Higher time warp and hibernation instead of magic, unrealistic "warp drive o.O".

[Outlander4]

In other words, FTL development isn't going to wait for STL travel to develop to any given point. It can happen at any time, exactly because we don't understand half the physics involved in its workings. I'm not saying it should come early, IRL or in-game, but making the assumption that we'd have superadvanced STL drives before we have FTL drives is foolish. No offense.

((P.S.: Unrelatedly, it seems the scientific community is lately becoming its own barrier to progress. At this rate, the first person to discover FTL travel will rather flee into the stars rather than make his discovery known, for fear of being burned at the stake. >_> ))

In case FTL would require only a gentle tap to the shoulder in order to work and not energies on a wast (say, planetary) scale - yes, sure, by all means, it won't affect development of any conventional means of propulsion in any significant way. A pure speculation at this point it is

Scientists are also people and possess all set of natural human traits. It's natural for some scientists to defend classical dogmas and for others - to make outrageous claims. Fragmentation of knowledge isn't helping either - fields of research are narrowing, and people lose all connections with reality. It's not the best of worlds we are living in.

P.S. Love, absolutely love space decompression drive idea!

Edited August 20, 2013 by Outlander4

[MRab2]

FTL (as many people see it) also has a lot of potential for abuse - if it's energy-dependent you'll just hop from system to system a-la Star Trek, recharging batteries and boldly going and exploring the galaxy with just one ship, mining asteroids for fuel as you go along.

Only if Squad are stupid, and I personally think they've done a good job so far of proving they're NOT stupid.

Nuclear pulse drive would require setting up production facilities first, thus more time and more challenge.

You imagine the same requirement couldn't be built in to an FTL system? Who says it'll run on batteried?

Actually, the more we discuss stuff, the more it starts looking as if difference between FTL and STL is in the name and travel time:

No, it's about breaking the in-system game.

STL - nuclear pulse, Z-pinch, whatever - you get into position (anywhere in space, essentially), you activate the engine, advanced physics happens, and after the initial burn you wait (quite a while), and then you're near the other planetary system, where you decelerate and do stuff. Because of really long acceleration/deceleration times it might have to be scripted/pre-calculated/whatever - it'd be just pushing the button and waiting doing other stuff, unless anybody fancies sitting in front of their PC for 3 months waiting their ship to accelerate to 25% of c at 1 g.

Actually no, magic happens here as well. It's tempting to think that relativistic velocities are just a matter of engineering, but harnessing and channeling the energies needed (if using something like an anti-matter drive) means materials with magical properties i.e. ultra high temperature superconductors. Whilst I disagree with him on many things AngelLestast is right in that a beam sail is probably the most realistic sublight model. Intersteller nuclear pulse ships are colossal, starting at around 500,000 tonnes. Since this will need to be scaled down for Kerbal any representation of this within Kerbal will be magical.

Realistic constraints can be made for both of them, it's just that people like me ideologically abhor the mere idea of having such a huge hole in the body of physics.

Then here's an idea - don't build the damn thing. Hell, don't even research it. Stick to the hard physics. Accept journey times in the many decades to centuries as THAT is the most realistic option based on modern physics.

Besides, developing FTL without developing some form of advanced propulsion (say, thermonuclear) first is a bit like developing an aeroplane in order to get to the town 20 miles away because it would take you so long to walk there.

I would tend to agree, whilst moving around in space with increasing ease is ultimately the aim of a space program a ship with the thousands of km/s of dV needed to reach another system will reduce interplanetary journeys to a matter of triviality. Whereas with an FTL system the in-system game can be preserved. Yes it'll be easier than it is now - bigger, cooler ships, less fuel constraints but still more involved than "point and accelerate".

[Outlander4]

You imagine the same requirement couldn't be built in to an FTL system? Who says it'll run on batteried?

People are saying those things. Does FTL drive require a piece of Kraken to function? It's all about energy. If you disagree, please share your vision, not just tell that 'things are different'

No, it's about breaking the in-system game.

What exactly prevents me from using FTL in-system? Gravity wells? Isn't getting into the solar orbit enough to get rid of them? Again, share your vision, not just criticise, please.

Actually no, magic happens here as well. It's tempting to think that relativistic velocities are just a matter of engineering, but harnessing and channeling the energies needed (if using something like an anti-matter drive) means materials with magical properties i.e. ultra high temperature superconductors. Whilst I disagree with him on many things AngelLestast is right in that a beam sail is probably the most realistic sublight model. Intersteller nuclear pulse ships are colossal, starting at around 500,000 tonnes. Since this will need to be scaled down for Kerbal any representation of this within Kerbal will be magical.

Well, maybe, maybe not. Compared to the magic of FTL building something huge and powering it with explosions seems almost doable. And we can reasonably exaggerate pulse drive efficiency as it's done with ion engine and pretty much all engines in KSP, there is no harm in doing that.

Then here's an idea - don't build the damn thing. Hell, don't even research it. Stick to the hard physics. Accept journey times in the many decades to centuries as THAT is the most realistic option based on modern physics.

I kind of stuck with accepting it in real life. KSP is a bit more relaxed; and if I want FTL and other stuff there are other games. The theme of KSP is to go with generally valid physical principles. And I like it that way.

[Sean Mirrsen]

KSP was never about generally valid physics, especially not to the level of general relativity and quantum mechanics. It began as a game about orbital mechanics, first and foremost. When you get to quantum mechanics, adding a plausible and generally valid FTL travel system is merely a matter of adding a Minovsky Particle. Not literally, but as a trope. We know little enough of the veracity of our knowledge in the fringe physics disciplines that a single, well-defined element can be used to facilitate a lot of the things we cannot accomplish in conventional physics.

And above all else, you should remember that game design maxim. "When a choice has to be made between realism and fun, fun must prevail." And its corollary - "A huge crime against physics is better than a small crime against gameplay." Slower-than-light travel is more likely to break the game, and for more people, than faster-than-light travel. It is worth overruling known physics to keep the core game running smoothly.

[MRab2]

People are saying those things. Does FTL drive require a piece of Kraken to function? It's all about energy. If you disagree, please share your vision, not just tell that 'things are different'

My vision is simple - I want to explore and colonize dozens of start systems, not just the next one over. All you sub-lighters seem to forget about everything except the system right on Kerbol's doorstep. What about the one after that, or the one after that? When journey times start to creep into decades (as they quickly will a few systems out) it'll start to become pointless to go further. AND SLT means intersteller travel is largely pointless anyway, apart from a pure science point of view.

Now, FTL opens up two things, the possibility of ferrying stuff back from the new system and an whole new tech tree of bigger, more powerful FTL engines. My vision is an economy that ultimately runs on anti-matter. A resource that's very difficult to obtain in large quantities. I'm think huge anti-matter collectors orbiting over gas giants, but even then, the quantities harvested not being enough to fuel an increasingly space faring civilization and so the hunt for more gas giants pushes our brave Kerbals further and further out into the larger universe.

What exactly prevents me from using FTL in-system? Gravity wells?

Game balance.

Well, maybe, maybe not. Compared to the magic of FTL building something huge and powering it with explosions seems almost doable. And we can reasonably exaggerate pulse drive efficiency as it's done with ion engine and pretty much all engines in KSP, there is no harm in doing that.

“There is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable. It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will.† Albert Einstein, 1932

This was 10 years before the world's first atomic pile was built. You'd be amazed at the things we take for granted today that were considered impossible not too terribly long ago...

Here's another one.

“Space travel is bunk.† Sir Harold Spencer Jones, Astronomer Royal of the UK, 1957 (two weeks later Sputnik orbited the Earth).

Of course people think engineering is easy, generally people who don't actually do any engineering. Speaking as an engineer, funding research into FTL looks an awful lot easier than building a half million tonne nuclear pulse rocket. Just because something is theoretically possible to put together something using existing technology doesn't mean it's *actually* possible.

I kind of stuck with accepting it in real life. KSP is a bit more relaxed; and if I want FTL and other stuff there are other games. The theme of KSP is to go with generally valid physical principles. And I like it that way.

Sounds like someone wants to have their cake and eat it. Relaxed/hard physics hmmm?

[Outlander4]

Woah, a day away from PC, and such an assault

Ok, I see all the points. They make sense if there will be many star systems around or even the whole galaxy, that's true, I can't deny that.

My vision is limited to a couple of systems close to Kerbol and doing stuff mostly in kerbolar system, because I expect current planets and moons to become much more interesting as the development goes further.

We'll see. As of now I'm limited to two ion probes in solar orbit that I managed to put there despite the horrendous lag caused by using Intel graphics (my other video card burned a while ago, so I had to switch to the integrated graphics...top-of-the-line Sony laptops - you just can't kill them completely without resorting to kinetic means of destruction...). I've discovered a whole new meaning of patience, moving ships to stars will be a piece of cake for me

End of discussion, I guess.

[DJEN]

Some mod needs to lock this thread.

[Sean Mirrsen]

Last post was two days ago. Did you really need to bring it up again, when the discussion had pretty much already ended?

[-Velocity-]

Here's something I wrote up somewhere else, I'll repost it here with some modifications:

Considering that FTL would break causality (allowing time travel to be possible and allowing the universe contradict itself), FTL is impossible. Even if warp drives are possible, the universe must have some way to prevent them from going FTL, otherwise, the basis of our physical reality- causality- breaks down.

There are some relatively simple thought experiments you can perform that proves this to be the case. Imagine a flat bed train car. In the center of the car, there is a light source, a light detector, and a bomb. The light source sends out two beams of light at the same time, one towards the front of the train car, and the other towards the back of the train car. At each end of the train car is a mirror that reflects the light back towards the source/detector/bomb. As the source, detector, and bomb are in the center of the flatbed car, the two beams of light return to and strike the detector at the same time. The detector is configured so that if the return beams of light strike it a different time, the bomb detonates.

Remember that no matter your frame of reference, the speed of light is always measured to be the same. So, we put the flatbed car in motion down the train track, and set up two observers, one observer on a train that is running parallel to the flatbed car, and one observer who is standing on the ground and watching as the train flatbed car passes by.

In the first experiment, we simply fire a beam of light in both directions. Let's say that the flatbed car is moving at 10 m/s down the track on a foggy morning where it is possible to actually see the beams of light as they travel through the air. The observer on the ground sees both beams of light travelling 3x10^8 m/s relative to the landscape upon which he is standing (his inertial reference frame) of course, but relative to the flatbed car above which they are travelling, the beam of light moving in the direction of the car's motion is going 3x10^8 m/s - 10 m/s, and the beam of light going in the opposite direction of the flatbed car's motion is going 3x10^8 m/s + 10 m/s. Thus, the observer on the ground witnesses the beams of light strike the two mirrors at different times. However, on the return trip, the beams of light are now travelling the opposite directions, so the one that was going 10 m/s slower than the speed of light relative to the flatbed car is now going 10 m/s faster than the speed of light relative to the flatbed car, and vice versa. So they make up the "time lost" on the return trip, and end up striking the detector in the center of the flatbed car at the same time. Thus, the bomb does not go off.

In this experiment, the observer travelling on the train that is paralleling the flatbed car and matching its speed sees exactly what you would expect- the beams of light both move at 3x10^8 m/s relative to the flatbed car (which shares his inertial reference frame), the beams of light strike the two mirrors at the same time, and return to strike the detector at the same time, preventing the bomb blast.

So now, let's say that instead of a mirror at each end of the train flatbed car, we have replaced each of the mirrors with a light detector and an instantaneous communicator. Instead of a beam of light returning to the central detector from each end of the flatbed car, an instantaneous signal will be sent.

So, the observer on the train paralleling the flatbed car, sharing the flatbed car's inertial frame of reference, witnesses the two beams of light leave the emitter, travelling at the same speed relative to the flatbed car, strike the detectors at the same time, which sends the instantaneous signals to the central detector at the exact same time, preventing the bomb from detonating.

But now, what does the stationary observer on the ground see? As already stated, he sees the two beams of light travelling at different speeds relative to the flatbed car- the one going in the direction of the flatbed car's motion is going 10 m/s slower than the speed of light relative to the flatbed car, and the one going the opposite direction of the flatbed car's motion is going 10 m/s faster than the speed of light relative to the flatbed car. (But of course, relative to the landscape on which this observer is standing, both beams of light are going the speed of light, 3x10^8 m/s.)

So the observer on the ground sees the beam of light travelling opposite the flatbed car's motion reach the back detector/instantaneous communicator BEFORE the other beam of light arrives at the front detector/instantaneous communicator. The observer on the ground witnesses the two signals from the two instantaneous communicators arrive at different times to the central detector/bomb. The bomb EXPLODES, killing the observer on the train who just witnessed the bomb not explode. What happens when the observer on the train tries to get off the train and shake hands with the guy who just saw him get blown into tiny pieces?

How can this be possible? Easy answer: it's not. Instantaneous communication is a fantasy.

This is why it is impossible to send anything faster than the speed of light. Any such device could be used to create a scenario similar to the one I detailed above. Violations of causality do not only imply time travel, they imply that the very basis upon which our reality is built is violated. Two observers won't even be able to agree that the same events happened!

But it gets worse. The simplest example, as I give above, using instantaneous communicators, but the exact same thing would happen if they had used tiny warp drive ships operating at 2X the speed of light instead of instantaneous communicators. The chances of FTL and instantaneous communication being possible one day are about the same chance as there actually being a Santa Claus. Less chance, in fact, as flying reindeer are not expressly prohibited by the laws of physics, but FTL IS.

Simply put- warp drives travelling faster than the speed of light are a fantasy, PERIOD, and we have repeated experimental verification of this. We have, time and time again, measured and confirmed that the speed of light is always measured to be 3x10^8 meters per second no matter what your reference frame is!

It might even be that warp drives are POSSIBLE, and it's just that travelling faster than the speed of light with them is impossible. That is, in fact, what some researchers have claimed:

http://www.universetoday.com/28549/warp-drives-probably-impossible-after-all/

Basically- warp drives would be destroyed by Hawking radiation coming off the inside of the warp bubble once they reached the speed of light and tried to exceed it. So no, funding into warp drives is not necessarily wasted. I'm not sure if they are possible or not. If we could use one to go just 20% the speed of light, that would still open up the stars to colonization- they don't have to travel at FTL speeds to be useful!

And finally, I just wanted to add that the speed of light isn't really the speed of light- it's the maximum speed at which two spatially separated events/things can possibly affect each other. It's the speed of force. Electromagnetism operates at this speed, as does gravity, the strong force, and the weak force. We really should be calling it the "speed of causality", not the "speed of light". Calling it the "speed of light" defines it much more narrowly than the fundamental limit that it really represents, and helps to contribute to the misguided thinking that it could ever be broken.

[DJEN]

Here's something I wrote up somewhere else, I'll repost it here with some modifications:

Considering that FTL would break causality (allowing time travel to be possible and allowing the universe contradict itself), FTL is impossible. Even if warp drives are possible, the universe must have some way to prevent them from going FTL, otherwise, the basis of our physical reality- causality- breaks down.

(LBB I say. LBB.)

There are some relatively simple thought experiments you can perform that proves this to be the case. Imagine a flat bed train car. In the center of the car, there is a light source, a light detector, and a bomb. The light source sends out two beams of light at the same time, one towards the front of the train car, and the other towards the back of the train car. At each end of the train car is a mirror that reflects the light back towards the source/detector/bomb. As the source, detector, and bomb are in the center of the flatbed car, the two beams of light return to and strike the detector at the same time. The detector is configured so that if the return beams of light strike it a different time, the bomb detonates.

Remember that no matter your frame of reference, the speed of light is always measured to be the same. So, we put the flatbed car in motion down the train track, and set up two observers, one observer on a train that is running parallel to the flatbed car, and one observer who is standing on the ground and watching as the train flatbed car passes by.

In the first experiment, we simply fire a beam of light in both directions. Let's say that the flatbed car is moving at 10 m/s down the track on a foggy morning where it is possible to actually see the beams of light as they travel through the air. The observer on the ground sees both beams of light travelling 3x10^8 m/s relative to the landscape upon which he is standing (his inertial reference frame) of course, but relative to the flatbed car above which they are travelling, the beam of light moving in the direction of the car's motion is going 3x10^8 m/s - 10 m/s, and the beam of light going in the opposite direction of the flatbed car's motion is going 3x10^8 m/s + 10 m/s. Thus, the observer on the ground witnesses the beams of light strike the two mirrors at different times. However, on the return trip, the beams of light are now travelling the opposite directions, so the one that was going 10 m/s slower than the speed of light relative to the flatbed car is now going 10 m/s faster than the speed of light relative to the flatbed car, and vice versa. So they make up the "time lost" on the return trip, and end up striking the detector in the center of the flatbed car at the same time. Thus, the bomb does not go off.

In this experiment, the observer travelling on the train that is paralleling the flatbed car and matching its speed sees exactly what you would expect- the beams of light both move at 3x10^8 m/s relative to the flatbed car (which shares his inertial reference frame), the beams of light strike the two mirrors at the same time, and return to strike the detector at the same time, preventing the bomb blast.

So now, let's say that instead of a mirror at each end of the train flatbed car, we have replaced each of the mirrors with a light detector and an instantaneous communicator. Instead of a beam of light returning to the central detector from each end of the flatbed car, an instantaneous signal will be sent.

So, the observer on the train paralleling the flatbed car, sharing the flatbed car's inertial frame of reference, witnesses the two beams of light leave the emitter, travelling at the same speed relative to the flatbed car, strike the detectors at the same time, which sends the instantaneous signals to the central detector at the exact same time, preventing the bomb from detonating.

But now, what does the stationary observer on the ground see? As already stated, he sees the two beams of light travelling at different speeds relative to the flatbed car- the one going in the direction of the flatbed car's motion is going 10 m/s slower than the speed of light relative to the flatbed car, and the one going the opposite direction of the flatbed car's motion is going 10 m/s faster than the speed of light relative to the flatbed car. (But of course, relative to the landscape on which this observer is standing, both beams of light are going the speed of light, 3x10^8 m/s.)

So the observer on the ground sees the beam of light travelling opposite the flatbed car's motion reach the back detector/instantaneous communicator BEFORE the other beam of light arrives at the front detector/instantaneous communicator. The observer on the ground witnesses the two signals from the two instantaneous communicators arrive at different times to the central detector/bomb. The bomb EXPLODES, killing the observer on the train who just witnessed the bomb not explode. What happens when the observer on the train tries to get off the train and shake hands with the guy who just saw him get blown into tiny pieces?

How can this be possible? Easy answer: it's not. Instantaneous communication is a fantasy.

This is why it is impossible to send anything faster than the speed of light. Any such device could be used to create a scenario similar to the one I detailed above. Violations of causality do not only imply time travel, they imply that the very basis upon which our reality is built is violated. Two observers won't even be able to agree that the same events happened!

But it gets worse. The simplest example, as I give above, using instantaneous communicators, but the exact same thing would happen if they had used tiny warp drive ships operating at 2X the speed of light instead of instantaneous communicators. The chances of FTL and instantaneous communication being possible one day are about the same chance as there actually being a Santa Claus. Less chance, in fact, as flying reindeer are not expressly prohibited by the laws of physics, but FTL IS.

Simply put- warp drives travelling faster than the speed of light are a fantasy, PERIOD, and we have repeated experimental verification of this. We have, time and time again, measured and confirmed that the speed of light is always measured to be 3x10^8 meters per second no matter what your reference frame is!

(Indeed.)

It might even be that warp drives are POSSIBLE, and it's just that travelling faster than the speed of light with them is impossible. That is, in fact, what some researchers have claimed:

http://www.universetoday.com/28549/warp-drives-probably-impossible-after-all/

Basically- warp drives would be destroyed by Hawking radiation coming off the inside of the warp bubble once they reached the speed of light and tried to exceed it. So no, funding into warp drives is not necessarily wasted. I'm not sure if they are possible or not. If we could use one to go just 20% the speed of light, that would still open up the stars to colonization- they don't have to travel at FTL speeds to be useful!

(No.)

And finally, I just wanted to add that the speed of light isn't really the speed of light- it's the maximum speed at which two spatially separated events/things can possibly affect each other. It's the speed of force. Electromagnetism operates at this speed, as does gravity, the strong force, and the weak force. We really should be calling it the "speed of causality", not the "speed of light". Calling it the "speed of light" defines it much more narrowly than the fundamental limit that it really represents, and helps to contribute to the misguided thinking that it could ever be broken.

(Thank you for all the information.)

Huh, so it wasn't the speed of light after all. Being the speed that our reality unfolds, I guess I should call LBB as CBB since it's more accurate.

Anyways, casualty-barrier-bypassing drives are our only hope for a interstellar empire.

[Sean Mirrsen]

Your example is flawed. The observer on the ground is not the one determining whether or not the bomb explodes. The world does not change due to changing the point of perception - only the view of the world does. So the observer on the ground merely sees the bomb somehow not explode despite beams of light apparently hitting the detector at different times. His mighty nanosecond-timed observation skills do not make him the cause of an explosion - he is simply not in position to cause it.

Even if he were, you have merely a classic case of light lag compensation - or lack thereof.

I personally find the problems people have with violating causality hilarious. Even putting aside the notion that quantum entanglement is a thing that sort of exists (you can never tell with those quantum things), there are no problems that I see with perceived violation of causality. Like many things relativistic, it just takes a particular point of view.

Just because you can't describe it in math, does not mean it does not happen. The universe can be more complex than any math can hope to be - just ask the people trying to solve the n-body problem.

Edited August 24, 2013 by Sean Mirrsen

[Outlander4]

I actually would agree with Sean Mirrsen that examples of 'causality violation' are somehow not convincing at all. I've never managed to become convinced that FTL equals time travel. Surely, violating timing at which events can trigger each other will make this universe a very strange place; things will happen or not happen seemingly without a cause, maybe that's what 'causality violation' is all about? Considering how disturbingly little sense this world makes, FTL must be already widely in use

However, current theories are quite good at explaining stuff, so if c is said to be a limit at which events can propagate from the place of their origin I would rather agree with that unless there is sufficient body of evidence that there are ways around it.

It's a wonder we are not having a flame war here; pro-FTL and anti-FTL sentiments are strong in this community

[Morrigi]

Your example is also flawed due to the fact that with an Alcubierre drive, the spacecraft does not move and thus the limits of relativity do not apply. A bubble, for lack of a better term, of space-time moves around it which drags the spacecraft along by way of artificial fluctuations in the fabric of the universe itself.

The major things required are antimatter and negative energy, which means that the quantum physicists need to get busy. That said, they may be one and the same. Experiments are being conducted at CERN to find out how antimatter is affected by gravity, and it might be the opposite of normal matter. That much is entirely untested.

That said, NASA is looking into it, and looking back at our history it may be quite possible. The discovery of radioactivity and the creation of the first nuclear weapon were less than fifty years apart. There were many who said that heavier-than-air flying machines would never work. That automobiles would never catch on.

[AngelLestat]

OMG, this topic is still going XD

This only means that we are all interested in interstellar missions. (dev team: check)

Haha, poor Velocity, he mentioned only one rule that gets in the way of FTL and all the followers contradict him with .... (well without any specific source).

I get it!! if FTL is not possible, then it means that there is not chance to explore the galaxy in a modest time frame, or just chat with aliens, or get into war with them (that is where all the fun is it dont you?) or visit your grandma who lives in the lupus constelation.

Damm! she really makes good cookies

The fact is, we have some limits and we dont know if we can break them yet. So lets embrace them and use them to have an entertaining and challenge game.

For example, if we would not have the gravity law, then the game it would be boring as hell.

However if we have Relativist Law, then we can compete with other players to see who gets closer to the speed of light, and experience the relativistic effect to those speeds. We cant experience that with FTL.

Using real concepts that not breaks any existence physics rule, maybe with some bonus help like the that already has ION engines it will be all that we need.

But when many of you said that FTL is a possible technology and even some dare to say that it can arrive before beamed sails or other propulsion technologies. Do you really stopped to think what you are asking for?

no? well lets make a list of requirements:

2 eggs, 1 milk, 1 cup of flour, opss sorry.. wrong list.

1- Relativity or Causality laws has to be wrong.

2- Thermodynamic, concervacion of energy has to be wrong.

3- Hawking radiation has to be wrong.

4- We need dark matter, and we dont know if exist or what it is, we dont know if we can get it or if it has the right properties that we need.

5- Hawking Chronology protection conjecture suggestion has to be wrong, Alcubierre metrics has sense only using a general relativity formules in the frame ruled by quamtum mechinics, so if we will have a merge theory this will not be allowed.

6- A way to send signals to the front of the bubble to control it. Tricky dont you?

7- Many times the energy saw in the universe training the exotic matter to an extremely thin band of 10^{−32} meters just to transport a small ship. This is not even practical impossible, this is physically impossible.

8- Other kinds of requirements that are not so important like listed above.

Well, lets think that we have all the ingredients, now we can start to built it!

mmm.. that is another problem, where are the schematics plans??

What materials we use and what properties they need to have for the different parts of the ship?

We need to make millons of tiny black holes of exotic matter and place them next to each other preventing it from joining in perfect position.

I can go on with the problems, but I think you already understood some of the drawbacks.

So.. now lets check the beamed sail requirements:

1- We need materials very light and with good temperature resistance to improve our velocities. (We got them!, we can make this materials in small scale already in laboratories)

2- We need very good aim to brake using beamed sail or to reach speeds more than 0,5c (this is a technical problem that we dont reach yet, but is not a physics problem, there is not law that prohibit this. Also we can solve the brake problem using mag sails in destination.)

That is it!

One other thing: Using a solar sail with those materials passing near the sun we can achieve 6 % to 12% the speed of light with only a solar sail (payload a probe). Not beam, not accuracy problem, not collector, nothing. And we can brake in the destination star using the same technique.

I will take the opportunity to answer some post that I left hanging.:

Outlander4

Space is not an ocean. You can bring your orbit down and thus get closer to the Sun; it is not the same as cancelling your orbital velocity entirely and just hanging somewhere motionless.

I guess you dont have idea what poetry is XD

You can cancelling all your orbital velocity and hanging somewhere motionless.

http://wiki.solarsails.info/index.php/Tacking_Solar_Sails

I want to do this in KSP with the solar sail mod to show you, but that mod do not work anymore in the 0.21 version.

Of course you need a computer to manage that to the perfection.

Kegereneku

I'm done answering to you AngelLestat, you keep ignoring valid point, you want 6years travel with 0.6C beamed-sail which somehow doesn't apply to interplanetary travel and require 99.999% efficient technology making antimatter-drive look easy. So either you put ridiculous amount of low-efficient laser-sat "for the challenge" (talk about boring) or you increase the travel time to at least 50 years for a lousy probe.

The website I linked you to "Projectrho" is a better reference than wikipedia for fictional story/game building so you may want to read it entirely, it will teach you that FTL can be easier to balance than magic-sail, and why your beam-sail project amount to magic inside a game which is rocketpunk to start with.

In my first reply I told you that you was the kind of people that no matter what evidence or logic we use, you will keep your ideas untouchables.

You ask me about a lot of things and I answer you, you dint accept any of those. Like avatar montains.

About projectrho I already told you, FTL for that guy is a JOKE, so even the pages that you show me are against you. And is all about rockets, so I dont know why you mention sails..

And that page is not updated with the last proyects or concepts.

About beamed sails, even if you get very low trusth for unit of power. Is still more efficient that any other technology, because you always push the payload, you dont need any extra weight to push. Imagine KSP only the capsule, then you dont need engine to push it, so less weight, no fuel, nothing. And if you add a delta V of 0,5c then you will see that beamed sail is infinite more efficient that other propulsion systems.

Edited August 24, 2013 by AngelLestat

[Sean Mirrsen]

Correction: known FTL methods require that. As I said before, FTL - and I mean the concept of instantaneous FTL here, solely - is a highly unconventional principle. Using negative energy and whatnot is just brute-forcing your way through it. The universe may be working in ways we do not understand - therefore those requirements may not be needed.

And as clarification, I believe there is nothing wrong with Newtonian FTL. The whole thing with relativity is that it's a little like an absentminded Ouroboros. You hear everywhere about how it is impossible to move faster than light, and everybody forgets to mention from whose perspective it is impossible - the snake is forgetting to eat its own tail. True, propelling an object so that it appears to move faster than light to a stationary observer may as well be impossible. But from the ship's perspective, problems like the universe turning into a massive laser notwithstanding, accelerating past lightspeed is nothing special. The crew will see space warp and distort, it will probably cease seeing a whole lot as it goes past lightspeed, and it is quite likely to be absolutely annihilated by interstellar particulates and even something as trivial as radiant heat and ambient light, but this will be an effect of the lightspeed barrier, not anything specific to relativity.

[-Velocity-]

Your example is flawed. The observer on the ground is not the one determining whether or not the bomb explodes. The world does not change due to changing the point of perception - only the view of the world does. So the observer on the ground merely sees the bomb somehow not explode despite beams of light apparently hitting the detector at different times. His mighty nanosecond-timed observation skills do not make him the cause of an explosion - he is simply not in position to cause it.

So the observer on the ground sees different events happen then? Instead of the bomb exploding, he sees, like, the trigger malfunction? Ok. So set up another experiment where a third person dies if the trigger is perceived to malfunction on the bomb. The observer on the ground then sees the third person die, while the observer on the train sees the third person survive.

Can you truly not see how this is exactly the same problem? Two observers see two different things taking place.

I personally find the problems people have with violating causality hilarious. Even putting aside the notion that quantum entanglement is a thing that sort of exists (you can never tell with those quantum things), there are no problems that I see with perceived violation of causality. Like many things relativistic, it just takes a particular point of view.

You should get a job as a physics professor somewhere. Tell all those super geniuses like Hawking and Weinburg why they are so sadly misinformed about the importance that the universe remain consistent and causal. Laugh in their face since they are so ignorant compared to you.

Just because you can't describe it in math, does not mean it does not happen. The universe can be more complex than any math can hope to be - just ask the people trying to solve the n-body problem.

You're talking about n-body gravitational interactions? Your example here is not even correct. n-body gravitational interactions are fully describable in math. It's just that they are CHAOTIC, and so highly sensitive to perturbations that we cannot predict planetary motion to high accuracy in the distant future. But n-body gravity is deterministic and fully described by mathematics that we understand.

[-Velocity-]

Your example is also flawed due to the fact that with an Alcubierre drive, the spacecraft does not move and thus the limits of relativity do not apply. A bubble, for lack of a better term, of space-time moves around it which drags the spacecraft along by way of artificial fluctuations in the fabric of the universe itself.

No. You missed the point of my thought experiment. My example concerns FTL communication. The spacecraft in the middle of a warp bubble does not accelerate, that is true. This means that the FTL warp drive spacecraft does not face the traditional barrier to FTL travel- that it takes infinite energy to accelerate up to the speed of light. HOWEVER, the FTL warp drive still represents a FTL communication method, regardless of the fact that the spacecraft does not accelerate. The warp drive ship gets from point A to point B faster than a beam of light, and the inhabitants of a warp drive ship can communicate information about point A to the people at point B faster than a beam of light can. Thus, it violates causality.

[wasmic]

Why are you arguing about these things?

An alcubierre drive might not be realistic, but from a gameplay perspective, I'd go for it anyway. I believe that it would make for a more funny experience than just a high timewarp.

[Sean Mirrsen]

So the observer on the ground sees different events happen then? Instead of the bomb exploding, he sees, like, the trigger malfunction? Ok. So set up another experiment where a third person dies if the trigger is perceived to malfunction on the bomb. The observer on the ground then sees the third person die, while the observer on the train sees the third person survive.

Can you truly not see how this is exactly the same problem? Two observers see two different things taking place.

I take it you've never played online games. Especially from halfway across the globe from the server. Your pathetic "light lag" and causality violations have nothing on the kind of stuff that you can see happen on poorly managed net code with a two-second latency.

To elaborate further, where exactly is the third person, and who determines whether or not he survives? If the one who makes the decision is in the "ground" reference frame, he will see the trigger malfunction and will kill the person. The person on the train will return later with logs showing that the trigger did not malfunction, and the ground person will probably be tried for negligence and spend the rest of his days trying to wash away the guilt with gallons of alcohol.

If the one who makes the decision is on the train, then the third person will not be killed.

If both persons need to make a conclusive decision, then, assuming a form of instantaneous communication between them exists, their opinions will clash - presumably with the opinion of the train person taking priority, as the trigger is in his reference frame, and he is right there and can tell if the bloody thing it malfunctioning or not.

You should get a job as a physics professor somewhere. Tell all those super geniuses like Hawking and Weinburg why they are so sadly misinformed about the importance that the universe remain consistent and causal. Laugh in their face since they are so ignorant compared to you.

I don't need a job as a physics professor. I don't need a degree. I don't need a label telling others that I can think.

Other people are quite likely far greater than me. More skilled, more experienced, having more knowledge. But you can't just experience light lag, not truly. We're too far away from making actual experiments with spaceships traveling at significant fractions of c. Until that point, the best one can do is use their imagination, substantiated by logic. There are more uses for the brain than memorizing and running equations. I tend to use my laptop for that crap.

[-Velocity-]

...

Yes, pretty much my thoughts exactly.

But getting off the topic of the impossibility of FTL for a second, and actually talking about KSP the game, what I like about realistic interstellar technology, such as beamed power propulsion or massive fusion/fission powered spacecraft, is that it requires a substantial amount of work to set up. For the beamed power propulsion method, you would need to construct the maser/laser facility in space, and probably some massive mirrors maybe 1000 km across to keep it focused on a distant spacecraft. That would be a fun, long-term project. Also, a big fusion or fission-powered spacecraft capable of going like 0.1c or maybe 0.2c would probably weigh many thousands of tons and need orbital assembly. Maybe it could require asteroid/Mun/Jool mining to get cheap helium 3 for the fusion pulse engines. It's just a much more serious, time-consuming, and realistic challenge than cheating with FTL, and would keep us occupied for a much longer time- in other words, it's better gameplay, as it gives players a long term, ultimate goal to shoot for. Instantly zipping around the procedurally generated galaxy visiting procedurally generated world after world would quickly get boring when there would be no aliens, no monuments, nothing really. You could set up a few colonies, then what? With realistic interstellar travel, it would be a monumental challenge to build your first colony, and that would probably be enough to keep you occupied for a year or more.

The biggest issue with beamed-power propulsion, like a laser pushed light sail, is that your sail needs to be HUGE to be realistic- like 50, 100 km across. Currently we face the 2 km size limit on ships, IIRC. You also need giant focusing lenses/mirrors, maybe even on the scale of 1000 km across. And of course, maybe something like a gigawatt of laser energy. Such things are not necessarily impossible to create, if you manufacture vast amounts of very thin and strong reflective material in space (which you could use for both the sails and the mirrors), and have giant solar arrays to collect the power for the laser(s). Again, you would need a massive and well-funded space program to do such a thing, giving players a long-term goal that would keep them coming back to KSP for months. When you achieve the ultimate goal and send your first interstellar probe, you will enter the leagues of the elite few KSP players who managed to reach the stars. Now THAT would be awesome!

Edited August 26, 2013 by |Velocity|

[Sean Mirrsen]

I would honestly prefer a more varied, explorable universe, instead of a work-intensive 3D repeat of Civilization with grinding tech and materials for the "ultimate project".

Because there needs to still be a goal beyond that. An interstellar probe in and of itself would be an achievement in timewasting. A bragging rights reward, because there is only so many ways you can build and send one, especially if you cling to known physics. Civilization at least had different starting conditions and opponents in your way.

And you still have not provided a causality violation case that I could not handily deconstruct.

[-Velocity-]

I would honestly prefer a more varied, explorable universe, instead of a work-intensive 3D repeat of Civilization with grinding tech and materials for the "ultimate project".

Because there needs to still be a goal beyond that. An interstellar probe in and of itself would be an achievement in timewasting. A bragging rights reward, because there is only so many ways you can build and send one, especially if you cling to known physics. Civilization at least had different starting conditions and opponents in your way.

Sorry about my clinging to known proven physics. I'm not ready to abandon those concepts that have been proven to be true time and time again

But you're right- I'm not saying that an interstellar probe mission be the ULTIMATE goal- there should be something after that. Interstellar colonies, of course. But FTL cheats just make it so damned easy to do, and are so fake, that colonies would be very easy, that they remove the whole fun factor IMO. You'd just be left exploring an endlessly varied universe, but one in which no planet really had anything of great interest- no life, no civilizations, just some random range of planetary orbits and masses. That would get real boring, REAL FAST. (Like planet scanning in Mass Effect 2, only, with not even a textual description of each planet... lots of fun, huh?) FTL also seems to go against the realistic theme of KSP too.

How about a game mechanic to automate aspects of building, launching, and guiding ships? If you are able to build something in orbit, then maybe allow some kind of way for it to be built again without having to go through all the dozens of launches, but with the same amount of resources it took to build the first, original version? I don't really know how the mechanic would work, I haven't given it much thought, but I have been thinking that KSP needs some automation of SOMETHING to remove some of the legwork. A real space program manager does not have to fly every single spaceship through every single maneuver, does not need to dock and build every single thing himself. For one, I would like to be able to plan a maneuver and have the game execute it FOR me. Maybe as much as tell an AI core or my Kerbal crew to do a Hohman transfer orbit to some planet followed by an aerocapture and circulization burn and have it all be done FOR me so that, at the same time, I can concentrate on building the latest and greatest ship I have designed in orbit. Some pop-up will occur when my crew has finished their task, and the quality of the maneuver will be affected by the amount of training the Kerbals have.

And you still have not provided a causality violation case that I could not handily deconstruct.

LOL and you don't even try. What, tell me, is your supposed deconstruction? That the observers go into two separate universes?! The MWI of quantum mechanics is the only theory we have where universes branch- and that requires a quantum phenomenon- not a macro-scale system like a bomb and detector.

Look, you can "deconstruct" any theory with some whacky, dreamed-up explanation (infinitesimally small angels create gravitational force by pulling particles towards concentrations of mass, invisible pink unicorns all running in one direction are what makes the Earth spin, etc., etc.) but real science requires evidence, testing, and the application of logic. Please tell me what YOUR ideas are based upon. My example is based upon Special Relativity, and has over 100 years of experimental evidence behind it. It seems to me that what yours is based on is just how you would *like* the universe to work.

Honestly, I am glad that FTL travel is apparently impossible. I don't believe we are the first intelligent inhabitants of this galaxy, and if it was easy to get from star to star, then it seems quite likely that some race would have colonized this planet in the 1 billion years that Earth has been an optimal environment for oxygen breathers. (Any colonization attempt would have probably caused a strange discontinuity in the fossil record and possibly left two different systems of life- but all Earth life uses the same basic pattern, DNA bases, protein chirality, etc. The only strange jump in the fossil record is the Cambrian explosion, and from the fossils we have of that evolutionary event, it looks like it was started with very simple multicellular organisms, which rapidly evolved to fill up all the ocean ecological niches- it looks like a natural event caused by the revolutionary introduction of the first multicellular life. So it does not look like any intelligent race has ever come to this planet and seriously attempted colonization.)

[-Velocity-]

I would honestly prefer a more varied, explorable universe, instead of a work-intensive 3D repeat of Civilization with grinding tech and materials for the "ultimate project".

Because there needs to still be a goal beyond that. An interstellar probe in and of itself would be an achievement in timewasting. A bragging rights reward, because there is only so many ways you can build and send one, especially if you cling to known physics. Civilization at least had different starting conditions and opponents in your way.

And you still have not provided a causality violation case that I could not handily deconstruct.

Also, let's do a different experimental setup. Same setup actually, but we replace the bomb with a balloon, and hide the balloon under a box. If the instantaneous signals return at the same time, then the balloon is not popped. Otherwise, if the signals arrive out of time with each other, the balloon is popped. Neither the observer on the ground nor the observer on the train actually watch the experiment either, as they are both too busy wasting time posting on the KSP forums.

Anyway, so immediately after the experiment is performed, the guy on the train pulls the emergency brake. He gets off, and joins up with the guy on the ground. They do not know the state of the balloon, whether it was popped or not. Walking hand-in-hand, they walk up to the box where the balloon was hidden, and lift it up. What determines whether the balloon was popped or not? What selects whether the reference frame of the moving train was the correct one, or the reference frame of the guy on the ground was the correct one?

Your "explanation" requires that there is a preferred frame of reference in the universe, or some mechanism exists to select a preferred reference frame. That goes against 100 years of scientific theory. The basis of Relativity is that there no preferred frame of reference. Relativity, and in particular, this concept of it, that all frames of reference are equally valid, is considered to be a fact by all modern, respected and peer-reviewed physicists. By saying you "laugh" at this concept, you are saying you laugh at some of the greatest intellectual giants of the 20th and 21st centuries. Really?

[Sean Mirrsen]

The problem is that in order to make a decision, there needs to be a preferred frame of reference. A decision can not be reached without one, but even without a conclusive decision the outcome is still definite, especially with a binary problem - in the existing case, if the system uses FTL communication to poll all existing observers and is unable to come to a conclusion, the balloon will remain unpopped. If the system takes a decision to pop the balloon as more important than to not pop it - i.e. if there is no system, and it just accepts the first kill signal it receives - then the balloon will pop, as at least one observer will see the system fail.

Observers don't go into different universes. Everyone observes the outcome of the decision made. To some, it is correct. To others, it is in error. This is the basis of the term "point of view". The "preferred" frame of reference is relative to the event in question.

There may as well be no preferred frame of reference for the universe as a whole, I'm not in a position to argue that, as I can't know. But if I see a perfectly valid and logical explanation where our world's mathemagicians are hell-bent to have our universe twist itself into a swiss-cheese pretzel whenever something travels at near-lightspeed, I can't help but point out every hole I see.

[Guest Brody_Peffley]

That is the problem, when you speak about FTL, you are speaking about magic drive, there is not other way to see it.

Maybe 500 years into the future, with a new know physsics, we can said.. yes.. can be possible, but it will take 10000 years more to do it.

Uhm I hope you know that NASA is currently developing new technology for warp drives using negative energy which there trying to make.