The Galaxy Tales - Dirk B. (Page 1 of 49)

Depends on what the story is about. With a name like Galaxy Tales, and sufficicient prep work, you could get into a Caligula POV here.

Okay, now that flight cocoons have been largely discarded, I could use some help with interstellar travel. I created something called the starlanes in chapter one that serves that purpose. As one might expect, it provides FTL travel by way of a higher dimension. Ships use a stardrive (aka the Hinkley drive) to reach the starlanes and travel through them. They then drop back into spacetime  once they get where they're going.

The starlanes are more like Star Trek than they are Star Wars. You can still see stars, planets, and other ships in the starlanes, but there are visible connections (flows) between stars. The flows connect all stars to each other, but the closest stars have the strongest flows, yielding the fastest travel. Imagine tubes interconnecting all the stars, except they're ethereal.

Ships travel within these flows to hop from one star to another. The overall route is then a series of starhops. The closest stars are one hop apart. Travel time can be as little as thirty minutes. To get from one end of colonized space to the other is 13 hops, which takes about a day. Travel from one end of the galaxy to the other is 10,000 hops and takes a year. Although it is possible to travel directly from any star to any other star, it is generally the case that it is faster to star hop your way to distant stars, along the strongest flows.

Flows are hazy with fuzzy boundaries. You can see what's out in spacetime around you (planets, moon's, asteroids, etc.) but things appear ghost-like until you drop back into spacetime.

My original idea was that these flows are natural and omnipresent, connecting interstellar bodies powered by nuclear fusion, hence all the stars connect to each other. Hadn't considered until just now what happens when a star becomes a black hole, but let's roll with it.

This is a lot to take in in a single dose, so I spread things out across several chapters throughout the book. Based on this description, can you envision the starlanes? Basically, it comes down to fuzzy tubes and starhopping.

One variation of this that I'm considering is making them artificial, constructed by some dead race of sentient beings. In this case, the only connections would be between starhopping points, and the number of them would be vast but finite. Even so, there would be something visible that has to be traversed between connected stars. Imagine all the highways feeding into NYC from surrounding areas, where NYC is the star. Newark, NJ is another star. Although I call it starhopping, they are not jump-gates. Perhaps I need a better term than starhopping, huh?

Thoughts?

Thanks
Dirk

Yes, he would have rediscovered it.

I was still thinking about this when I went to bed and realized that if a race if aliens created these all over the galaxy, then there should be vast ruins of their civilization all over the galaxy, including in our solar system. I could change the story to allow for that, and it would add another layer to the story, but that's a big change. And perhaps a distraction from the story I originally set out to tell.

Too much like Stargate SG1. (Alien race star lanes). Consider gravity lanes. It is a concept that is still being understood, so you can make stuff up. Imagine that the sun is like a magnet. Travel away from the magnet and the pull is less, so the ship can be pulled into another star's gravity well. By traveling through the tubes, you can negate the gravity attraction of your origin and be pulled into position by the destination.

Some star systems are better hubs because if their relation to black holes. So it might take you one jump to get to a star 5000 light years away, but five jumps to get to Alpha Centauri.

I should write Sci fi but I gotta finish the next chapter first.

Yup. Checked out Stargate SG-1 and they were built by the Ancients. I'm not surprised that Mass Effect uses it too. It's a staple of sci-fi dating back to Arthur C. Clarke among others. So much for artificial connections. I'll stick with the natural flows.

Sounds like you're better off with the warped space bubbles.

Roman pimples. Pop!

(I caught a splenic laceration at work...Amy reaches out and catches the ball...woot woot! I'm drinking a beer at 9 AM!)

If you are propagating faster than light (notice I used propagate rather than travel) you would likely translate through smaller objects without interacting with them. By its nature, FTL travel -- competing with the planck distance -- means a small system body cannot bring enough gravitation to bear on you to even cause a ripple in your path of travel (Notice, I've avoided saying momentum).

Neutrinos are much slower than your ships, and if I understand correctly, many of them can sneak through the Earth (I believe this feat is due to their mass, not their velocity) but the average comet vs your ships is not going to be able to compete

*Edited for spelling since my keyboard hates me

Hmm. It occurs to me that I do need something other than "go like a bat out of hell." Without another dimension, I'm still in spacetime. If you recall, God claims in my book that Einstein made up General Relativity as a lark while soused. Nevertheless, any alternate explanation for what we experience in spacetime is still limited by the upper limit of light speed.

So we're, back to the starlanes. I still need a stardrive to shift to the starlanes, where everything in spacetime appears as ghostly images. Besides that, there are no flows. The stardrive simply allows you to go like a bat out of hell, or distances are shorter. I can either force the traveler to circumnavigate massive objects or allow the ships to pass right through the objects, including stars. I'm leaning toward the former (circumnavigating), otherwise you could fly through black holes, too. If the object has substantial mass, you have to go around it. Will ponder what to do about smaller objects (pass through them or deflect/destroy them).

I'm quoting the part of your post that I understood. :-)  If I shorten distances, then scanners ought to work. Ditto for my "sublight" thrusters. I think.

I wonder what technobabble Data would use. And what's a particile?

I'm not. Almost by definition, FTL travel requires some kind of technology. I'm just trying to define something very simple that functions the way required by my story. One requirement is that most of my other ship tech (shields, sensors, thrusters, weapons, etc.) function the same way they do in spacetime. It also has to include elapsed time in the starlanes (e.g., 30 - 60 minutes between nearby stars, without relativistic effects). In addition, I want all spacetime objects (e.g., planets, moons, etc.) to be visible from within the starlanes, only ghostly in appearance. The starlanes, then, are relatively cleared paths that minimize the number of objects that have to be circumnavigated.