[Solatar]

First, let me say we're talking about the Terrans and Vasudans BEFORE the Capella incident and the discovery of the Knossos.

Would it be feasible, given the GTA's knowledge of subspace, to create a "knossos" portal to assist civilian ships in long distance jumps in the same system? My scenario involves Sol, and the GTA has the Lucifer to study (which, arguably, can use unstable nodes). The basic premise is that the GTA has created a couple of jumpgates through Sol to connect parts of it. Mostly the civilians would use these gates, as with the economy doing badly in Sol civilian ships might not be able to afford subspace drives that are long distance, or subspace drives at all. This would enable a civilian liner, for example, to make a jump from Earth to maybe Jupiter, for example.

I want to add this aspect in, but I would like to hear opinions on how this would go over. Keep in mind, no Knossos to study, but the GTA studied the Lucifer wreckage. And these gates do NOT go to different starsystems.

[General Battuta]

Aren't intrasystem jumps basically instantaneous across any distance?

[Droid803]

Yeah, but I'm guessing its for the Satis transports that don't even have em.
I'd just use acceleration gates though (like magnetic acceleration rings).

[Solatar]

It'd be for Satis freighters, along with plenty of other civilian ships without them (they're expensive I would imagine). Acceleration rings would be another option, but I kind of wanted to stay with what Freespace seems to normally use, which is subspace. Although I can more easily see acceleration gates in use than Knossos style portals by people who haven't seen one.

I'll see what I can come up with as far as models, etc..

[Droid803]

Well, maybe you could just make "ferry" ships that dock with these civillian transports and take them into subspace together.
Or, you could use the Arcadia hole, which is a rather strange in the first place.

[WMCoolmon]

I think the situation as you've presented it is kind of silly. The economy in Sol is not just going to be "doing badly" so nobody has any money. It's going to be doing badly either Sol was relying on imports from other systems, or because it was relying on the money from exporting to other systems.

From command briefings during FS1, it's obvious that Sol was involved in a lot of research and development. That probably means a lot of military contracts providing funding from the central government in Sol. So the government is going to be missing a large chunk of the stuff it spent money on, but it also means that the economy as it pertains to high-tech equipment is going to be largely intact. I can also see that a lot of manufacturing and production plants would be based in Sol, possibly not the largest ones, but simply because they were there first and it's more cost-effective to scale them up than to move them to another system.

I suspect that one of the key components to be produced at those factories would be jump drives. This is the last key technology that Terran craft would require before they started colonizing other worlds, and it sounds as though improvements on jump drives were not revolutionary until the introduction of interstellar jump drives (and interstellar technology was perfected at Sol). Furthermore, the fact that the technology was moved from being invented to being mass produced so rapidly suggests a close association between the research team and the manufacturing plant, and that supply lines were not disrupted by the war (ie all critical points were located in secure systems). According to FS1 on 3/2/35,

This mission will be facilitated by the new subspace drive we have received. For years the GTA has tried to give a fighter the ability to do intersystem jumps. After monitoring the Beta Aquilae engagements, the GTA science colony at Sol has finally been able to solve the puzzle. All GTA fighters are currently being equipped with intersystem subspace drives.

The first mention of Beta Aquilae occurs in La Ruota Della Fortuna (2/15/35).

So my guess would be that jump drives are the most likely thing for Sol in the GTA to have a surplus of (besides people and government officials). Without a huge fleet to equip with interstellar jump drives but all the manufacturing capability, they'd probably be dirt cheap and easy to get hold of. Countless supply craft would've been diverted to Earth to evacuate the government and populace; the fact that the remnants of the GTA were in such turmoil suggests that no clear government existed and that most of it was trapped back in Sol. Thus those transports would still be around and would need something to do to remain profitable.

Finally, Sol would have all the vessels of the 1st Fleet hanging around with nothing to do. Sure, they could keep order, but that'd be a job for intrasystem police, not the GTA's elite fighting forces. So it'd be perfectly reasonable for large military transports to be diverted to ship civilian vessels across the system. Transit between planets should only take GTA vessels a matter of hours, and rescue would only be a matter of minutes or seconds away. Flying across the system would not nearly be as unrealistic as it is today; in fact it might be more analogous to taking a road trip across the United States, except emergency crews could actually get to you much sooner (unless you encountered a crisis during re-entry or something).

re: GTVA's technological ability
I doubt it as well...the Lucifer was pretty much vaporized; the back half was trapped in the subspace node and never emerged. The front half blew up and large chunks were apparently vaporized. Given that the jump drives and hangar bays were on the back half, I don't think it's very likely that Sol had any physical Shivan jump drives to study. Computers are a possibility, but I have real doubt of the GTA finding anything even more than slightly intact on the Lucifer. Given that the Knossos was apparently Ancient and not Shivan in origin, I don't think that the Lucifer even had the technology to do anything similar to what you're suggesting. It's possible that just having the more advanced technology might provide some clues, but it's really just wide-open speculation.

So if you're asking if it's a reasonable progression of events from Freespace 1, I would say no. If you're asking whether people who play a game with 2 km-long interstellar spacecraft that are limited to the maximum speed of a fast biker, and interstellar fighters that can't go faster than a Cessna, all of which operate according to principles that directly violate the laws of physics, would be willing to accept this idea? I would say probably.

[Solatar]

I have to say WMCoolman, you make a lot of really, really good points. My first instinct was that the economy would be doing poorly because Sol lacked resources from other systems, so construction materials would be more expensive. However, as you've presented it, it would make more sense if the GTA economy was doing well, not poorly.

I agree one hundred percent, thank you very much for your input.

[WMCoolmon]

Well, maybe, maybe not. I didn't mean to argue that the economy would be doing well, but that you'd probably have a lot of cheap jump drives available. That's good for civilians traveling across the solar system, but not so good for the companies that have a suddenly-devalued product and factories. The reason they'd be so cheap is that the manufacturing companies would have a lot of supply, but not a lot of demand (compared to when they had several other solar systems buying from them).

If the big defense and space technology contractors didn't adapt quickly, they'd eventually experience layoffs and possibly go out of business. That would in turn carry over to research facilities, possibly including universities and other business service providers (shipping, call centers, financial consultants, law firms, etc). That would put people out of work, meaning damage to the 'luxuries' industry, such as toys, luxury spaceships, entertainment industries, sports, certain overpriced fast-food chains, etc etc. That would in turn hurt the economy as more people were forced out of work.

Fresh water and food might've also been imported from other systems with large ice deposits or with large amounts of unused, fertile soil. Possible farmland would then be sacrificed for additional housing on earth, or commercial interests. That would leave earth with a sudden deficiency in food and water, and facing a sudden famine.

Consequently you'd see a lot of people moving from traditionally high-tech and high-paying jobs to seek opportunity on other planets in risky conditions in order to be able to survive. People with terraforming experience or with lots of land would find themselves in a position to make lots of money, whereas people who'd formerly been upper white collar workers would end up seeking re-education or competing viciously to be worth holding on to and dodging layoffs.

On the other hand, you could simply state for your campaign that Mars had been the center of food and the GTA had perfected efficient water purification methods, and Sol had actually been providing the bulk of food and water to the rest of the GTVA while colonies got established and became self-sufficient. The destruction of the Sol node left a large number of farmers without occupations, but the vacuum left in the defense and space industries was filled by a project to establish contact with the the GTVA. A large number of out-of-work farmers found employment as engineers on various space-based projects and consequently the Sol economy actually boomed as a result of the destruction of the Sol node.

Meanwhile, demand for the weapons and equipment formerly shipped to the rest of the GTA was filled by earthers-turned-colonists, who evacuated their homes for the coming invasion and never turned back, instead seeking opportunity carving out underground settlements on Jupiter's moons. Prometheus cannons became mining equipment for people who had planned to ship out to Beta Cygni or the fringes of explored space to seek opportunity and riches.

[Solatar]

You should just do my campaign for me...

As far as getting fresh water, I think there is plenty of water ice in the solar system to keep people going, although with the Delta Serpentis node collapse the price would certainly increase. The supply of certain minerals and metals would be hurt because of the lack of imports from other star systems so for the first few years the price of metals would be very high. This results in higher prices for spaceships for everybody, military and civilian.

Mining operations on asteroids and moons in Sol would grow very large as quickly as they could. The problem with expansion being that mining machinery is also very expensive. As more people took up residence on these mining colonies, they would require more fresh water and food, so the price of food and fresh water would increase. Earth would most likely have enough to sustain itself, but it's unlikely it could export vast quantities without damaging the planet.

I'd say that by ten or twenty years later the economy would have stabilized somewhat. Water would still be expensive, but at the GTA's technology level once an installation has a "supply" of water it would be able to recycle it with very high efficiency.

With so many people now off the planet, large space stations might now be constructed to orbit major regional hubs, like a station around Jupiter and Saturn.

I do wonder how many Vasudans were in Sol? Any sizeable population or just those three or four lonesome fighters.

[FUBAR-BDHR]

Too much to read but the easy solution is to put a ship like an awacs in a position for those types of jumps. 

[Goober5000]

First, let me say we're talking about the Terrans and Vasudans BEFORE the Capella incident and the discovery of the Knossos.

Would it be feasible, given the GTA's knowledge of subspace, to create a "knossos" portal to assist civilian ships in long distance jumps in the same system? My scenario involves Sol, and the GTA has the Lucifer to study (which, arguably, can use unstable nodes). The basic premise is that the GTA has created a couple of jumpgates through Sol to connect parts of it. Mostly the civilians would use these gates, as with the economy doing badly in Sol civilian ships might not be able to afford subspace drives that are long distance, or subspace drives at all. This would enable a civilian liner, for example, to make a jump from Earth to maybe Jupiter, for example.

I want to add this aspect in, but I would like to hear opinions on how this would go over. Keep in mind, no Knossos to study, but the GTA studied the Lucifer wreckage. And these gates do NOT go to different starsystems.

You could do this even without bringing the Lucifer wreckage into it.

We only know two things about intrasystem jumps: a) they require an "intense gravitational field", and b) they're "nearly instantaneous".  Everything else, such as power consumption, is vague enough to be adaptable to a great number of plot requirements.  Even the two ground rules are open to interpretation; for a) we don't know how much a planetary gravitational field helps or doesn't help in comparison to the sun's; and for b) the "instantaneous" jump of the Belisarius took at least 23 seconds.  There's a lot of flexibility.

Note that "most small space-faring vessels are equipped with [intrasystem jump drives]" according to the FS2 tech room.  Perhaps most large space-faring vessels are not.  According to The Sicilian Defense, it takes a period of time for large ships to charge their drives before jumping.  One could easily conclude that it takes an enormous amount of energy for a large ship to make a subspace jump.  It might be cost-prohibitive to mount subspace drives on large ships unless there's a very good reason (e.g. they're needed for the military).

So you could probably set up a series of "subspace drive booster stations" that are scattered throughout the Sol system.  These provide the energy for large ships to make subspace jumps, but without the expense of mounting a drive on each and every ship.  You could also say that booster stations near large planets are cheaper than booster stations in the middle of nowhere, as it's easier to jump while in the vicinity of a planet.

[WMCoolmon]

Hmm, that gives me an idea, too...

Maybe rather than employing subspace tech these gates could include artificial gravity tech. We know that the GTA has that technology. The reasoning could be that by generating a sizable enough gravitational field, the gates allow ships to jump within their radius just as if the sun were closer to that point, extending the reach of jump drives. You could also use Goober's idea that this reduces the energy required to make a jump, so it's more economical for ships traveling within the rings as well.

[FreeSpaceFreak]

I like Droid803's idea on the Arcadia hole...

[Solatar]

That would almost make a good reason for it existing. It always seemed like a drydock or something, but it's an interesting thought that it could be used like that.

[Snail]

That would almost make a good reason for it existing. It always seemed like a drydock or something, but it's an interesting thought that it could be used like that.

I always thought the Arcadia hole was some kind of a freighter hangar, not really a drydock, just for crew exchanges and stuff. Gameplay-wise I believe it was so that you could get to the other side without having to go all the way round. But I don't see why it couldn't be used as an accelerator ring.

[Androgeos Exeunt]

I do wonder how many Vasudans were in Sol? Any sizeable population or just those three or four lonesome fighters.

I think there just a handful. Most of the surviving Vasudans were resettled on other planets in the Altair system, weren't they?

Now that you bring that up, I wonder what happened to them after the Sol-Delta Serpentis jump node collapsed...

[Snail]

I think there just a handful. Most of the surviving Vasudans were resettled on other planets in the Altair system, weren't they?

I doubt that, unless it's mentioned somewhere. The new Vasudan government was in Aldebaran (though I'm not sure of the canonicity of this statement either). Altar is a fringe system that was almost completely unexplored at the time of the Great War.

[Androgeos Exeunt]

Oh, oops...

I think it's mentioned somewhere in Intelligence, but I forgot. I remembered it as Altair, but I probably mixed that up with whatever belonged to the Ancients.

[Solatar]

I wonder if any Vasudans might have fled to Sol before/after the attack on Vasuda Prime?

Also, I could imagine a Vasudan fleet being moved to Sol to assist in the defense of Earth. A stranded fleet would leave a fair amount of Vasudans in Sol, possibly enough to fill up a few "colony" stations around the system.

[Droid803]

I would believe some Vasudans may have taken refuge in Sol after V.Prime was glassed.