[Discussion] Year 2016 Revision on FTL thematics

Khasidel said:

Regarding nebula as FTL blockages. It probably doesn't make much sense for them to negate hyperspace travel, but it would probably be dangerous for CDD in normal space.

Hitting the minuscule amounts of gas of a nebula at a significant fraction of light speed -- or worse yet FTL speeds -- would still blast that matter apart and turn it into energy in the form of hard radiation; basically the same result as a matter/anti-matter reaction where the matter and anti-matter are turned into gamma rays. You'd get the equivalent of a multi-kiloton nuclear bomb of energy being released against your hull just by colliding with a grams worth of nebula dust.

Given how tough ships are in this setting, that wouldn't necessarily destroy one or even severely damage it with only short exposure, but you would still need to have your shields up and the larger the nebula is, the longer you'd have to fly through what is essentially a continuous explosion weakening your shields, washing out your sensors, with a massive amount of radiation threatening to fry your ships computers and crew. The faster you fly the worse it would be, as you would collide with a larger amount of matter-per-second. Even if nebula realistically only have a few kilograms of matter filling a volume the size of the earth, when your ship is traveling over 300,000km per second you'd be hitting enough dust each second for the nebula to still be a hazard.

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That's actually happened before IIRC. The SAoY ships in question ended up completely fragged, though I don't remember what FTL drive they were using for that jump.

FrostJaeger said:

Oh, for the love of.........

Is there anything wrong with having multiple solutions?

Isn't it kind of, you know, a given that different factions (each with their own histories/cultures/etc.) would have differing methods for FTL travel?

......Anyways, moving on:

Let's break this down, shall we?


Continuum Distortion Drives

• Combined Field System (Yamatai) [FTL/Defense/Offense/STL] {Speed Chart 1 (Distortion Field)}
• Enhanced Subspace Distortion Drive (Lorath) [FTL/Utility]
• Continuum Distortion Drives (Yamatai/Nepleslia) [FTL/STL] {Speed Chart 1, Speed Chart 2, Speed Chart 3 (Distortion Field)}
• Gravitic Centrifuge (Lazarus) [FTL/Defense/STL/Stealth]

Wormholes

• Wormholes (Yamatai/Nepleslia) {Variable; see link for formulas}
• Rift Generators (Freespacers) {Instantaneous}

Hyperspace

• Hyperspace Drives (Yamatai/Nepleslia) {Speed Chart 1 (Hyperspace Drives), Speed Chart 2 (Hyperspace Drives)}
• Hyperspace Fold Drives (Yamatai) {Speed Chart 1, Mechanics Example 1, Mechanics Example 2}

.........Mechanically, it looks pretty damn solid to me, bro. The speeds themselves are, of course, obscenely fast, but that's a pretty easy fix, no?

EDIT: Also, @Zack, you still haven't answered my question from earlier:

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To be honest, I don't like the idea of just cutting FTL down to just Hyperspace, and would like to keep all three as viable methods as you're suggesting. Though, the thing I would like to see the most is them being fleshed out more. Fred asked what's it look like, how dangerous or what possible risks are there, so on, so forth. Both Star Wars and Star Trek make it pretty damn clear that, despite being done routinely, it's a big deal where things can go wrong. We should probably focus on that out of all things.

Khasidel said:

With CDD or any warp-style travel -- because you're travelling faster-than-light and the rate at which gravity waves travel across normal space (which is lightspeed as well) -- you'd only detect a ship using CDD with conventional sensors if they travel at FTL past you or away from you, not as they are travelling toward you... unless you're using some exotic FTL sensor that breaks the laws of physics so you can detect their mass or gravity or emissions at a distance before those things can physically reach your own vessel.

If the ship travels past you at a distance of say -- three light-minutes -- then about three minutes later the emissions of the ship should reach you and you should notice that they've flown by you... but not before that.

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I think we already have that. Tachyon modulated sensor systems or something along those lines?

CadetNewb said:

I think we already have that. Tachyon modulated sensor systems or something along those lines?

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There are actually several sensor types -- used by Yamatai at least -- that might conceivably be able to detect a ship at FTL in normal space. There are Tachyon sensors as you say.

You also have the 'Aether Wave Detection and Ranging System' which supposedly has a detection range of 10 LY. You have the 'Wave-front Affinity Resonance Monitoring System' which supposedly can precognitively detect quantum events before they occur; whether CDD is a quantum event is open to debate. You have 'Subspace Mass Detectors' with a range of about 20 LY. The 'Quantum Remote Scanner (TQP-RDD)' with a range that varies depending on target mass. Then there is the 'Hyperspace Pulse Doppler Detection and Tracking System' with a range of about 20 LY.

Overpowered sensors are overpowered

I knew we had things that could do so in inventory, but not that many!

I'm going to pose a question about these sensors Khasidel mentioned.

I think it's on topic, as any delays-to-arrival/time-to-destination matters is kind of related to FTL travel.

What exactly makes these sensors overpowered when we have ship's traveling at 1ly/m (I'm thinking an early warning system wouldn't give that early a warning). Also, how do some of those sensors apply considering Fold, which is a point-to-point FTL method of travel (essentially teleportation).

Honestly, I don't know the fine details of SARP sensors, just that they're OP as hell. Despite this, I suggest tackling getting FTL and its thematic details down pat first before we tackle how sensors interact with FTL gameplay-wise. Otherwise, there's too much on the plate at once I think.

On the risk of desecrating a corpse here, I'd like to present the Perry Rhodan novels's FTL system as an example for how Hyperspace could work, too.

In PR starships conduct interstellar flight with a so called transition drive which is basically a teleportation drive (not quite unalike our hyperspace except that the starships arrive instantaneously). There are, however, several limitations for said transition drive that make it less powerful than the hyperspace drive we have.

1) The maximum distance that can be jumped at once are 600 light-years. PR takes place in a galactic scale, however, where 600 light-years is not that much.

2) To perform a transition you have to move with at least 0.5*c first, better faster because 0.5*c would put a dangerous stress on your transition drive. So before jumping there is some time involved accelerating towards a safe jump velocity and unlike in SARP accelerations do matter in PR (though they have inertia dampeners to, of course).

3) The amount of power required to jump increases with the size of the object to be jumped (of course in SARP we have basically unlimited power, which I think needs serious rethinking).

4) After each jump there is a considerable cool-down time for the transition drive that increases with the distance jumped. At the maximum jump distance of 600 light-years that cool-down phase is a good 20 hours. On the one hand this limits the maximum speed you can achieve to effectively 30 ly/h, on the other hand adds in some period of vulnerability.

5) Transition drives occupy a massive amount of space. We're talking of about half the ship, give or take, depending on engineering capability etc.. A huge part of these transition drives are actually empty space.

I'm not saying we should match our hyperspace drives to those transition drives but I think these are some good ideas to be considered to waken the FTL of SARP a bit.

Those are some interesting ideas to toy with, though, I don't think most of these would be applicable since they'd contradict the canon even more. The cooldown times between jumps is not a bad one and may be worth thinking about however.

We've ping-ponged ideas around, butted heads over a few things, but we've certainly arrived at a few points we can work with.

Charge time for a fold jump

• This seems dependent on distance traveled.
  
• Charge time implies a preparation time and a power consumption; for shorter jumps (planet to planet in a star system), this 'micro-fold' charge time could be minimal and take a modest amount of power. An interstellar fold would imply a power cost higher than what a ship's power plant could furnish at once, so the charge time would be spare power being shunted into the drive before meeting the needed amount to perform the desired jump
  
• Another factor can be the amount of ships in proximity, allowing one vessel to carry others into hyperspace
• 'Interdiction' is relation to preventing ships from escaping too quickly could be counted as the 'interdicting ship' counting as a tagalong, placing a burden - and thus a longer charge time - on the fold drive.
• Currently, ships cannot fold while under a tractor beam

Warm up/cooldown in relation to fold jumps

• Quick temperature changes can be harmful to hyperspace fold-related systems
• High-temperature can also be damaging to a fold drive system
• A gradual warm-up period is usually necessary to what a fold jump without risk of rapid-temperature-changes based damage
• Foregoing the warm-up period is an Emergency Fold Jump. The implied risks are a system breakdown causing a misjump; and even when successful the stress to the unit would likely require maintenance
• Small miniaturized fold drive units as seen on compact high-performance vessels are bound to have lower heat-saturation damage thresholds than ships that can afford to have non-miniaturized drive systems. Like with real-life computers, miniaturization usually comes with the price of lower heat and stress tolerance.
  
• The charging process for a jump usually heats up the drive.
• Engaging in a FTL jump generates a lot more heat in the fold drive, based on the ship's FTL speed; so the faster the ship goes, the hotter the drive systems for the duration of the FTL jump.
• Like Nashoba suggested, this likely alludes to ships having FTL 'cruising speeds' and 'maximum speeds'. Cruising standing as FTL travel at a speed unlikely to stress the drive systems, and Maximum being the best performance the engine can give while disregarding the heat/safety concern.
  
• On arrival, the drive system are subject to the heat they've built up during their travel time and need to cooldown before they can be safely used again.
• It's probably a bad idea to engage in combat with a very heat-saturated ship; other systems can carry their toll in terms of heat load, and already being subject to heat-saturation makes the threat posed by directed-energy-weapons (most of which apply damage by super-focused head) higher.

I just spotted this thread today. I have apparently being handling space travel all wrong. I only had the fairly small wiki articles and examples from RP to go by, though. Also, nobody ever questioned what I did or tried to correct me...

I'd always heard that hyperspace travel was one of the key ways to keep the wacky timelines correct. For things like a plot taking months to handle a day or week of in game time. When the in game year passes at the same rate as a real life year. So you'd start a mission on January 1st and wrap up the thread on March 7th, but you only had a few days of in game time pass. So then you'd pop into hyperspace and head to your next destination on January 3rd, spend a few days/weeks off camera traveling, and when you popped out your computer tells you it's March 7th now.

I always thought this was the only way time made sense here at all. Otherwise you have months/years of time passing that never 'happen' for characters/plots/etc. I know many plots will jump from one mission to the next and characters will act like no time has passed. If space travel isn't messing with time, I can't think of any way to explain the weird way time passes for characters due to us sticking to a 1 year = 1 year rule. I always figured space travel taking a good while and popping you out at weird times was just acceptable due to the fact that a travel time of a few weeks/months was incredible compared to the thousands of years it would take to get around otherwise.

As far as what it looks like, I only remember finding one wiki article that mentioned everything being lit with teal light and figured it was just like that the entire trip.