Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: Stryke 9 on April 27, 2002, 07:21:22 pm
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I won't post the 1-page, rather involved timeline, but how'm I doing on imaginary technology so far? Eventually, I'm going to use this, either in an FSF or an EOC campaign, and I'm just wondering how feasible it is to everyone else:
Wormhole Generator:
Unlimited-range, highly advanced device, generates a "tear" in space (better described as a bubble of the destinationspace), which, upon entry and closure of the wormhole, allows instant transportation to anywhere in the universe. Unfortunately, existing wormhole technology cannot be fitted into anything smaller than a midsize capital ship due to power and gravitic requirements, and any wormhole jump into comletely unknown territory is potentially lethal- opening up a wormhole into a sun or largish asteroid can destroy the generator ship. Large, immobile generator stations link most of the former Imperial systems to the rest of the universe for the benefit of smaller or unfitted vessels.
Energized Sublight Systems
Used for short "jumps" by those vessels incapable of sustaining a wormhole generator, sublight drives partially break down a vessel into its component subatomic parts and propels it forward for a fraction of a nanosecond at the speed of light, after which the ship is reformed into its matter form, only to repeat the process almost immediately. While this is a very fast and effective way to propel small ships fair distances, it requires enough power to make its use somewhat inconvienient for those vessels with small reactors (and impossible for most nonfusion ships), and the ship's rapid transit between energy and matter makes it extremely vulnerable to attack, particularly by Particle Accelerator weapons.
It should also be noted that, due to the incredible speeds and time compression involved in using the ESS, all sublight travel is controlled automatically, with the pilot setting a destination coordinate and engaging the drive, and a computer controlling movement from there. Theoretically, it is possible to track vessels through sublight by reading off of navigation computer signals, and it is already a favored tactic of renegades to attack this nav computer and thus cause pilots to jump out of control. There is rarely any risk involved in this to fighter pilots, though, since as no mere 50-G rated support seat can protect against the violent shock of being torn into ones component protons and electrons, most veteran pilots would sooner stand alone against an army of several dozen ships than experience the 'discomfort' of sublight.
Particle Accelerator
The first usage of particle acceleration technology was seen in the development of specialized rebel Dispel Rockets during the fall of the Imperium. Simply put, a well-timed Dispel burst could scatter the particles of a ship traveling in sublight, utterly destroying it in a single shot. Later, particle accelerators were recognized for their mass driving potentials and adopted into the Wasp and Gadfly classes. Meanwhile, Dispel Rockets and related anti-sublight technologies all but dissapeared as per the arms treaty contained in the Post-Earth Agreement, which also banned usage of chain-reaction fusion bombs (a provision discarded by no determined date during the IC's rise to power) and biological superweapons (discarded roughly 2385). Dispel Rockets are rumored to remain in some renegade group arsenals, however.
Fusion Power
Midway through the 21st century, mankind perfected the device that secured humanity’s place in space: the fusion power plant. These complex machines were capable of producing an almost infinite supply of power from the very materials most common in the universe- even in the vacuum of stellar space, there was enough “free” hydrogen to keep a fusion plant operational forever. The incredible energies fusion could produce paved the way for every space-based technology to come afterward, and it seemed that for the first time in history, all of humanity would have full access to the supplies needed for a comfortable life. Unfortunately, it was not to be. While fusion power was clean, efficient, and easy to supply, there was no way to dampen its energy production. Fusion power plants produced amounts of heat paralleling those inside stars, far too much to safely build one on a planet. When properly constructed, fusion plants could take advantage of the near-absolute-zero temperatures of space to prevent themselves from instantly melting down, but there was no efficient way to transmit the power they produced from space down to a planet’s surface, and the cost of even the simplest method was so prohibitive that it would bankrupt most of the Earth’s nations. Thus, fusion power failed to become the solution to the global struggle for rapidly vanishing fuel resources that it was hoped to be, and merely enabled it to become a galactic one.
At some indeterminate point during the Imperial wars of the mid-23rd century, the chain-reaction fusion bomb was developed simultaneously by scientists on Earth and in the Imperial Rim. Simply put, these weapons caused a wide-reaching, near-instantaneous chain reaction with all the available hydrogen nearby, causing it to fuse in a massive fireball resembling a short-lived star, vaporizing everything for several thousand miles around it and generating enough heat and force to destroy any nearby celestial bodies completely. Perhaps not surprisingly, these weapons were put to use almost immediately upon discovery, in a surprise attack on the heart of the Earth Imperium, Earth itself. The planet, the myriad space stations orbiting it, and the assaulting fleet were completely obliterated. Four hours later, the staggering Imperium responded in kind with an enormous all-out attack on the rebel fronts. A coordinated assault that had been in planning for months was carried out on the three rebel Core systems: Arcturus, Procyon, and Delta Lupi. The Arcturan assault was turned back in one of the bloodiest battles the galaxy would ever see, more by the rebels’ good fortune than anything else; the Procyon and Delta Lupi defenders were not so lucky. Fusion bombs were detonated in the atmospheres of the most influential worlds in both systems, and the Imperial armies fled back to their home stars to battle amongst themselves for supremacy. In one day, 26 billion people, a third of the Galaxy’s population, had been killed. Fusion bombs were not used again for more than a hundred years.
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This is the kind of thing I'd point Shrike to. I wonder where he's been, lately.
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You didn't dust the table, did you? :D
better described as a bubble of the destinationspace
:confused: Is this technobabble?
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Few comments.
1) Generally, radiative cooling - ie, the only cooling in space - is the least efficient type. So on a planet, cooling is actually easier than it is in space.
2) Even if they are in orbit, a microwave beam (like in SimCity 2k) would work to move the power to the surface. If that doesn't, just run a really big superconducting cable down a beanstalk.
3) Wormholes as they are currently understood most likely need energy and or exotic matter to function. Just a bit of trivia. ;)
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Originally posted by Shrike
3) Wormholes as they are currently understood most likely need energy and or exotic matter to function. Just a bit of trivia. ;)
And on top of that, you need the technology to precisely distribute that energy/exomatter to make sure that the wormhole doesn't close around you. Gee, how sucky would that be?
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That's what the energy (it's negative energy, forgot that little detail) and exotic matter is for. ;)
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The thing foremost in my mind is the Energised Sublight System. Firstly, even though the ship and its cargo would get broken down into its constituent parts, each of these would still have mass. Meaning (1) it can't reach the speed of light following conventional physics (2) the energy required to propel the entire mass of particles would still be roughly equal to that needed to propel a fully assembled ship at the same velocity - not taking into account the energy required to dissassemble/reassemble such a complex structure. While it is an interesting idea, it wouldn't work as imagined.
Wormholes are largely still in the realm of fiction as to their construction and manipulation. So there would be a bit of leeway as to the materials used - as Shrike mentioned you could use exotic matter which emits negative gravity for example - plus their actual range and power requirements (power required per light year or other spatial field density measurement for example). In the early stages at least such wormhole generating devices would be big, complex, and dangerous. Which seems to have been covered. If you're interested I have developed what I consider a plausible means of the visual transfer of a vessel between wormhole points, something to add to the story.
Particle Accelerators are generally defined as something that accelerates particles (obviously), in the form of a weapon the particles themselves are emitted as the destructive force. Massive projectiles such as rockets and mass driver slugs use different forms of delivery, so you might have to make a differentiation between them. On thinking further, I am under the impression that you intend to use the particle beam to accelerate the projectiles themselves, like a turbocharged version of a sail? In that case you might have to think up another name for this type of weaponry as the two afforementioned devices already have a defined working method.
That chain reaction fusion bomb reminds me of the USA's development of the nuclear bomb. Prior to the initial "practical" tests there was a concern that such an explosion would result in the local atmospheric Oxygen combusting, forming a chain reaction that would envelop the entire planet. Of course, they didn't really stop to consider this option and went ahead and detonated the bomb....
Anyway, one of the points that little flashback was designed to relate to was that a fusion bomb might not be able to ignite Hydrogen in the manner described. And even if a chain reaction is possible, through the use of focused energies in a similar form to lasers jumping from affected Hydrogen atom to another so long as there is more than one atom in the area to fuse together, the atmosphere (Earth's in this example)doesn't contain enough Hydrogen to create as large a fusion reaction as described. Unless these populations have been altered to breathe it. Maybe in this case you could try something more elaborate, such as a weapon that sends the atoms off into another dimension (that always seems to work since you can currently make anything happen in another dimension), each affected atom pulling its neighbours in, and only really useable on a massive object e.g. planet.
These are simply my takes on the ideas, other people would probably have other ideas so it would be a good idea to listen to what they have to say too :)
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What is the precise reason you can't go faster than light? And what makes light so special that nothing can go faster than it?
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Originally posted by Wildfire
What is the precise reason you can't go faster than light? And what makes light so special that nothing can go faster than it?
Does anyone happen to have a copy of the VBB discussion where I explained this? It would save a few hours and worn out fingers :)
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Actually, though right now it's entirely theoretical, it's quite possible to convert matter to energy more or less directly. The difficulty is in getting it back to matter, an issue I don't plan to touch. Suffice it to say that there ARE experiments going on intended to shift matter to energy form, I don't know how they'd get all the energy going in one direction, and that by the time it got into energy form the matter-based machine was already changing the whole thing back to matter. Confused? No? Then gimme a minute.:D
Wormholes? It's time to haul out the Infinitely Complex Machine. Actually, their operation is supposed to be quite simple, and I had the details for a theoretical generator somewhere, but I do believe they are currently being sat on by the Win32.Magistr virus and I can't recall them. Not to worry, it was technical BS anyway.
And the Particle Accelerator is basically a nice name for something that speeds up particles without actually touching them. Thus, "Dispel Rockets" would just generate a lot of force in the area immediately around them, of such a sort that could move electrons out of their preset path. The engine, as many saw in my very earliest renders here, is basically a big ring of technical device, which propels anything inside backwards very fast, thus moving the ship forward slightly less fast. I had an extremely amusing picture of what could happen to a particle-accelerator engine rigged for space when the ship came in contact with an actual atmosphere... think rather large crater.
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What is the precise reason you can't go faster than light? And what makes light so special that nothing can go faster than it?
Well, according to the general relativity equation, you would have an imaginary or complex velocity if v exceeds c. That of course doesn't really mean that FTL speeds is not possible (tachyons, etc.), but in the 3D (parametric) realm, it wouldn't really mean anything. ;)
I think that the matter->energy conversion process is basically the principle behind today's nuclear fission power units. ;)
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It's largely open to debate. Einstein postulated that matter cannot travel faster than c, and somehow people take that all sorts of ways.
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It's basically more of an implication than a stated fact of relativity; really depends on how the complex plane fits into the real world. ;)
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That post didn't mean anything at all, did it?:p
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nah, it meant postcount==postcount++, as did this one. :D
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Originally posted by Stryke 9
Actually, though right now it's entirely theoretical, it's quite possible to convert matter to energy more or less directly. The difficulty is in getting it back to matter, an issue I don't plan to touch. Suffice it to say that there ARE experiments going on intended to shift matter to energy form, I don't know how they'd get all the energy going in one direction, and that by the time it got into energy form the matter-based machine was already changing the whole thing back to matter. Confused? No? Then gimme a minute.:D
While it may be possible to change matter to energy on the scale you're talking about, my point is "why would someone bother with using that process which uses x energy for disassembling the object, y energy to move the object, and z energy to recompile the thing, to move an object from A-B while you can move from A-B while using only y energy?" For a civilisation advanced enough to dissassemble and reassemble molecular structures, they'd surely have a means of propelling a full ship to near the speed of light anyway. Possibly even cancelling the effect of relatavistic distortion.
Wormholes? It's time to haul out the Infinitely Complex Machine. Actually, their operation is supposed to be quite simple, and I had the details for a theoretical generator somewhere, but I do believe they are currently being sat on by the Win32.Magistr virus and I can't recall them. Not to worry, it was technical BS anyway.
While overall a wormhole may sound like a simple premise there are many details to be considered when it comes to the device controlling them. It's not as simple as clicking your fingers - you have to make sure that the fingers click within a 0.0000001% tolerance, otherwise the fingers collapse and crush whatever's inside. It would be all this intricacy that makes a wormhole seem simple, but that's just stating the obvious.
And the Particle Accelerator is basically a nice name for something that speeds up particles without actually touching them. Thus, "Dispel Rockets" would just generate a lot of force in the area immediately around them, of such a sort that could move electrons out of their preset path. The engine, as many saw in my very earliest renders here, is basically a big ring of technical device, which propels anything inside backwards very fast, thus moving the ship forward slightly less fast. I had an extremely amusing picture of what could happen to a particle-accelerator engine rigged for space when the ship came in contact with an actual atmosphere... think rather large crater.
I'll have to look at your renders. Otherwise I've become slightly confused as to the definition of a rocket :)
On the subject of the speed of light, I think this is my speel as originally posted on VBB, criticisms and physicists welcome:
Back in the 19th century a pair of scientists doing some experiments in an attempt to study the mystical "ether" which filled the universe found that no matter which direction light came from, the velocity was always constant - it didn't matter how fast an object was moving in relation to the world around it. Working from these experiments, later scientists determined that the the length of an object decreases as it approaches the speed of light, until you get to the speed of light when the length becomes zero. Since the length is zero, the mass of that object becomes infinite, because when you divide by zero you either get infinity or a complaint from the calculator. Now you can have an object with no measureable size, but you can't have an object with infinite mass - since light is supposed to be massless it can travel as fast as it does. Einstein later summed up all this in his special theory of relativity, with the statement that the speed of light always appears constant whether you're just sitting there or moving at a furious pace, and that there was no absolute rest i.e. everything in the universe is moving relative to something else. He later went on and used this work to derive the famous equation e=mc^2 (you can really call yourself a nerd if you can derive this from the initial equations written up from those original experiments....)
That's a basic, probably incomplete, and probably unintelligable rundown of why it's supposedly not possible to travel faster than light in this universe. However...
[hypothetical brain-exploding discussion]....what I'm concerned about is that light is actually not massless (as shown in Einstein's general theory - the one which is still being proved), therefore the scale is screwed up somewhat. Meaning that it could be possible for something lighter than light (gravitons maybe? Would explain why the gravitational effect is instantaneous) to travel faster than light, up to a point where you could travel the biggest possible distance in the shortest possible time.....[/hypothetical brain-exploding discussion]
....but generally, the speed of light is considered to be the speed limit of this universe....
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Kazashi: the trick is, it DOESN't take as much energy to convert as it would to get that speed. In fact, the whole point is that any matter approaching c is impossible, or damn near so, and thus you've gotta convert it to energy. It still takes quite a lot of enerfy to do the shift, but not nearly as much as standard acceleration to a third or a half of light speed would take. Plus, you wouldn't be able to attain it very quickly. This argument could have parallels to a man in the Middle Ages saying it would be easier to feed a horse some hay and ride it than to make a hay-powered car.
And nobody understands wormholes. They're damn complex, and nobody's ever seen one. So any real speculation is just that. But that aside, it wouldn't take more than a fraction of a second to use the wormhole (in fact, the less time the better). Wormholes aren't like subspace- a little place in between that requires a little less movement than standard spatial travel. It's a direct link to another piece of space- say, if you wanted to jump from here to Mars, a little piece of the space in Mars would appear around you (or in front of you, depending), then would snap back to its standard location, with you in it, and there you'd be. No in-between.
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By converting the mass of your ship entirely to energy, you will automatically be going at c.... it's one of the properties of EM radiation.
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'Zactly. But you spend about as much time in matter form, since more than a momentary shift to energy means there's no way of going back at all, so you end up actually traveling at about half or a third c.
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Originally posted by Stryke 9
Kazashi: the trick is, it DOESN't take as much energy to convert as it would to get that speed. In fact, the whole point is that any matter approaching c is impossible, or damn near so, and thus you've gotta convert it to energy. It still takes quite a lot of enerfy to do the shift, but not nearly as much as standard acceleration to a third or a half of light speed would take. Plus, you wouldn't be able to attain it very quickly. This argument could have parallels to a man in the Middle Ages saying it would be easier to feed a horse some hay and ride it than to make a hay-powered car.
The impression I got with your use of "subatomic parts" was that it was only breaking the structure down into its particular components, meaning that each component has a relatively large mass and would still require energy to propel to near the velocity of light. You could convert everything to energy given advanced enough technology to overcome issues such as the Uncertainty Principle. If you can't convert and move everything at exactly the same time in exactly the same direction at exactly the same velocity. You'd have to make sure that all the energy is converted to photons, plus devise a means of not having to rely on a material base to recompile everything properly at the end of the trip. After all the effort required to make all this happen, would it really end up being more effective energy-wise than a more conventional propulstion system? Though I guess that being a work of fiction there shouldn't be a problem with any of this :)
My main point here is that if they have advanced enough technology to perform this, chances are they have the technology and available energy sources to propel a massive object at such speeds, without problems assosciated with recompiling with a few extra molecules of space dust, or affected by excess energy or bigger objects and gravitational fields. If I were you (and be thankful you aren't) and had to include such technology as a ship that converts from matter/energy, then I'd have it as a top secret project that happens to materialise one day in front of (or inside) another ship thereby revealing a secret that propells some opposing sides into mistrust and inevitably conflict.
And nobody understands wormholes. They're damn complex, and nobody's ever seen one. So any real speculation is just that. But that aside, it wouldn't take more than a fraction of a second to use the wormhole (in fact, the less time the better). Wormholes aren't like subspace- a little place in between that requires a little less movement than standard spatial travel. It's a direct link to another piece of space- say, if you wanted to jump from here to Mars, a little piece of the space in Mars would appear around you (or in front of you, depending), then would snap back to its standard location, with you in it, and there you'd be. No in-between.
Saying that "nobody understands wormholes" wouldn't be entirely accurate - while much about them is still unknown, a fair bit can be built upon from theoretical constructs. Wormholes aren't like the subspace depicted in the Freespace universe, I'm very well aware of that :)
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Kaz: actually, it makes one ***** of a kamikaze throw in some of the video clips I did. Imagine a hard beam about half a kilometer across- now there's a nice explosion.:D
And it's no secret when it gets invented. There aren't really any 'sides' to speak of when it gets invented, there's only one unified group, and it's hard enough to make an ESS that that group doesn't have to worry about it getting captured 'till 10 years later or so.
And it's supposed to be essentially the fastest thing around. There are certain physical limits, problems with engines the size of the Moon with even bigger fusion plants powering them, etc. that make sublight a viable alternative.
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I like the sound of that. Despite any misgivings I may have about the technology behind it, it sure gives you something nice to play around with. ;7
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What is a "wormhole" defined as anyway? It doesn't appear in any real science stuff; I have only seen it in science fiction. Is it the same thing as a singularity? (where k(x,y,z,t) is infinite)
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It can be described any number of ways. As far as we know, they only exist on paper, anyway.
Most SF portrays them as somehting vaguely resembling subspace, looking like a freaky version of what an actual giant, space-eating worm would make. From what I know about it, they'd actually look more like my description (which is cooler, anyway)- just a spot in space that really is somewhere else. In any case, light would travel through the wormhole just as anything else would, so it would actually look just like the place you were going into. Which, in space, isn't all that exciting, so I'm trying to find a way to legitimately jazz the artificial ones up.:D
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To all of this my response is:
TECHNOBABBLE=NOT UNDERSTANDABLE
there I've said my piece. :D
Truthfully, I like Stryke's ideas but I have no idea whether they work or anything. Then again, all of you guys are picking at him when he said it was FICTION. Then again, he said to pick at him.
I dunno, but it sounds cool. ;)
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I did say pick at it. That's the idea- if someone finds a hole, I can find a way to patch it. It's quite a useful thing to do, since all of this made perfectly good sense to me (well, the ESS was a late arrival, since I decided wormholing everywhere would make everything way too boring- what's to worry about if you can teleport anywhere you want instantly?), but it clearly didn't to some. And seeing as I've got this stuff marked to be part of a project that'll ideally get seen in the end by way more people than are in the HLP community alone, it better damn well make sense to all of us geeks.:D
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The rough definition of a wormhole is a distortion in space-time that connects 2 points in space with a quicker route than that accessible through normal space-time. By this definition the Freespace subspace passages would fit into this fine, contrary to previous beliefs. It also would apply to space that has been folded in such a way as to make 2 seperate points convergent. Currently wormholes are believed to be created by intense gravitational distortions, such as those experienced inside a black hole (note: not every black hole would make a suitable wormhole in this case).
Enough ramble from me, here's a link to some discussion about the existance of real wormholes:
http://www.sciam.com/askexpert/physics/physics34.html
Stryke 9: I noticed that comment about having the ESS using a momentary shift. Working on that, if you could make the transitions fast enough (more of a vibration than a single conversion) then it would be reasonable to have the ship, plus drive, reactor etc simultaneously existing as matter and energy property-wise. This would mean that while it could travel distances very quickly, it would also have a solid foundation for the engine to actually keep converting the matter to energy and vice versa without irrevocably disappearing into energy itself. Of course, it would be power intensive, limiting the distance that you could travel in a single flight session (limit it to the same distance that it would fly normally with a single conversion, possibly extend it further), but this sounds like it could be a reasonable explanation/workaround of what you might be trying to achieve.
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That was roughly the idea- not simultaneously, but that it would set off a near-instantaneous process that would convert energy back to matter just as the ship was turned into energy.
But the ESS doesn't, technically speaking, have any real foundation in reality, like the others do (more or less). I jsut made it up at the last minute before a release because it was convienient (and because there are soooooo many ways to have fun with the idea of ships warping into energy beams. All of them, I should note, quite evil.):D
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Wormholes are solutions to the Einstein field equations for gravity that act as "tunnels," connecting points in space-time in such a way that the trip between the points through the wormhole could take much less time than the trip through normal space.
This is what I needed to know; thanks. :)