Musing out loud: space flight

[shadesofmauve]

Hey, space-friends!

I have a novel idea slowly, slowly percolating in my brain: I know who the main character* is but not her name. I know how the setting feels but not its details or mechanics. I know how some of the side-characters are related but not how they influence the story (because "Plot? What plot? We ain't got no 'plots' here, no sir!" is still my main story-failing).

I realized while writing A Star to Steer Her By that I want to write something sci-fi rather than fantasy because it's much, much easier for me to do believable character humor in a futuristic setting. That brings up the question of what level and kind of 'sci' goes into the 'fi'.



In that arbitrary back-brain way, my imagination is dead set on:

A) A group of space-stations/asteroid-stations/closed-planet-side-terraforming-colonies which are in close proximity to each other -- at least regularly (I.E, it may be that the orbital period of the asteroid belt is such that the nearest planet-orbiting space-station is 'close' only every one and a half years; at other times travel is next to impossible This wrinkle isn't nessecary, it's just a possibility -- they could all be moons and satelites of one gas giant, for instance).

B) All of these stations should be closer to each other than they are to earth. A kind of station-solidarity and shared spacer/colonist culture is nessecary to the fragments of character story I have so far.

C) Between 20 and 40 years ago, the colonies rebelled and lost, so they must be 1) self supporting (or they wouldn't have dared rebel) and 2) close enough to get troops to in a reasonable amount of time (otherwise you have that whole 'England is busy and can't cross the Atlantic quick enough, poof, successful revolution' thing going on).

I'm trying to build from those criteria. Of course, it's astronomic distances, and 'near' or 'far' depends on your method of travel.


Sol's asteroid belt, mars, the moons of Jupiter (or some combination thereof) could work for this, but I'd have a lot less wiggle room for my imagination and it would hasten the inevitable day when my world was jossed by reality. :P If I pick something farther away, people won't figure out how wrong I am for years!**

As I write this I keep thinking of all the ways interstellar travel could be integral to the (non-existent) plot, and one of them would work well for Sol -- namely, imagine a colony was formed by sacrifice and hard living, at what was then months or years of travel from the home planet -- and then there was a technological breakthrough that left the original hard-won colony a total backwater, while new garden planets were showered with attention. That could be pretty interesting.

If I can figure out a rough method(s) of travel I can narrow down (or open up) where it takes place and also get a better handle on when. Or, I can figure out where I want it to take place and extrapolate/develop travel tech from there.

Off the top of my head, fictional space-flight seems to fall into three rough categories. If anyone can think of more categories OR really interesting examples, I'd love to hear them! I'm in the 'collecting scraps for the creativity compost' stage, so I want as many inputs as possible.

Wormholes -- travel is near instantaneous, but only between select points. For the purpose of how they affect travel, Mass Effect's relays are constructed wormholes. Not my favorite idea, but I could work with it -- there could be interesting permutations regarding who has control of the jump point, and it would work well into the possible backwater story.

Warp Speed/Hyper Space Ridiculously fast/easy/cheap travel a la Star Trek or Star Wars is unappealing to me. The presumed speed of Mass Effect's more conventional FTL drive (roughly 100-200 x c, I think?) is reasonable for storytelling purposes, but I'm under the impression it breaks several laws of physics***, and my theoretical physics knowledge is not that good non-existent, so I don't even know where to start coming up with a plausible/entertaining bit of phlebotinum.

Perhaps "FTL and/or fractional c travel that obeys time dilation effects" should be its own category. Here's a handy page on math for sci-fi writers for help figuring that out. :P

Fancier version of conventional tech This pretty much only works if I place the colonies in the Sol system, since it generally assumes that even hitting an integer percentage of c is out of the question. For reference, it took Spirit 7 months to reach Mars.


Did I mention this will be soft-sci-fi, not focused on this stuff at all? It will, but I need to work out at least some framework or my brain will never hear the end of it.

*There will possibly be more than one PoV character because I'm enjoying writing that way, but it started with her.

**Longer, if NASA keeps getting its funding slashed!

***The other methods fly in the face of special relativity, too, but they come with built-in phlebotinum, usually involving travel in extra dimensions (warp drives and Vorkosiverse necklin rods both 'fold' space, iirc, though the latter requires a wormhole which is itself a folded-space tesseracty thing).

Comments

[tersa.livejournal.com]

I have a science background, at least some of it being physics, but those three seem to be all I can remember as examples of interstellar flight in media. (B5's jumpgates also fall into the Relay/wormhole category).

ME's use of eezo/unobtanium was kind of an ingenious explanation for what suddenly made all this possible in their universe.

[sinvraal.livejournal.com]

I still think that manipulation of mass was a stroke of genius for the ME-verse. FTL travel, flying cars and machine and human-based telekinesis in one stroke. As a central conceit for a soft sci-fi universe, it's nigh unto perfect.

[shadesofmauve]

It really is. They only had to create that one bit of space!magic/phlebotinum and everything else flowed from there, which is really brilliant worldbuilding.

I'm still a little confused about how ME ships using 'conventional' FTL get above c (they can reach c because they're massless at that point), but since that issue never even occurred to me until just now when I was trying to pick apart how different systems work, I'm totally willing to let it slide.

[sinvraal.livejournal.com]

Handwavium?

I always assumed that manipulation of mass is such that you're essentially dicking with the fundamentals of the universe to the point where you're unbalancing the normal time/space zero-sum.

[shadesofmauve]

Works for me. After you've fucked with the constants of the universe it's all just a math problem, right? And math problems are what computers are for. ;)

[sinvraal.livejournal.com]

Insert eezo, divide by zero. Success!

[shadesofmauve]

Okay, I went back and looked it up, and apparently the relevent bit of lore I'd forgotten was that when given a negative charge, eezo reduces mass even past the point where the object has negative mass.

So, yeah, pretty much dividing by zero.

[shadesofmauve]

I really love that everything came from that one bit of disbelief-suspension/space!magic/unobtanium. It really gelled the whole feel of the universe that this one 'simple' change could create all these different effects.

[fenmere.livejournal.com]

I have one more method of space travel, as proposed by Douglas Adams. It is effectively quantum manipulation. You enter the entire ship into a quantum state, expand its probability field to match the size of the universe, and then collapse the field at the right moment. As far as we're concerned, it's more of a piece of impossible magic than warp or wormholes, but it is definitely not part of one of the other categories.

[shadesofmauve]

And you power it with a cup of tea! How could I have forgotten? :P

[fenmere.livejournal.com]

Well, Adams did! But I think you could also come up with passable technobabble for this device as well. The first hurdle is powering it, of course. The second is that as of right now the only way to get a multi-atom object into a quantum state is to freeze it to near zero kelvin first....

I'm thinking that whatever method you come up with for this, it's gonna look in practice a lot like the Super Nova description below, which many of the same dangers.

[shadesofmauve]

I think that even if I came up with the technobabble, it would allow transit too easily for this particular story idea. Or rather, it would allow it to too many different places too easily. With risk, sure, but once you figure it out you could choose to end up anywhere.

Unfortunately the more I think about it the more I lean towards a Sol system setting (plus potentially a future or recent past wormhole discovery), which stinks because it means people with actually scientific knowledge can check my work and point out where I screwed up. :P

BTW, where is your fatjack stuff set? I really want to see more of that. I like the flavor of it.

[fenmere.livejournal.com]

I haven't had much time to work on it lately, and I'm stuck on a plot hole. Once I figure out the hole, I'll probably have a new gush of material.

Anyway, it's set in an interstellar society, in an ever changing network of solar systems. Even with FTL travel, relativity has made it so that any sort of overarching government doesn't work very well, but there is a corporation that has managed to hold onto the monopoly of travel and information and insert itself as a form of law enforcement for hire. Local governments call on them to get to deep space crime scenes quickly.

The Fatjacks themselves are not capable of interstellar travel, but can latch in train onto an engine that jumps from one star system to another. It's kind of a wormhole/hyperspace like technology, but I haven't decided whether it's true FTL or if going faster just makes it take even less time for the traveler while for everyone else perceives the travel time as light speed. Weird physics.

Most people communicate via radio or hyperspace mail tube. The corporation has a lock on a quantum entanglement network, accessed and controlled entirely by A.I. in order to attempt to avoid paradoxes.

[oddlittleturtle.livejournal.com]

For added flavor to the space travel: 90% of FTL equates to an added 100 hours per "real" hour in normal space.

Arcbuilders I think had the warp/relay/hyperspace going on.

Event Horizon had some kind of folded-space gravity machine.

Super Nova uses dimensional jumps that are brightly colored and dangerous if the crew is out of their life pods while in transit. They can merge matter together. Share a pod is not a good thing.

[shadesofmauve]

For added flavor to the space travel: 90% of FTL equates to an added 100 hours per "real" hour in normal space.

Do you mean time dilation? Because that'd be 90% of c rather than FTL (which is just 'faster than c' and very vague), and... lezzee... what feels like 1 hour of travel time to the traveler is 100 years to the observer. Let me know if I've got the wrong end of the stick and you meant something else.

I like the idea of adding a little extra danger with matter squashing. That's a nice trade-off. It needs something to make it less of a free-ride, y'know?

You don't have a box full of extra plots, do you?

[oddlittleturtle.livejournal.com]

Jeeze. I am smurt. I wrote that so wrong! Sorry! One hour of time to the traveller is about 100 hours to the observer at 90% of c.

I used to have a handy-dandy chart that had hours and percentages, but alas. Lost when my other computer crashed. :( That's the only one I remember because it's the only one that's easy to remember.

Unfortunately, the matter squashing and the pilot/AI computer interaction is the only good thing about Super Nova. I had such high hopes too. I'm also fond of stories that have some effect on the crew when traveling through space time, whether it be upset tummies, misaligned brain function if in transit too long from over exposure to phlebotinum, or what have you.

u cud shoot holes straight through most of them >_>;;

[shadesofmauve]

Here, have a useful link!

Heck, have two!

The first is javascript where you plug in various factors and it spits back the missing one. There's a bit on relative time dilation, and one on length, too (I forget what the shortening effect at lightspeed is called).

Thanks for the warning; I'll give Super Nova a miss, then.

[westrider.livejournal.com]

Wormholes and Fancier Conventional Tech certainly require the least screwing around with the Laws of Physics. Wormholes of some sort seem to be the method of choice for SF that's not really focused on the Space Travel as such.

If you set up a less screwy Star System, the Firefly set-up seems like it'd make a pretty good basis here: Entire system colonized, Earth either gone or far enough behind that it's irrelevant, sub-colonies rebel. Depending on how you set that up, it's doable with Fancier Conventional Tech.

Sporadically usable Wormholes could get you there without having to worry about the interstellar part, too.

[shadesofmauve]

Drat, thought I'd replied to this.

I really want to keep earth in the picture, mostly because I don't want it to be that far in the future, so there isn't time for a new parent-colony to develop all the way to industrialized power and decadence.

I'd forgotten how crazy the Firefly map is. I think the show is better that way. Their astronavigation only works if you don't think about it.

[westrider.livejournal.com]

Possible tack: Enough material was sent for one Colony to establish itself quite quickly, but the group fractured, leading first to sub-colonies (which are a couple of orders of magnitude less well equipped than the first) and then to their rebellion.

When I say Earth is far enough away that it's irrelevant, that might only need a few years of travel time, maybe not even that much. Enough for this all to play out before a message could get to Earth and Ships could make it back from Earth. Depending on the timescale you need for the story, it could even be a matter of months rather than years.

OK, I think I'm stuck on this idea for now. If you want to play with it further, I'll go along, but I'm not sure I'll be of any use for a while on other directions :P