Re: FT: FTL Smorgasboard

In message <F88HJXEE8fsTkkP44O9000180f5@hotmail.com>
	  "Brian Bilderback" <bbilderback@hotmail.com> wrote:

> Recently several different concepts for means of FTL travel have been
batted 
> about, and I must admity I've enjoyed it.  At least 2 different
methods 
> struck me as at least plausible, whether or not they're actually
attainable. 
>   For that I thank the list's resident science whizzes.  Just a quick 
> observation & question:
> 
> Most Science Fiction backgrounds takes one of these methods of FTL
travel 
> and base an entire naval & commerce culture on it.  Has anyone ever 
> cotemplated a fictional background where 2 or more of these different 
> methods are ALL available?	Each method has it's own particular 
> technological requirements, benefits, drawbacks, etc.  How would this 
> variety of choices be viewed by ship designers?  I'm guessing that
different 
> methods might be attractive for ships designed for different purposes 
> (Naval, commercial, private/luxury, pirates, raiders, smugglers,
etc.).
> 
> There's the ball.  Run, list, run!
> 
> 3B^2
> 
Well, I thought up a far future setting which used both the Alcubier
'warp-surfing' travel for ships and artificial wormholes for direct
system to system travel.

Essentially, exploration was by the 'warp surfers' once a system was
established, a wormhole connection was made.

Most systems were paranoid about having either ships or wormholes to
close to their habitable worlds (for numerous reasons).

FTL drives tended to be rather large - so warships were often 'battle
rider' types for fleet ships, with long endurance warp cruisers for
patrol details.

Comms was by sending 'message packets' through wormholes, or quantum
entanglement, although the latter tended to be unreliable over
interstellar distances.

I had lots of other ideas, involving genetically engineered humanity
(or _post_humanity), cyber-intelligances, _alien_ aliens etc.

Sometime I'll get round to writing it all down :-)

Charles