[Stryke 9]

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.

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.

[Kazashi]

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.

[CP5670]

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)

[Stryke 9]

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.

[Corsair]

To all of this my response is:
TECHNOBABBLE=NOT UNDERSTANDABLE
there I've said my piece.

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.

[Stryke 9]

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.

[Kazashi]

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.

[Stryke 9]

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.)

[CP5670]

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.