The Link Drive

[TKalbfus]

The Link Drive is an interstellar Drive with an unlimited range, there is a catch however. The Link Drive can only link two places, and any ship carrying a Link Drive cannot be transported by a Jump Drive Ship. If a Jump Drive Ship tries, the Jump Drive fails and receives damage such that the Jump Drive will not operate until it receives repairs.

The secret to the Link Drive is that it contains a tiny wormhole that connects to elsewhere. When the Link Drive is activated, it expands that wormhole to allow the Starship to pass through and then collapses it again. The Wormhole is still there after it collapses, its just so small that nothing can pass through it. The collapsed wormhole is virtually undetectible by any starships sensors except within range of about a meter or so. Each wormhole always has two ends, one end is inside the Link Drive containment system, and the other is somewhere else unseen and unobserved. Each end of the wormhole moves separately, by moving the starship with a maneuver drive, The Link Drive contains the end of the wormhole inside of it and moves it around with the starship, the other end is usually kept freely floating around in space, usually in orbit around some body. When a starship activates its Link Drive, it expands the wormhole, goes through it and then the wormhole collapses again. The wormhole end that's left behind when the Starship dissapears through it continues on the orbital path the starship was last on right before it activated the Link Drive. The Wormhole can travel through solid objects without effect to those objects, it can fall through stars and anything else that gets in the way, it is so small that it just drifts inbetween the atoms of each onject and sometimes right through the atoms, the wormhole is not destroyed by this and neither are the atoms. The mass of the wormhole is negligible, but gravity still pulls on it.

Another property of the Link Drive is that the wormhole it contains may link the present with the past or with the future as well as someplace else in space. The Link Drive may not use any other FTL drive to move from place to place while it contains a wormhole, it may only travel at slower than light speeds, but the Link may connect any arbitrary two points in space and time no matter how far apart they are.

What is the origin of the Link Drive, no one really knows, but the ships may come from a future that no longer exists. The technology is self repairing, and the power source is Zero Point Energy, but the ship must store enough energy from the ZPE Powerplant in order to activate the Link and make the jump through the wormhole. It generally takes about a week for the ship to store enough energy from the powerplant to make a jump after its last jump, the energy banks of the ship can store no more energy than that. As for who manufactured the wormhole, presumibly the civilization that build the Link Drive Starship, whatever was used, the starship doesn't contain equipment for manufacturing wormholes, it only has the wormhole it came with.

 

[mike wightman]

Neat idea Tom

How would you rate it in game terms? Mass, cost, TL etc.?

 

[TKalbfus]

Sigg Oddra said,

Neat idea Tom

How would you rate it in game terms? Mass, cost, TL etc.?

I worked out some standard Link Ship Sizes to start out with, they are basically flying saucers with controls and arrangements that are designed for some type of human. The numbering system is base 10, but the letters and language appears alien with some resemblence to the ancient greek Linear B script.

The Standard Link Drive Starship Starts at 100 tons of Displacement.

Flattened Sphere/Flying Saucers
Diameter 25 meters, Height 3 meters: 100 tons
Diameter 35 meters, Height 3 meters: 200 tons
Diameter 49 meters, Height 3 meters: 400 tons

 

[Keklas Rekobah]

The Link Drive seems similar to the Heechee FTL drive, except that the destination can not be changed.

Do I have it right?

 

[TKalbfus]

I'm not familiar with how the Heechee FTL Drive works, but yes, each wormhole has but two ends, one end is where the ship is currently and the other end is somewhere else in space and time. I think that I should make the drive a little more versitile, by allowing it to contain more than one wormhole opening Each wormhole leads to a specific destination. The Wormholes are very small and the Link Drive can open up one at a time for the starship to pass through. It takes a week for the Link Drive's capacitors to accumulate enough energy to open up a single wormhole. The Wormholes are technically open all the time, it just that without that energy surge nothing can pass through it. The Link Ships can be used as a limited sort of time machine, it can connect to one place and one time with the time advancing at both ends of the wormhole at the same rate.

Time paradoxes don't occur, only changes in the past affect the future; changes in the future don't affect what has occured in the past. In other words a time traveller who causes a change in history in the past will find that the present he returns to will be different, but he himself will be the same, he will remember the old timeline and be unfamiliar with the new one. If a Time traveler prevents himself from being born, he still exists in the past and can return to the present, its just that no one there will know him, he will have no record there of being born, and while he has his own memories of growing up there, no one who remained in the present while he was in the past changing history will know him.

Time in this model has two dimensions, the 1st dimension is where time flows from past to future, that is the dimension the Link Ships can move through. The second dimension is called hypertime, that is the dimension in which the timeline itself changes. Usually what causes changes in the timeline are time travelers going back in time and interfering with history.

Only time travelers in the past are aware of the flow of hypertime in the present, basically they send time probes into the present, the probes take readings and return to the past where the time traveler is and reports on the changes in the timeline.

No one really knows whether time has multiple branches or not, they assume not and that the timeline just changes changing everything in the present with all memories and records changed to be consistent with the new timeline. The only people who are aware of the change are those time travellers in the past before the change in history occured. The is considerable concern in the time traveling community about time travelers inadvertantly or deliberately changing history, there are rules and regulations about how time travelers can interact with the past. Although the PCs in this setup aren't aware of these rules, the time machine they discover has either been stolen or the operator has died, so they just have the time machine in their possession.

The Linkships have wormholes that are keyed only to certain times and places, those times and places cannot be changed, so the PCs using this ship cannot go back in time and correct their mistakes, or go into their own local future to see how they solved a problem. If they look into the historical records to find themselves before a mission has occured, then they can't find out how the mission when because the timeline hasn't been changed yet. Each mission into the past changes history somewhat, usually not significantly to be noticed upon their return, but if a key moment or event is altered or changed, the present they return to could be radically different. The PCs aren't the only time travelers, their are members of the Time Corps, an organization from the future whose mission is to preserve the timeline, and their are fugitives from that timeline bent on changing it to suit their own some times nefarious purposes. Their is only one change to change or prevent a change in a historical event, as both ends of each wormhole advance forward in time at the same rate, there is no possibility of a second try to change a historical event. If the ship has the right wormhole, then it connects to a time and place shortly before the event occured. People traveling in the past know what's going to happen and perhaps can change it, but they only get one chance to do so, once that moment has passed, it is in the past of both ends of the wormhole and cannot be changed. Other wormholes usually lead to radically different times and places so the chances of a second wormhole leading to that same time period for a retry are remote, although other time agents maybe encountered in the past. Cold Sleep is one possible answer, but machinery breaks down over time, so a person left in a low berth for more than a century might either thaw out when the cooling system fails, or might never be revived again as the machinery wich does that has failed. A Low Berth is designed for short trips through space, not centuries of use. The chances of a low berth mishap increase with the increased duration in cold sleep.

I think I've covered the bases of historical tampering.

 

[TKalbfus]

The time travel thing is the main item of concern, otherwise it can be used as a drive of unlimited range to a preset coordinate The destination was chosen by the manufacturer of the wormholes. There is a world outside the galaxy that all the ships have a wormhole leading to, it is a size 8 planet with a standard atmosphere, from it can be seen the entire Milky Way Galaxy, the world and this destination is 500 million years in the past and it orbits a rogue star in intergalactic space unreachable by any jump drive in any case. the World is inhabited by humans who originally came from the future. This planet is the site of the Time Corps, it is set in the past and its location is unknown so that no rogue agents can alter the past relative to the Time Corps and erase their existance The Time Corps itself is at TL 15 with the exception of the time machines themselves which are leftovers from a previous civilization of the future which erased its own existance through altering future history, the survivors of that catastrophe live on this planet and are in charge of the equipment which manufactures additional wormholes and link drives. Aside from the Link Drives and the Zero Point Energy Power plants the rest of the time machines are standard TL 15 technology. The Time Corps recruits from a number of eras, but most of the technitions come from the Classic Imperial Era.

 

[Sifu Blackirish]

Cool idea, Tom.

Had a thought...this was probably discussed somewhere here before, but couldn't you use a similar technology to provide a continuous fuel source for ships?

Some smart scientist might figure out how to do that (hopefully without destroying the ship)...

 

[TKalbfus]

Actually, I was thinking of putting the Link Drive and the power plant into a single unit. Time travel should not be easy, otherwise everyone would have a time machine, which is what these ships are. The energies required to open up a wormhole are enormous, far in excess of that an antimatter powerplant can hope to generate, so basically the powerplant is intergrated with the Link drive and it harnesses cosmic energy or energy of the vacuum from the universe itself. Most of the energy is channeled into a capacitor, where it accumulates for a week until enough is collected to make a Link Jump, but excess energy is generated in the process, and so the Link Drive itself can substitute for a power plant to operate the ship's systems including the maneuver drive. The only thing left is to determine how much excess power the Drive Produces. I'll Say it produces the same in excess as a TL 15 Fusion power plant, only it requires no fuel to operate. Everything associated with the Link Drive is out of the ballpark when it comes to a Standard Traveller campaign, the Drive can be considered TL 20 technology, but everything else about the ship is TL 15, this kind of helps facilitate repairs on the time machine from the TL 15 personel who mainly staff the station on this remote base planet. Most are from the 3rd Imperium, and the planet specializes in preserving human history, it is sited half a billion years in the past and about 500,000 light years outside the Milky Way Galaxy so that it will be separate and beyond the reach of any jump drive than any interstellar civilization might conceivably build, and its precise location in space and time is kept a secret. Most of the humans living on this planet don't know exactly when and where the planet is located other than its outside the Milky Way Galaxy, and is roughly 500 million years in the past, the secret coordinates are known only to a few, but each timeship manufactured here has a wormhole that leads to it at this particular time. The time corps monitors the future timeline to see if any other civilization develops time travel capability, then it tries to alter future history just enough to prevent that civilization from discovering time travel. The Imperium has several research facilities devoted to time travel research, and the time corps has a group that's equally devoted to preventing the Imperium from discovering time travel, it alter's history just enough to push the research efforts in the wrong direction, but occasionally the Time Corps slips up and on a particular timeline the Imperium does build a Time Machine. If someone pilots that time Machine into the Past before the time corps has a chance to alter the timestream, then the timeship and it occupants are safe from being erased from history, but the base which sent them might be gone by the time they return. You see that while the time corps base exists before the Imperium, in Hypertime, they both exist simultaneously and all times on the timeline at a given moment in hypertime exist simultaneously, so its possible for a time machine to leave the future before the time corps has a chance to alter history to prevent the time machine from coming into existance. The time corps sometimes misses important developments like that, but here is an opportunity for the PCs to acquire a time machine. The GM could allow the Imperium to establish a small base in the past and maufacture several wormholes for a single time machine. The PCs can then hacve adventures in time and try to solve the mystery of why the present they came from changed after they left, in the meantime Tiome Corps personnel will attempt to tract the PCs down before the inadvertantly deliberately alter the timeline, but this takes time. In the meantime the PCs might radically alter the timeline and find themselves in an alternate history until the time corps finds them and attempts to restore history back to its original path. Basically the official Traveller timeline is the way history is supposed to go according to the time corps.

To make things interesting, their may be other versions of the Time Corps out in the past with different ideas of how history is supposed to go, they will try to fix history, and thus ruin history for the base Time Corps that considers the Traveller Timeline to be the official history, naturally these two sets of agents will find themselves in conflict with each other. the GURPS Traveller timeline might have a time corps all its own, they agents of both versions of history often bumb into each other around the time of the Emperor's assasination or attempted assasination and history switches back and forth over and over again. With one set of time corps agents trying to cause the rebellion and new Era an the other trying to prevent it.

Further back in time, around World War II, time corps agents bump into the "Thousand Year Reich" time corps and each group tries to make either the Allies or the Axis win. History switches back and forth here too. Most people who don't time travel don't notice this, but the time travelers who travel before World War II do. A PC group might explore Ancient Egypt for example, and then return to the Present only to find the "Thousand Year Reich" in charge. The PCs might puzzle for a while about how they caused this change, but they didn't, they just happened to be in the past at the wrong moment in hypertime and their timeline changed while they didn't. A very interesting plot device, don't you think?

 

[ChaserCaffey]

Looks pretty cool! Just to clarify, you seem to envision this as being a kind of "black box" similar to Ancient technology- i.e. it can't be made by anyone in Charted Space, it has to be found, and once it's found it can only take you to the place or time the other end of the wormhole has been linked to. Is that right?

Sounds like a great way of sending the PCs off to some obscure corner of space or time. I may have to steal it...

 

[TKalbfus]

Actually there are two possible sources of these Time Machines, or lets call them Time Ships. The special power source used is one of the enabling technologies required to build a Time Ship. If you can build a Zero Point Energy Power Plant, you are already half-way towards building a Time Ship. The Imperium and other interstellar nations have Secret Research facilities trying to develop technologies for the Zero Point Energy plant and have some idea about how to make time travel work, at the same time, their is an organization in the Deep Past called the Time Corps trying to see to it that no one develops Time Travel technology other than themselves, but they don't have perfect knowledge of what goes on in the future and their agents can't be everywhere. There are only 10 million people on the Time Corps Planet, most of them are technitions who maintain the equipment for producing Wormholes and the Link Drive. The Imperium is capable of developing this technology as it is not much more advanced than their own. The Problem is that everytime the Imperium develops this technology, the Time Corps eventually will find out about it, when they do, the travel to a time before the key scientists are born and they meet with the scientists parents and prevent them from getting together so the scientists are never born and in the new timeline the Link Drive never gets developed by the Imperium. However before this happens, the PCs could get hold of an Imperial Time Ship and take it into the Past before the Time Corps is able to erase the research program from the timeline or at least the key scientists who make the breakthrough. The PCs may return to a parallel timeline that is almost the same as the one that they left, but where the time machine they are traveling in never got developed, this also means that in this timeline, they have counterparts here who never traveled back in time because there was no timeship. Consequently the PCs might meet themselves, of course their doubles would be NPCs controlled by the GM. This scenario is good if you what the PCs to find out about time travel by experimenting. The Timeship's Link Drive has 100 wormholes in it, those wormholes lead to 100 different places in times and that's it, the PCs can't change the destinations of those wormholes. Depending on the purpose of the Timeship, those wormholes could all lead to Earth at different historical eras, or they could lead to different parts of the Galaxy or even different galaxies. The Time Machine can only go to those eras and places for which it has wormholes to. Time advances in all eras and places at the same time. Once an oppotunity has been missed in one of those places, the time machine can't revisit that time for a do over.

Another way for the PCs to get a timeship is for them to be recruited by the Time Corps, they join the organization, which is a secret organization much like the Psionics Institute and they travel to their home planet using the Recruiters Link Drive Time Ship. The Planet there is very Earthlike, and this particular branch of the Time Corps specializes in Human History, they have slowly terraformed this planet, as they had timeships, they had plenty of time to do it. They started with a suitably located planet about the size of Earth with a large moon orbiting it, and they kept of revisiting it with their timeships at later and later periods in that planet's evolution, and they brought with them Earth lifeforms they've aquired from the Ancient Earth at similar periods in its history. Consequently the Time Corps planet has dinosaur fossils buried in it rock strata, and the Time Corps engineers arranged for a suitably large asteroid to hit the planet at the right time to wipe out the dinosaurs. Basically the evolution of this planet followed the Earth's evolution in lock step. As the large moon was slowing down the planets rotation, the Time Corps engineers arranged to set up a base and for the ecosystem to be Modern prehuman right at the point in time where the planets rotation slowed down to exactly 24 hours! This base happened to be built on the planet at around 500,000,000 BC, although the exact year is not know for security purposes. The planet has several continents, each one roughly analogous to a continent on Earth, it is a very artifical planet though although it looks natural and even has coal oil fields to prove it, but the planet was terraformed over a period of 4 billion years!

The Time Corps has recruited a bunch of natives from the Past Earth, and it houses them in separate villages kept apart from people of other time periods, basically to ensure that the agents don't know the future of their communities on Earth. The Ancient Roman Time Corps engineers aren't told when and how the Roman Empire exactly collapses, and they are concerned mainly with the time before the period from which they came, this ensures that the agents can return home and eventually retire back on Earth in the time period from which they came, they learn the basic rudiments of piloting the timeships, but they aren't the technitions of the Time Corps, they act basically as agents, and their knowledge of the local languages and customs of those past eras has proved useful to the Time Corps. The More modern recruits learn more about the time traveling technologies and how to maintain them as well as go on specific missions in the past.

 

[ChaserCaffey]

Sounds like a great plot for more dark conspiracy-oriented campaigns. A couple other thoughts to toss out there:

1) There was a discussion about pocket-universe "islands" in jumpspace somewhere else on the thread. As things stand now, anyone in Charted Space pretty much has to stumble across them through a random jump drive malfunction, but a link drive could change all of that. Having the PCs find or somehow acquire a link drive ship could be a way of starting an "island" campaign- if I read the technology right, the link drive shouldn't care if the other end of the wormhole is in a pocket dimension. Link could be a great way to flip in and out of jumpspace islands.

2) Based on what Tom said- yeah, the Time Corps would be terraformers par excellance, wouldn't they? Go back in time, get a process started, wait to see what the effect is on the present, and adjust as needed. Heck, they could even do controlled experiments in terraforming, which would otherwise be multigenerational projects, if not outright impossible.

 

[TKalbfus]

Link Drives could reach other universes, including pocket universes. The key lies in the Wormhole factory where the wormhole destinations are decided. If a way can be found of navigating the multiverse, and finding other universes there, then a destination in another universe could be plotted, including universes with different laws of physics. Some universes might be artificial, created by creatures called gods, and have mana levels greater than the Traveller default of zero. A Link Drive might connect to a D&D Universe, where spell casting is possible. Any sort of Fantasy world that is typically D&D fare would be created by time travellers using transplanted Earth life forms and some genetic and magical alterations to create the various monsters and races of the D&D Monster Manuals. T20 is quite compatible with D&D, more so than D20 Modern, Most of the worlds in the magical universes are probably quite alien to Earth life, but the ones with humans in them are probably the product of "gods". Who these "gods" are is quite unknown, one theory is that they are another group of time travellers way more advanced than the Time Corps, and they are so powerful that they are few in number and reside in small groups called pantheons, each group lording it over some magical group or another.

The Space Corps may have inadvertently created one such world. One link drive entered one such magical universe where the physical laws were the same as in the Traveller Universe except for the high levels of mana that pervaded this particular universe. There were no humans here, at least not originally, and the Space Corps was not initially aware of the existance of Mana, they just assumed that it was a parallel Universe as the coordinates were such that they could not possible be in the same universe. Well, this looked like as good a place to settle humans as any, and it could be reached just as easily using the Link Drive and no time paradox problems either once a suitble planet was terraformed. An Earth like planet orbiting a yellow star was soon found and the 4 billion year process had begun. The terraformers were not alone however, once the terraforming had begun certian creatures made of mana took notice and help the process along just a bit. Several of the creatures managed to kidnap one of the terraformers, and extracted some ideas from him, as these creatures were not very creative, from that human they got the idea to manifest themselves as physical creatures as assumed the form of gods modeled after the Ancient Greek Pantheon, as the terraformed was a classical literature student. Well the kid was released and DNA samples were taken from each of the crew members without their knowledge. Upon the terraformers next visit, and entire civilization was discovered on the terraforming planet, composed of Earth life plusat least 50 intelligent races related to humans, hundreds of intelligent races related to animals and gods ruling over them all. The gods took over the terraforming experiment in this universe and told the Space Corps to buzz off, using their mana powers, the gods managed to suppress the functioning of items of technology higher than TL 1 on the planet, the Space Corps could safely observe from orbit, but if they tried to land anyone on the planets surface, the gods would politely allow the ship to land, and once on the ground, they would suppress its technology so it could no longer take off again. This made the planet an excellent place to send criminals, mostly of the minor sort, such as those who tried to deliberately alter the time stream without authorization. The Space Corps shyed away from other universes for a time after that.