camouflage
gaslit at scale.
So, I've spent ages reading wiki, and the replies to this thread thanks f'that and a friend of mine with an idea or two, and basicaly I've decided I'll take the Alcubierre drive one please, as the most possible, for now anyway, working-title-wise.
There doesn't seem to be any plausible way to even 'cheat' FTL in as a possibility. Previously, like most hacks, I've been content to just say it's all down to some sort of "field thingy, now lets not think any more about that, on with the story".
But I can't help writing 'hard-skiffy', because it bugs me if things aren't as plausable as can be. I'd actually prefer to write some sort of magical realism so I can get on with creating a rollicking-good-yarn, but I always end-up getting bogged down in a quicksand of 'realism' and 'hardness', and the uncertainty of knowlegde I do not have. The stuff produced as a result reads to me abit dry, abit dull, infexible, and drained of imagination.
Anyway, this time I've gone for yer classic 'wharp-field' model where space-time just kind of helpfully contracts directly ahead of the field (pull) and expands directly behind (push), with the vehicle just sort of 'drifting' at the centre of the field, unbothered by all that time-dilation nonsensebuggerfuddle in the universe outside, and in fact not really 'moving' at all. A special whizzymajig is used to generate the phenomenon in the first place using some sort of "invertiving hoo-haar" working as a source of negative energy to power the 'pull' and [mythic-terms]zero-point energy[/mythic-terms] to power the push.
Abit Trekkie but fuckit. It's called an "Alcubierre drive" that.
I imagined vehicles would be fired from some sort of "Alcubierre generator", so it's like the space-craft are fired off from this giant... 'gun' thing. The field perhaps having a certain duration or rate of degradation that translates neatly into range.
Another intersting idea I came across in the useful-tho-not-entirely-reliable wikipedia is the idea of a zone of lower-energy vacuum that carries the vehicle along inside it as it reacts with the higher energy vacuum of the rest of the univese, but I kind of suspect that would be the kind of deeply dangerous universe-eating vacuum-voodoo it's best not to fuck with, and anyway I never did really get my head around all that Gregg Egan type mumbo-jumbo.
Besides, it should be the other way around with higher-energy state vacuum potentially eating and overwhelming lower energy state vacuum depending on stuff to do with Open School, Flat School or Closed Schools of thought. Or something.
I also invented all by myself in my room late one night a method of infinate acceleration based on a rod of exotic matter where the greater the temperature-difference between one end (A) and the other(B), the greater the force of attraction of End B to End A, and the greater the force of repulsion of End A from End B (was thinking about the problem with women at the time). I decided if such a material were possible it would turn out that the relativistic effects just kind of take care of themselves in a massive accumilated release of "bow-wave" energy upon deceleration or summik (End A heated and End B cooled or something). So it's like the universe just kind of cause/consequences-up a little private relativity-pocket around the vehicle and waves it on through, muttering something about IOU-notes and settling-up accounts on arrival so the vehicle doesn't have to do something silly like accumilate infinate mass or something. Unfortunately I get the impressison that even if this cheat were allowed, an arrival-event would consist of the obliteration of several hundred stars in an all consuming wall of... whatever kind of radiation "bow-wave radiation" would consist of.
So, that's how far I got so far.
There doesn't seem to be any plausible way to even 'cheat' FTL in as a possibility. Previously, like most hacks, I've been content to just say it's all down to some sort of "field thingy, now lets not think any more about that, on with the story".
But I can't help writing 'hard-skiffy', because it bugs me if things aren't as plausable as can be. I'd actually prefer to write some sort of magical realism so I can get on with creating a rollicking-good-yarn, but I always end-up getting bogged down in a quicksand of 'realism' and 'hardness', and the uncertainty of knowlegde I do not have. The stuff produced as a result reads to me abit dry, abit dull, infexible, and drained of imagination.
Anyway, this time I've gone for yer classic 'wharp-field' model where space-time just kind of helpfully contracts directly ahead of the field (pull) and expands directly behind (push), with the vehicle just sort of 'drifting' at the centre of the field, unbothered by all that time-dilation nonsensebuggerfuddle in the universe outside, and in fact not really 'moving' at all. A special whizzymajig is used to generate the phenomenon in the first place using some sort of "invertiving hoo-haar" working as a source of negative energy to power the 'pull' and [mythic-terms]zero-point energy[/mythic-terms] to power the push.
Abit Trekkie but fuckit. It's called an "Alcubierre drive" that.
I imagined vehicles would be fired from some sort of "Alcubierre generator", so it's like the space-craft are fired off from this giant... 'gun' thing. The field perhaps having a certain duration or rate of degradation that translates neatly into range.
Another intersting idea I came across in the useful-tho-not-entirely-reliable wikipedia is the idea of a zone of lower-energy vacuum that carries the vehicle along inside it as it reacts with the higher energy vacuum of the rest of the univese, but I kind of suspect that would be the kind of deeply dangerous universe-eating vacuum-voodoo it's best not to fuck with, and anyway I never did really get my head around all that Gregg Egan type mumbo-jumbo.
Besides, it should be the other way around with higher-energy state vacuum potentially eating and overwhelming lower energy state vacuum depending on stuff to do with Open School, Flat School or Closed Schools of thought. Or something.
I also invented all by myself in my room late one night a method of infinate acceleration based on a rod of exotic matter where the greater the temperature-difference between one end (A) and the other(B), the greater the force of attraction of End B to End A, and the greater the force of repulsion of End A from End B (was thinking about the problem with women at the time). I decided if such a material were possible it would turn out that the relativistic effects just kind of take care of themselves in a massive accumilated release of "bow-wave" energy upon deceleration or summik (End A heated and End B cooled or something). So it's like the universe just kind of cause/consequences-up a little private relativity-pocket around the vehicle and waves it on through, muttering something about IOU-notes and settling-up accounts on arrival so the vehicle doesn't have to do something silly like accumilate infinate mass or something. Unfortunately I get the impressison that even if this cheat were allowed, an arrival-event would consist of the obliteration of several hundred stars in an all consuming wall of... whatever kind of radiation "bow-wave radiation" would consist of.
So, that's how far I got so far.
me skint 
