Superluminary Drives

Created Friday 08 June 2012

Four types of faster-than-light (FTL, or fettle ["to put a ship in good fettle" means to equip it with the best FTL drive. A ship in good fettle is a very fast ship, capable of long (and thus fast) FTL channels) channels:

• "Punch jump" drives.` The human way to go. At the time of the story, the best drives can punch jumps up to 250,000 light years. Blasts a hole through space-time right around--more importantly--in front of a craft. The hole in front of the craft is sufficiently energetic to stretch a great distance in front of the craft. The craft then falls through that hole to a new location. A very energy-demanding method that requires energy equal to the craft's mass plus the distance travelled plus some extra energy caused by errors and inefficiencies. Known about for about fifty years before it was useful. The useful paradigm switch was that the energy needed was no longer the craft's mass _times_ the distance, but instead the mass _plus_ the distance. The Dean's lab has the public patten on this. His efforst to make the next patten (for the unsuccessful-for-travel phase shift drive) to make the next mass movement drive not a public patten instigtated his insurrection. Departure and arrival points are noted by a blast of sun-like radiation (the "extra energy from inefficiency and also--for some reason not yet understood a little less than a third of the mass of the craft (in fact, the inverse of pi times the craft's moment) is intense--intense enough to be used as a weapon, intense enough to mark where the craft went at long (albeit only at light-speed), and intense enough to damage--or, rather, obliterate--the craft doesn't make it through the hole just right. In fact, about 20% of the time, a craft is damaged, 10% of the time it is destroyed.
• "Groove flying" drives.`That used by the Spongies (and the Good). Creates a negative density throughout and in front of the craft allowing for the craft to build up more energy/mass than would otherwise be allowed by physics, i.e., it can go fast than light. Top speed is still based on the craft's mass, though, so--like punch jumping--it still favors smaller crafts. More energy efficient than punch drives, but only capable of travelling at about 10,000 times the speed of light.
• Hlraft drives. The oft-derided Jjarl technology, it hurls a craft very long distances through space and even a bit through time--with one flaw. It throws the craft into a parallel base-4 dimension set. In other words, it can send a craft very far (~40 million light years or about 100 years) and requires so little energy, a craft can use in-house power plants to regenerate five or six jumps, _but_ with each jump, it moves to a parallel universe (what was that? The 7th dimension in that list of the 10 dimensions that guy postulated?).<br/>So, the Jjarl use it to advance themselves but themselves in a set of parallel universes. The Spongies (and others) are more than willing not only to tolerate the massive endeavors the Jjarl put into the jumps, but to help finance them. The Spongies for one look at this as a silly religious rite not dissimilar to the preparations of Egyptian pharohs for the next world.<br/>In fact, the Hlraft drive is a one-way system: not enough information is carried forward with the craft to let those in the other dimension know where the craft came from. (It's specific enough, though, that the Jjarl can repeatedly and pretty reliably throw crafts to the same dimension.) So, the Jjarl are fortifying themselves other dimensions (those in the fortified fortifying others in turn), but not reallyknowing what the other Jjarl need.<br/>And so, yes, it _ihas_ become a sort of religion for the Jjarl; it's certainly a resource-consuming enterpirse done largely on faith and only cnojectured information. (In fact, in the story, leave it as conjecture. It's a neat thign to think about, but leave it as a bramble of thoughts for the reader, too.)
• Finally, the Dean's phase shift drive. It moves all energy and matter instantly from one point to another.

By also using a time-phase loop, the energy needed to make the teleportation (which, like the punch jump drive, is essentailly what it is) is mostly the energy it produces: It requires and produces a prodigious ammount of energy akin to that needed by the punch jump dirve, but by curving time it uses teh energy it produces as most of the energy it needs to teleport. Unfortunately, it moves thigns particle by sub-atomic particle, and all matter and energy that is moved fundamentally dispupted: turned to sub-atomic dust.

The field in which it moves particles travels and acts a lot like a gas cloud, though. So, it is used as a relatively slow-moving (and utterly invisible) wave of destruction. Only a second or so after the wave has passed it is clear that all in its path has been destroyed.

The one way it _is_ noted is that it produces a blast of high-energy radiation in the opposite direction of the path of the wave. So, it looks like a lot like a failed burst from an impulse AM-drive.

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First created 2012, hun? Yeah, been a while since I've given more thought to a pretty fundamental concept.
Anyway (2021-12-29), human jumps do take a lot of energy. In fact, the inefficient use of lots of energy is a core aspect of human dech. Sher, how current Zeitgeist of me, but I don't think it's one we'll soon shake voluntarily.
But instead of being one-shot jumps a la Asimov, it's the creation of worm holes. That last for so many jumps. How many? Depends on several factors, most of which humans are really trying hard to figure out.

• That the struggle to understand jumps, B&Bs, Good Tech, interstellar combat, the sudden changes of political calculus, etc. all do eclipse the search for where the plants are coming from and why they're traveling.
• The story itself is told in part through piece of information coming in and the reactions to them.
  • Whense telling the stories of non-humans through snippets gained by humans. Buzzkills stories through their Odes to Others (which I jusst made up): Their "prayers" that they send out to Buzzkills in other dimensions that humans stumble upon intercepting.
  • The very Zeigeist-inspired understanding I have of what it's like to live through a social revolution. And the struggle humans have with adapting to this new world they all live in even if they never leave earth. (And---as you may well gather by now---few ever do. Or at least the system,)

Anyway, one part of the equation of "punch jumps" is that the wormholes produced erode, and erode most quickly by subsequent jumps. Each jump make the wormhole less safe and able to carry a somewhat smaller payload.
The aspect that is known about them is that the number of jumps that can be withstood by the wormhole is some function of the square root of the distance it spans: Wormholes to farther points can only withstand a fraction of the jumps as wormholes to points much closer.

• If it's aimed well, a jump point can be a very long distance artillery shell (and at the limit of their range can allow no further passages).
• Mide-range they can be used to colonize new areas . . . as long is the push jump (I havne't re-read what I wrote above, of course (a general theme here if you havne't noticed), so I may well be mis-using that concept from above) is well aimed and timed so, say, the system's sun can block the radiation from subsequent jumps from frying the new colony. (Of course, the sun being iunfused with a big does of radiation might do a wee number on its own health---interesting thing to look into)
• Very close jumps just suck. And part of the aiming of jumps isn't only angle to the site out there, but the distance to it. And since humans are still trying to figure it out, sometimes the distance to the other side of the wormhole is reeeeally close. And that's also just the sort of wormhole that last.
  • Or myabe not. Maybe if it's too close it will also collpase. Like maybe if both sides touch. Also something to look into in our own understanding of them.