SciFi writing: Need help with FTL travel :)

[Carina]

I've been lately working on the FTL travel concept for my comic Traces of Chaos (http://www.trarr.net/) and I'm a slightly bit stumped here. The concept seems sound to me, but we're not sure about all of it's physical implication.

Basically, the intelligent races of the current generation never evolved a hyperlight engine, like in StarWars; they were stuck with generation ships for a long, long time. That put a large damper on the building of an interstellar community - Not many races were willing to flee their star system, unless they have large problems problems.


But there had been a nasty, (most likely) universal-wide chain of catastrophes ca. 2000 years ago, lots of races died out, others were thrown back into the stone age (including humanity), others again took it as reason to figure out how to get their butts out of their star system.

Anyway, eventually got a problem with some stallites and co vanishing - it took a while till the first race figured it out:
In some areas of space, everything (including light) suddenly went much faster than usual, but only into a certain direction.
Humanity dubbed them rifts. They're basically basically like giantic three dimensional rivers; in the middle the things would go faster and at the border of it, things would go slower. Rifts bend and twist, so one has to use it's thrusters to follow the rift - No matter how someone is carried out of the rift, the deaccelleration is still smooth, but often so sudden, that the ship's crushed from the forces of the sudden deacclerration. Getting in and out of a rift is tricky.


But I currently have problems wrapping my mind around how the accellerating-deaccelerating in those rifts would work.

Most people have no idea where they came from or what they are. One of the biggest mysterities in that universe.


What I need, story-wise:

* FTL must be dangerous - people should need either a good reason to use it or a death wish. One could mark the rifts to make it safe and use electromagnetic guidiances for the ships to get them in and out - but only at high costs.
* The rifts grow, usually from solarsystem to solarsystem, but sometimes they also end in the the areas between the stars and the solarsystem.
* Ships are the fastest way to sent messages from one star to another, since the rifts bend; and light and radiowaves have problems to travel on curves on it's own.
* People fight hard about the control of the rifts - especially on those nodes, where three and more rifts entangle and build up intersections
* Rifts are still growing and changing the social structure of the galaxy
* Interstellar empires grow along the rifts, so that which race meets whom is a giantic gamble.
* Currently there are only two rifts who lead outside the galaxy, although there might grow more in the next 2000, 3000 years
* There are still alot of civilisations which have no access to FTL
* carteographing rifts is even more dangerous, but very well payed job. Robots are often used to do it, but in some areas intelligent persons have to fly - the AI's of this universe are in general shoddy.

Any input? :)

[AT]

EDIT: Missunderstood the question.
Um.... I don't know then...

[Gullible Jones]

You could assume that we live in a brane-universe adrift in 5-dimensional space... Perhaps the rules would be diferent in 5D space, sometimes dangerously so.

If you want this to be true "hard scifi", I'll try thinking of something else...

[TinFoilHat]

Here's a thought-

If the speed of light is different inside the rifts, they will be visible by the fact that light hitting them will bend as it transitions from normal space to rift space. When light passes from a medium with one speed of light to a medium with another, it bends at the interface. This is why things underwarer look distorted - light travels a different speeds in water and air.

If the speed of light inside a rift is *much* faster than outside, then light which hits the rift will tend to be reflected back out unless it hits the normal-space-to-rift interface at a nearly perpensicular angle. So the rift will appear reflective, mostly, and will have the effect of bouncing most starlight off. And the rifts will be visible by telescope, from quite some distance away, by the effet they have on starlight.

Objects inside the rift will appear shrunken and distorted to an observer outside the rift. Communication between someone insode the rift and outside the rift will be difficult, as radio waves will bend or be reflected by the rift-to-normal-space interface, and there will probably be a fierce doppler effect at the interface as well.

On the other hand, it will be easy to follow the rift, since the optical effects will show you exactly where to go.

Transitioning from rift space to normal space is likely to be dangerous, especially if your ship is travelling in the rift at a speed above the external lightspeed. Hitting the rift wall at an angle, so that part of your ship is on the border while the rest is still inside, will probably be really bad.

There are also all sorts of issues with general relativity and FTl travel. According to current theories of relativity, FTL travel is mathematically eqivalent to time travel. If you can do one, you can do the other. There is an explanation with a lot of math and some possible workarounds at http://www.physicsguy.com/ftl/index.html

[TravisM]

Maybe to enter the transition you'd need explosives of some sort, to disrupt the interface long enough to hop aboard. The ships would need sheilding. A simmilar technique could be needed to exit.

If the rifts are sufficiently large in diameter, to exit you could get near the transition, where from what I read the speed of light travels slower.
Also, if the speed of light is faster in the rifts, they could circumnavigate the time dilation effects through some twist of phyiscs...

And at the nodes, there could be 'eddies' and 'whirl-pools' that are difficult to navigate around.

[Baloo]

Transitioning from rift space to normal space is likely to be dangerous, especially if your ship is travelling in the rift at a speed above the external lightspeed.

Probably this will result in some spectacular effects, as (a kind of) Cerenkov radiation...maybe this could be so intense that could pose a serious threat to crew's life when is exiting from the rift.

Edit to add: I've said "a kind of Cerenkov effect" because this effect, as we know it, requires a medium in which a particle having a speed above light speed in this medium is slowed down and the radiation is produced as a interaction between the particle and the medium's molecules. In your case there are no molecules, but still the ship will be slowed somehow below lightspeed in normal space.

[Tacitus]

Most scifi FTL ideas stem from either the folding of space (e.g. Warp drive) or shortcuts through space (e.g. wormholes in Stargate, or hyperspace in Babylon 5). I'm not sure where your rifts come in, but I suppose they could be areas where there is some kind of weakness in the fabric of space/time that allows some effect from another dimension to leak into normal space? Maybe the attributes of the quantum foam in these places if different somehow? (All mere speculation - no hard science in any of this!)

One thing I would point out though, is that if the technology exists to "ride" these rifts then there is no need for people to risk their lives exploring them and/or marking them safe to travel. All this would be done using remote probes and automated craft, unless you can think of a really good explanation why it might not be possible.

In any case, don't get too hung up on trying to explain everything. the new Battlestar Galactica is one of the most compelling scifi shows for a long time, and they spend exactly zero time trying to explain how their FTL drives and other techno stuff works. It proves that if the characters and stories are strong enough, most people won't care if you get the technobabble right. You just have to make sure it doesn't get in the way.

[Bathcat]

How about working in the collapse of the inflationary universe?

See, one of the original models of inflation had the 'false vacuum' collapsing or condensing into 'normal vacuum' in somewhat the way steam bubbles form in a pot of boiling water. In one scenario the false vacuum collapses all at once at a whole bunch of points, and the collapse spreads outward from each point until the bubbles coalesce.

Now, what if the places where the bubbles come together -- the domain walls -- are slightly 'mismatched' so that spacetime doesn't join smoothly there?

These could be the seeds which, in an expanding universe and under ... um, fictional physics ... might grow and change shape as the universe matures.

I think they'd have to change for your purposes, because if I recall rightly the domain walls look like 'cosmic strings' from the perspective of our current physics. No dimensions of width or height, just length.

---

Alternatively, you could note that some of the normal-vacuum bubbles happen to condense out of the false vacuum with slightly different laws of physics than we see here. In the past these altered-state bubbles did not expand as fast as the rest of the universe in some directions -- they weren't isotropic -- and so they ended up very long but thin. And their physical laws are different -- the speed of light in them is not isotropic, but varies with direction, gravitation may have corresponding anisotropies, etc.

Moving matter or energy across the boundary of one of these altered-state areas could be pretty risky -- I suppose arbitrarily risky, depending on how you wanted to mess with the altered-state physical laws.

[The Supreme Canuck]

Steering when the rift twists or bends could be a problem as well. If you're going, say, 20 c left and the rift takes a sudden turn right, you'll need a lot of thrust to change directions. Otherwise you hit the normal universe and BOOM, massive deceleration.

[TravisM]

Or, just read the last few pages of "Potential threat to the Huygens Mission," throw in some altered physics that changes the amount of thrust proportional to the change in c... :D

[Enzp]

8,000,000 scifi books can't be wrong, just make something up.

The breakthrough came in 2274 when the development of the Zimmerman interface took gravtitational lensing to a microscopic scale and thus enabled the smooth transistions into and out of the rifts... Who knows what it means, and who cares. It is no less likely than the premise, and there you go, now back to the story it propels. We certainly watched several series full of Star Treks without a real explanation of how any of that worked. We got technobabble, but no real physics.

And if the plot needs it , you can always invoke superconducting coils or a field chamber no one can enter without dire consequences or whatever. Or maybe time dilation entered into it for anyone who got within the fields. Whatever the fields are. Once they got the sub-neutron rectifiers perfected, the ion induction valves were a snap. Wahoo.

You can always lie about unknown physics, you just can't lie about the physics we do know. Just don't tell us how many parsecs it took you to make the Kessel run.

[eburacum45]

Here is a link to the sort of thing Bathcat mentioned;
http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/gr/public/cs_top.html

note that textures sort of fit the bill, and are supposedly cosmologically benign (although the thinking on that may have changed...)

[vorblesnak]

Light could become an artifact of the interaction between the rifts. Stars are at swirl nodes where rifts come together or turbulance sweeps the rift and the reaction we see as atomic fusion and radiation is actually the turbulence of rifts interacting. Light is the detritus created by the energy that is the rift dropping across the barrier and matter is a further slowing of the energy into particle stage.

On this level, the only entry into the rift is through the star as that is the only place the rift can be experienced in the anomaly known as here and now. One would have to carry a bit of reality with them to make the jump. Which would mean levels of energy from the slowest, say blue light plasma on the human side to a constantly evolving level of energy on the rift side. No ship needed really. Think of an air bubble in a crystal clear stream. From our point of view the traveler would be surrounded in a field of intensifying light as they moved off of the planet. On approach to the star they would become more and more star like until the energy balanced and they disappeared into the star.

Since time / space is only outside the rift interactions, it is 'now' forever as you are swept along the rift. The laws of our time / space / now is only in the universe of stars. The realities, if any, can be what ever you want in the other places. The rift would have no reality, so no need to describe it.

The transition through the star, that would be the nasty part. If you don't synchronize the energy on the outer surface, you will be toast. On the rift side, "there ain't nothin."

[kenneth rodman]

the rifts occur due too the gravitational effect of 5 supermasive black holes that are to far apart to colapse in on each other yet so close together that the rift occurs.

[Sinanju]

Perhaps they could be "faultlines" in the fabric of reality?


* FTL must be dangerous - people should need either a good reason to use it or a death wish. One could mark the rifts to make it safe and use electromagnetic guidiances for the ships to get them in and out - but only at high costs.

Traversing a faultline would be quite dangerous, I assume.

* The rifts grow, usually from solarsystem to solarsystem, but sometimes they also end in the the areas between the stars and the solarsystem.

Just like plate techtonics....

* Ships are the fastest way to sent messages from one star to another, since the rifts bend; and light and radiowaves have problems to travel on curves on it's own.

Perhaps the kinetic energy in the "faultline" is what powers this FTL travel.

* People fight hard about the control of the rifts - especially on those nodes, where three and more rifts entangle and build up intersections

Individuals are constantly fighting for resources and the method of transporting said resources.

* Rifts are still growing and changing the social structure of the galaxy

Plate techtonics again... further more, black holes could be "sinkholes"

* Interstellar empires grow along the rifts, so that which race meets whom is a giantic gamble.

I love the smell of commerce in the morning!


* Currently there are only two rifts who lead outside the galaxy, although there might grow more in the next 2000, 3000 years

Two that have been discovered =)


* There are still alot of civilisations which have no access to FTL

Judging by your cataclysm, i would assertain that few would possess the technology needed to protect the vehicle.

* carteographing rifts is even more dangerous, but very well payed job. Robots are often used to do it, but in some areas intelligent persons have to fly - the AI's of this universe are in general shoddy.

Sounds like a great story whichever way you decide to take it... I would agree with others here, have a "simple" story and cover it with technobabble.

[dgavin]

Perhaps they could be "faultlines" in the fabric of reality?


* FTL must be dangerous - people should need either a good reason to use it or a death wish. One could mark the rifts to make it safe and use electromagnetic guidiances for the ships to get them in and out - but only at high costs.

Traversing a faultline would be quite dangerous, I assume.

* The rifts grow, usually from solarsystem to solarsystem, but sometimes they also end in the the areas between the stars and the solarsystem.

Just like plate techtonics....



Now here is an intresting twist to think about for the rifts.

Perhaps the first discovery of one was because of a rare Rift-Space/Time Quake, which could have some very adverse effects on ship or people if a ship got caught in one...

The rift-quakes occur when rifts intersect or a new rift grows out from an older one.

[Carina]

:D

You guys are great! I don't want to overexplain, it's just that I felt that the thing with the rifts wasn't very thought through, especially since they are kind of the technological backbone of the story. n.n

There are a lot of great ideas I never thought about - So you already have helped heaps. :3 *hugs all*


@TinFeulHat
I orgininally wanted the rifts to be invisible, but having them reflecting the light of the stars is a damn nice idea too. :) When it comes to the reflected/bent light, the rifts should still be hardly visible, unless near a star, ney?
If they're near a star, a strong rift reflects (and scatters, because of it's form) the light just like a planet, just better. It would still hard to be seen, I imagine. You'd had to look for it.
Outside the star system, it would just scatter/bend the light of the stars far away; otherwise being black as the (usual) background of the cosmos. I imagine a similiar effect like the ships of the shadows in Babylon 5, just not completly black, but scattered with weak, deformed "stars." You'd had a hard time looking for it.

Tacitus
Maybe theres a kind of radiation in the rift, that disturbs off most of the computers? If we declare something akin a strong magnetic field, neither quantum computers nor normal silicon based should, if also disrubts how light flows you cannot use computers based on optics too.
Some humans and other aliens who's brainfunctions are based on the much slower chemistry could cope with that, so that they fly through the rifts per manual stearing. I can imagine that an "artificial brain" could do the job, too; but simply setting trained humans into the ship is much, much cheaper (at least for humanity). ;)
Such a strange area like the inner of rift actually might make a person crazy after too long exposal. Heh, another possible plotpoint. n.n Rift-illness!

@vorblesnak
Your idea is intriguing. Especially because it seems to take care of the timetravel problem of the warpdrives - if you take parts of your reality with you, you could also take your position in time with you, so that if you exit the rift, you automatically assume your correct place in time again.
Basically the fastest that could happen would be popping out of existence in one starsystem, just to pop INTO existence 400.000 light years away.

I'd like to add the "time" one spent travelling the rift to the traveltime, though. I have to think about that, that's very interesting.

@Sinanju and dgavin
=D>
The faultlines idea is GREAT. :D The chain of catastrophes could have been akin to an earthquake in the space-time; and the faultlines are what's left from it and once weakened, new are cracking up. :3

The quaking of the rifts once in a while could be exactly because they are left overs of the big series of quakes 2000 years ago. Eventually all will settle down again, but the catalycism is just to young on a cosmic timescale.


All in all, I will rewrite the effects and the rift theories according to your input, then we'll see again. n.n

[Frog march]

How about a multidimensional quantum computer that works out the wave structure of the space ship and all it's atoms and in so doing these wave forms start to collapse where they are forcing the whole ship and its crew to move away from that position.
Due to the uncertainty principal the computer can't actually workout the wave function of the whole ship but in trying there is a partial collapse and a "rebuild" of wave function in the plotted direction. The only limit the speed of the ship is the speed of the computer. The computer, as well as using multiple dimensions could have some virtual dimensions to work in made possible by the configuration. This computer would be alive of course and very intelligent. The ship would basically be "thinking"/"feeling" itself forward and be much faster than light.

[General Zod]

Why go faster than light? Warp your genes so you never age and take your pretty time. :wink: