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The Trouble with StarDrivesI wasn't going to put this section in, but I have to. I wanted to keep the website as free from handwavium as possible. However, while Faster-Than-Light travel is about as handwavium as you can get, it is unfortunately the sine qua non of interstellar space opera. Space opera with no StarDrive is like chocolate cake without the chocolate. In his "Lucky Starr" novels, Isaac Asimov uses the term "Hyperatomic spaceships", presumably since the spacecraft had both a faster-than-light Hyperspace engine and a more conventional atomic engine. Go to The Tough Guide to the Known Galaxy and read the entry "FTL", and the "Faster Than Light" entry in Wikipedia. Fred Kiesche says that a faster than light starship should have a license plate that reads "ME = MC2" |
The important point is to keep the fracture under control. Hack writers will assume that "if we have to break a few laws of physics for FTL, why not just throw all the laws out the window?" Don't give in. Omitting physics will degrade your novel to a pathetic lack of accuracy worse than an average Space Ghost cartoon.
What to do? Keep all the physics you can. And when you break the laws for your FTL drive, at least establish some limitations and rules. Then stick to them! Internal self-consistency is better than nothing.
An example from the movie Forbidden Planet are the DC stations where the crew members are protected from the deceleration from hyperspace to normal space by stasis beams
The general rule is what physicists call the correspondence principle or the Classical limit. This states that any new theory must give the same answers as the old theory where the old theory has been confirmed by experiment. Newton's laws and Einstein's Relativity give the same answers in ordinary conditions, they only give different answers in extreme conditions such as near the speed of light, refining the accuracy of the GPS system, or calculating the orbit of Mercury (none of which Newton could confirm by experiment).
The point is: you, as a science fiction author inventing a FTL drive, have to explain why current scientific theory didn't discover FTL travel decades ago. Harry Turtledove turned the problem on its head and turned the explaination into the plot of the short story.
Why does FTL violate the laws of physics? Well, that is complicated, but there are two main problems: the Light-speed barrier and Causality. This is explained with some depth at Jason Hinson's authoritative "Relativity and FTL" website, so I'm just going to give a short summary. Refer to Hinson for details.
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The Light-Speed Barrier |
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No, this is not like the "sound barrier", it is much more fundamental. That old spoil-sport Einstein ruined FTL travel when he created his theory of General and Special Relativity. Now according to common sense (and as codified by Isaac Newton), velocities will add to each other. If you are travelling at twenty kilometers per hour due north, and you add five kilometers per hour northward to your velocity, you should now be travelling at twenty-five kilometers per hour due north. Everybody (including Newton) knows that 20 + 5 = 25. Unfortunately for us, Einstein is not everybody. In Special Relativity, no matter how fast you are moving, a beam of light appears to be moving at exactly the speed of light (the technical term is The Principle of Invariant Light Speed). One of the unobvious consequences is that velocities do NOT add. At least not when one gets close to the speed of light. Only a percentage of the new velocity is actually added. What percentage? Well, the faster you go, the lower the percentage. And at the speed of light, the percentage is zero. So in theory, once you are at light speed, no matter how much velocity you try to add, the amount actually added is zero. Which means you can never exceed lightspeed. Almost every single FTL drive you read about in science fiction is based on some clever way to avoid the light speed barrier. |
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The basic assumption of special relativity, which is most strongly confirmed by observation, is that lightspeed is the same for every observer. So, as you speed up, lightspeed stays as far away from you as it ever was. Your time and distance coordinates distort to allow lightspeed to be equally far away from people moving with respect to each other, but the point remains, no matter how much you accelerate, you can never even approach lightspeed, let alone exceed it. Even if you completely ignore things like mass and energy, and consider simply velocity, adding more velocity can never get you to lightspeed, no matter how much you add. The tricksy parts are the "coordinates distort" things. But the basic concept is relatively simple; approaching lightspeed is worse than a red queens race. It takes all the speed possible to just stay the same distance away from it. |
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Luke Campbell: Note that in special relativity, velocities do not add. Instead, rapidities add. The velocity is the speed of light times the hyperbolic tangent of the rapidity. At low rapidities, the rapidity times the speed of light is almost the same as the velocity. However, no matter how high your rapidity gets, the hyperbolic tangent maxes out at 1 for very large rapidities so that your velocity can never be higher than the speed of light. So imagine someone in a starship. As he burns propellant, the (delta-V) / (c) consumed adds to his rapidity. If he has a lot of delta-V, he can get a very high rapidity, but when you look at the velocity, it is always less than the speed of light. Interestingly, the time dilation and length contraction factor is the hyperbolic cosine of the rapidity. |
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CausalityHowever, very few SF novels deal with the second problem. The aphorism at rec.arts.sf.written goes "Causality, Relativity, FTL travel: chose any two." Your average physicist holds Relativity quite strongly. It has been tested again and again with an accuracy of many decimal places. They hold onto Causality even tighter. Without Causality the entire structure of physics crumbles. Causes must preceed effects, or it becomes impossible to make predictions. If it is impossible to make predictions, it would be best to give up physics for a more profitable line of work. Therefore, they chose to jettison FTL travel. Please note that as far as Causality is concerned, FTL communication is every bit as bad as FTL travel. |
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Why only two? Relativity proves that FTL travel is identical to Time travel (to help your research, the technical term for time travel is "Closed timelike curve"). Time travel makes Causality impossible, since it can be used to create paradoxes. So if you have Relativity and FTL, Causality is impossible. If you do not have Relativity, FTL is not Time travel, so you can have Causality. Or more mundanely you can have Relativity and Causality, but no FTL/Time travel (the latter is the opinion of physicist Stephen Hawking, he calls it the chronology protection conjecture). Clever readers will have already spotted a possible loop-hole. What if there was some law of physics that prevented Time travel from creating paradoxes? |
 The Time Tunnel (1966)
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The classic Time-travel paradox is the so-called "Grandfather paradox" (though it actually should be called the "Grandmother paradox"). Boris Badenov sneaks into Mr. Peabody's Wayback Machine (actually the WABAC machine, but who cares?) and travels back in time to when Boris' grandfather was a baby. Boris then gives his infant grandfather a lit stick of dynamite then cackles evilly as his grandfather is blown to bits. Bah-hah-hah! But wait! Boris' grandfather is now smithereens, he'll never grow up, beget Boris' father, who will beget Boris. In other words, Boris will never exist. But if Boris never exists, then he will never travel back in time to assassinate his grandfather. In which case grandpop will beget Poppa Boris, who will beget Boris. Start back at the beginning and repeat. Does Boris' grandfather get blown up? Both Yes and No! A paradox. |
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Hinson shows there are four ways of enforcing a "no-paradox" rule for time travel. Parallel Universes, Consistency Protection, Restricted Space-Time Areas, and Special Frames. In some ways Special Frames is the best, though it directly contradicts part of Relativity (the first postulate of special relativity is that there are no special frames, "no privileged inertial frames of reference"). Oh well. For details, you'd best read the Hinson article. The latter three are examples of the Novikov self-consistency principle. In some late-breaking news, physicists Daniel Greenberger and Karl Svozil have shown that the laws of quantum mechanics enforces Consistency Protection. You can read their paper here, but it makes my brain hurt. Translated into English, they maintain that time travellers going back into the past cannot alter the past (i.e., the past is deterministic). This is because quantum objects can act sometimes as a wave. When they go back in time, the various probabilities interfere destructively, thus preventing anything from happening differently from that which has already taken place. As a side note, those interested in the various ways time-travel seems to work in SF novel should run to the Guide To SF CHRONOPHYSICS. |
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Why have you not read about this in any science fiction novel? It is absent from some because the authors do not know enough relativity theory to spot the FTL equals Time Travel implication. It is absent from the rest because of those who do know enough relativity, practically no author who just wants a quick way to get their hero from star to star wants to deal with the huge squirming can of worms opened by time travel. This is why the time travel connection is the dirty little secret of science fictional FTL travel.
From Exultant by Stephen Baxter (2004).
Time was slippery. The way Pirius understood it, it was only the speed of light that imposed causal sequences on events.
According to the venerable arguments of relativity there wasn't even a common "now" you could establish across significant distances. All that existed were events, points in space and time. If you had to travel slower than lightspeed from one event to the next, then everything was okay, for the events would be causally connected: you would see everything growing older in an orderly manner.
But with FTL travel, beyond the bounds of lightspeed, the orderly structure of space and time became irrelevant, leaving nothing but events, disconnected incidents floating in the dark. And with an FTL ship you could hop from one event to another arbitrarily, without regard to any putative cause-and-effect sequence.
In this war it wasn't remarkable to have dinged-up ships limping home from an engagement that hadn't happened yet; at Arches Base that occurred every day. And it wasn't unusual to have news from the future. In fact, sending messages to command posts
back in the past was a deliberate combat tactic. The flow of information from future to past wasn't perfect; it all depended on complicated geometries of trajectories and FTL leaps. But it was good enough to allow the Commissaries, in their Academies on distant Earth, to compile libraries of possible futures, invaluable precognitive data that shaped strategies -- even if decisions made in the present could wipe away many of those futures before they came to pass.A war fought with FTL technology had to be like this.
Of course foreknowledge would have been a great advantage -- if not for the fact that the other side had precisely the same capability. In an endless sequence of guesses and counterguesses, as history was tweaked by one side or the other, and then tweaked again in response, the timeline was endlessly redrafted. With both sides foreseeing engagements to come for decades, even centuries ahead, and each side able to counter the other's move even before it had been formulated, it was no wonder that the war had long settled down to a lethal stalemate, stalled in a static front that enveloped the Galaxy's heart.
 Artwork by Ed Emshwiller
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From "Beep" by James Blish (1954). She paused and smiled. "I have heard," she said conversationally, "the voice of the President of our Galaxy, in 3480, announcing the federation of the Milky Way and the Magellanic Clouds. I've heard the commander of a world-line cruiser, traveling from 8873 to 8704 along the world line of the planet Hathshepa, which circles a star on the rim of NGC 4725, calling for help across eleven million light-years -- but what kind of help he was calling for, or will be calling for, is beyond my comprehension. And many other things. |
Since FTL drives are ruled more or less impossible by current science, you have to invent your own. In such cases, the best way to start is to focus on effects instead of causes. Many novice SF novelists and game designers make the mistake of inventing a cause first and may not even try designing the effects.
An example of an effect is "The star drive can move the ship at ten light-years per hour". An example of a cause is "The Mason Field is generated by the amplification of the interaction of the Alpha and Omega sub-particles contained in the Xanthe crystal when bombarded by pseudo electron valients in a charged hydrogen field."
Effects help you avoid unintended consequences, and define the implications of your drive. Causes are fluffy technobabble explanations that a good SF story might avoid all together. As Gene Roddenberry noted, in a police TV show a policeman does not explain to the viewers how the primer of the bullet ignites the main charge propelling the lead slug down the barrel every time he shoots his handgun. Neither should Captain Kirk explain the operating principles of his phaser weapon, the fact that it is some species of sidearm is enough for the viewers.
Causes can also get you into trouble if your explanation implies new effects that you did not intend. They also give more weak points that a scientifically minded reader can use to poke holes in your theory.
The important things are the effects. Here are a few examples: How big a ship can be moved? How much faster than light is the ship? Does it require large intricate starships, or can you just mount it in a submarine? Does it require huge amounts of energy? Does it require the ship to be outside any planetary or solar gravity wells? Can the ship only enter FTL flight at special locations ? ("jump points") Does each FTL "jump" require days of tedious mathematical calculations? Can a ship in FTL flight be detected by another ship also in FTL flight? Can a ship in FTL flight be detected by another ship not in FTL flight? Does FTL flight make the crew vomit, hallucinate, have epileptic fits? Is the supply of FTL drive units limited due to a tight monopoly on their manufacture, or due to the fact that they can no longer be manufactured at all? Does it require rare and hard to get materials? (the Traveller RPG required Lanthanum, H. Beam Pipers' ships required Gadolinium. Both of these are rare earth elements, emphasis on the "rare")
These are just off the top of my head, you can find more by reading SF novels, or from your imagination.
The effects have implications in the SF universe you are creating:
If the only ships that can be moved are ones smaller than a Greyhound Bus, one implication is that you will not have titanic ships the size of Star Wars Imperial Star Destroyers, much less any Death Stars.
If your ship is twice as fast as the speed of light, it can go 100 light years in a mere 50 years. Therefore most of the action in your universe will take place close to Sol, if the average interstellar journey is two years. On the other hand if your ship is 36,500,000 times as fast as the speed of light, your ship can cross the Galaxy the long way in about one single day. The action in this universe will therefore be galactic in scope.
If there are only large intricate starships, they will be few in number and crewed by the cream of the crop. If any fool can build an FTL drive from plans downloaded from the internet and convert a septic tank into a starship, there will be zillions of starships crewed by a wide range of eccentric people.
If ships require huge amounts of energy for their FTL drives, you have to decide upon the source of said energy. Antimatter fuel implies antimatter factories or antimatter "mining." There is also the unintended consequences of a given starship containing enough energy to, say, vaporize Greenland. The further implication is that starship captains will be on a very short leash (John's Law). If on the other hand a starship can run on one AAA battery, you start having problems with FTL missiles the size of bullets.
Ships that can only enter/exit FTL flight at special locations make those locations into military choke points. Ships that can exit FTL flight anywhere coupled with ships that cannot be detected while FTL will open the possibility to genocidal interstellar wars that last all of five minutes.
In John Maddox Roberts novels Space Angel and Spacer: Window of the Mind, the "Whoopee Drive" makes the crew suffer projectile vomiting, violent diarrhea, and hallucinations. Before each jump they have to attach a barf bag over their mouth, strap themselves on to a toilet, and try to ignore the paisley Peter Max metal termites eating the hull. Naturally this made troop ships a nightmare. In Gordon Dickson's The Genetic General, closely spaced FTL jumps made without a recovery period in between would rapidly incapacitate the crew.
In Frank Herbert's DUNE, mutated Guild Steersmen move starships between stars with their psychic abilities. Thus the spacing guild has a monopoly on starships. In John Brunnner's Interstellar Empire and Frederik Pohl's Heechee novels (Gateway et al) the starships are artifacts from some long lost alien race, humans can fly them but cannot construct them. In SPI's game Freedom in the Galaxy all stardrives are manufactured by the Empire, and contain thermonuclear self-destruct devices to discourage hackers from attempting to engage in reverse-engineering.
If you want to do the job right, work backwards. Decide what type of universe you want for your book, figure out what implications it must have, then figure what constraints on the FTL will create the desired implications. Finally add a bit of colorful technobabble to describe the cause.
If you want to explore uncharted terrain, work forwards. Create a few unusual constraints, spend some time deducing some implications from the constraints, and see what sort of SF universe flows from the implications. You might stumble over an interesting universe for your next novel and/or game.
Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle took the bull by the horns. Before they wrote their award-winning classic The Mote in God's Eye, they went to physicist Dan Alderson. Niven and Pournelle gave Alderson a list of things they wanted the proposed FTL to allow, and things to forbid. Dr. Alderson then custom designed a mostly plausible FTL drive to spec, but with additional limits. Niven and Pournelle kept within those limits, and the novel was improved as a consequence.
From "Building the Mote in God's Eye" by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, collected in N-Space and A Step Farther Out.
(interesting description of the physical basis of the Alderson drive omitted)
Travel by Alderson Drive consists of getting to the proper Alderson Point and turning on the Drive. Energy is used. You vanish, to reappear in an immeasurably short time at the Alderson Point in another star system some several light-years away. If you haven’t done everything right, or aren’t at the Alderson Point, you turn on your drive and a lot of energy vanishes. You don’t move. (In fact you do move, but you instantaneously reappear in the spot where you started.)
That’s all there is to the Drive, but it dictates the structure of an interstellar civilization.
To begin with, the Drive works only from point to point across interstellar distances. Once in a star system you must rely on reaction drives to get around. There’s no magic way from, say, Saturn to Earth: you’ve got to slog across.
Thus space battles are possible, and you can’t escape battle by vanishing into hyperspace, as you could in future history series such as Beam Piper’s and Gordon Dickson’s. To reach a given planet you must travel across its stellar system, and you must enter that system at one of the Alderson Points. There won’t be more than five or six possible points of entry, and there may only be one.
Star systems and planets can be thought of as continents and islands, then, and Alderson Points as narrow sea gates such as Suez, Gibraltar, Panama, Malay Straits, etc. To carry the analogy further, there’s telegraph but no radio: the fastest message between star systems is one carried by a ship, but within star systems messages go much faster than the ships.
Hmm. This sounds a bit like the early days of steam.
Not sail; the ships require fuel and sophisticated repair facilities. They won’t pull into some deserted star system and rebuild themselves unless they’ve carried the spare parts along. However, if you think of naval actions in the period between the Crimean War and World War One, you’ll have a fair picture of conditions as implied by the Alderson Drive.If the Drive allowed ships to sneak up on planets, materializing without warning out of hyperspace, then there could be no Empire even with the Field. There'd be no Empire because belonging to the empire wouldn't protect you. Instead there might be populations of planet-bound serfs ruled at random by successive hordes of of space pirates. Upward mobility would consist of getting your own ship and turning pirate.
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The Alderson Drive or "jump point" drive has been used in many SF starship combat games, for the same reason Niven and Pournelle used it: unlike most other FTL, it allows the possibility of interstellar battles. Most other FTL is a "fly anywhere" kind of propulsion, which generally does not allow battles to occur except by mutual consent. Often a planet cannot even detect an enemy invasion fleet until it suddenly pops out of hyperspace. Interstellar wars only last long enough for your hyperspace bombers to fly to the enemy's planets, then a brief emergence to spit out a hellburner, a planet-wrecker nuclear bomb, a planet-sterilizing torch warhead, a planet-cracker antimatter warhead, or a planet-buster neutronium-antimatter warhead. Then they fly home, only to discover that the enemy's bombers were on a similar mission. Go to The Tough Guide to the Known Galaxy and read the entry "SLAG" |
(As a side note, SF Author Colin Kapp often had ships armed with "Diffract Meson" warheads, presumably based on an as-yet undiscovered scientific principle. I always thought that there was some room for a warhead type in between the 10% efficient thermonuclear warhead and the 100% efficient antimatter warhead. Say Diffract Meson warheads are 50% efficient. )
Brett Evill put it this way: "These start-anyway go-anywhere drives play merry Hell with concepts like 'distance', 'remoteness', 'proximity', 'adjacency', 'line of communication', 'border', and 'defence', while reinforcing such concepts as 'trade', 'concentration of force', and 'first strike'. Give me a setting in which the map still matters."
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With jump points, you have choke points that can be defended. Battles occur because the enemy has no choice but to invade though the jump point. Though it does become difficult and fuel intensive for the defenders, since Alderson points do not orbit their primary star, while planets, orbital fortresses, anti-ship mines and blockading tasks forces have to. The defending forces must constantly be thrusting for the entire tour of duty just to maintain their position. In The Gripping Hand, sequel to The Mote in God's Eye, there is some mention of a constant stream of tanker ships travelling between the defending forces and the gas giant fuel sources. And there are only blockading spacecraft, orbital fortresses and mines are impractical. Well, maybe not totally impractical. For mines a possibility is Dr. Robert Forward's statite concept. This uses a carefully angled solar sail to generate the constant thrust required to keep the mine stationary. I haven't done the math, but my gut feeling is that if the jump point is too far from the primary star the solar flux will be so low that even for low mass miles the sails will have to be huge. However, I am quite proud of making the jump point/statite connection, since this is actually an original idea by me (unlike almost all of the rest of this website). |
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While I haven't done the math on statites, David Harris did! Here is his analysis: There is actually a very simple method to find the "thrust" on an object due to the solar flux radiating on it. The intensity of light per square meter divided by the speed of light has the same units (after some manipulation) as a pressure. So, very simply, to find this solar pressure, divide the intensity of light (in Watts per meter squared) by c (in meters per second). You get a pressure (in Newtons per meter squared). This pressure equates to light impacting on a surface, but if you have a mirror, the light also bounces off. This actually doubles the pressure on a mirror.At 1 AU from the sun, the solar intensity is 1400W/m2. Dividing by c = 3x108 m/s and multiplying by two, we find that the pressure on a 1 square meter mirror should be 9.3x10-6 Newtons. |
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Now, if you want your mirror to float stationary at a certain point in space (like a non-orbiting "Jump Point"), the light pressure must counterbalance the gravitational force of the sun at that point. A quick check through a high-school physics book (bring a calculator) will show that the force on a 1 kg object at 1AU from the sun is a mere 0.00590 N. With this, it is easy to show that a 1 kg statite needs a solar sail 632m2 in area, or a square 25m on a side. Now here cones something interesting: Solar intensity falls off as a 1/r2 law (inverse square), meaning if you increase the distance by a factor of three, the intensity falls by a factor of nine. Gravity also follows a 1/r2 law, meaning if you increase the distance by a factor of three, the gravitational force falls by a factor of nine. The math is easy, but it is excruciating to type, so I will leave it as an exercise for the reader to show that, since both forces are governed by a 1/r2 law, the size of the sail does not change as you change your distance from the sun. No matter how far you are from the sun, a 1 kg statite will always need a sail 25m on a side. |
 Artwork by Frank Tinsley. Click for larger image.
Image from Plan 59 |
Now, what fun things can we go and do with this? Perhaps we can start with a simple minefield. We can arbitrarily assume that each mine is 1 megaton. Adding on detonators, sensors, etc., assume that the whole mine is one tonne. A one tonne mine needs a sail 794 meters on a side, or 632,000m2. Since the statite mine field will be located away from a planet, let us also arbitrarily decide that we will be defending a volume of space equal to the volume of the Earth. I really do not know how big the Jump Points or Crazy Eddie Points are, so this is pure guess work.
Assume we set our mines to detonate when a ship is 1km away. If a ship flew straight through the center of our minefield, I would hope that it would get within 1 km of at least one mine. If we assume one mine per 37,680 cubic kilometers, this gives us a 50/50 chance of a ship traveling through the center of our minefield coming within 1 km of a mine. Again, the tedium of algebra manipulation in ASCII prevents me from showing how I came to this figure. At one mine per 37,680 km3, we need 24 million (!) mines. That's 15 million square kilometers of solar sails!
With that many mirrors, you could do more damage with the reflected light than with the nuclear mines themselves! 15 million kilometers of solar sails adds up to 2.1x1016 watts of reflected light at 1 AU. That's 5 megatons of energy every second. In less than two months, the solar energy delivered by these mirrors would do more than the nuclear mines they are supporting.
ClaysGhost's points out that the magnitude of the constant thrust problem depends upon how far the jump points are from the primary star. He says "The acceleration due to the Sun's gravity acting on a mass at the orbital distance of Jupiter is about 0.2mm/sec2. Even for a 100 tonne vehicle you need a counter-force of only 20N to keep your station." This will make stealth difficult for a minefield. Even such low thrust from a rocket will be readily detectable, and a statite sail will be large enough to be hard to hide.
A very common limit is that the FTL drive can only be entered if the ship is "not too deep in a gravity well", that is, farther than a certain distance from either a planet or the primary star. Again keep in mind that if ships can only enter or leave FTL at about Pluto's orbit, the ships will either require unreasonably powerful normal-space rocket drives that run afoul of Jon's Law, or the ships will take years to travel between Earth and the FTL take-off point.
In the boardgame Attack Vector: Tactical, Ken Burnside avoided this problem by specifying that jump points orbit a star at about the orbit of Mercury.
StarForce Alpha CentauriAnother FTL system that was carefully crafted in order to force a specific situation was the one created by Redmond Simonsen for the wargame StarForce: Alpha Centauri. In the game, starships or "TeleShips" are jumped or "shifted" instantaneously from one location to another several light-years away by teams of women with psionic powers. Shifting cannot be done by a machine, it has to be done by a person. The supply of psionic or "telesthetic" women is limited. There is no way to genetically engineer them, they naturally occur at the rate of one First Order Telesthetic per million females. Energy is cheap, any ore or element can be synthesized, any material good can be manufactured. So the only valuable interstellar commodity are telesthetic women. This has several implications. In interstellar warfare, there are no carpet bombings of planetary populations with mass destruction weapons. This would destroy the only valuable item the planet has: a population that can produce more telesthetic women. Obviously, there are no restrictions placed on population growth, and large families are encouraged by the planetary governments. Since the population of telesthetics is so limited, they sort of know each other. They are also all members of the same Telesthetics Guild. Therefore, in ship-to-ship combat, weapons are not designed to kill. |
 StarForce: Alpha Centauri (1974) |
Instead, the anti-ship weapon is sort of a telepathic command to the enemy teleship to make an uncontrolled interstellar shift into a random location. Such a shift can be up to five times the distance of a safe shift, so a teleship will take a while to crawl back to the battle. And in any event, a teleship that can jump between the stars is not going to have any difficulty avoiding something as sluggish as a laser beam.
Against planetary populations, teams of telesthetics can create the so-called Heissen Effect. This sedates the inhabitants, sending them to sleep. The ships then land squads of StarSoldiers in gravity sleds to take control. The inhabitants later wake up with migraine headaches.
Teleships have a maximum safe shift limit of five light years. If a friendly teleship does nothing but sit stationary and telesthetically "enhance" its location, another friendly can do a safe shift to that enhanced location from up to ten light years.
Attempting to shift a distance greater than the safe limit is called "over-shifting." There is a small chance that the shift will go as planned. There is a greater chance that the shift will malfunction. A bad shift will be either a "mirror shift" where the teleship moves in the exact opposite vector, or a "randomization" where the teleship appears in a random location within twenty light-years of Sol.
A "Star Gate" is a nine kilometer ring of chanplastic, crammed with telesthetics intimately familiar with the fabric of local space. A teleship starting at a star gate and shifting to an unenhanced location has a safe range of ten light-years, fifteen light-years to an enhanced location. Shifting from one star gate to another has a safe range of twenty light-years.
Since telesthetics are at a premium, there are no warships or orbital fortresses. Instead, merchant ships and star gates are modified for warfare.
You see the basic effect that flows from the FTL drive is that wars are relatively bloodless. The secondary effect is that pressures were created that caused wars. The latter effect is desirable, since a wargame simulation requires wars to simulate.
 Artwork by Redmond A. Simonsen
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Redmond Simonsen: The Solar Government was to expend several trillion Labor Credits before it discovered that...(a) the discontinuity window could not reliably be produced on or near a planetary mass; (b) only 139 people out of 19 billion could produce the effect; (c) they were all women; (d) they were all powerfully telesthetic (i.e., clairvoyant), and mildly telekinetic; (e) a window could only be created between two positions in space that the Telesthetic was "comfortable" in and felt she "knew"; (f) a Gnostech initiated by the using Telesthetic was required; (g) bionic/electronic techniques could be used to amplify and refine the effect, but no pure-machine system could create it; (h) the range of the effect was theoretically unlimited but its accuracy was subject to degradation with the square of the distance. Psionic linking techniques and the Telesthetics founding of the Telesthetic Guild was the response. It is probably the heavy use of empathetic bridging in these techniques that explains the remarkable fact that no member of the Guild, even while on opposing combat teams, has ever deliberately caused another member's death.) This solidarity of Telesthetics was almost totally responsible for the virtually bloodless conduct of the Intra-Specific Wars of Autonomy in the 25th Century. In a sense the Outleap itself was responsible for the Wars of Autonomy: it dispersed and enlarged the human community into a multi-system race which was heavily dependent upon one socioeconomic factor, one resource that could not be synthesized by technology -- the Telesthetics. The number of Telesthetics available to a given system was almost purely a function of how much population was contained within or controlled by that system. |
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THE TELESHIP Length: 1048 meters. Ring diameter: 1224 meters. Mass: 50,402 tons. Telesthetic crew: 104. Service crew: 43. Star Soldier lift capacity: 80,000 in stasis. Maximum safe shift: 5.12 light years. Stellar shift cycle rate: 7.31 hours. Tac-Shift cycle rate: 0.15 hours. A. Primary Shift Ring. B. Secondary Shift Ring. C. Bridge. Real Flight Maneuver Center, Crew quarters. D. Gnostech Module, Mapping and Recovery tanks. E. Gravity Sled cluster. F. Energy Modulation Pack, Kinetic Drive. G. Ship systems control, life-support, and recreation garden. |
The freedom from birth-controls in the colonized systems did have the desired effects of providing the population basis for "home-grown" Telesthetic crews to operate the Star Gates and the increasing number of Teleship.
It also, however, had several counter-productive side effects: (a) The vastly increased and dispersed human population became ungovernable by the institutions of the Solar Hegemony, (b) the "frontier" societies tended to produce divergent eco-political systems that either wanted independence, or worse, attempted to impose their provincial "solutions" on the rest of humanity.
All these factors conspired to produce a number of essentially pointless wars.
From Islands In Space by John W. Campbell, jr. (1931).
Fuller still looked puzzled. "See here; with this new space strain drive, why do we have to have the molecular drive at all?"
"To move around near a heavy mass -- in the presence of a strong gravitational field," Arcot said. "A gravitational field tends to warp space in such a way that the velocity of light is lower in its presence. Our drive tries to warp or strain space in the opposite manner. The two would simply cancel each other out and we'd waste a lot of power going nowhere. As a matter of fact, the gravitational field of the sun is so intense that we'll have to go out beyond the orbit of Pluto before we can use the space strain drive effectively."
From Starman Jones by Robert A. Heinlein (1953).
But he had not eyes for it. To the west where avenue and buildings ended was the field and on it space ships, stretching away for miles -- fast little military darts, stubby Moon shuttles, winged ships that served the satellite stations, robot freighters, graceless and powerful. But directly in front of the gate hardly half a mile away was a great ship that he knew at once, the starship Asgard. He knew her history, Uncle Chet had served in her. A hundred years earlier she had been built out in space as a space-to-space rocket ship; she was then the Prince of Wales. Years passed, her tubes were ripped out and a mass-conversion torch was kindled in her; she became the Einstein. More years passed, for nearly twenty she swung empty around Luna, a lifeless, outmoded hulk. Now in place of the torch she had Horst-Conrad impellers that clutched at the fabric of space itself; thanks to them she was now able to touch Mother Terra. To commemorate her rebirth she had been dubbed Asgard, heavenly home of the gods.
Her massive, pear-shaped body was poised on its smaller end, steadied by an invisible scaffolding of thrust beams. Max knew where they must be, for there was a ring of barricades spotted around her to keep the careless from wandering into the deadly loci.
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Existing DrivesThere are a few semi-plausible FTL methods out there. One of the most famous is Dr. Miguel Alcubierre "Warp Drive", along with Chris Van Den Broeck's improvement. There are others at Dr. John Cramer's Alternate View archives, Edward Halerewicz, Jr.'s Warp Physics site, Marcelo B. Ribeiro's Warp Drive Theory site, Lawrence H. Ford and Thomas A. Roman's Scientific American article Negative Energy, Wormholes and Warp Drive, David Waite's Modern Relativity site (if you can understand the math), and NASA's Warp Drive When? More on the fringe is Burkhard Heim and his theory of everything. If the theory describes reality, it could give a form of FTL travel with an artifical gravity propulsion system at no extra charge. You can read a PDF file of the research paper here and the expanded version here |
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The Canonical List of StarDrivesIf you want to roll your own, you might find the following useful. Noted physicist and Hugo & Nebula award-winning SF author Geoffrey A. Landis has created a catalog of every kind of StarDrive that has ever existed in science fiction. It appears here with Dr. Landis' permission. |
The EMF (Erik Max Francis) classification
