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I have been working on new TG fiction, using an entirely different style, making use of the one liners that those who know me in person find amusing. I have also been searching to find a way to write about some very lurid and steamy things within the confines of my personal beliefs.
The biggest problem, however, has been to write about space travel to several other Galaxies, making it seem merely inconvient and arduous, not imposible.
There is a dearth of information these days on the Internet, like the fact that our own Galaxy is a mere 100,000 light years across. The distance to our nearest other Galaxy, if you ignore the one tangled up with our own, is 27 Million light years away. At first I thought that travel at 100 times the speed of light would do it, but it was not until I tried to calculate travel times at 10K the speed of light, that I realized that any appreciable travel at fantastic speeds still confines us to the crib. It would still take an astonishing 2700 years to reach that nearest Galaxy, and there are how many cajillion Galaxies out there?
Now, perhaps my only math ability was contained in the two little brains that I had cut off, but I think my calculations are correct, I can just feel it!
So, I think I will take the fantasy escapist approach on Galactic distances; we just won't talk about it; pretend it is not a problem, right?
If anyone has any suggestions that would not butcher Einsteins thought, um, now would be the time.
Many Blessings
Khadijah Gwen
Comments
Breaking the Lightspeed Barrier
Once it's broken, it's broken. If traveling at 27x10^10 times the speed of light is necessary for your story, well, that's really no more unbelievable than 100.1% C. Broken is broken.
There are two accepted ways of doing this in SF, one is called warp drive and involves moving a bubble of space with the ship. The other involves stable wormholes. A third innovative way startled me with it's audacity--the author simply postulated that Einstein's speed limit applied to ballistic particles only; that self-propelled vehicles did not have to follow that law in the same way. Since there are currently no self-propelled vehicles capable of achieving a significant fraction of C, who can actually say for sure? The experiment looks to be a certain confirmation for Einstein--but the old guy has been wrong on a few quibbles before and until the experiment is done, who knows? :)
Hug,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
David Weber's FTL drive
I've read most of his work, but I really like the Honor Harrington. He uses some sort of believable mystery drive that I don't begin to even half understand. It seems like FTL travel is posible by using different bands; he talks about the D band and the highly unstable F band, but for me the story was too good so I just ignored the physics.
In Weber's work, I don't even know if he gets outside the Milky Way Galaxy? I am just starting to realize the astonishing distances in inner Galactic travel, and the huge number of planets and suns are contained herein.
I am writing it from the point of view of a somewhat ditzy convert, who only cares about how many hours it is to Shopping! Her um "blondeness" is only one dimension of who she really is. I hope to develop the story to show that she is indeed very bright, but just uses her charms to get what she wants.
Oddly enough, I sometimes find it much easier to get what I want with feminine wiles than brains. The years of my agnst about my grevious fate are hopefully over. I want this to be a comically fun romp!
I am even thinking of doing all this under a pseudonym just to erase old baggage.
Many Blessings
Khadijah Gwen
Actually...
...what you're talking about, and what Weber uses, is the third way of getting around the barrier: hyperspace. Instead of taking a bubble of normal space and with you, and bending it through the rest of space ("warp" drive), or relying on a higher-spatial-dimensional connection between two points in normal space ("wormhole" drive), one travels somehow in "different" space. In Weber's case, he talks about hyperspace as being a parallel to normal space where each point that corresponds to a normal space point is closer to all the others, and thus travel from point "A" to point "B" takes less time, and so nominally sub-light speeds produce effective trans-light speeds; the different "bands" represent levels at which this effect is increasingly intensified; thus the "Alpha Band" positions point "A" and point "B" closer together than normal space, but the "Beta Band" positions them closer still, and so on; strictly speaking, Weber's "hyperspace" is not a classical hyperspace, but includes elements of "warp" drive-ism, and he incorporates wormholes in his system as well). Weber's stuff is nominally all within the Milky Way, though the absolute positions are somewhat irrelevant, as the Manticoran Wormhole Junction (and other Wormhole Junctions and hyperspace "currents" and "waves" make the actual volumes less pertinent than the functional ones they create. That is, the Solarian League and Manticore, for example, are relatively close together due to wormhole transit, despite their actual "linear" space distance.
If you'd like, I can try to give a more lay-comprehensible answer. Just PM me if you'd like one. ^__^
-Liz
-Liz
Successor to the LToC
Formerly known as "momonoimoto"
Infinite Improbability Drive
Douglas Adams came up with the Infinite Improbability Drive. For an Instant, the spacecraft exists everywhere in the universe, and then appears at the destination, usually.
Mr. Ram
Or, more sedately...
...there's Slartibartfast's ship, which is powered by a bistromathic drive.
--Ben
As the right side of the brain controls the left side of the body, then only left-handers are in their right mind!
Also...
The warp 10 ship Tom Paris flew. Although you might not enjoy the horrible mutations that go along with it...
G11
Khadijah Gwen, if you haven't read Sarah Bayen's G11 trilogy, then it's definitely worth a look, and provides one approach to some of the issues you raise.
Sarah Bayen's Stories
Practical Space
Bike Resources
Sarah Bayen's stories
I just finished reading her first book, and I must say it is some of the most pleasant reading I have done in a long time. I would have happily paid for it but the Lulu thingie doesn't seem functional.
Thank you so much PS
Khadijah Gwen
Sarah Bayen's writing
You're most welcome Khadijah Gwen.
You'll find Sarah's other writing equally rewarding I'm sure.
You might also be interested in Angharad's Blog Entry.
Primo SciFi
Bike Resources
space travel
Imagine a robot capable of rearranging atoms. Feed it scans of all the people who will be your colonists, then send it blasting off into space at sublight speeds. Centuries later, it arrives at its destination planet and builds the colony from local matter, including the colonists. (And suppose that somewhere in its data matrix a couple records got corrupted along the way, and it builds Alice's body with Bob's mind.)
4 transistors was a big deal!
It was 1970 and I was sitting in a class at Clackamas Community College. My professor walked in while almost doing hand stands. "Look at this guys, there are 4 transistors on this little chip!" I think he called it LSI or Large Scale Integration. He went on to say that very soon, we'd have a whole radio on one LSI chip. Techtronix was big, and I don't think that Intel, at least in Oregon was anything more than a glimmer in someones eye.
Look at what has happened in just 40 years? I remember the first video game I saw. It was called "Asteroids" and it chilled me to look at it being played by young teens. "They are being taught to be murderers", I thought. Oh, there have been astonishing advancements in electronics, perhaps mostly good. I just wish that those involved with the distribution of the work to the young had a moral compass.
Who am I to say anything, I am sitting here with two computers on my desk, a printer, a scanner, about 500 gig of storage. I still have vista on this machine, so I can't run Flight Sim. Soon, I'll upgrade to the next level and hope that makes things better.
I doubt that I'll make it another 40 years; getting too tired. Besides the young know everything, they can handle it, right?
Khadijah Gwen
Rather earlier, I think.
In the mid to late 60s we were using integrated operational amplifiers containing a lot more than 4 transistors. SGS-Fairchild were supplying ua702 amplifiers at a cost of about £35 a throw IIRC. They worked well until they suffered from the dreaded 'Purple Plague' which I think was some kind of corrosion on the substrate. The devices were in 8 pin aluminium packets which were about 5mm diameter and 5mm high. Intel was created a few years later (1968) as a child of the so-called Fairchildren when Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce left Fairchild to design a simple micro-controller.
I was designing circuits with those Op-amps (and terrified to damage one because each one cost more than a week's wages) in the 60s. I also delivered a series of lectures about the potential for micro-processors within the company. Long time ago and I've forgotten most of it :) So don't quote me.
In the meantime do what most most space opera SF writers do, ignore the current state of the art, invent a instant warp drive with some cod science and press on regardless to the edges of universe. The technology is irrelevant the story is king.
Robi
Transistors
Actually, my thinking improved when my two little brains were removed. They interferred with the big one. HaHa
I remember getting my first transistor radio. It was amazing at that time.
Hilltopper
My very first Radio
We used to live within a mile of KEX Radio and it was so strong that I wound a coil of very fine wire on a 2x2 block that was about 8" long and then used a diode to make a primitive "Tank Circuit". I usd ear phones until I got a little single tube amplifier.
Later, a huge station was erected near that one and there were lots of complaints that that people could hear that station by putting a pan on an electric stove burner. I wonder if it partially fried me gonies and me brain?
Khadijah
Portable Wormholes
Yup, most authors just use wormholes to cross the vast distances. So, if you invented a method of focusing gravity into a lens and then poked a hole in the center of the lens... you'd have a portable wormhole. Simple to do - after consuming a bottle of wine while watching the ball drop!
Webber in his Honor Harrington series postulated that some (many?) stellar systems would have wormholes formed by gravitational effects/attractions between massive stellar bodies. When humans learned how to detect and traverse these gravitational anomalies, the "universe" shrank into manageable distances. The speed of light remains unchallenged, but by sidestepping into a different physics it's limitations can be ignored.
Hope this helps.
Some days you're the pigeon, some days you're the statue
FTL, hmmm, let me see...
There are several ways to do FTL...
E.E. "Doc" Smith (in the Lensmen books) just handwaved off Einstein's barrier by means of nullification of inertia: if inertial mass is zero, doesn't matter for how large a factor it's multiplied by relativistic effects, it *stays* zero. And so you can keep accelerating, limited only by the friction of the interstellar medium on your force fields. Conveniently, he also postulated that matter density outside galaxies is way lower than inside galaxies (not an unreasonable assumption), meaning that you can achieve far higher speeds when traveling between galaxies.
Many authors, notably Isaac Asimov, used the concept of instantaneous interstellar "jumps". Those are conceptually similar to wormholes, in which you assume our four-dimensional space-time is folded (more like "crumpled") in the higher dimensions like a wadded sheed of paper. Any place the sheet "touches" itself it's possible to "jump" from one part of the sheet to another (imagine an ant walking through that crumpled wad of paper...). Speed does not really apply to this, although total travel time is usually not instantaneous because you have to travel at sublight speeds to the "sweet spot" where the jump is possible, and long travels usually involve a lot of shorter jumps. Other examples I remember using the concept: Niven & Pournelle's "The Mote in God's Eye", Heinlein's "Starman Jones."
Hyperspace, as mentioned, involve jumping to a "smaller" parallel universe which still keeps a 1-to-1 relationship with our space. Kinda jumping from the real world to a map, moving a bit on the map and them jumping back. That's how interstellar travel worked in the "Babylon 5" universe. In B5, most regular ships can't do the parallel-universe jump on their own, and so depend on "jumpgates". Military vessels have huge, expensive engines that can open "jumppoints" unassisted. Keep in mind that you can tweak the travel distances to your needs -- the travel time in hyperspace is shorter, but the relationship is not necessarily in straight proportion to the regular universe. Think of the hyperspace as a *weirdly distorted* map.
I was never a big fan of the concept of "Warping", like in Star Trek; it kinda means "yes, it's FTL, only it works as if it were not" -- and disguises it under techobabble. Doc Smith's approach, which achieves similar results, at least takes the thing head-on and kinda thumbs its nose at the thing. But warbing goes well with the whole "Space is like the sea" trope.
Star Wars ships (and a number of other fictional authors, including, I think, the FTL ships in Heinlein's "Friday") apparently don't interact with the rest of the universe while going FTL. Maybe they get translated into tachyons, or are shunted to a parallel universe where rules are different or something.
And then, of course, there is the Douglas Adams way, already mentioned... Bistromatic drive rules!
By the way, regarding that comment about the "Asteroids" game, I give you this quote:
"Computer games don't affect kids; I mean if Pac-Man affected us as kids, we'd all be running around darkened rooms, munching magic pills and listening to repetitive electronic music." -- Marcus Brigstocke, English comedian
Recurring Dream
When I was a child, Andre Norton and Heinlein were running in my blood. As an Adult, I learned that there really are no complicated troubleshooting problems. When it did take me a long time to solve a problem, it was almost always some little assumption I had made.
Over the years, I have had the same dream about a half dozen times. It is always a sort of space sailing ship that looked almost identical to a ship in the post Columbus Era. It is three masted, wood coated with pitch, and sailed by people who look oddly like a combination of American Indian, and Arab. I encounter them on a wide plain, and they want me to go with them, but first I have to get rid of all the metal in my body including any metalic scraps that somehow wound up there. They took my fillings by simply healing my teeth.
Their method of travel was simply the purity of thought of their Shaman, who sat near the Focsle. The ship had air, though I have no idea where it came from.
I did have a rapt fascination for a fellow named George Adamski, a UFOlogist. I must have been about 12 and I actually believed his books at the time. :)
I think I will just take Grover's advice and just blow past it, not even mentioning the problem because the story is about people and the technology part of it simply does not interest me. :)
Many Blessings
Khadijah Gwen
Invent Science
Or invent your own science. I used a alternate universe called "Transition" which has unexplained beings that will turn you into something else if you stay there too long.
A comment on Sir Lee's name.
i must say that there was a time, when all a Master would have had to do to get me as a 24/7 TPE slave, would be to tell me where to meet you.
Ma Salaama
Khadijah Gwen