide his serious input on what we discussed so far.

 

[Rizzo]

Capacitors only release in large bursts. Put enough amperage to the wires or whatever electrical system is in use it'll start to heat up(fast). The more power use the harder it gets.

I imagine there are a great many forces acting on the system propelling the ship. One that makes for nearly instantaneous travel would most likely need massive amounts of power and would operate like, and probably need, capacitors.

The cooling system for the unit would also receive stress, as the point of a cooling system is to remove heat stress from whichever system is driving the FTL movement.

I strongly believe the implementation of stress damage to Drive systems will also accomplish the goal of slowing down power armor, seeing as its systems are smaller it would have a harder time pushing limits.

In the MechWarrior games Heat sinks were King. If you overheated your mech you did damage to it, possibly critical damage. You could always override the computer that perform the emergency shutdown, but you were taking a risk every time you did that.

I feel that heat management should be the biggest factor in stress.

Think about it, let's say I built a ship. The entire ship is made from zesuaium, it is seamless and it has guns lining it tip to tip. For this situations sake let's just say that it is completely impervious to all forms of attack. But, zesuaium is not a conductor and thus cannot be used as an acceptable substance for heat dissipation.

That means that this completely indestructible monster of a ship cannot even fire because of the massive amount of heat it would generate and even if it did fire, It could only do so once because now it is x amount of degrees in the ship and all of that heat is unable to escape.

This, of course, is why every system on a ship is important it is why these systems are built from a variety of materials. Some of the best conductors are soft metals and they cannot handle much stress, so now you have a trade-off. Do you want efficiency in energy transfer or the ability to dump massive amounts of power through one channel?

Assuming we make the best decision in our choice of materials we will still encounter the same problems as before.

 

[Zack]

To build on what Rizzo said:

In Mech Warrior you can dissipate VERY fast by standing in cold water.

If cold water isn't around, well you can always blow hot air out into the atmosphere to cool down.

But what if you're a starship? You're in the vacuum of space. Your ship is basically one big thermos because there is nowhere for the heat to go. Everything you do causes heat to be generated and the only way of getting rid of that heat is sending it somewhere else. You're going to need massive radiators or large, flat, areas on your ship to help radiate heat off the ship and into space to keep cool.

And all that Zesu that you have armoring your ship? That is just going to re-radiate internal heat back into the ship.

Not only is getting too hot a problem, but each time you warm up your ship and then cool it down you're going to have thermal expansion along the entire length. This is going to cause small cracks and damage. Worse yet the problem gets much worse the larger your ship is, and those fancy composite materials you use are going to be made up of things that all have different rates of thermal expansion.

There is LOTS to be done with thermal stress on starships.

 

[Fred]

I played with heat management in the final Miharu mission. "Cooldown" was a thing I was in favor of. I just wasn't sure that notion would be as popular with other people.

With that in mind, we're looking at two potential Fold drive limitations:

• Charge time: Time to being capable of transiting to FTL travel
• Heat saturation: The amount of heat the fold drive (and related systems) can handle

Other elements that can factor in:

• Charging probably generates heat, warming up the system/preparing it for fold
• The length of the FTL jump would probably be a state in which the system is constantly active, so it's unlikely to cooldown and there's probably a build-up.
• Your travel speed. The faster your fold drive are trying to make FTL travel be, the warmer it probably gets.

This keys in to the actual heat tolerance of the fold drive. One thing that comes to mind is the difference that tower PCs and laptop have at managing thier heat. You could have a super-amazing Surface i7 tablet that actually does a task requiring that kind of processor... but geez is it going to heat up in your hands.

This makes me think about how the Plumeria's fold drive is so small and miniaturized in a small engineering section, facing perhaps simiar problems despite being one of the fastest fold systems for its ship's size-class.

Which brings about the notion that a larger fold drive could probably handle its heat better (less overly delicate miniaturized components). Whereas the cooling system and the size of the vessel could help determine how much heat it could soak, and if an overheating fold drive is a threat to itself breaking down, or a threat to its surroundings sustaining heat saturation-based damage.

Also, that emergency hyperspace jump thing mentioned earlier? Maybe fold drives need to be warmed up/be given preparation time because otherwise they might go from cool to really hot and the abrupt change in temperature can be liable to require more man-hours maintaining the system (at best) and actual damage/incapacitation of the system at a very bad time (you use an energency FTL fold in an emergency, right?)

 

[Zack]

This makes me think about how the Plumeria's fold drive is so small and miniaturized in a small engineering section

Another thing that may be worth discussing is what do we want our fold-drives to look like? A lot of settings gloss over this, but I think a good example is Star Trek's Nacelles. When you see a pair of Nacelles you know 2 things right away: That ship can go to warp and you're looking at a Star Trek ship.

The Plumeria may have a small widget that does FTL inside of the ship, but it is my understanding the big panels on the exterior of the wings are the field-generation part of the FTL engine which makes the ship seem like it has a proportionally very large FTL drive.

On even further of a tangent, I tried to make the FTL engines on my ships look like the most futuristic thing I could think of: The monolith from 2001. I forget when I started doing this, but anytime you see the flat, black, squares on my ships that's the FTL drive.

 

[Fred]

@Wes ping #3

 

[Wes]

I like what you guys are saying but I don't really know where to go with it. I'm not looking to radically change the way FTL in SARP works but I'm interest in adding some limitations in regards to heat, how far we can communicate, etc - particularly since we've now got this galaxy concept being discussed which means at some point we might be going to places that are years away, even with current SARP FTL speeds.

 

[Fred]

I think you're looking forward to at least some radical changes of that in the 3 changes you wanted:

• Phasing out CDD in favor to Fold: CDD offered translation based travel which was able to get through more difficult kinds of environments like nebulas, and was touted to be a stealthier way of traveling, the hyperspace defold being very conspicuous by contrast.
• Power Armor losing the ability to effect FTL travel leaves them only with sublight speed. Sublight speed is still generally sufficient to reach planetary breakaway speeds, which means that a decision needs to be made on if power armor can escape a planet's gravity on thier own, if they can make atmospheric entry on their own, and how dependent they are going to be on ships/shuttles
• Most shuttles don't have Hyperspace, but like power armor, many have CDD speed. Does this mean that most shuttles will actually only have sublight speeds and only be restrained to interplanetary travel, but not interstellar travel (unless equipped with a fold booster

Changing power armor and shuttle travel implicates some retcons, or at the very least production changes to units that would inexplicably have these things cut out of the design (economy saving changes based on how seldom power armor are actually used to travel at those speeds in space?)

For phasing out CDD in favor to fold, we don't necessarily need to retcon, but we're essentially creating a new kind of fold engines that can at least travel through "difficult" terrain and at least have a way of making stealthier defolds under certain circumstances -- otherwise the new fold tech would still be inferior to just packing a traditional fold drive with secondary CDD systems.