What would be the implications of wormhole-based FTL travel ?

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**LethalShade**

I'm still working on the background of a Sci-Fi setting, thinking about FTL travel. Wormholes seemed like a good idea, but I can't figure out all the implications of actually creating negative mass (to sustain the wormhole entrance) and using wormhole-based FTL travel, and I don't want to spread Misapplied Phlebotinum everywhere.

Basically the ship generates a shortcut between two points of the universe with a short-lived wormhole. Time travel isn't possible as the entry and exit points are stationary and don't move with the ship.

FTL ramming isn't possible either, because the ship never go faster than light (or faster than its cruising speed for that matters) at any given time. Sending warheads is of course possible.

FTL travel is kinda slow in-universe, taking several months to reach Proxima Centauri.

Opening wormholes inside stars, planets or other ships would be possible (as there isn't any magical sensors to detect the presence of gravity wells on the other side), but I don't know how it would look like. The ship would probably just merge with whatever it collides.

So, if someone has enough spare time to help me on this, it would be greatly appreciated.

**LethalShade**

In the setting, it's a somewhat new technology, in the hands of one big company which have monopoly upon space travel, space mining operations and space freighting. Humanity has only 5 colonies, no more than 1 million people per colony (at the moment). Sentient aliens are nowhere to be found, however complex extraterrestrial life exists (and was even discovered in the Solar System, on Europa).

Spaceships are rather big, the largest being 1.6km long cargo ships. Military ships are much smaller and maneuverable.

Wormhole mouths will probably move according to the nearest gravitational perturbation, but they're only created when the ship needs to get inside/outside and the ship itself cannot modify their location at will (it's always a one-way trip between two fixed sets of coordinates).

-> Thus unmanned FTL probes must to be sent to allow communications between colonies or ships.

The Human Ecumene's military has access to FTL travel, but it is really expensive and there isn't many spaceships anyway (the company has only a handful of cargo ships, and the military doesn't have much more).

Insurgent and terrorist groups were crushed decades ago. Colonies will probably try to gain their independence in the future, but they are way too young.

**LethalShade**

Kilkrazy wrote:
Violation of causality is the major implication of any FTL communication.

That said, as I understand it, Science has not made its mind up whether causality really exists or is merely an artifact of human psychology.

Well, isn't it only true for real FTL speeds ? The whole point of wormholes is that information never exceed light speed. Sure you could, with a technobabble-powered telescope, see yourself entering the wormhole light-years away. But you can't communicate with your former self, as it's just an optical illusion, so everything is fine.

**LethalShade**

juraigamer wrote:
LethalShade wrote:
I can't figure out all the implications of actually creating negative mass (to sustain the wormhole entrance) and using wormhole-based FTL travel, and I don't want to spread Misapplied Phlebotinum everywhere..

As someone who already wrote the first book in a series that deals extensively with this, all I can do is point you in the right direction.

First things first, if you don't have the following website as something to read, do it: http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/

Also, a great website to ask questions and get real answers: http://stackexchange.com/

The first website sets out what you have to do to solve your issues.

Opening wormholes inside stars, planets or other ships would be possible

What? You realize the levels of nonsense involved in that? Just the gravitational differences of a planet alone would cause havoc on the ship as it exited the wormhole.

You're probably looking at the "Portal" method, which is similar to wormholes except they reduce the distance between to points to 0, wormholes only shrink it down to close to 0.

Spaceships are rather big, the largest being 1.6km long cargo ships. Military ships are much smaller and maneuverable.

So cargo ships could completely out gun military ships with ease then?

Wormhole mouths will probably move according to the nearest gravitational perturbation

You have to realize that if you open a wormhole, it needs to stay put. What you're forgetting is in terms of the whole universe, everything moving really fast. Lets ignore the fact that galaxies are flying around and ludicrous speeds, or that galaxies are spinning/stuff inside them is moving, or that the speed of a planet is actually pretty damn fast when it's in orbit. Everything moving, you need to account for this, not simply say "it just works"

Insurgent and terrorist groups were crushed decades ago

Completely? Nonsense, space is big, lots of room for dissidents. Furthermore you will always have those with differing opinions.

in the hands of one big company which have monopoly upon space travel

Which means people are actively trying to steal the knowledge.

I'll do my best to monitor this thread and help answer questions.

Thanks for the reply.

First point : Yep, the ship would be utterly destroyed.

Cargo ships would indeed out gun military if they had weapons.

Concerning wormhole moving, that's exactly what I wanted to say. The spelling was quite random, I admit.

Completely crushed ? Nope. But that's kinda obvious. Just wanted to say that no insurgent cell is currently actively opposing the government. If they're up to something, they're still trying to figure out what to do and how.
Legal opposition (politicians and so on) is of course active.

Even with the knowledge, you need the infrastructures to produce the drive and the ship (or just steal both of them). And it would take a lot of time. (Definitely possible though)

Grey Templar -> Yep... That seems right. It all depends on the power source anyway.

**LethalShade**

Ensis Ferrae wrote:
Just have the ships rip into an alternate dimension filled with sentient beings that we don't understand.... Then, you have these ships protected by "special" people who have "abilities" to keep those sentient beings from getting inside your ship.

What could possibly go wrong?

Absolutely nothing *gets slaughtered by a random Lord of Change*

**LethalShade**

Well, wouldn't realistic space battles be two fleet engaging each other thousands of kilometers away (or just filling space with warheads/mines/drones eating the hull) ?

**LethalShade**

juraigamer wrote:

Please take the time to read the atomic rockets page, I spent a good month acting like an amateur scientist with all the info I had to compile for my setting.

I'm already reading it

**LethalShade**

Peregrine wrote:
Grey Templar wrote:
Realistic space warships will more closely resemble 18th century warships, massive vessels bristling with guns and armor that engage in thunderous broadsides.

No, they really won't. Not at all. Armor means mass, and mass means your fuel requirements very quickly end up in the wrong part of the exponential curve. Much like modern aircraft any realistic warship is going to have an absolute minimum of armor (a very thin layer to avoid having a hole punched in the hull because you hit a grain of sand at high relative velocity) and durability will consist of redundant backup systems. And even that is going to be severely limited by mass issues.

A realistic space warship is going to be a giant fuel tank with tiny crew and weapon systems bolted on. And there will not be any thunderous broadsides. Combat is going to happen one of three ways, depending on the relative merits of laser and missile technology:

1) An exchange of missile salvos that take months (or even years!) to reach their targets, followed by an extremely brief match of point defense lasers vs. missiles that decides who lives and who dies. This quite possibly ends in mutual annihilation.

2) An exchange of laser shots at extreme range that probably kills both sides unless one side has a significant advantage in focusing and aiming technology. Even the "winner" is likely to suffer damage before they can shut down the enemy's lasers, and a damaged ship is probably a dead ship even if it survives the battle itself.

3) Why are we even fighting? There's no stealth in space, both sides probably know what the outcome of the battle is going to be, so why even take the battleships out of their parking orbits? Conflicts are decided by political alliances and nobody ever bothers with the formality of a shooting war.

If you have FTL, just send a nuclear warhead on the planet/fleet.

Realistically, yep. Starships are fuel tanks. But it's kind of boring, to be honest.

**LethalShade**

Little to no fuel ? With a reactionless drive maybe. I guess a significant part of the ship needs to be fuel even with a fusion power source.

**LethalShade**

Torga_DW wrote:
How does a corporation have a monopoly on this wormhole drive? Is it a utopian society (you mentioned lack of insurgents) and everyone is content (goverments and individuals) to have one company have the secret tech needed to travel the galaxy? The most powerful nation on the planet can't keep the president's indiscretions a secret (billy c), but one company managed to design test and manufacture ftl drives without anyone being able to compete?

Utopian society ? Hahahahaha.
No.

There is one "unified" authoritarian government for the whole Human Ecumene (Solar System + Five colonies, almost 18 billion humans), firmly interlaced with Lux Conglomerate (the corporation).
Not a particularly cruel one, but not kind either. Insurgents are into hiding.

Basically, Lux Conglomerate controls the whole production chain, from mining to manufacturing and they are the only ones to produce FTL drives (They discovered it after all), space elevators, mining probes and spaceships (but they're not the only ones to use them).

Vaktathi -> It needs to be stabilized with some kind of exotic particle with negative mass, IIRC.

SilverMK2 -> True

**LethalShade**

Orlanth wrote:
Fixed jump point or gate based science fiction has its merits. As you have routes between jump points that do not deviate. This means you can have de facto terrirtorial expansion in space, and deffacto fortification in space. Wormholes beome choke points and orbiting fortress space stations guard them, either that or fleets.
You can have unstable wormholes only smaller smuggler ships can traverse to open things out, you can have newly discovered wormholes that change the map and direction of travel. You can have transport routes system to system that pirates can picket. You can have devices that close wormholes for good.
Most of all you can have a starmap that makes sense in real terms mad up of systems with linked lines between them. Its unambiguous and not scale dependent, you can avoid movement scale in sapce altigether with this system, but you can also do so with jump and hyperdrive travel.

You can add a lot of room for politics and map based strategy to your SF with this type of system. Warp or hyperdrive movement allows far more freedom but when you consider the vastness of space it means that combat is only realistic near planetary orbits.

The plot isn't directly about space combat, politics or trade anyway. It's more about "What if the wrong coordinates were entered/the FTL drive failed, causing the ship to exit the wormhole in a planet's gravity well and then crashing down with all its cargo (mainly weapons, vehicles, industrial machinery, scientific gear, some prototypes and supplies) leaving only one/some survivor/s stranded in his/their escape pod on a planet where everything is trying to kill him/them".

This is why a ship generating wormholes would be more interesting for my setting (and it somewhat seems more convenient than hyperspace/subspace/portals/warp to me).

You may ask "So why do you bother with the background?"
I like well-defined settings.

**LethalShade**

juraigamer wrote:
Orlanth wrote:
Warp or hyperdrive movement allows far more freedom

Actually warp and hyperdrive mean you would never have space combat. If you can jump just outside a planet with your whole fleet from across the galaxy, you would only fight to defend a few key locations. Then, it would be with orbiting defenses.

In order to have space battles, you have to have a FTL system that allows them to occur. This is a primary problem with many sci fi settings, combat just wouldn't occur.

LethalShade wrote:
exit the wormhole in a planet's gravity well and then crashing down with all its cargo

Hold up, are you talking about in space or actually in the planets atmosphere? If the latter, then the ship gets broken apart by gravity as it exits the wormhole, literally snapped like a twig. From 0 gravity to gravity.

Otherwise I assume you have ships that can't enter a planets atmosphere, which means they would have safeguards against such situations. This would mean someone sabotaged their safeguards to cause them to crash.

Not in the atmosphere.

Either a big human mistake (think Chernobyl), insurgent crew members trying to seize the ship (crashing it in the process), a software error...

Ensis Ferrae :

Wormholes aren't fixed points, ships generate their own. And well, there isn't pirates. FTL-able ships are way too rare and expensive (It was discovered less than 50 years ago).

**LethalShade**

Torga_DW wrote:
LethalShade wrote:
Torga_DW wrote:
How does a corporation have a monopoly on this wormhole drive? Is it a utopian society (you mentioned lack of insurgents) and everyone is content (goverments and individuals) to have one company have the secret tech needed to travel the galaxy? The most powerful nation on the planet can't keep the president's indiscretions a secret (billy c), but one company managed to design test and manufacture ftl drives without anyone being able to compete?

Utopian society ? Hahahahaha.
No.

There is one "unified" authoritarian government for the whole Human Ecumene (Solar System + Five colonies, almost 18 billion humans), firmly interlaced with Lux Conglomerate (the corporation).
Not a particularly cruel one, but not kind either. Insurgents are into hiding.

Basically, Lux Conglomerate controls the whole production chain, from mining to manufacturing and they are the only ones to produce FTL drives (They discovered it after all), space elevators, mining probes and spaceships (but they're not the only ones to use them).

I'm less interested in the physics and more the humanitarian side of things. As i said, how exactly are they keeping exclusive control of this world-shattering technology? Why haven't other corporations stolen/copied this technology? Why is the(a?) government allowing a private corporation this much power? Who is enforcing the patents? A utopian society is the only answer i can come up with.

Utopian or dystopian. Look at Alien's Weyland-Yutani. Ever heard of another company in the movies ? Nope.

They allowed their government (Earth wasn't unified yet) a cheap access to Earth orbit, created the drones and infrastructures that solved a huge ore crisis and then discovered a technology that mankind could only dream of, allowing them to spread through the galaxy (albeit at a slow pace, colonization was started some years ago). No wonder they are powerful.
This, plus they build all the government spaceships for them, and are the only ones to have mining operations on human colonies (mainly Gliese 832 c, Gliese 667 Cc and Kapteyn b).

Sure they have competition on other fields, mostly research and industry. But they are the only fish on the aerospace market, for now.

Their FTL drive would be difficult to steal. Competitors would need the actual device or the appropriate infrastructures to build it. As humanity only possesses a handful ships, and there's no backup FTL drive stored somewhere (they are built with the ship). And the government will not let that happen either. They completely rely on Lux's cargoes to provide supplies to the colonies.
Not impossible, though. Maybe some company will manage to build its own in the future.

**LethalShade**

I'm not very familiar with economics and politics (Still a student), so I might need help on this one if a clever explanation is required.

But I would probably take the infrastructures they own in consideration, as they are the only private company to own shipyards.

**LethalShade**

Grey Templar wrote:
If I recall correctly,its because gravity is more or less instant in its effects. Every atom in the universe has an effect on every other atom regardless of distance. Of course beyond certain distances the effect is very infantessimally small.

It kind of violates laws of physics, as you could use these "instant" effects to communicate faster than light.

**LethalShade**

I'm not into very hard SF for this setting, with major deviations being FTL travel, probably artificial gravity (Could be avoided, but... Rule of Cool, and it allows horizontal spaceships), and miniaturized fusion reactors. Not much else.

FTL sensors and communications are non-existent, with unmanned probes doing the job (at a sluggish pace).

**LethalShade**

It can have some nasty effects when both you and the one you're communicating with move at high speeds.