FTL inertial drift and translocation for scifi space propulsion

[Spacescifi]

Some form of translocation (moving space past your spaceship without accelerating it) is a useful tool for scifi.

Yet I read one work where the warp/translocatio/hyperderive followed a ballistic course. And you would only drop out of warp once you were nearby another star.

That means you would have to already have your momentum heading for the place you want to end up. Otherwise you would end flying at warp forever until your vessel runs out of power and is stuck in interstellar space.

Inertia drift would matter for a ballistic course, depending on how efficient and how much thrust sublight engines provide, and how fast FTL is. One LY per hour is good, but dealing with hours of inertial drift after dropping out of warp is either solved with high thrust/high efficiency sublight engines OR using the translocation drive to get much closer to the planet of choice without acceleration.

I thought it was an interesting concept as it brought back the danger of spaceflight in a setting that was very much space opera.

I nearly adapted it for my own work, setting mass lock distances (where ship can drop out of hyperdrive) at whatever the raduis of the destination celestial body times light seconds max or less.

So for our sun, you could drop out of warp about 4 light seconds away, which would still make it uncomfortably bright. From there it would take 15 min to spool up the drive to warp again, and then you could do a drop near earth. Since earth's diameter is much less than a light second, you could drop in one earth radius away.

Yet I didnt use it since I wanted to justify scifi ship designs where acceleration pulls you back toward the wall.

For that I needed ships that would NOT have to use constant acceleration to reach their destination. It is only a matter of 15 min between every jump. Weightlessness is not so bad for such a short time period. Thrust only really would be needed for space rendezvous or landing on planets.

Otherwise, you really should have decks on a ship like an office building if you have to rely on constant acceleration to get close enough to your destination to try landing.

 

 

Edited May 15, 2019 by Spacescifi

[Bill Phil]

This is partially why Battletech has such a good jump system.

You can technically jump anywhere in space but gravity causes issues. Since stars and their planetary systems are the only real targets of interest for an expanding FTL civilization they’re the only destinations. However there’s a minimum safe jump distance, not just from stars and planets but from other jump drives as well. However, a jump takes days if not over a week to charge, and you can’t jump to a planet’s sphere of influence. So the best thing to do is use “dropships” to travel from “jump points” to the planets and vice versa, usually at 1g.

Also welcome to the forums.

Edited May 15, 2019 by Bill Phil

[Nuke]

2 hours ago, Bill Phil said:

This is partially why Battletech has such a good jump system.

You can technically jump anywhere in space but gravity causes issues. Since stars and their planetary systems are the only real targets of interest for an expanding FTL civilization they’re the only destinations. However there’s a minimum safe jump distance, not just from stars and planets but from other jump drives as well. However, a jump takes days if not over a week to charge, and you can’t jump to a planet’s sphere of influence. So the best thing to do is use “dropships” to travel from “jump points” to the planets and vice versa, usually at 1g.

Also welcome to the forums.

up to 5 g for combat drops. i like their space stuff, but realism kinda drops off the second mechboots hit the ground. also nobody really knows how the jumpships work and they are somewhat irreplaceable. so instead of space battles  you get mech battles. the zenith and nadir points are were jumpships usually go. not in orbit just hovering above the solar pole at about a distance of 1 au, and you need to provide thrust to avoid falling in. its kind of an unorthodox way to do things. of course they have torch ships so all is good.  

dune is another great example of one thing a lot of scifi glosses over. if you go ftl you are flying blind. and it really helps if you have a mutated navigator doped up on spice that can see the future (at least far enough in advance to avoid collisions). though in some of the kja/bh books the navigators can make some incredibly accurate jumps. like into drydock, on ix, underground, with no room for error. in the pre-navigator days it wasn't uncommon to slam into a star or enter a black hole because you couldn't account for everything you might encounter, death rates were like 1 in 10 for each space fold. 

Edited May 16, 2019 by Nuke

[Bill Phil]

2 hours ago, Nuke said:

up to 5 g for combat drops. i like their space stuff, but realism kinda drops off the second mechboots hit the ground. also nobody really knows how the jumpships work and they are somewhat irreplaceable. so instead of space battles  you get mech battles. the zenith and nadir points are were jumpships usually go. not in orbit just hovering above the solar pole at about a distance of 1 au, and you need to provide thrust to avoid falling in. its kind of an unorthodox way to do things. of course they have torch ships so all is good.  

Well, mechs are cool, so yeah.

What's interesting is that the setting actually accounts for other vehicles (fighters, tanks, and so on) and in the actual tabletop they can be very effective and have low cost compared to the mechs. The videogames make the mechs seem way too overpowered though.

Well in the current setting (3150s or thereabouts) there are people who know how the jump drives work, but making them is indeed difficult - another factor to consider in a fiction setting: how difficult it is to get your hands on a starship. 

There are space warships in the setting, but of course they're immensely expensive so only certain factions can afford them. 

But in the original setting it was designed so that the jumpships were essentially irreplaceable, which affects the combat in the setting (jumpships essentially being off limits for most combat until the setting advanced).

2 hours ago, Nuke said:

dune is another great example of one thing a lot of scifi glosses over. if you go ftl you are flying blind. and it really helps if you have a mutated navigator doped up on spice that can see the future (at least far enough in advance to avoid collisions). though in some of the kja/bh books the navigators can make some incredibly accurate jumps. like into drydock, on ix, underground, with no room for error. in the pre-navigator days it wasn't uncommon to slam into a star or enter a black hole because you couldn't account for everything you might encounter, death rates were like 1 in 10 for each space fold. 

I only read the first Dune, but that was interesting. If I recall there was also a monopoly on the shipping since the only source of Spice was... well, Dune.

[Nuke]

1 hour ago, Bill Phil said:

Well, mechs are cool, so yeah.

What's interesting is that the setting actually accounts for other vehicles (fighters, tanks, and so on) and in the actual tabletop they can be very effective and have low cost compared to the mechs. The videogames make the mechs seem way too overpowered though.

Well in the current setting (3150s or thereabouts) there are people who know how the jump drives work, but making them is indeed difficult - another factor to consider in a fiction setting: how difficult it is to get your hands on a starship. 

There are space warships in the setting, but of course they're immensely expensive so only certain factions can afford them. 

But in the original setting it was designed so that the jumpships were essentially irreplaceable, which affects the combat in the setting (jumpships essentially being off limits for most combat until the setting advanced).

I only read the first Dune, but that was interesting. If I recall there was also a monopoly on the shipping since the only source of Spice was... well, Dune.

mechwarrior living legends makes a lot of the other vehicles kind of powerful. unfortunately nobody plays it. there are a few who still work on it.  mwo, my other game, has developers that don't seem to want to develop and are just farming cash at this point. give squad $15 bucks and you get unlimited dev and free dlcs, give piranha $300 and you get more mech shaped skins. mw5 looks like its going to be the same stuff over and over, vehicles are just there for you to trample or swat down. living legends got almost everything right though, damn those demolishers. as for the books im only a few books in and there are over a hundred or so, im reading it in chronological order.

as for dune the first is all you need. the next 2 are kind of meh, then the final 3 are good. the kja/bh books are all pulp. monopoly on shipping was held by the spacing guild, they kept their navigators a closely guarded secret (contrary to the '80s movie). but they themselves were dependant on the spice. the holtzman drives they use are pretty common knowledge but without a navigator they are very unreliable. you can also use a computer but those are illegal in the duniverse. 

Edited May 16, 2019 by Nuke

[Bill Phil]

19 minutes ago, Nuke said:

as for dune the first is all you need. the next 2 are kind of meh, then the final 3 are good. the kja/bh books are all pulp. monopoly on shipping was held by the spacing guild, they kept their navigators a closely guarded secret (contrary to the '80s movie). but they themselves were dependant on the spice. the holtzman drives they use are pretty common knowledge but without a navigator they are very unreliable. you can also use a computer but those are illegal in the duniverse. 

Considering how much emphasis was put on the Spice I always wondered how the humans even found it. Since it is thousands of years in the future I thought they may have used slower than light drives. But if it just made the drives more reliable that would make sense. 

[KSK]

55 minutes ago, Nuke said:

mechwarrior living legends makes a lot of the other vehicles kind of powerful. unfortunately nobody plays it. there are a few who still work on it.  mwo, my other game, has developers that don't seem to want to develop and are just farming cash at this point. give squad $15 bucks and you get unlimited dev and free dlcs, give piranha $300 and you get more mech shaped skins. mw5 looks like its going to be the same stuff over and over, vehicles are just there for you to trample or swat down. living legends got almost everything right though, damn those demolishers. as for the books im only a few books in and there are over a hundred or so, im reading it in chronological order.

If you get tired of the official books, Battletech seems to be a setting that attracts decent fanfic writers too, which is nice. 

The vehicles were pretty nasty in Battletech (the recent turn-based strategy offering). You can't buy them and if even if you did you'd probably still want to go with Mechs but taking a Demolisher or SRM Carrier to the face can go very badly.