Time Travel, anyone tried to incorporate this?

[justindurkan]

I'm toying with the idea of adding a time travel element to a scenario involving activity in the vicinity of a neutron star (a ship gets caught in the gravity well of a neutron star and its only hope is an emergency jump. This leads to a misjump. Because of the enormous speed reached by the fall into the gravity well relativistic effects apply including time dilation, etc.)

I'm wondering if there is anyone out there that has tried this before and if so have they any rules, guidelines, etc.

I'm intrigued with the possibility of throwing this at the players without them getting any warning. It sounds like an ideal enigma type edventure.

 

[Shadowdancer]

I'm planning to do something similar. We started a campaign in the Spinward Marches in the 1100s, but I want to move it to the Gateway Domain in the 990s.

What I was planning is to have some sort of unusual phenomena affect the ship just as it jumps (your neutron star idea sounds perfect) that causes a misjump in time rather than in distance.

But the PCs aren't going to realize anything is wrong until later. They will be traveling through parts of space that are foreign to them anyway, so there won't be much to tip them off until they reach their final destination. I was going to have their jump -- the one that sends them back in time -- last an unusually short duration, say 4 or 5 days. They'll be caught by surprise, but will be in the system they expect to be in, so they'll probably dismiss it as a boon.

Then as they continue their journey, other little oddities will start to occur. Jump calculations will be a little off because the stellar bodies aren't quite where they should be in relationship to each other. Sensor readings will be a little different than expected. When they stop at inhabited worlds, the expected UWP code won't match what is actually there. People won't recognize their ship design, or some of their equipment -- they'll just think it's something new, when actually it's been commonplace for several decades. And equipment the PCs would expect to see in a museum is actually being used.

 

[jchurchill]

Paraquat,

A very intriguing and underhanded idea. I really like it. If down slowly and subtly it could be a lot of fun.

Will you have them discover a broken down Statute of Liberty on a beach somewhere? Give the players a chance to look in stunned horror and say "you bastards...you blew it all up. Damn you...."

[of course that was being thrown into the future but the look on their faces will be the same.]

 

[TheDS]

Kep in mind that even the lowliest E-class starport is going to have a time-server as part of its traffic control net. The computer may automatically update the ship-board time from it, but that doesn't mean such a large change won't alert the computer that something is wrong.

The computer then tells the traffic control net that their time server is whacked, and the tcn says their clock is whacked, and they'd like to take a look at the ship's logs and manifest and do an inspection while we're at it, all in the name of making sure your obvious tampering with the transponder goes reported, not because we believe time travel is possible.

Time dialation works by sending you FORWARD, not backward. There is no difficulty in saying that the 2 minutes they spent plummeting into the gravity well was actually more like 42 years everywhere else. Going backwards in time requires the use of a Schwartzchild limit, which so far are found only around black holes, and probably the only one that might be safe enough to enter would be the one around the hypermass at the center of the galaxy.

You don't activate a jump drive in a gravity well THAT ferocious. It just can't happen. And even if it did, the snapback of the jump-hole would destroy the ship in an instant.

If you want a time travel accident that ALMOST sounds plausible, try this: the ship is on a high-velocity vector and they activate their drive. Maybe they're making a run for it, and not slowing down. At the same time, a ship doing much the same thing jumps in right on top of them (well, not counting that 100 diameter limit thing) but the two ships are travelling fast enough that the miniscule 100-diam limit of a ship will be crossed in a millisecond, more than enough time for the two jump-holes to intersect each other. Each ship enter's the other's hole, while the holes themselves enter each other.

What happens? The hole that's opening fits inside the hole that's closing. It holds it open. But there's two ships in here now, one of which has just shut off its lanthanum grid (thinking the jump was over) and is promptly dissolved. All that extra energy is enough to warp the jump bubble, sending ripples throughout the sub-jumpspace within this hybrid bubble, and the bounceback shoves the ship out to N-space, whenever and wherever you want it, but with some serious damage to the jump drive and the hull.

The computers are damaged, the ship is crippled, the reactor is scrammed, the ship is adrift, and nothing's going to poll the traffic net or worry about a hacked transponder, since all the electronics are fried.

 

[Andrew Boulton]

I have a vague plan for using time travel (probably involving an Ancient artifact powered by a Darrian Star Trigger). Dunno if I'll ever use it.

 

[Zutroi]

I will remind one and all of one of Niven's Laws:

"If the Universe of Discourse permits Time Travel, Time Travel cannot exist." He does a nice job 'proving' this in (IIRC) "Theory and Practice of Time Travel"

For another couple of take on the subject, try "The Return of William Proxmire" and "Rotating Cylinders and the Possibility of Global Causality Violation."

 

[stofsk]

The most plausible time-travel idea I've heard came from the Night's Dawn Trilogy. One of the characters, a spaceship pilot, travels forward into the future.

There's a thing called zero-tau, where the body is kept in a temporal stasis - no aging, no death, nothing - to all intents and purposes the person ceases to be when he enters a ZT pod.

This character uses it to "sleep" ahead 50 years, comes out and spends the next 5 yrs seeing what's changed, what's happened and so on.

It is entirely one-way, but it is a form of time travel. I thought it really cool, because the concept is actually appealing and realistic. Well, realistic enough to suspend disbelief.

But there's a thought - would anyone do that, assuming they could? I probably would.

 

[alanb]

In the CT Zhodani module there's an Ancients doohickey that allows visions of the future. This demonstrates that time travel is possible in the OTU. (Since information is being passed backwards in time.)

Alan B

 

[themink]

There are a couple of real world "backwards" time travel devices. The easiest to construct and use is tipler cylinders (refered to above as reotating cylinders of causal violation - title from memory, I should have copied it before writing my reply).

There are a huge number of "forward" time travel devices, the easiest one of which is the maneuver drive that every ship carries (do 2G for a couple of months and you build up a ferocious Tau factor)

A nice hand wave that I use when one of the players/characters says something like - but that violates the Charle-Maczinsky law of time travel exclusion:- "You are sure that he universe is doing everything right, it is possible the law has been overstated"

 

[TKalbfus]

My favorite is wormholes. Wormholes allow connections between two points in timespace, they can even connect two separate universes. This fact neatly deals with time paradoxes. With wormholes, they just don't happen.

1) The first step is to create a wormhole, this is done by threading a quantum wormhole with exotic matter and then expanding the wormhole to macroscopic size. These two wormhole mouths start out in close proximity to each other.

2) Each wormhole mouth is then given an electric charge and then coupled with a metal sphere. The metal sphere at each end completely surrounds the spherical wormhole mouth and the spheres are large, say about 1,000 meters in diameter.

3) A three meter diameter hole is cut into each metal sphere. To a man-sized creature, the surface of the sphere appears flat when they get up close. Both spheres are then rotated so that the holes line up with respect to the interior of the wormhole. The length of the wormhole neck is zero so that the inside surface of one metal sphere is in contact the the inside surface of the other metal sphere at the other end of the wormhole. By lining up the two holes, a person can step through one opening and out the other at the same time.

4)You attach a manuever drive to one sphere and you pipe in fuel to that manuever drive through a pipe that leads through the openings of both metal spheres. The other metal sphere has fuel storage tanks from which the fuel is pumped.

5) You turn on the manuever drive and and one metal sphere accelerates away from the other drawing fuel through the wormhole as needed. Fuel tankers constantly refuel the fuel tanks on the other metal sphere as they are drained.

6) The metal sphere with the manuever drive approaches the speed of light and goes some distance away, slows down and returns to its original location through acceleration and deceleration until it stands next to the original metal sphere once more.

7) Now if you step through the hole in the metal sphere that stayed put, you will exit the hole in the other metal sphere some time later or in the future. If that person returns immediately, he goes back into the past. This act creates two parallel timelines: one where the time traveller returns to the present and one where he does not.

The present wormhole connects to a future wormhole in which whose timeline, the time traveller never returned in its past. The time traveller does step back through the hole in the present wormhole and if he waits the time interval separating the two spheres, he may see himself emerge from the hole in the other sphere or he may not. There is roughly a 50/50 chance of either occuring.

 

[TheDS]

Good one, Tom! You've done a much better job of explaining that than any other rendition I've read. Makes me think of a new application for wormholes: impossible ships! However, one little thing always bugs me:

Who says wormholes age? I understand the concept that, due to relativistic concerns, the hole which traveled is "younger" than the hole which didn't. What I don't get is, does a wormhole actually age, and if so, why would some one go forward/backward in time? It would probably require a knowledge of physics that would make my head spin, so I'm not going to harp on it or anything. It just doesn't seem to me that this necessarily makes it possible.

This does bring up another interesting idea, though: entangled particles. We've already heard stipulation that entangled particles could be used to communicate at FTL distances. Why not (if the wormhole example you gave is true) accelerate one particle and bring it back, after it's say a year younger, and use them to transmit information forward and back? Seems to me like it's a little easier than creating a wormhole, which as far as I know, is still just a theory.

 

[TKalbfus]

Who says wormholes age? I understand the concept that, due to relativistic concerns, the hole which traveled is "younger" than the hole which didn't. What I don't get is, does a wormhole actually age, and if so, why would some one go forward/backward in time? It would probably require a knowledge of physics that would make my head spin, so I'm not going to harp on it or anything. It just doesn't seem to me that this necessarily makes it possible.

Yes a wormhole ages, this explains the time travel. Both ends of the wormhole are of the same age, since a wormhole is one object and not two. The object is made out of gravity. When you go through the wormhole you always find that both ends of it are at the same age. If one end moves and the other does not, the end that was moved is younger than the one that did not, it could be a second older or ten years.

You go through the younger end and you go back to a time when the older end of the wormhole was at the same age.

You go through the older end, and you go forward to a time when the younger wormhole end will be the same age as the older.

One can go into the future and go into the past.

One can go into the future and see what was done in the past then go into the past and do something different that was not recorded. This creates two timelines, if one returns back through the wormhole one does not see the results of one's revised actions in the past. The past and the future ends of the wormhole are no longer casually connected. What's done outside the past end of the wormhole does not effect what occured outside the future end of the wormhole as seen from inside the wormhole. This can lead to a number of parallel timelines that resemble the past but aren't really. A traveller character can travel through a wormhole and visit Earth in the 21st century, but it won't be the OTU Earth in the 21st century. Maybe events are preceding in a similar fashion to OTU history and maybe they aren't. Traveller characters can change the outcome of world events assasinate political leaders with no effect on the timeline they left. This removes paradoxes from the picture and forces the characters to deal with the environment of the pastlike of futurelike time lines. If they visit a future timeline, they may get a hint of bad things to come and do something about it, like preventing the virus from happening in their own universe.

 

[aramis]

I've used Misjumps for some time variation effects. Nothing quite like the look on a player's face when you tell him his exit date seems to be the day before he entered jump, even tho the ship percieved 7 days of jump.

canonical sources show that Jumps are strange phenomena. MT provides for numoerous "Minor Mishaps" involving jumpspace durations not being the same as standard.

TNE took the concept a bit further, allowing for asynchronous jumpspace relativity errors.

I took it a bit further.... I have occasionally used misjumps to create time-jumps forward OR Backward. I ignored minor causality issues (Such as the sudden appearance of a 1220 Regency owned TL 16 Type T in 1106) since neither it nor the encountered ship were interacting significantly.

I made one rule about jump-derived time travel: You'll snap back on the very next jump! (Even if aboard a different vessel!)

Triggering a time jump, IMTU, requires intentionally plotting an impossible course, and then while in jump, jumping again, plot is Impossible, JumpPhysics, Edu, Fateful, Hazardous. If made, roll d6: 1: decades back, 2: years Back, 3 Weeks back, 4 weeks forward, 5: years forward, 6: decades forward. Roll dice equal to the product fo the two jump nummbers to determine number of time increments thrown. Roll a mishap with the higher jump number as the number of dice for other effects.

Then agiain, I allow intentional misjumps, too. Make a Formidable, jumpspace physics, edu to "prohibit" one direction of misjump and the resulting replacement direction. Impossible allows 2 directions.

(I had a player who was on theory 35.3 working to attain J7)

 

[jhulse]

I haven't done this yet, but when I start my campaign in the early part of 04, I will begin during the "classic age" in the spinward marches. Most of my friends have no knowledge of the Traveler Universe, so I'm starting them off the way most of us did. I've also came up with a way to incorporate the new Gateway source material I've acquired. After many fun (I hope) adventures through out and around the spinward marches, the characters will be lead eventually to the abyss. There is a secret research station orbiting a small black hole at the center of the abyss. Long range gravimetric sensors had failed to notice it's existence (I'm still working on that one, any ideas?) until only a decade ago. The characters arrive at the research station delivering goods or important scientist, or even on a spy mission... This whole thing is a scripted trap. Once I've tapped out the spinward marches, it's time to send them back to the past...
A major catastrophe at the orbital research station sends our white knuckled hero's plummeting toward the great beyond. I will let them make their way back to their ship, take off, but by the time they get to the ship, their maneuver drives cannot produce enough thrust to break the gravitational pull of the black hole. They have no choice to jump, knowing full well a miss jump will result... and what a miss jump. They will end up on the other side of the Emperium, and in the past. This is where I can start using the source material from the Gateway Domain. I'm ignoring speculative physics on how and why this could work. It's sci-fi and fun. Most people have scene Star Trek enough to understand the relation between speed, high mass, and time travel...
Any thoughts?

 

[flykiller]

Any thoughts?

1) the catastrophe is deliberate, initiated by a mad scientist who wants to rule today by reliving and reordering the past. the players become aware of this, perhaps by observing events in this past that did not happen in their original past, or perhaps by observing him in the developing time vortex, and must fight his machinations and restore the time balance before all of history is destroyed. complicating matters is the black hole time travel having created a rupture in space time that is slowly spreading out of the rift and that threatens to engulf a large area of our galaxy. the only way to repair it is to correct the time imbalance and jump back into the hole (of course). standard epic story, always good.

2) the players become aware of some distinction on or within themselves that marks them as time travellers, and they learn to look for that mark in others, finding it rarely or commonly in some who are remaking the past / visiting / hiding.

3) the player characters must evade a time-enforcement agency from the future attempting to arrest them for their unauthorized travel, imperial and solomani scientists from the present attempting to capture and interrogate them regarding time travel, and religious zealots from the past attempting to kill all time travellers and end all time travel. lots of action potential there. the past and future actors don't have to be human - how 'bout intelligent dinosaurs for the religious zealots from the past?.

4) the time transit scoops up a truly alien being from another dimension to become an NPC in the player's party - maybe something that expresses itself through computers or robots as if it were an AI. perhaps it is part of the black hole, and will have a roll in returning the players to their original time.

5) all four of the previous.

factors to consider: how much historical data in the character's computer banks survives the time transition, how technically advanced the PC's are in relation to their present time and how well they can hide or flaunt it, how they will repair technically advanced gear, medical indications that may exist in their bodies, "best-if-used-by" stamps on their food packets, etc.

 

[Whipsnade]

Gentlemen,

Bravo! Although I haven't yet read it all, this is a fascinating thread with equally fascinating ideas.

Back in my GM days, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, I ran a rather twisted(1) time travel session on different groups. Instead of sending the PCs forward or backward through time, I had them respond to an automated distress call coming from a vessel that had experienced a very odd misjump.

It seems that the vessel in question had made its jump in 'No Time'; it had taken no appreciabel time for the ship to jump between its departure and arrival systems. From the frame of reference of the arrival system, the vessel was from seven days in the future! As the first responders, the PCs had boarded a ship that held potentially lucrative and/or dangerous information; information whose utility would slowly 'decay' as the clock ticked off the next ~168 hours.

In this manner, the PCs get to wrangle with all the troubles(2) raised by time travel but all those troubles 'go away' in roughly seven days.


Sincerely,
Larsen

1 - twisted, so what else is new?

2 - troubles; i.e. adventure hooks...

 

[Andrew Boulton]

A book people might find useful.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0141005343/qid=1071670744/sr=1-3/ref=sr_1_3_3/026-5749178-7902835

 

[jhulse]

Good ideas flykiller. Only a hundred years, or is it two hundred years? - have passed since the Solomni Rim war and the time of the Gateway Domain source material. So the tech levels won't be that different, if at all. Also remember that the AVERAGE tech level is 12 throughout the Emperium. If the PC's have something slightly more advanced that the average tech level of the Solomon Rim War, it shouldn't be that big a deal.
Dates and things like that can add a real interesting twist. Working knowledge of the Gateway Domain during the Rim Wars will be vague at best. How many of us know of all the political aspects and individual states, counties, and cities of our own civil war? We all know who won, and might even recognize important names of southern and northern generals etc... But more specific knowledge would be very hard to come by. And the PC's would have to explain why they have "The complete encyclopedia of the Gateway Domain during the Rim Wars" program on board their ship.
Besides, I'm making this up as I go!
Thanks for the input!
Jaknaz

 

[pennshome723]

I have used the TIME Travel idea before and it works nicely. One thing you need to do is have the players "do things" that set things in motion that happened in the future. Thus even if they attempt to try to change the past, then end up causing "what-ever" to happen in the way that it did. Trust me you can have a great time at this, I know I did. Plus it also helps to really know your players and what they like to do within a game as well, planning is key but some times one must GM from the cuff. Pay attention to the small details and plot/plan away.

 

[pennshome723]

I was thinking about this and the "way" I got my players into a Time Travel Mode, was to cause a accident to happen. I had them being chased by either Pirates or Waht-ever, had their ships jump engine, power plant, and maneuver engines all take minor hits. All are still working but giving off some non-standard signals and etc (needs some repair and maintance). Then I force them to run to close to a sun and have to jump, with the computer not working at 100% either so it is less than perfect jump calculations. Thus it is a kinda Mis-Jump, that from the get go can be determined that something is strange/different/wrong.

So thus they end up in a different system with a bunch of mechanical failures, and damage. One but has to look at the ship to see that it has taken damage from a fight. The crew can mostly fig or rig most systems to get by to limp into the local starport, that is most likely a type "C".

Now I would have this Starport a Corporation owned one, and most of the authorities are lax to say the least, and are willing to overlook certain matters and issues for a "price". Please note I have always run my campaigns in the Verge Subsector, and have three Corps that have been fighting one another there for a long time; Pell Corp, GTE Tech. Corp, and Treckeon Corp. The Verge sub-sector has always been a backwater location and has never had a strong Imperial presence to control the peace there. It has relied on local governements and these Corps to do that...mostly over the years.

So to continue, I have the ships transponder replaced with a current one, and then the player continue on in many different adventures. I then involve them in what they would consider historic events, like causing a local War and etc. They try to stop it but in so doing so, they cause a person to die that was to die and setting the stage for events to happen they way they did.

I have always lived with the "Rule" that if one can go back in time that anything that they do there, they were meant to do and they are not changing anything. Remember with most histories, they are written from someones perspective, and that means it might not be totally correct or stated exactly as it truly happened. So the written history might not be exactly what or how something actually happened

Now this does leave you the GM with lots of room to have fun!