Empress wave - jump space woops variant

[mike wightman]

IMTU Grandfather created jump space as an interface between our universe and the higher dimensions usually only accessible by 'psionics'.
It expanded at light speed and granted jump drive travel to the galaxy.
He also gave the Zhodani the impulse to launch the core expeditions.
IMTU on one such expedition the Zhodani reached towards the core and discovered ruins of long dead civilisations.
They also somehow managed to awaken or upset something that wasn't quite as dead as they thought.
This "power" activated machinery that created a wave with one purpose - destroy the jump space interface that Grandfather had created all those years before.

The greatest challenge that Charted Space faces then is how to travel from system to system once jump drive goes away.

I've thought of stutterwarp, wormholes, psionic teleportation, possibly even warp drive...

anything I've missed?

 

[jfetters]

Neat concept.

I think that the items you list above cover most of the options, but the mechanics of how they work exactly can vary.

A couple other FTL variants could include subspace (as described in FFS v1), or a kind of quantum travel (which again could be a variation of any of the above) similar to the "dimension walk" concept in Dark Conspiracy, but on an interstellar scale.

 

[mike wightman]

I'd like to use some of the exotic stuff from FF&S, and the dimension walk concept sounds intriguing...

 

[Border Reiver]

Peter F Hamilton's Commonwealth Saga has a nice take on "Dimension Walking" as a form of travel. It also some interesting wormholes where the gates are planet bound and transit between planets are by train.

Oh and don't forget the Infinite Improbability Drive.

 

[Lenadh]

There's always Calabi-Yau shunts, though I suspect those would be "a bit" above TL15.

Yaskoydray's Used Starships anyone?

 

[mike wightman]

If the maths is TL8, the engineering is only TL9

 

[mike wightman]

Originally posted by Border Reiver:
Peter F Hamilton's Commonwealth Saga has a nice take on "Dimension Walking" as a form of travel.

Ah yes, the Silfen paths...

It also some interesting wormholes where the gates are planet bound and transit between planets are by train.

An idea that is similar to BRP's Future World and GURPS Meridian.

Oh and don't forget the Infinite Improbability Drive.

As if I would

 

[Plankowner]

Whatever drive(s) you come up with I would make them LESS efficient than Jump Drive. After all, if they were known about and were better than Jump, wouldn't they be used?

Maybe they are all slower than Jump, lightyears per week instead of parsecs per week.

If wormholes could be created/used at TL15-, wouldn't the Imperium (or someone) already have them, even with Jump Drive?

The Stutterwarp is a good one to use, especially with the 2 parsec limit! It might be faster, but since you can't go more than 2 parsecs, it fell out of use by TL12.

 

[mike wightman]

What if STL ships travelling at 0.9c - normal Traveller maneuver drive - are used to move wormhole mouths to distant systems to allow nearly instant travel from system to system.

It would take decades to expand across a subsector, but once the network is established...

 

[GJD]

Good old wikipedia has quite a section on theoretical stardrives, including Alcubierre warp drives, diametric drive, bias drives and the wonderful sounding Droscher-Heim drive.

G.

 

[mike wightman]

Originally posted by Plankowner:
Whatever drive(s) you come up with I would make them LESS efficient than Jump Drive. After all, if they were known about and were better than Jump, wouldn't they be used?

Good point.
But perhaps the jump drive at TL9 is a cheaper investment than other methods, or the actual physics may have changed thanks to the Empress Wave...

Maybe they are all slower than Jump, lightyears per week instead of parsecs per week.

Yep, this cold be a good limiting factor.

If wormholes could be created/used at TL15-, wouldn't the Imperium (or someone) already have them, even with Jump Drive?

Not if the economics are such that it is vastly cheaper to just invest in jump technology.

The Stutterwarp is a good one to use, especially with the 2 parsec limit! It might be faster, but since you can't go more than 2 parsecs, it fell out of use by TL12.

I agree, I've actually toyed with having the stutterwarp as the maneuver drive IMTU.

 

[Keklas Rekobah]

In my Maranan Cluster campaign, we've developed an FTL mode called the "Collapsar Jump." It's an outgrowth of gravitic science. The functional concept is simple.

[technobabble]

Instead of all that Lhyd forming a bubble around the ship, and being lased to provide the energy pulse that opens a rift into j-space, we use just enough Lhyd to supercool our lanthanum grid, while the rest of it goes into a meta-critical fusion reaction. The energy released in this reaction gets dumped into the gravitic generators (j-drive), which forms an intense gravity field around the ship via the lanthanum grid.

Since the ship is inside the field, it is not crushed. Instead, n-space warps around the ship, which drops into its own little 'pocket' universe. However, this pocket is asymmetrical. The asymmetry is pre-determined before jump, and controlled through the collapsar process, so as to arrive at the proper destination. Wherever the ship is between points A and B, it is not j-space, but somewhere else.

[/technobabble]

- Fuel consumption is the same.
- Chances for misjump and jump failure are the same.
- Travel time is the same.
- Cost is the same.

For every jump past overhaul, there is a cumulative 1% per parsec chance of ending up in a different probability ("parallel universe"). This means that if it takes two three-parsec jumps to get to the shipyard after the due date, then there is a 3% chance after the first jump, 6% after the second jump, and 9% after the third jump to end up in a universe where (for example) the First Empire fell to a Soviet-run Earth, and Galanglic sounds more like "Galaruss."

Dosvedanya, Komrade!