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So I've been quiet for a while, slowly brewing an idea for a Pathfinder game in space. One thing I haven't been able to settle on is whether I want superluminal (Faster-Than-Light) travel or wormhole travel. Both would definitely change the setting in various ways between each other. So I had some questions regarding the two. Admittedly they are kind of more involved than my usual questions, so I do apologize.
1. Which technology would be discovered first; FTL drive or wormhole drive? Or would you see them as parallel technologies that do the same thing but in different ways?
2. How would varying advancements in FTL travel look like and progress? Kind of like how we've come from the Wright Brother's plane to jets, how would FTL advance? Same question, but with wormhole technology.
3. What are some things that would inhibit FTL travel? Same question with Wormholes.
4. Would wormhole technology obsolete FTL travel? Or could the two coexist?
Thanks for any answers.
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I would see wormholes being like highways. They are static. They need to be built and maintained. You can only go where there is "road".
Superluminal is more like off roading. You can go where you want.
My views are probably clouded from SG1. I like how they handled it.
I would guess that it might be a toss up on which is developed first, assuming both are possible within the setting. I would wager that which ever is discovered first would be the only one that would be used assuming it continued to work. Once you have a technology that is able to work, there is little reason to explore alternatives and research and money would be diverted to the working method.
For creatures/dangers that would exist in these forms of travel, I might point you to movies like Event Horizon and From Beyond.
I would lean in favor of wormholes, since D&D/Pathfinder already has something similar developed with Dimension Door/Teleport, Plane Shift, Gate, etc. (with Astral Projection being sort of its own oddball thing that is neither wormhole-like nor FTL-like). Note that if the wormholes are actually portals to some plane of distorted distance like Hyperspace in Babylon 5 (Astral Plane in Pathfinderjammer?), you actually get FTL travel and wormholes that go hand-in-hand.
I can imagine some awesome scenes of Chelaxian Hellbringer battlecruisers loaded with hellfire (nuclear) missiles going up against Kyonese(?) Stinger destroyers. I tend to imagine them as Babylon 5 style ships, complete with rotating sections, at least for the Infernal Armada (they COULD use some derivative of Reverse Gravity, but they hate having the gravity go out when they enter an Antimagic Field or take a hit from a Ray of Neutralization). The opponents of the Infernal Armada fight valiantly, but in the end they simply cannot stop the relentless machine of war and tyranny. As the last opposing ships are ground into debris, the Infernal Armada battlecruisers fire up their Astral Portal engines and proceed into Astral Space. After a short journey there, we see what their opponents were making a last stand to prevent them from reaching, for once again they fire up their Astral Portal engines, and swoop back into normal Dark Tapestry space. On the bridge of the command battlecruiser, we hear Grand Admiral Moff Thrune announce "Our destination lies before us. Soon, all the stars will fall to the shackles of Hell. All will be ours." In the main viewscreen, we see . . . Earth.
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There is a lots of possibility here:
Warp: The ship travels in a normal reality in a bubble of warped space. Because of the space warp the ship's move against background space does not exceed light speed. At the moment it might be the most probable form of FTL. Allows going anywhere, but there might be some arbitrary limitations (massive gravity fields interferes with the bubble restricting effective speeds inside planetary systems).
Example: Star Trek, Space Master, EVE Online
Related technology would be warp accelerator: a stationary superstructure that allows warping along a specific path.
Example: EVE Online.
Hyperspace Drive: The ship's drive shunts the vehicle into a parallel dimension where it can move much faster in relation to normal space. Primary difference between warp and hyperspace drive is the fact that the later takes the ship outside of normal space. While there is no interaction with N-Space, it might allow for a completely new set of encounters in H-space.
Example: Star Wars, Babylon 5
Related to hyperspace drive is Hyperspace Gate: A superstructure that allows accessing hyperspace by ships lacking their own hyperspace drive.
Example: Babylon 5
Jump Drive: The ship vanishes from normal space and reappears in another point either immediately or after some time. It mighthave restrictions such as limited range, time needed to initiate, complete, or recharge after jump. In Traveller it involves creation of pocket dimension.
Examples: Star Drive, Traveller
Wormhole: A naturally occurring phenomena that can be harnessed for travelling between various fixed or slowly changing points.
Example: EVE Online, Forever War (maybe, I don't recall much information about collapsars
Gate: An artificially created wormhole. Note that a ship with drive that creates an artificial wormhole would classify as jump drive.
Example: Fading Suns, EVE Online (thought they actually might be instant speed warp accelerators mentioned above instead of artificial wormholes)
Jump Drive: The ship vanishes from normal space and reappears in another point either immediately or after some time. It might have restrictions such as limited range, time needed to initiate, complete, or recharge after jump. In Traveller it involves creation of pocket dimension.
Examples: Star Drive, Traveller
Macross (Robotech in the US) uses a technology called Fold Technology, which is effectively a branch or subdivision of this.
In typical Jump technologies, the theory is that you are effectively Teleporting - disappearing in one point of Spacetime and then immediately (to you) reappearing in another point in Spacetime.
Theoretically, how much time will have passed to viewers OUTSIDE your container will be relative to the distance traveled - so, to us, teleporting a photon 10 yards is "instantaneous"; and yet, we don't know what the effects are once you get passed a certain distance.
It could be that a Jump DOES allow for travel at effectively Superliminal speeds (meaning you are getting there faster than light in a roundabout way), but itself has very specific limitations, and thus might still create a "lag"... after all, it might be instantaneous to you, but if you Jump in 2015 and get to the other side of the Galaxy in 3015 by earth terms, it's still not nearly as useful as you'd want, right?
---
Anyway, back to Macross/Robotech
What Macross'/Robotech's "Fold" Technology does is to effectively combine Jump and Warp technologies together, with a sprinkling of Hyperspace technology along the way.
Folds, like Jumps, take you from Point A to Point M, without having you travel across Points B-L.
However, like Warpdrives, the amount of time that passes both within AND without the vessel is directly relative to the coordinates in Spacetime one travels (and it's a one-way journey - you can't use Folds to go back in time).
Therefore, short Folds, like from the Earth to Neptune (as demonstrated in the very-first Fold in the series) is instantaneous to those inside the vessel (in this case, the SDF-1 Macross), whereas a few hours/days have passed to those on Earth. Meanwhile, long folds, like those when Hikaru, Misa, and the others were captured, resulted in several hours passing for everyone inside the Zentraedi ship, while several WEEKS to MONTHS had passed for those still on the Macross.
Effectively, the way the technology works is to not so much "Jump" outside of Spacetime as it is to create a rather noticeable Subdimensional (or, technically, SUPERdimensional) "Bubble" encapsulating the Folding vessel, on the very, very surface of the Timey-Wimey Ball that is our Universe's Spacetime Continuum, and then effectively surf the current until you've reached your chosen destination and the vessel dives back into the whole of the universe-proper - the trade-off being that time will have passed both for you within the vessel and for everyone still stuck the universe itself during that whole process (and you can't fight against the forward-flowing current, either).
In short, Fold technology allows for HYPERliminal speeds, but still suffers rather greatly from the Urashima Effect. Within the series itself (explored a bit more in the Robotech franchise than in Macross, and especially the Jack McKinney novels), this can lead to people being biologically 60 years old but 300 physically, and great-great grandparents being biologically YOUNGER than their great-great grandchildren.
You also say that plants and wotnot in earth's/golarion's outer space is closer than in reality. That would mean that a suitable vessel could stock enough food and water to fly to another planet.
You could go the Mass Effect way but with magic. Use levitation stones as your base. Certain magical energies make their field lighter, certain ones make them heavier(or less mass more mass technically). Then you could develop both short range 'slow' ftl(travel between nearby planetary systems within a few days/weeks span) and 'fast' ftl conduits (Mass Relays) that create corridors of such low mass that ships can travel quickly across the span of the galaxy. Of course, control of said conduits can make or break an empire.
Dragonstar setting for 3rd edition (I don't remember at the moment if it was 3.0 or if it was updated to 3.5) had a setting that combined relatively hard SF with D&D fantasy - FTL was solved by imbuing the ship with teleport spell for example, and androids and computers used recycled souls instead of (or maybe in addition to) AI.
Dot so I can respond from my comp and not phone.
In my own non-physicist reasoning I don't think Teleportation will ever be good for sentient things to use. I'm speaking specifically about reality. In a fantasy setting where magic is real, you can literally talk to gods, resurrecting/reanimating the dead is possible, the soul is quantifiable, etc this may not be the case. "It's magic" is a neat bridge for various gaps in the reasoning. So my line of thought is based in reality and if you want to take any/some/none of it for your setting feel free.
Assuming it's possible to break down a person (for example) at the sub-atomic level and put them back together in the exact same order you've destroyed one creature and reconstituted another. This leaves a lot of unanswered questions. Is it really the same person? If the soul/Spark of life (or whatever you want to call it) is real then does it follow to the new body or do you get a new one? I could go on, but you get the idea. I do however think that it would be great to move non-sentient matter around as needed. Perhaps even using it to break down matter for storage and redistribution purposes. There would be theoretically zero wasted space in storage containers and you could make a lot more things. Like having a kitchen full of every base ingredient known to man (or fraction therof). You could theoretically cook any dish if you put the ingredients in the right order. Basically a replicator from Star Trek, but moving on.
In my non-physicist mind Space folding and wormholes are probably both easier and more reliable. You don't move a person so much as the space around them. The person stays in tact and yet the end result is that they're somewhere else.
There's already a non-scifi concept for FTL and it's closer to space folding/wormholes than teleportation. It's all theoretical of course, but people far smarter than me (and I suspect anyone reading this) think this is the "easiest" way to accomplish FTL travel. Assuming the technology was perfected you could use this for short distance "teleports" as well, such as from one side of the planet to the other. It might be a gateway or more likely based on the NASA explanation it'd be a device of some kind. Perhaps a souped up "car" or just a platform you stand on.
Frankly, I'd be more comfortable with the space folding than being torn into little pieces and put back together.
I came up with a FTL technology that I felt was interesting. Instead of just traveling through space, you also modify the speed at which you're traveling through time. So for example, relative to earth, in normal speeds (sublight) you travel at 1 sec/sec (I know this changes as you go faster, but bear with me). Then at ftl you're traveling at 10 sec/sec relative to earth. so by the time you've traveled through 10 second at whatever sublight speed, you've effectively gone FTL.
If I'm going 188,000 miles per sec, for ten seconds, that 1,880,000 miles in one second earth time. So from earth you went faster than light, but in your terms you remained sublight.
Kinda like a warp field, but with time instead of space. A danger with this technology is getting the time speed correct. If you modify it incorrectly, you may travel through time farther than you intended (Maybe go .01 sec/sec which effectively transports you to the future). Interesting work for a saboteur. Gravity fields could affect this because of relativity, and have to be planned for in the equations.
I came up with a FTL technology that I felt was interesting. Instead of just traveling through space, you also modify the speed at which you're traveling through time. So for example, relative to earth, in normal speeds (sublight) you travel at 1 sec/sec (I know this changes as you go faster, but bear with me). Then at ftl you're traveling at 10 sec/sec relative to earth. so by the time you've traveled through 10 second at whatever sublight speed, you've effectively gone FTL.
If I'm going 188,000 miles per sec, for ten seconds, that 1,880,000 miles in one second earth time. So from earth you went faster than light, but in your terms you remained sublight.
Kinda like a warp field, but with time instead of space. A danger with this technology is getting the time speed correct. If you modify it incorrectly, you may travel through time farther than you intended (Maybe go .01 sec/sec which effectively transports you to the future). Interesting work for a saboteur. Gravity fields could affect this because of relativity, and have to be planned for in the equations.
Interesting thought. Time travel would effectively accomplish FTL travel. You simply launch the ship and put the crew into hypersleep. Then once you reach your destination you jump back in time to the moment you left.
Practically speaking it's probably easier to build a wormhole generator, but the idea opens up a lot of potential for cool story lines.
Edit: You could have immortals (through whatever method) drive the thing and act as caretaker for the million year journey. Lots of time to read I suppose.
I came up with a FTL technology that I felt was interesting. Instead of just traveling through space, you also modify the speed at which you're traveling through time. So for example, relative to earth, in normal speeds (sublight) you travel at 1 sec/sec (I know this changes as you go faster, but bear with me). Then at ftl you're traveling at 10 sec/sec relative to earth. so by the time you've traveled through 10 second at whatever sublight speed, you've effectively gone FTL.
If I'm going 188,000 miles per sec, for ten seconds, that 1,880,000 miles in one second earth time. So from earth you went faster than light, but in your terms you remained sublight.
Kinda like a warp field, but with time instead of space. A danger with this technology is getting the time speed correct. If you modify it incorrectly, you may travel through time farther than you intended (Maybe go .01 sec/sec which effectively transports you to the future). Interesting work for a saboteur. Gravity fields could affect this because of relativity, and have to be planned for in the equations.
Interesting thought. Time travel would effectively accomplish FTL travel. You simply launch the ship and put the crew into hypersleep. Then once you reach your destination you jump back in time to the moment you left.
Practically speaking it's probably easier to build a wormhole generator, but the idea opens up a lot of potential for cool story lines.
Edit: You could have immortals (through whatever method) drive the thing and act as caretaker for the million year journey. Lots of time to read I suppose.
You could have the ship go to a destination sub light. Then travel back in time and start the colony. The trick is that the colony builds the time travel machine in orbit so when they arrive they can use it to go back and start the colony. But what happens if you arrive and there's no colony or time portal.....
Thanks for all of the responses. Mostly, I kept the type of superluminal and wormhole modes of travel vague just to see the wide amount of responses for them.
With the setting, I would like both in, in varying degrees. Various empires will have developed different technologies, so I was curious how their relationship would be to each other.
I figured the classic jump drive would be almost a combination of ftl tech and wormhole tech, limited mostly by huge energy concerns. But I may avoid the jump drive because I do want to focus more on travelling and exploration.
I do know that I don't want to do "hyperspace" though I am alright with the idea of wormholes being non-instantaneous "space highways". And I do like the idea someone gave me on another forum of something similar to the Mass Effect relays, where they are essentially space "catapults". Orbital machines that launch ships at superluminal speeds towards a destination, with relays along the journey to speed and slow down ships. How does that sound?
Also, what are some obstacles to ftl and wormhole travel in science fiction? And what are some ways to bring a ship out of ftl speed or a wormhole? I'd imagine people would have the ability to hijack ships at that speed for military or pirating purposes.
Thanks again for the responses!
With the setting, I would like both in, in varying degrees. Various empires will have developed different technologies, so I was curious how their relationship would be to each other.
Warp drive would be slower than gate/wormhole but would have the advantage of being the most versatile - you can go everywhere where there is no physical restrictions. Gates have to be build (and might require exotic matter, or just enormous investment of time and resources) and naturally occurring wormholes need to, well, occur at right places.
I figured the classic jump drive would be almost a combination of ftl tech and wormhole tech, limited mostly by huge energy concerns. But I may avoid the jump drive because I do want to focus more on travelling and exploration.
Jump tech might be restricted by a) navigation beacons; b) navigation data (for example - you can't jump to a place you haven't previously measured with jump scanner - meaning you can jump back to place that you already visited and scanned properly, or for which you have scan results but not a place that is unfamiliar to you).
I do know that I don't want to do "hyperspace" though I am alright with the idea of wormholes being non-instantaneous "space highways". And I do like the idea someone gave me on another forum of something similar to the Mass Effect relays, where they are essentially space "catapults". Orbital machines that launch ships at superluminal speeds towards a destination, with relays along the journey to speed and slow down ships. How does that sound?
Warp accelerators I mentioned in my first post act that way - except they don't have end points - the warp field just dissipates hen you reach destination point of particular accelerator.
Also, what are some obstacles to ftl and wormhole travel in science fiction? And what are some ways to bring a ship out of ftl speed or a wormhole? I'd imagine people would have the ability to hijack ships at that speed for military or pirating purposes.
Traditional obstacle is gravity fields for warp (and hyperspace drives). Other could be artificially created warp inhibitor field (a basic tool of any PvPer and lots of PvE enemies in EVE Online), long time needed to either initiate or recharge drive after warp travel, inability to make corrections to the course enforcing coming out of warp to adjust the course (which would make specific warp routes within and around systems possible, with points where ships drop out of warp to adjust course being obvious hunting grounds for pirates - which would mean that in space controlled by some sort of authority military/police patrols would also keep an eye on them).
Wormhole travel probably shouldn't be possible to interrupt, especially with instantaneous and near instantaneous wormholes, but they could be disrupted, temporarily or permanently closed/collapsed. A specific wormhole restriction could be need for a very specific speed or angle of entering, under the threat of a) no travel; b) destruction; c) traveling completely elsewhere than intended.
Gates could require specific codes to activate (Fading Suns) or have a physical shutter covering the business part (Star Gate).
I know Mindjammer has time dilation for its travel setting, but not much beyond that.
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*sigh* I had a long post ready, then it appears that the Paizo website went crazy for a short while and my post was one of the casualties. :(
Short version:
Note: both magic and technology co-exist in my homebrew version of PF/Golarion, although some star systems/parts of galaxies are effectively dead magic zones. Due to the risk of entering a dead-magic Sargasso, there are no open-decked sailing ships in space.
Hyperspace (taken from Babylon 5) is called the Phlogiston by some, and it is literally a transitive plane. It can be entered by either jump-gate or a capital ship's jump-drive. The vessel/jump-gate must be beyond the system's warp limit (taken from Star Trek). Travel is not instantaneous. The same amount of time elapses for travellers in hyperspace as it would in normal space, it's just that the hyperspace travellers get to their destinations faster than they would in normal space.
Gravity fields interfere with local hyperspace. Pirates moving big asteroids into hyperspace "corridors", Interdictor-type vessels, and black holes can force ships out of hyperspace (taken from Star Wars).
Shortcuts exist within hyperspace. Often called corridors/tunnels/wormholes, they allow for an even faster transit time between two specific points. Some are apparently natural phenomena, others are temporary creations of even more advanced technology.
Vessels normally need jump-gates/jump-drives to exit hyperspace (or else get trapped there unless they can find another exit), and they need accurate navigational databases and/or depend on hyperspace beacons/buoys/relays (or risk getting lost in hyperspace).
Communications and sensors are FTL for the sake of GM sanity, but can be interfered with (ion storms, cloaking devices, etc.), sabotaged, etc.
In-system (within the warp limit) travel is achieved via sub-light engines (taken from Star Trek).
Magic items/spells can replace all the technological equipment mentioned, but the afore-mentioned risk of dead-magic zones tends to put technology at the fore-front of space travel.
Deep space (between star systems) is dangerous. Pirates ... and far worse. Mythos/Far Realms creatures often lurk there (they are from a very different - and hostile - dimension), as does the Dominion of the Black and other dangerous forces (e.g., the Brood [X-Men version of Aliens]). All of which is why everyone sane travels by hyperspace.
I do like the ideas you guys have here. FTL communication like an ansible is something I'm thinking about not including mostly to involve that feeling of isolation when the players are out exploring. Although I wonder if it would be easier to send communication at ftl sites than a ship... mostly for verisimilitude sake. At the very least there can be communications through wormholes I'd imagine, right?
The Philadelphia Experiment is a good example of what can go wrong with early experimentation. The movie makes it into a wormhole. A few sailors may have been embedded in walls and the whole thing was covered up. Any further experiments are hidden away in places like area 51.
The things falling out of the sky in Charles Forts books can better be explained by experiments in the far future. Someone tried to send fish from one pod to the other. Instead, all the fish kept falling on an unsuspecting town, all at once.
A good example of using existing wormholes is Sliders. The handheld device takes 24 hours to locate and expand an existing micro wormhole between realities.
One idea I'm playing with is our near future has found a crude form of time travel. They can only send machines into the past. So they send androids into an otherwise normal Glorion, looking to harvest magic that they can use to travel to Mars and Alpha Centauri.
Another idea is you send space probes to where you think there was once life to they can find the technology they used to flee to the stars.
So I've been quiet for a while, slowly brewing an idea for a Pathfinder game in space. One thing I haven't been able to settle on is whether I want superluminal (Faster-Than-Light) travel or wormhole travel. Both would definitely change the setting in various ways between each other. So I had some questions regarding the two. Admittedly they are kind of more involved than my usual questions, so I do apologize.
1. Which technology would be discovered first; FTL drive or wormhole drive? Or would you see them as parallel technologies that do the same thing but in different ways?
2. How would varying advancements in FTL travel look like and progress? Kind of like how we've come from the Wright Brother's plane to jets, how would FTL advance? Same question, but with wormhole technology.
3. What are some things that would inhibit FTL travel? Same question with Wormholes.
4. Would wormhole technology obsolete FTL travel? Or could the two coexist?
Thanks for any answers.
Another idea you might want to look is the difference between Jump Drive Vs. Warp Drive.
With a jump drive you put in a heading and a distance, and with the required power you poof. It means less travel time, but longer distances would require some recharging where they would be open to attacks.now if you go Light speed, you can have things ambush them in FTL travel.
now that being said, I really like the way Babylon 5 did it, where they have gates for smaller ships to access FTL travel, but if a ship was big enough it was able to punch through itself.
That would make it easier to keep your players under control until they got a hold on the setting and how the game was played.
but that's just my $0.02
Jump drive has limited distances. Infinite Improbability drive on the other hand...
The space fold on Event horizon looked instantaneous...but the ship had been gone for a while. Was that travel time? Was it in "hell" that long?
I'd think that FTL that occurred within physics governed space would suffer time related effects. Anything that does not (hyperdrive, warp, etc) would not or maybe for the sake of story telling should not.
Captain: "Why are all of these colonies we've been sent to aid gone?"
Science Officer: "Probably because it took hundreds of years real time to get here, while it was only hours for us."
Captain: "Whats the point then?!?!"
Just food for thought.
The space fold on Event horizon looked instantaneous...but the ship had been gone for a while. Was that travel time? Was it in "hell" that long?
I'd think that FTL that occurred within physics governed space would suffer time related effects. Anything that does not (hyperdrive, warp, etc) would not or maybe for the sake of story telling should not.Captain: "Why are all of these colonies we've been sent to aid gone?"
Science Officer: "Probably because it took hundreds of years real time to get here, while it was only hours for us."
Captain: "Whats the point then?!?!"Just food for thought.
If the temporal compensator is maladjusted, you may arrive before the colonies were founded.
I just finished my second first won playthrough of Endless Space which involves three methods of interstellar travel: cosmic strings that allow travelling between connected systems - each string has its length and each ship has a speed value that represents how many parsecs of cosmic string it can cover per turn. After researching special hulls capable withstanding the stress of crossing the wormhole your ships gain the ability to travel through wormholes connecting some of the systems. Travelling through the wormhole ends the fleet move for the turn.
A much more complex technology later in the game allows traveling from any wormhole to any other wormhole.
Finally there is warp drive technology that allows travelling freely between the stars ignoring strings and wormholes but its slower than strings and wormholes so the game uses them to plot the fastest course to the destination.
The systems are grouped in constellations that are connected with strings, and the wormholes connect the constellations creating the progression of exploration - first you explore your corner of the galaxy, then the neighboring regions, and then warp drive lets you cut on connection, which is especially useful during the wars when you can launch an attack from one galactic arm to another without crossing the neutral not yet antagonized empire that happened to occupy galactic core before you.
EDIT: Next on the list to play through research various types of FTLs: StarDrive and Star Ruler.
I've actually played a lot of Endless Space and GalCivIII. Love those games. The string idea is interesting, though much of this will be the players going into the vesper abyss to explore and see what stars are out there.
Unsure about time dilation for going light speeds. I own Mindjammer and I know it talks about that and even has a table on how much time would pass. But, I think it might be a little more complicated than I can handle atm. Though I'll certainly think about it.
I don't have a lot of time to type, but if you are using magic in your setting have you considered planar travel as a short-cut.
I like to mix science with my fantasy, so I envision space ships unable to overcome the problems of relativity magically travelling to the Astral or Ethereal Planes as a shorter route to distant stars and even galaxies. Other planes could work too, I know some people like the Shadow PLane
It also overcomes some of the issues that I find tend to pop up when seriously considering Sci-Fi FTL. If you use stable wormholes it creates choke points to attack and hold restricting interstellar war. Actual FTL, tactically speaking results in you basically teleporting to your destination. I know it's not instant, but at FTL you're traveling to fast to interact with so any kind of interaction over that distance travel is basically impossible.
With Planar travel you have an setting you can travel through at a reasonable pace and interact with others in meaningful ways during your journey.
AN idea for an FTL drive I came up was inspired by Northstar from Marvel comics.
Northstar and his sister fly because they can align the inherent vibrations of their atoms all in the same direction. Literally, they can point their atoms at a target, and instead of vibrating in all directions, they go that way. It has a aside effect of rendering them more invulnerable as they go faster.
It's also VERY similar to what a Bergenholm does (inertialess drive). You are effectively creating momentum while ignoring inertia.
So, if you can find some way to replicate this effect, you've got a reactionless drive. Still, you're limited by Einstein's Wall, as you still can't get your atoms to hit light speed.
So, what if the rules of the dimension of your book allow you to mess with Einstein's wall using tachyon saturation? The way I imagined it was that you could tachyon saturate a bubble of space around you, and within it time was a constant. By dialing up your drive, approaching the speed of light, time would seem to slow for you...except in this instance, time isn't slowing, your speed is multiplying along the curve...time is constant, and your speed is multiplying as you approach Einstein's Wall.
Start getting past 99% of lightspeed, and your speed multipliers get fast indeed.
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That website above is an awesome read about sci fi. I heartily recommend it!
From a story standpoint, the most useful seems to be the following:
Foldspace/teleport technology taking place outside the confines of a system. Gravity drives or the like for functioning inside the system itself, with potential FTL travel dealing with higher/lower dimensions for shorter trips to systems.
In the end, it's all about the story you want to tell.
==Aelryinth
I do like that idea aeltyinth. I was originally going to use the Alcubierre drive but I do like the sound of the Bergenholm Drive. Since my focus will be exploration, I think I'll have the focus on FTL travel, with wormhole gates found or able to be built (though expensively) to connect found star systems.
Avoiding FTL Will get you around all the ageing at different speeds stuff.
Remember, a hyperspace on/off ramp is easier to build if there is a gravity well. The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy is very funny but no science textbook. All objects as massive as a planet or bigger are gravity wells.
Conceivably, some of the aliens in MIB are only on Earth to get to other objects in the Solar System.
For communication, you might want to consider entangled particles. I forget which particle it is (I think electron) but once they're entangled, what is observed in one inversely affects the other in the pair, instantly, regardless of distance. In theory this could make FTL communication possible. The down side is you need relay stations and your end must have a matching end (which means that for home base to communicate with 5 ships, there needs to be 5 pairs of communicators). This can create a situation where you have regional ships which have FTL communication that act like post offices. With local ships using something else and relaying anything really important using the regional ships. You still get the isolation with that system, but have the option of communicating with home.
Meh. If you can handle tachyons and gravity, you can handle FTL communication.
Nobody knows how fast gravity is. If you can fluctuate gravity, it's possible that it can be read from across the galaxy if your instruments are attuned. Likewise, if you can control FTL tachyons, all you need to determine is how fast they go.
Or, you can do something like 'teleportation is possible on things without mass' and bing, neutrino/tachyon instant conversations.
If you have anti-gravity, you have gravity drives, which are reactionless. YOU can easily accelerate a ship by holding gravity constant in vital areas, and have superdense matter acted on by hypergravity generators, accelerating it in one direction or another, or just use the vibrational reactionless above, which is less and less powerful in competing fields of energy (magnetic and gravity) so it becomes slower the further you go in system.
As for power source...white hole and quantum singularity are the two best to work with, harnessing baby universes seems to be a thing, too.
If you want to give holding systems an edge, then broadcast power can become a thing. Transmatter conductors broadcasting power to ships insystem set up to receive, giving them extra power while closer to the sun. Basically millions of square miles of space covered by solar sails that feed the power out to ships or planets, bypassing the need for wires and cables and stuff, probably located at the top and bottom of the solar body. A system's might could well be explained by how good its solar conductor array is.
You can get really crazy with this kind of stuff. :)
==Aelryinth
I can see that. And here I was just going to go with a thorium reactor lol
In the book Crystal Singer, certain gifted individuals were able to tune crystals so the signal put into one came out the other. Distance was not relevant. They also tuned crystals that created warp fields. The crystal singers had crystals in their flesh are were supposed to be sterile, but that might just be a literary device. The subspace radio would have no tuner, just a series of buttons for selecting the crystal.