Speed in Espace...
Ben Wilson
subluminally. I have an answer.
The MMORPG Astro Empires has already provided me with some idea of
ship classes. Those are in the book. But, I lacked a way of
calculating speed that made sense. This is important as I'm writing a
novel. Again, Astro Empires, with some help from my imagination, has
yielded a speed system.
In AE, units (ships) have speed without specific units. For example, I
have a Cruiser that travels at 7.6 per hour. Absent a unit of measure,
I call them "paces." Stars (and astros, or planets, moons, etc.) are
so many paces apart, with galaxies being from 200 to 5400 paces. So,
to travel from one galaxy to another would take, say, from 26 hours to
29 days. I've already borrowed that concept for Soup travel. This
concept works for intersteller travel via Soup if you accept each
system is between 200 to 5400 "paces" via the soup.
But, I lacked subluminal. I now have the answer...
The 7.6 is a percentage speed of light. Light speed is 300,000 km/sec.
A percent of that is 3,000 km/sec. So, the cruiser above has a maximum
speed of 7.6 percent light speed (%C), or 22,800km/sec. By comparison,
Voyager travels at 16km/sec. One AU is 150,000,000 km (I'm rounding
up), or 50 light seconds. The same distance at %C is 50,000 light
seconds, 834 light minutes, or 13.89 light hours (let's call it 14
hours due to significant digits).
Assuming the Cruiser accelerates/decelerates, the average speed would
be half that, or 3.8%C. This Cruiser could cover 1 AU in 3.68 hours
from a dead stop to a dead stop. Mars is (on average) 42,500%C away,
or 3 hours away by the Cruiser.
My scout ship moves up to 22.8%C, which is one hour from Earth to Mars.
Now we just have to adjust this for technology... I'll try to put a
write up together.
--
Ben Wilson
"We cannot determine the character or nature of a system within
itself. Efforts to do so will only generate confusion and disorder."
Boyd
Aaron Clausen
a small amount of interstellar travel between the Core Worlds. This
would suggest that at least some worlds were capable of building ships
that moved at a healthy fraction of C. I'm thinking these would
probably be sleeper ships, and the star systems in question must have
been very close (maybe no more than five or six lightyears).
This also suggests that these systems had very healthy in-system
transport, as even reaching the outer limits of their systems would
maybe take a few weeks or months. This could suggest why they became
dominant after the rediscovery of FTL.
Aaron Clausen
Aaron Clausen
mightym...@gmail.com
Ben Wilson
understood this because the Core worlds were relatively close, so the
impact of Hop pollution was not as severe as others. As you'll see
below, I've finally thought of a way to describe interstellar
distances and speeds, which I gloss over below.[Travel]
I've started to think of the distances from an MMORPG I'm playing
right now, AstroEmpires. I'm using some of this in the novel I'm
slowing drafting that's set in the Imperium. In AE, distances are just
numbers, with no units. I've used the unit "paces," which allows a
certain arbitrariness to remain. In AE, a unit (ship) has a speed
(from 1 to 12), and covers that many paces per hour. (Technology
research in game increases this base speed). I've a set of units for
the Imperium that includes speeds---loosely based on AE units.[Units]
Different eras could have different speeds by using the tech scale as
a multiplier. So, Superb is 4x faster than Fair.
I've taken to thinking of the distances between most systems as a set
of near (< 100), medium (100-800), long (1800-3000) and distant
(3000-5400) distances. A unit traveling through the soup would move at
its speed per hour, as in AE. So, a Cruiser (speed 4) traveling 2000
paces would take 500 hours between systems. (That's 20.84 days). Worse
case would be a Behemoth (speed 1) going 5400 paces: 225 days. As a
given system has routes to other systems, each system should list its
routes and distances; both by class (near, medium, long, distant) and
the actual number (which I opine should not have more than two
non-zero numbers to make life easier). The same Behemoth with Superb
tech would cover that distance in 56.25 days. A Scout's speed is 10
(40 with Superb tech). Maximum (5400) distance would take 22.5 days,
or 5.625 days at Superb tech. Of course, from a game perspective, the
actual speed could be modified by a roll.
I opine that the Core Worlds were a set of worlds that were only
Nearly apart (<100). Travel was severely limited to minimize more Hop
pollution. Perhaps this is a set of 4-6 systems at most.
I'm also reading Jack Campbell's Lost Fleet series. He describes the
same network system, which seems common in Military Sci Fi. His use of
%C seeded my decision to use the Soup speeds as %C in non-Soup travel.
Distances are reasonable at those speeds (~3%C being an average speed,
or 4 hours per AU). He requires proximity to a gravity body for
entering hyperspace, where we require distance. He seems to cap speed
at around 20%C outside hyperspace. He just refers to weeks of travel
in hyperspace.
I'm wondering if system-wide Lagrange points might not be a better way
of locating jump points, though that limits the ability to smuggle.
Our system lends itself to porous entry into a system. His is
predictable, with fixed points.
[Travel]: http://espacesociety.org/NaturalSciences/SpaceTravel
[Units]: http://espacesociety.org/SpaceTravel/ShipTypes
Aaron Clausen
>
> There was slight intersteller travel in the Core worlds. I always
> understood this because the Core worlds were relatively close, so the
> impact of Hop pollution was not as severe as others. As you'll see
> below, I've finally thought of a way to describe interstellar
> distances and speeds, which I gloss over below.[Travel]
I think my chief objection to that would be the Dio En Machino, whose
discovery ushered in a new age of interstellar travel. If there were
still hop drives in use, then that discovery would hardly have been
all that monumental.
--
Aaron Clausen
mightym...@gmail.com
Ben Wilson
Core Worlds does refer to slowboating to retain communication. So, to
fit what we wrote, then Scout ships (10%C) would fit the bill. Looks
like time dilation at 10%C is only 1 day per year.
Aaron Clausen
>
> So, then, the Core Worlds couldn't be accessible via FTL. Imperial
> Core Worlds does refer to slowboating to retain communication. So, to
> fit what we wrote, then Scout ships (10%C) would fit the bill. Looks
> like time dilation at 10%C is only 1 day per year.
This does mean, of course, that the Core Worlds are, very much, a 3+1
dimensional entity, rather than the bizarreness of the Soup geometry.
The other thought I had was that while there would be slowboats, for
them, it might mean many decades in transit, radio transmission are
not so limited. I rather envision that as the Hop traffic faltered
and finally died out, that systems that were reasonably close to each
other (say within a 20 or 30 lightyear sphere) could, in fact,
maintain some degree of communication (for instance, between Earth and
Alpha Centauri would only be a 3.5 year lag on communications, enough
to certainly keep abreast of reasonably recent events).
This could explain one of the major principles of the First Decline,
that much of the information known about other worlds was sketchy,
inaccurate and often almost mythical or legendary in nature (ie.
http://espacesociety.org/Macropedia/Kazam-Re). If the story you got
about what happened on a world 50 lightyears away took 150 years to
get to you and had been filtered through half a dozen worlds during
that time, what you got probably wasn't going to be the story that
started out.
For the slowboats, I'm assuming two major impetuses; trade and
emigration. I'm thinking slowboats used for trade would be massive,
and pretty much owner-operated, because it's difficult to see any
company investing in something that might take a century to turn a
profit. The ships would have to be massive, because to underwrite the
cost of such a venture you would have to be selling a lot of goods.
Emigration would be another. As we can see from the colonization of
the New World, you had a combination of those hoping to strike it rich
and those seeking freedom from the governments they lived under. If I
were a slowboat captain, I'd be underwriting the vast amounts of money
to build ships and stock them with trade goods by selling, say, 25% of
the space of the ship's freight capacity to would-be Ponce de Leons
and Puritans.
It's too bad in a way that we opted to keep our hands off the
Declines. Sometimes, I think, the most interesting things happened
then.
--
Aaron Clausen
mightym...@gmail.com