Re: FT3 DEVELOPMENT QUESTION: FTL

On Sunday 01 Nov 2015 17:49:57 Jon Tuffley wrote:
> How many SIGNIFICANTLY DIFFERENT styles/concepts of FTL travel can we
come
> up with between us from SF movies, TV and literature?
> 
> To start things off, I'd say we have the Star Trek model (which is
> ironically looking like it just MIGHT be the most plausible, in the
form of
> the Alcubierre Drive)

Only for certain definitions of 'plausible'.

> Interestingly, the only series I am aware of that actually has more
than one
> type of FTL travel (as I recall, at least three different methods?) is
> Brian Stableford's old "Hooded Swan" books - quite fun as I recall
them,
> though nowadays they would quite likely be categorised as "Young
Adult"
> SF….

Uplift has been mentioned already - but that has Hyperspace, Probability
Drives and Quantum Tunnelling (according to a quick read of my GURPS
Uplift book).

> OK, feel free to add to this list with any personal favourites,
wherever
> they come from……

Bergenholm "Inertialess" drive from Lensman by E.E. 'Doc' Smith.
Einstein was wrong, so there's no speed of light limit. Activate a
Bergenholm and you immediately accelerate to the maximum velocity
permitted by your drive thrust and 'atmospheric' density of local
space (since you become massless).

Smith's Skylark series has the same with no inertialess drive, so
just keep on accelerating to millions of times light speed. He
never says whether your headlights fry the people in front of you,
or fry the crew.

Traveller has a jump drive, but with significant time period spent
in jump. From a campaign perspective, this is very different from
the BSG model of instant jumps (especially since different ranges
of jump capability can have a big strategic impact).

Traversable Wormholes, as first described by Kip Thorne in 1988,
and used effectively in many of Stephen Baxter's 'Xeelee' novels.
As for the Alcubierre drive, it requires exotic matter to keep
them open. You inflate both ends of a wormhole (they occur
naturally at the quantum level), then can move mass between them. The
two ends link two points in space-time.

The idea is you accelerate one up to near light speed towards your
destination. It is time dilated, and so you get time travel between
the two ends. If subjective travel time is ~1 year, and the
destination is 100 ly away, then every time you go to the destination
you travel 99 years into the future, and when you come back, you
travel 99 years into the past.

You can colonise a galaxy (or many galaxies) that way, with a star
empire spanning millions of light years in space, and millions of
years in time. Causality may or may not be conserved.

They can remove the need for starships - just drop the two ends
down on planets, and you can walk between star systems.

(you can also use it as a weapon - 'throw' one end at a big asteroid
at high velocity, the asteroid will pop out the other end at the
same velocity it entered the first end. Or drop one end into a star
whilst the other is near a planet...).

The "Stargate" from the film/TV series of the same name is another
type of wormhole that does away with the need for starships (it's
still FTL travel though). Sidesteps the time travel issues though.

-- 
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Sam.		      Posts: http://www.google.com/+SamuelPenn