FTL travel

Black holes are definitely real things.

Quote :

Teleportation scans you and transmits all the information using radio-waves or another form of electromagnetic radiation and creates a clone at the other end, then destroys the original. It is not instantaneous, photons cannot travel faster than the speed of light.

Quantum entanglement can transfer information across any distance in zero time. Info

~sciocont wrote:

Black holes are definitely real things.

Quote :

Teleportation scans you and transmits all the information using radio-waves or another form of electromagnetic radiation and creates a clone at the other end, then destroys the original. It is not instantaneous, photons cannot travel faster than the speed of light.

Quantum entanglement can transfer information across any distance in zero time. Info

I had a simmilar idea, but wouldn't it require preparation/already entangled objects and/or space? Ofcourse, that holds unless you have an absolute scale for universal coordinates.

EDIT: You gave me another one of them ideas. Use entanglement to teleport =D

Ok, I sort of had this concept for a race on the concept race thread I have yet to post.

So, as speed increases in space, mass will also increase until it will reaches the "speed limit" of lightspeed. What I had in mind is for the ship to sort of, merge itself with the 4th dimension partially, so it is sort of there and yet not there. As a way to get around the mass problem and push to FTL speeds.

Feel free to tear this concept to shreds.

Immortal_Dragon wrote:

Ok, I sort of had this concept for a race on the concept race thread I have yet to post.

So, as speed increases in space, mass will also increase until it will reaches the "speed limit" of lightspeed. What I had in mind is for the ship to sort of, merge itself with the 4th dimension partially, so it is sort of there and yet not there. As a way to get around the mass problem and push to FTL speeds.

Feel free to tear this concept to shreds.

Why mass increase?

But yeah I think that works, its kind of warp speed, like that used in Warhammer 40k. We can't prove it one way or another so as long as we justify it and stay within our own boundaries its fine.

Well, I sort of thought it would be needed to get past that, but maybe it doesn't since it is merging with another dimension and partially not existing.

I thought up another while away from the computer, and this may be similar to another idea posted on this site, or another type of travel in another game, but I'll put it up.

I was thinking something like a star/warp gate, but instead of simply being like an expressway through space, these gates connect to a pocket dimension I for now call the Nether. The ship will have a transmitter on it that the gates can lock onto, and once the ship is in the Nether, the gate at the destination will lock onto it, and open a tear back into normal space, allowing for near-instantaneous travel between star systems connected by these gates.

The way it would work in the game would be that the player builds the gate, they can add a simple transmitter part to the ship (or have it already included automatically with the discovery of the invention) they want to send through, order the ship to go to the destination gate, and the ship enters the local gate, wait a few seconds, and then the ship will come out at its destination gate, ready for more orders.

The problem would be setting up the gate network in the first place, just like a stargate or warp gate.

Pocket dimension, too sci-fi, I don't know, I'll let you all decide.

Well we cloud have both in a way. Use warp speed to explore and then build warp gates between locations. Standard warp speed would be a lot slower than using the gates of course.

That last concept wasn't really a warp gate, it is sending a ship to a dimension that is existing within the current one (Thrive's), and the ship is only there for a few seconds at least until the destination gate locks onto its signal and pulls it out. Thus it is nearly instantaneous travel, not truly instant like teleportation, but kind of close. My intention was to get away from the traditional stargates and warp gates.

My personal view of a warp gate is simply an expressway through space, what would take the regular drives weeks, months, or even years to traverse is cut down significantly by the gate's dedicated systems.

Is there something I missed in your post Inca, because I may have misunderstood your meaning.

If you're talking about wormholes, they will be in the game. The three types of FTL travel derived from the Research Web are Warp Drives, Wormhole Generators, and Dark Matter Boosters.

No, I'm not talking wormholes.

I'll try to explain this again. Say the "Nether" is a box that you can access in one location, and another person can access in another location. You put something in the box and tell the other person to take that object out on their end. Since they can access the same things in the box that you can, they are able to take out what you have put in. The Nether Gate works the same way, except the Nether is a box that is in itself a nearly infinite void that can hold massive quantities of mass and material, such as ships and other large objects.

This process will allow for nearly instantaneous travel (with emphasis on "nearly") between two places, but is not teleportation, as the matter itself is moving. The gates represent simple openings in that void. The first gate opens access to the Nether, the ship goes in, and the receiving gate will lock onto the ship's transmitter signal (generic part for TO/unseen addition), and open the Nether in front of it, and the ship moves through this opening under its own power. This entire process would ideally take a few seconds to a couple minutes, in short, severely shortening response times and the like.

To summarize, Pocket Dimension Gates.

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And could you possibly explain Dark Matter Boosters, they sound interesting.

What you are explaining about the nether doesn't sound very realistic, nor make much sense. From what I understand wormhole generators already fulfill that purpose.

Dark Matter Boosters are simply mentioned and not explained, so I cannot answer you.

Well, the other three methods of travel are not entirely realistic either, but they do seem more realistic than the "Nether" does at the moment.

But from what I understand wormholes that are stable enough to travel through safely are hard enough to find when they do occur and possibly even harder to make artificially. And they are also bends in space and time. They are little more than fancy expressways to me.

In my head this concept seemed very different from wormholes, and I really do want to come up with a unique concept for FTL travel, but maybe this isn't it. Otherwise it is really an unneeded use of forum space.

Harnessed wormholes and warp drives are seen as feasible, but requiring lots of energy, according to theoretical physicists. What's more, there is a difference between realism, predictable realism, and unrealism. A car is realistic, in that sense, because we know its possible to make a car, we know how to make a car, we do make cars, and we use cars. Something that is predictably realistic is something like extraterrestrial colonization. We know its possible to do so, we know methods of doing so, but we cannot do so, we haven't done so, and we don't have the technology or resources to do so. Something like the nether idea falls into the last category, especially since there is no scientific explanation for it I can think of.

Uh, Nick, to me, the nether is already in the scrapyard, and I'm trying to figure something else out. Thanks for the explanation anyway.

I would have pulled a theory from an old documentary about surviving the death of the Sun (and from there Earth) by using a huge concentration of energy in one spot to tear open reality, but that's really more like a wormhole and does not justify my idea at all.

Other ideas I came up with soon after, like an Antimatter Drive, too much like Dark Matter Boosters, is out.

Then came the High Gravity Slingshot, but that went to the scrapyard too since gravity is not strong enough and I don't have a scientific explanation for it either.

Anything else I come up with will have some serious brainpower behind it though.

I don't know why it is so necessary to come up with more FTL alternatives, I think 3 is good.

I don't see it as necessary, I just wanted to come up with something that wasn't as (in my eyes) conventional as a wormhole generator or warp drive. I can respect the three that are there already, it was my creative side that took hold there for that time.

I'll try and find something else to contribute to in the meantime.

EDIT: That, and my brain likes even numbers, sorry. :oops: 

While this may be premature, allow me to throw in my two cents. Thrive should utilize three different FTL devices for simplicity's sake. Warp Drive, Jump/Warpgate, and Wormhole generator.

Warp Drive: This would be the first form of FTL a species should discover. It allows for a single ship to feasibly travel in and between the stars at the cost of energy and fuel. For the extra mile in realism, base it on Harold White's theoretical Warp Drive technology. He utilizes an "exotic matter" ring, that helps to produce a warp field around a ship. The Warp Drive should be able to be up-gradable for faster speeds, lower energy consumption, and smaller sizes.

Jumpgate: The second form of FTL, this technology uses two Jumpgate nodes and allows a ship to travel far faster than a Warp Drive can ever go. This technology would consume more energy per jump than Warp Drive would for travel, but allows for many ships to begin passing through two systems that have them. Warp Drive is necessary to travel between a planet and set up a jump gate node. I don't have any real science behind this, I just feel this is a good intermediate technology. This should be up-gradable in terms of lower energy consumption, increased range, and increased accuracy along with a variety of individual upgrades (friend or foe detection between gates, linking gates with other races, etc.)

Wormhole Generator: A final form of FTL travel, Wormhole generators allows for instantaneous travel between two static points at the cost of tremendous amounts of energy. The build time for this project would be high, the initiation of the wormholes would cost an astronomical amount of energy, and maintaining the wormhole would be cheaper than reinitiating it. This particular technology is for enormous empires where Jumpgates are not fast enough. The idea for these would be that you'd put them in a different hub of your empire for instant travel to any part of the galaxy. The science behind this is of course the Einstein-Rosen Bridge that allows for two different points to be linked together. This should be up-gradable in terms of lower initiation energy, lower maintenance energy, and lower build costs with a tremendously expensive up-grade to allow for a wormhole to become like jump gates in terms of "nodes" instead of two points.

Again this is just my two cents and may be a bit unnecessary to talk about since we are so far away from anything resembling a space stage.

you forgot one of the most (in)famous......the infinite improbability drive.......(okay this is more of a joke, but hey you wanted something out of the box right?)

The thing is, there are already three techs Nick said are established, he even told me so on this very thread. They are also meant to be equals if I remember correctly, all three are expensive so it would behoove players to only have one form or another.

1. Warp Drive

2. Wormhole Generator

3. Dark Matter Boosters

Basically. You remembered well.

Well as this is a discussion on design I posted my post to let my ideas be heard. We are so early within the design process at this stage that saying any form of design choices made are set in stone would be kind of silly.

Anyways, the idea behind my post was not the technologies involved but to add some depth and complexity into the development of a galactic infrastructure. Simply put, you can break down my idea into three categories (which I assigned technologies to, but I do not feel the technologies behind the different forms of FTL are important as long as we can place these forms into the technology paths that have been decided.)

Here are three categories to take away from my post:

Free-Roam Travel(My Warpdrive): Analogous to a car in most aspects, allows for personal transportation of a single ship through interstellar space and does not require any specific requirements to reach stars, you can just point into a directions and fly into a star. I would assume building ships with the Free-Roam Engine would be more expensive than one without.

Node Based Transportation(My Jumpgate): Analogous to a public transportation system such as trains, allows for large amounts of ships to pass through different transportation nodes at a quicker rate than warp drive. This is to establish quick trade lanes without having to relegate oneself to a Free-Roam engine to get large ships from place to place. In fact, once these are built between two systems, ships without (what I assume to be) expensive Free-Roam engines can travel between stars using these gates. These initially would likely be used at key systems, using Free-Roam Engines between the systems near-by. Once you become bigger, you could allow a node to be built in every system if you so desire

Point-to-Point(My Wormhole Generator): Analogous to airports(sort of), These would be massive structures for massive galactic empires where the node based transportation system no longer provide enough speed to reach a destination in your empire without investing a lot of time traveling between Nodes. These Point-to-Point gates would be completely static (unless you research something astronomically expensive) between systems and would be a large investment with a very nice pay off of reaching one end of your galactic empire to the other in an instant.

I actually think if you can find a way to fuse our ideas of the different technological paths of FTL with the different forms of FTL it would add to the game more than the ideas individually. Say for instance, if you take the Warp Drive path your Free-Roam engines are better(or maybe node? I'm not entirely sure what a darkmatter booster is), Wormhole generators make your Point-to-Point systems better, and Dark Matter Boosters would make your node base better (Or Free-Roam; see note beside Warp Drive). This would be an early concept and the benefits and penalties of one form of FTL technology pathing can be further expanded upon.

I have been browsing these sections for ages, please bare with me while I cut in my two cents.

What I would like in FTL travel is to see it create interactive gameplay, that adds a level of strategy (it's a game after all, it needs to be realistic, but it also needs to be fun). Here's how the hierarchy of techs for FTL should look like:

Warp Drive: The idea behind it is that it should allow you to get anywhere given enough time. The speed of warp increases as the tech is researched, but it will always take time to get from A to B. This is analogous to Star Trek tech, but if researched to max it could become viable like Star Wars hyperdrive.

Dark Matter Boosters: The idea behind it is that it should allow almost instant travel from A to B, but the catch is that it should have a range limitation, such like 20-30 ly for instance. Basically, if A and B are distant enough, you would need to jump to C and D first, spending more resources with each jump. If nothing is in the way, warp is the only way. This is analogous to Spore's tech, where you need to jump from star to star. You would not need to build anything at the target star, just have it in range to jump there.

Wormhole Generator: The idea behind it is that it should allow instant travel from A to B, so long as a "gate" is built in both points. Building the gate should cost a lot, and the energy to activate the gate should be huge, so basically, a vast empire could build a few of these only. This is Stargate/Mass Effect type tech, it should ultimately help navigate the galaxy easier.

The concept of these ideas should add to what Nick said earlier (yes, I read it all), but it should give players options, so that, if all 3 are maxed out, one inferior-looking tech should still be viable and just as usable, along with what Falthron mentioned about infrastructure. For instance, I wanna run 20000 ly in my galaxy to a remote star between two galactic arms (50 ly away from the closest star). What would I do? I would wormhole my way to the closest gate, then jump star by star until I get close to the remote star. At this point, I couldn't jump anymore, so I would warp the last 50 light years to the location. With a maxed out warp drive, it should not take too long, but it would be my only option.

Even military strategy would work with this idea. Consider this. The AI would effect the following strategy to conquer a vital star of yours. Enter system, destroy wormhole generator tech, and jam the Dark Matter tech, so you can't "teleport" to the system, even if it's in range. You are then forced to use warp drive to attack the system, but the enemy would know your entry vector. You would need to devise a strategy to retake your system. Adds a bit of spice for those who want challenges in expanding their "empire". It could even be made so that jamming takes time to develop, so you can counter-attack fast enough to still be able to jump there.

The (equivalent tech->player will take long to have all 3) idea will not work out IMO. But if all 3 work together, in order to add depth, you would make the Space Stage, an already massive experience, even better. Making your civilization even get out of the local Bubble could maybe take years of game play, but people would consider it only if it's much much more than what Spore was.

If anything above is useful, I am glad that I could help. If not, I wish you good luck further on, this project is a tremendous effort on everyone involved, I simply cannot wait to see the final layout.

I have an idea: perhaps a something like a FTL monorail? lets say, hypothetically, that crafts could only reach the speed of light and beyond on some sort of monorail like object that work like a particle collider in which a ship can attach to this "monorail" and nearly instantaneously move from point A to point B, But the catch is that it takes time to build these monorails. In the beginning it should only be simple stuff like an A to B system but later it can be much more complex systems like an A to B,C, and D system.

Your thoughts?

Derpybats wrote:

I have an idea: perhaps a something like a FTL monorail? lets say, hypothetically, that crafts could only reach the speed of light and beyond on some sort of monorail like object that work like a particle collider in which a ship can attach to this "monorail" and nearly instantaneously move from point A to point B, But the catch is that it takes time to build these monorails. In the beginning it should only be simple stuff like an A to B system but later it can be much more complex systems like an A to B,C, and D system.

Your thoughts?

A monorail, or a particle in a particle collider, would never be able to be faster than the speed of light. With enough energy, you could theoretically almost reach the speed of light, although you would need probably more resources than the resources available in a stellar system. ( Just think that the distance to the nearest star to the sun is around 4 light years, so you would need enough metal to build a 4 light years long monorail line)