Re: FT3 DEVELOPMENT QUESTION: FTL

I use something similar in my gaming universe. Originally I used stable
point-to-point wormholes (usually placed in orbit at the trojan points
of
gas giants for stable orbits), but I found, as many others have before
me,
that it leads to severe choke points. The big battles are going to be
fought at the wormholes, and it basically turns into space based siege
warfare because if you can control the wormholes, you control all
access.
And if only one ship can transit the wormhole at a time, it becomes very
very difficult to break that hold. I think this is what happened in the
Mote in God's Eye universe.

So in later iterations, I've added more of the Jump Drive aspect to it.
My
PSB is that quantum entanglement relies on wormholes, so you just have
to
"convince" some particles here that they're entangled with particles
over
there - widen the wormhole connecting them and go through it. At the
tech
level of my gaming universe, the jump drives only work in-system - they
haven't been used for interstellar trips yet, the uncertainty in arrival
point increases with distance traveled. They still use the stable
wormholes
for travel between star systems, but you can thread your entangled
wormholes through the stable wormhole - so that the stable wormholes are
still important strategic points, but you can use them over a wider area
of
space, so they don't become the strategic choke points that they had
been.

I still have older ships that can only transit through stable wormholes
and
travel through space between wormholes the old fashioned way, but all of
the newer ships have the entanglement jump drives. It also means I can
also
justify cooler looking ships because they don't have to have a huge pile
of
reaction mass to travel the distance between wormholes. So it's pretty
much
a make stuff up so that I can have the space battles and cool ships that
I
want to have.

Randy Wolfmeyer

On Mon, Nov 2, 2015 at 6:37 AM, Jon Tuffley <jon@gzg.com> wrote:

> Interesting discussion so far, please keep the comments coming!  :-)
>
> Some did mention C. J. Cherryh's Merchanter books, which has a "travel
> through" Hyperspace model with a jump limit far out on the system
fringes,
> but when incoming ships drop out of hyper they are still doing a
> significant fraction of c in realspace and there is mention of them
> "pulsing" their jump drives (presumably "in reverse") while inbound in
> order to bleed off velocity…. none of this is really explained,
which in
> some ways is one of the things I like about the series - the general
lack
> of technobabble/PSB, things just "are" and the characters use them in
their
> everyday lives without the need to pseudo-explain everything. Cherry's
> universe is a bit of a special case of course, since there are very
few
> planetary colonies - in most systems the human presence is only on the
huge
> space stations, thus all inbound and outbound traffic is  basically
headed
> to and from one point in the system - of course this would make the
> stations terribly vulnerable to hypervelocity bombardment from the
edge of
> a system, and indeed there are passing mentions to a few stations
being
> "blown" in the wars, but overall there is a consensus that this is
just
> "not done" for the same reasons you don't bomb settled worlds into big
> glass marbles….
>
> One of my current personal favourites (largely because it feels quite
> "game-able") from recent publications is the Jump Universe series by
Mike
> Moscoe (starting with "The Price of Peace") - Moscoe wrote the Kris
> Longknife series under the pseudonym of Mike Shephard, the books I'm
> referring to form a set of prequels to the Longknife books, set a
> generation earlier (and, IMHO, are actually better).
> Moscoe's "Jump Universe" has FTL via a series of Jump Points providing
> instantaneous transit to another jump point, systems having varying
numbers
> of points of varying degrees of "stability" - the most stable ones are
the
> only type used by commercial shipping, while the less stable points
(in
> that they tend to wander around a bit, and are thus harder to locate
and
> more difficult to traverse safely) are used only by the military,
explorers
> and in emergency situations. Each point may be connected to just one
other
> in another system, or it may actually lead to several options
according to
> exactly how the ship enters the point (exact angle and velocity, plus
other
> entirely PSB factors like the spin on the ship…). It doesn't appear
that
> ships need any special drives to transit a jump point - anything can
be
> sent through provided it enters the point on the right vector.
> This setup makes for quite an interesting situation, obviously the
most
> stable and commonly-used jump points in a system will be defended in a
war
> situation, but there is always the possibility that the attackers
might pop
> through a less stable (or even previously undetected) point elsewhere
in
> the system….
>
> Jon (GZG)
>
>
>
>