A new take on wormholes

The most appropriate place for Questions, Queries, and Quandaries regarding the nature of the Vega Strike universe and its past, present, or future history. Home to the occasional unfortunate RetCon.
Post Reply
safemode
Developer
Developer
Posts: 2150
Joined: Mon Apr 23, 2007 1:17 am
Location: Pennsylvania
Contact:

A new take on wormholes

Post by safemode »

I couldn't really think of a better forum for introducing a modification in the game for what wormholes are, and to a much lesser extent, how they look and possibly how they can be mapped/located. Unlike my hatred of SPEC, this idea really requires very little in the way of changing things, and it really doesn't change canon at all except in terminology for the most part.

My idea is to use a means of FTL similar to the wormhole method we use now but in a totally novel way. No other game, book, movie, or tv show has done things quite like the following, so we can be the first and set ourselves apart while simultaneously having a fairly believable means of FTL.

Basically, the idea is a mixture of BoseNova's and quantum teleportation. Basically, a real experiment with BoseNova's resulted in a lot of material being lost when the nova occurred. There are some ideas where the missing matter went undetected, but I want to postulate that as the bose einstein condensate collapsed, some of the material quantum teleported outside of experiment along magenetic field lines. What the experiment did was create a condensate, then apply a massive magnetic field to it, causing the condensate to collapse to undetectable size, then explode. No explanation exists for the source to the energy allowing the condensate to explode, nor to where the missing matter went.

Now, in-game, we only need to modify some storyline in minor ways. Basically, having the humans discover these naturally cold isolated regions of space (nebulas have been known to exist close to absolute zero due to particular magnetic fields in real life), very small regions, near quasars via probes. These regions catch our attention because the quasar is emitting particles that get caught within this region and every now and then, it seems that the emissions exiting the region are much less than what enters it. Further probes are sent and perhaps hundreds of years later we get data back from these early probes telling us exactly what is happening. The intense magnetic field from the quasar is collapsing what becomes a bose einstein condensate (the particles emitted from the quasar cool within the region to a condensate) and the matter simply disappears. Theoretical physics at the time this information is found suggests what is happening is quantum teleportation and we begin to experiment by recreating the conditions of the region near the quasar.

Years go by and eventually it is found to be a success. Humans look for close natural regions of ultra cold space caused by natural magnetic fields isolating space. One such region is found within the outter skirts of Sol system. A special probe is sent with what is now considered a prototype jump engine. Basically, a device that focuses a massive ultra strong magnetic field around itself. The theory being the probe will release gas (probably hydrogen, but it's not important) then activate this jump engine and the condensate will collapse, but not before the condensate forms around the probe's magnetic field. The ship should then quantum teleport along the natural magnetic field lines that create the region to another sister nexus somewhere else in space. It will then attempt to come back after taking some readings and images by doing the process again.

The mission is an amazing success. And so starts humankind's exploration of interstellar space.

It becomes clear however, over time, that there is far too much order in the organization of the regions in space that nexus's occur. A theory develops that what humans have discovered is actually an artificial network. Basically, a teleportation web network created by an ancient, apparently extinct, civilization to reach various parts of it's galaxy wide vast empire.

The rest of what happens with discovering alien civilizations and the divergence of humankind occurs like in canon.

jump drives work pretty much like they do now, only we have an exact description of what they do, why wormholes are instant, one way, and how they function.

What visually should probably be changed is how wormholes look in game. I would suggest possibly making them only a dull deep red flash. The person actually jumping would probably not see any of the effect of their own jump, but could witness others. No lasting vortex anymore. As soon as you hit J within the region, you are gone.

Players wouldn't have to worry about gas emission and such, this would all be done automatically and you would always be assumed to have collected enough in traveling around in space. Visible condensate need not be made, though it would be cool to see the ship's mag field covered in some weird flowing substance. it wouldn't be necessary to have such an effect though, as it wouldn't glow or anything.

other story arcs related to locked gates and lost gates can be explained easily. Basically, the artificial network was created by manipulating natural phenomena creating the vast magnetic fields in such a way to place nexus' around the galaxy where the ancients saw fit. For the most part, these fields moved in sync and remained fairly stable over the millions of years they have existed. Some, however, have been altered due to super nova and the TWHON war and such. Also, locked gates could be regions of space completely surrounded by a material that mangles the nexus. By locking one side of a flux pair, quantum teleportation cannot occur. Normally you always get a flux pair, if something mucks up one nexus, it simply forms nearby. The locked gates can be said to create a monopole by cutting the field lines via a technology we dont have yet (they are ancient tech afterall). attempting to jump from the other end would result in no effect, the bose nova would not teleport anything and just release a lot of energy (seriously damaging the ship possibly). nobody has yet figured out a way to disable a lock around a "gate", nor where it would lead to.
Ed Sweetman endorses this message.
safemode
Developer
Developer
Posts: 2150
Joined: Mon Apr 23, 2007 1:17 am
Location: Pennsylvania
Contact:

Re: A new take on wormholes

Post by safemode »

This allows our FTL to totally differentiate itself from anything else. Also, it makes the tech much more believable. No subspace warping strange matter emitting crazy tech. Our jump engine is not any more exotic than than a massive ultra powerful magnet. Our means of activating the FTL, is simply to emit gas and activate the field. No need to worry about destroying the fabric of space, etc etc.

Much less is needed to be placed in a black box.


I really think such a change should be considered. It's a vast improvement over the tired and much more complicated wormhole system.
Ed Sweetman endorses this message.
ace123
Lead Network Developer
Lead Network Developer
Posts: 2560
Joined: Sun Jan 12, 2003 9:13 am
Location: Palo Alto CA
Contact:

Re: A new take on wormholes

Post by ace123 »

An interesting idea indeed.

I hate to be a skeptic, but believability is relative, and even with an arguably solid description like that, at the end it's still a sort of magic (albeit more believable than dilithium crystals and flux capacitors). It was still a jump network created by the ancients. Jumping is still just a plot device, and science will change to make this description feel either more or less plausible over time.

Also, another question is how every other race has the same technology. Was this something obvious that every major race was destined to discover at some point?

It's fine to have detailed descriptions of how the magical components of the universe work, and for some parts of the storyline it may be necessary to have a bit of high-level knowledge. I just don't want to get into too much detail about pseudophysics like pretty much every popular science fiction TV show gets into at some point (if not incessantly)

Anyway I'm fine with this becoming our official description of jump drives. Have we had anything this detailed before? or was it just like these "gate" things that are drawn by the HUD.
MC707
Venturer
Venturer
Posts: 555
Joined: Sun Jan 18, 2009 5:18 am
Location: Quito, Ecuador.
Contact:

Re: A new take on wormholes

Post by MC707 »

This seems like a great idea!
My Machine: OS: Ubuntu 8.10 (intrepid) 64 bit in a 500GB Maxtor HD @ 7200 RPM, Windows Vista PsyChoses Edition 2009 32 bit in a 500GB Samsung HD @ 7200 RPM CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Quad CPU Q6600 @ 2.40GHz GPU: nVidia GeForce 9400 GT @ 1024 MB RAM: 3891 MB
Earthlings|The End of the Internet?|FreeWebsite
safemode
Developer
Developer
Posts: 2150
Joined: Mon Apr 23, 2007 1:17 am
Location: Pennsylvania
Contact:

Re: A new take on wormholes

Post by safemode »

ace123 wrote:An interesting idea indeed.

I hate to be a skeptic, but believability is relative, and even with an arguably solid description like that, at the end it's still a sort of magic (albeit more believable than dilithium crystals and flux capacitors). It was still a jump network created by the ancients. Jumping is still just a plot device, and science will change to make this description feel either more or less plausible over time.

Also, another question is how every other race has the same technology. Was this something obvious that every major race was destined to discover at some point?

It's fine to have detailed descriptions of how the magical components of the universe work, and for some parts of the storyline it may be necessary to have a bit of high-level knowledge. I just don't want to get into too much detail about pseudophysics like pretty much every popular science fiction TV show gets into at some point (if not incessantly)

Anyway I'm fine with this becoming our official description of jump drives. Have we had anything this detailed before? or was it just like these "gate" things that are drawn by the HUD.
The answer to why other races have the technology is two fold. 1. Not all the other races were completely out of contact with the ancients. Earth was, but other places had contact with races who once had contact and so forth with the Ancients. So the technology, being integral in nature, was passed on through the ages. Other races who did not have that benefit discovered it much like how Humans did. 2. By watching the phenomena naturally occur around pulsars. Pulsars are interesting, they'd attract the attention of any space observing race and that race would soon discover this issue of missing matter.

The problem with getting too in depth with magical technology is having to create more and more fake things to make that description. No particles need to be magically created here. No subspace manipulating reverse polarity beams. It's using a known substance, bose einstein condensate, and a known technology, massive magnetic fields, and a known reaction between those two, condensate collapse and strange energy release, and proposing that another somewhat known physics phenomena occurs at the point of collapse, teleportation , to explain the missing matter which was actually witnessed in the real experiment.

That's pretty much the end of it. The only leap of faith needed is that by the condensate wrapping around the magnetic field of the ship, the entire thing is treated as a quantum object, much like the macro sized condensate is. Thus allowing the ship to teleport like a quantum particle is (and like the condensate is), and this occurs along specific field lines that traverse the galaxy and probably universe.

That is extremely more simple and requires much less faith than space time wormholes. It's also extremely novel. We'd be the only thing to use that method of travel. Everyone uses goddamn wormholes, and the whole mechanics of traveling through them requires umpteen levels of imaginary technology that would have to have been co-discovered and developed on all these different alien worlds.
Ed Sweetman endorses this message.
safemode
Developer
Developer
Posts: 2150
Joined: Mon Apr 23, 2007 1:17 am
Location: Pennsylvania
Contact:

Re: A new take on wormholes

Post by safemode »

We give a realistic means for creating a network here, Wormholes do not.

Each cold zone is a pole between magnetic field nexuses (also explaining why each zone has only one destination and that the other end can only return back to the current end). Sometimes these nexuses link up naturally near pulsars. The TWHON were obviously the first to observe this and discover how they worked and begin using them. They were probably the first to start manipulating the magnetic nexuses to move these cold zones into favorable areas where they wished to travel. They passed this technology along to the ancients, who maintained and created their own network. Over time it changes, so it needs somewhat periodic updating to continue remaining the same. Manipulating the location of nexuses requires destroying or moving stars. Only extremely advanced civilizations can do such a thing. No civilization since the ancients has been so advanced, so the network has drifted a bit, allowing the Sol system to become part of the network for the first time in recent history, explaining why aliens who travel the network haven't discovered us long ago.

It all really fits much more nicely than wormholes.

It also works very nicely with the TWHON war mucking things up and cutting people off in the network. It would have drastically altered the makeup of the network and require discovering the new locations of the cold zones and discovering where they now lead for those that changed. Civilizations dependent on them and the ancients would have collapsed in short time, taking much of the technology and maps and such with them. Only a handful of child races may have retained the technology, and this is where some current races have come into the technology. Over time maps were recreated and much of the network has been re-discovered. Though, still, some parts remain unknown. The sol area was not discovered until very recently, allowing the humans an area to expand into despite being late bloomers.


With wormholes, you have to create pretend ways of how a wormhole network is created. Pretend in the sense that such a network would have to operate on physics that is totally and completely made up. With wormholes, you have to create a means of activating them that is pretend. Pretend in the sense that, the physics needed to open a wormhole as opposed to them always being open is totally and completely made up. With wormholes, you have to create a means of traveling through them and keeping them open for the transit that is pretend. Pretend in the sense that the physics needed to keep a wormhole open depends on completely made up and imaginary matter and energy. The amount of energy hypothesized to be required to do this is pretend. Pretend in the sense that the amount of energy is so staggeringly great that each ship would have to house a neutron star and collapse it into a black hole to generate the necessary energy create one. With natural wormholes you'd have to explain how you create a subspace anomaly that bends spacetime into a funnel without altering gravity and thus pulling things into it from around it like a black hole whenever it opens (wormholes exist around planets often and each time they open it would alter gravity in a solar system greatly, causing it to become unstable). See a pattern here? Wormholes are a copout. Much more in the sense of the word than what i've suggested we use, so much more that if we are to prefer wormholes, then we have to call into question the reason why all our other technology isn't as wonderfully advanced and semi-magical. Why are we still flinging laser bolts at enemy ships when we can manipulate the fabric of space? etc etc. it's all very wrong.
Ed Sweetman endorses this message.
safemode
Developer
Developer
Posts: 2150
Joined: Mon Apr 23, 2007 1:17 am
Location: Pennsylvania
Contact:

Re: A new take on wormholes

Post by safemode »

Basically, this is all the backstory needed ....most of it is fairly the same if not more believable than than the current wormhole based backstory.

TWHON, early in their history, discover naturally occuring cold regions of space exibiting strange matter loss near pulsars and other super-massive stars. (early in their history, super massive stars were much more common, and the galaxy was quite a bit smaller).

They at first, are only able to utilize these naturally occuring regions, discovering other regions in less hostile areas of space and began using them for colonization. At some point, (still early in their history) they advance to the level of technology that allows them to alter the position of stars and they begin to construct the first interstellar network. It takes perhaps tens of thousands of years.

Along come the ancients, much much later. They learn directly from the TWHON about interstellar travel through these zones. Eventually, the ancients achieve a level of tech allowing them to maintain and even modify the network. The Ancients have taken over the responsibility of the interstellar network. The galaxy had grown much since the early construction of the TWHON network, and their gates being the earliest, were nearest to the fastest changing part of the galaxy (center), so much of it had changed or been lost, with the "gates" leading to random areas of little to no interest or to plain dangerous places. The Ancient network built up the arms of the galaxy. This changed much more slowly, and was much vaster.

The TWHON and ancients goto war, destroying entire star systems and forever altering the makeup of the galaxy. The magnetic nexuses making up the interstellar network adjust to this devastation. Some of it is cut off from the rest, some merely alter routes, some destroyed entirely. The knowledge of the network is preserved in it's most basic form by some lower races at the time of the demise of the Ancients. Those that survive the chaos that followed the war began remapping the network and trying to take the place left by the Ancients. Most failed.

Over time, the Ancient's network drifted a bit. Other civilizations rise in other areas of the galaxy and observe natural phenomena that lead them to discover the network. Wars come and go as they discover other races. Etc etc.

In much the same way, Humans begin observing the phenomena. After numerous theories and laboratory testing, they discover such a cold region magnetic nexus has been found within the solar system. Thus ushering in the expansion of humans. In this lost section of the network, humans expand freely for a time with no interaction with alien life of significant advancement. Eventually, though, that ends when a "gate" is discovered that connects to a populated system and first contact is made. etc etc



Now what is needed for a ship to jump ?

jump drive : Super conducting magnet with a focusing aperture. Ultra capacity hyper capacitors store gigavolts of energy that is released in a short burst. The result being two magnetic fields, one extending outward from the ship in a spiralling sphere. The secondary field envelops the ship tightly. The condensate collects on the secondary field, while the primary field rapidly collapses to a point at the center of the drive (which is located at the center of the ship, roughly). At the point the two fields meet, the condensate collapses and teleports along the flux field line connecting this nexus to the next nexus. The ship, being engulfed by the condensate, is treated as a quantum entity, and is teleported with the condensate. The ship is essentially destroyed and recreated out of temporary quasi-particles from the vacuum of space within this region of magnetic nexus. (such temporary particles have been semi-proven to exist, as they are what makes up hawking radiation, and it's basically how quantum teleportation is supposed to work). Shields would probably have to be lowered to produce the necessary energy. Nav system, communications and such would not work correctly while within the nexus region. Internal systems would not be damaged however, since the hull shields internal components from magnetic interference. Edit: Also, the after-effect of such a thing is a burst of low frequency energy. Likely a dull red flash burst (bose-nova). This is caused by the remaining condensate releasing excess energy from the teleporting condensate. In the case of the other end being locked (something not in the game at the moment), the amount of energy is massive (equal to the amount of energy the ship puts into the fields to collapse the condensate plus the inertia of the field collapsing on itself to a critical size). Any ship attempting to jump from one end of a locked gate to the locked end would likely be destroyed in the feedback nova. The only way you can determine a new gate is not leading to certain death is by sending a probe that is jump capable to map the new gate. Though, since no such locked gate has ever been found, it leads one to believe that such probes wont be used until ships start exploding :)

Gas collector: A ship must collect the necessary amount of gas to vent within the cold magnetic nexus regions in order to create a condensate to form the jump. It would be assumed that the necessary amount of gas is always readily collectable during normal transit in game.


That's about it.
Ed Sweetman endorses this message.
Deus Siddis
Elite
Elite
Posts: 1363
Joined: Sat Aug 04, 2007 3:42 pm

Re: A new take on wormholes

Post by Deus Siddis »

safemode wrote:We give a realistic means for creating a network here, Wormholes do not.
It sounds like you might be on to something with this model.
Each cold zone is a pole between magnetic field nexuses (also explaining why each zone has only one destination and that the other end can only return back to the current end). Sometimes these nexuses link up naturally near pulsars. The TWHON were obviously the first to observe this and discover how they worked and begin using them. They were probably the first to start manipulating the magnetic nexuses to move these cold zones into favorable areas where they wished to travel. They passed this technology along to the ancients, who maintained and created their own network. Over time it changes, so it needs somewhat periodic updating to continue remaining the same. Manipulating the location of nexuses requires destroying or moving stars. Only extremely advanced civilizations can do such a thing.
But what about the Aera Jump fleet that, under its own power traveled from Aera space to the core of Rlaan space under its own power, in one jump, off of the jump network? Could this explain that, or would jumping without using the direct individual links of the network or without using the network at all, be impossible?
No civilization since the ancients has been so advanced, so the network has drifted a bit, allowing the Sol system to become part of the network for the first time in recent history, explaining why aliens who travel the network haven't discovered us long ago.
That isn't necessary to explain, no earlier empire was big or close enough to have landed on us, within the timeframe that we've been around. The reason for this being that the Ancients were super old and the TWHON probably even older, and Alpha and Beta and any others like them were killed or "bombed back into the stone age" by the nanoplague. Only Humans and Rlaan have had any recent invasive impact on less powerful civilization-capable species.
The sol area was not discovered until very recently, allowing the humans an area to expand into despite being late bloomers.
We're not at all late bloomers though, the Rlaan are the only species even close to our timeline that wasn't totally whipped by the nanoplague, maybe because of their focus on biotechnology (unless it was in fact a reaction to the plague). And the Rlaan are slow growers from very far away, it might have taken them 100,000 years to expand into Sol from where they currently are, at their average rate of expansion.
With wormholes, you have to create a means of activating them that is pretend. Pretend in the sense that, the physics needed to open a wormhole as opposed to them always being open is totally and completely made up. With wormholes, you have to create a means of traveling through them and keeping them open for the transit that is pretend. Pretend in the sense that the physics needed to keep a wormhole open depends on completely made up and imaginary matter and energy. The amount of energy hypothesized to be required to do this is pretend. Pretend in the sense that the amount of energy is so staggeringly great that each ship would have to house a neutron star and collapse it into a black hole to generate the necessary energy create one.
Not really, the game would be just as balanced and play almost exactly the same if wormholes were always open. Needing a "Jump Drive" seems more like a remnant of VS' WC roots.
With natural wormholes you'd have to explain how you create a subspace anomaly that bends spacetime into a funnel without altering gravity and thus pulling things into it from around it like a black hole whenever it opens (wormholes exist around planets often and each time they open it would alter gravity in a solar system greatly, causing it to become unstable).
Why couldn't a natural wormhole always be open, and thus have a constant and not destabilizing influence on its surroundings?
Wormholes are a copout. Much more in the sense of the word than what i've suggested we use, so much more that if we are to prefer wormholes, then we have to call into question the reason why all our other technology isn't as wonderfully advanced and semi-magical. Why are we still flinging laser bolts at enemy ships when we can manipulate the fabric of space? etc etc. it's all very wrong.
The existing canon answer to that question is probably too spoiler heavy to be uttered on this public board.

But that's not to say that your explanation isn't more elegant.

What would really be cool is if you could encompass this explanation around a type of player-navigated pseudo-FTL drive for cruising around systems, like SPEC. One semi-magic technology is a hell of alot better than two, imo.
safemode
Developer
Developer
Posts: 2150
Joined: Mon Apr 23, 2007 1:17 am
Location: Pennsylvania
Contact:

Re: A new take on wormholes

Post by safemode »

Deus Siddis wrote:
safemode wrote:We give a realistic means for creating a network here, Wormholes do not.
It sounds like you might be on to something with this model.
Damn right i am :)
Each cold zone is a pole between magnetic field nexuses (also explaining why each zone has only one destination and that the other end can only return back to the current end). Sometimes these nexuses link up naturally near pulsars. The TWHON were obviously the first to observe this and discover how they worked and begin using them. They were probably the first to start manipulating the magnetic nexuses to move these cold zones into favorable areas where they wished to travel. They passed this technology along to the ancients, who maintained and created their own network. Over time it changes, so it needs somewhat periodic updating to continue remaining the same. Manipulating the location of nexuses requires destroying or moving stars. Only extremely advanced civilizations can do such a thing.
But what about the Aera Jump fleet that, under its own power traveled from Aera space to the core of Rlaan space under its own power, in one jump, off of the jump network? Could this explain that, or would jumping without using the direct individual links of the network or without using the network at all, be impossible?
You can't just arbitrarily create a nexus link with another nexus. But what the Aeran could have done is discover a previously lost nexus connecting their section of space to the main network. This would be a somewhat common occurance as much of the map data to the network was lost with the ancients, and as space has drifted over the millions of years since their reign, some sections of the galaxy have been closed off from the network, or apparently closed off by losing the locations of the nexuses that lead to it.

The distance of a jump is completely arbitrary. The two nexus poles on a flux line can be close together or in some cases span across half the galaxy. closer ones are much more stable and change very little over time and require little maintenance, longer distance ones would require more frequent maintenance or degrade and possibly disappear or move drastically over time. The Aeran link may be a new short lived (relatively speaking) link. There may end up being a more stable series of links available to them as well, however.
No civilization since the ancients has been so advanced, so the network has drifted a bit, allowing the Sol system to become part of the network for the first time in recent history, explaining why aliens who travel the network haven't discovered us long ago.
That isn't necessary to explain, no earlier empire was big or close enough to have landed on us, within the timeframe that we've been around. The reason for this being that the Ancients were super old and the TWHON probably even older, and Alpha and Beta and any others like them were killed or "bombed back into the stone age" by the nanoplague. Only Humans and Rlaan have had any recent invasive impact on less powerful civilization-capable species.
There are other races that had direct influence from the ancients and survived with such technology. They just dont seem to be the expand and conquer type. But this may be true. i was just covering the bases.
The sol area was not discovered until very recently, allowing the humans an area to expand into despite being late bloomers.
We're not at all late bloomers though, the Rlaan are the only species even close to our timeline that wasn't totally whipped by the nanoplague, maybe because of their focus on biotechnology (unless it was in fact a reaction to the plague). And the Rlaan are slow growers from very far away, it might have taken them 100,000 years to expand into Sol from where they currently are, at their average rate of expansion.
Expansion of your empire is one thing. This is slow, and takes a lot of resources. Especially when you have no competition. Exploring, however, is done at a _MUCH_ more rapid pace. Detecting and then using a nexus and mapping it would be a rapid affair comparatively. It would make sense that once the network was discovered by the Rlaan, they would have sent out probes constantly to every nexus they found and done fairly extensive tests in each system they lead to, searching for another and then proceeding to those systems. Now, granted, there still may have been far too many nexuses between Sol and the Rlaan for them to detect us, I just wanted to make it concrete as to why this didn't happen.
With wormholes, you have to create a means of activating them that is pretend. Pretend in the sense that, the physics needed to open a wormhole as opposed to them always being open is totally and completely made up. With wormholes, you have to create a means of traveling through them and keeping them open for the transit that is pretend. Pretend in the sense that the physics needed to keep a wormhole open depends on completely made up and imaginary matter and energy. The amount of energy hypothesized to be required to do this is pretend. Pretend in the sense that the amount of energy is so staggeringly great that each ship would have to house a neutron star and collapse it into a black hole to generate the necessary energy create one.
Not really, the game would be just as balanced and play almost exactly the same if wormholes were always open. Needing a "Jump Drive" seems more like a remnant of VS' WC roots.
Wormholes are spatial distortions. Gravity being a spatial distortion as well would be inevitible. That is, the curve of the wormhole being extreme would equate to extreme gravity. How much gravity depends on the size. Obviously it would have to be big enough to let our biggest cap ships through. Them being open all the time means attracting gas and dust and basically creating an accretion disc. This disc would spin at close to the speed of light since the curve of the wormhole would basically be the same as a black hole, only instead of a curve shaped like a cone, it would be a curve that levels off at 90 degrees all around like a tube. This for all intents and purposes is the angle as you approach a singularity, there is no escape. Thus one end of the wormhole is a black hole as far as anyone can tell, except it never grows no matter how much matter falls into it. So you have to ask yourself, how would a black hole effect a solar system. Not good. The accretion disc alone would put off so much radiation that it would destroy all life in the system, forget about orbiting a planet as some in-game wormholes do. That also brings me to the other issue of an always open wormhole. They're one way by design. Not simply one way at a time, since they're not being activated and "opened" they're one way all the time. One wormhole has the curvature allowing you to enter it (it actually sucks you in when you get too close) and the other side has the opposite curvature that spits you out (pushes you out whether you want to or not). You can't enter the other side, it's curvature is wrong for that. So once you go through a wormhole that is always open you have to find another different wormhole to get home on, and good luck finding one that goes back to the system you just left.

It's just a whole lot worse to have always on wormholes. even worse than opening wormholes on demand....where you could at least pretend that each time you initiate it, the correct side opens at the initiation point.
With natural wormholes you'd have to explain how you create a subspace anomaly that bends spacetime into a funnel without altering gravity and thus pulling things into it from around it like a black hole whenever it opens (wormholes exist around planets often and each time they open it would alter gravity in a solar system greatly, causing it to become unstable).
Why couldn't a natural wormhole always be open, and thus have a constant and not destabilizing influence on its surroundings?
Like i mentioned above, their constant influence would be plasmatic death to all life anywhere within lightyears of it. Accretion discs aren't fun. Wormholes would be required to have them if they were always active.
Wormholes are a copout. Much more in the sense of the word than what i've suggested we use, so much more that if we are to prefer wormholes, then we have to call into question the reason why all our other technology isn't as wonderfully advanced and semi-magical. Why are we still flinging laser bolts at enemy ships when we can manipulate the fabric of space? etc etc. it's all very wrong.
The existing canon answer to that question is probably too spoiler heavy to be uttered on this public board.
I dont know what is a spoiler or not. I dont consider backstory that has nothing to do with campaigns and isn't even written in stone yet (since the documents aren't finalized) to be spoilers. Such backstory is required by anyone who eventually will be interested in writing campaigns, so it's not like it's going to be kept a secret. I haven't mentioned anything that occurs in the future from the point of VS's current timeline. Though, i dont think my comment above here has anything to do with the future.

If various races are developing these space-time altering technologies, it makes much more sense to use the same tech to create weapons than it does to resort to low tech weapons. In fact, i would assume the weapon application would have come first then the discovery of using it for transportation. I just dont see the reason why one piece of tech would be massively advanced (jump engine) but everything else is craptastic.

My solution allows everything to be craptastic, which is more fun, because the level of tech needed for my jump engine is really not that exotic.
But that's not to say that your explanation isn't more elegant.

What would really be cool is if you could encompass this explanation around a type of player-navigated pseudo-FTL drive for cruising around systems, like SPEC. One semi-magic technology is a hell of alot better than two, imo.

The problem with extending it to "at will" use is explaining why you can't use it at will for the long distance traveling. The trick is doing it without destroying the truthiness of the original long distance method. i haven't really put much thought into the short distance method. I Hate spec. HATE IT! It makes no sense, it isn't portrayed functionally accurate in game, and it leads to all sorts of horrible hacks dealing with navigation code in-game. it's horrible.

The main problem with using my method as a spec replacement is that it's a teleportation. There is no intermediary navigating. One instant you are here, the next instant you are there. The problem with trying to go faster than light across space is that it's extremely impossible. Too many things are up against you to keep you from doing it. Navigating with thrusters and moving around while traveling FTL is a joke. The light and thus reading you see aren't where those objects actually are because you're actually seeing the objects traveling in reverse time and you're seeing the object traveling forward in time at the same time and those images are still not accurately portraying the location of those objects at the moment you are seeing them. Everytime you break the speed of light you should see duplicates of everything (and thus your nav system would see duplicates) and all the complicated crazy shit involved with that would have to be computed and dealt with. That's just the least of your worries.

I've mentioned in the off topic thread how i think SPEC should work. If i were to have to my idea be used in intra-stellar travel... It would probably require fixed stations setup to create temporary artificial nexuses. This would cut down on any type of off the trail travel significantly compared to how we deal with spec, but It could easily be explained away in all but the un-inhabited systems. Basically, such un-inhabited systems may only have such stations placed near the interstellar nexuses. Populated systems would have them around most important planets and stations.. Basically they would work by "tuning" to the requested station you wish to travel to within that system (probably limited to nearby stations if there are many or the system is very big). A connection would be made and then you could initiate the jump. This would allow us to not have to have a separate set of stations for every possible jump combination we want to have. That idea is actually pretty neat, and would have some interesting consequences in-game.

How then, do we deal with traveling off intra-stellar network? Conventional thrusters are extremely slow to accelerate and slow down. Time dilation would work, but would easily destroy the gameplay. Unfortunately, the only other plausible idea i can think of right now that would work off the same idea would require the use of nanites :) basically, shotgun them out at close to the speed of light with a given coordinate set to have them slow down and stop at. Then they would form a small station similar to the other intra-stellar jump stations where you can then jump to (having created a local station near your current location). So basically allowing you to travel very close to the speed of light anywhere you wanted. Too bad we can't use nanites though :) heh.
Ed Sweetman endorses this message.
safemode
Developer
Developer
Posts: 2150
Joined: Mon Apr 23, 2007 1:17 am
Location: Pennsylvania
Contact:

Re: A new take on wormholes

Post by safemode »

I basically want to submit this method of travel to replace wormholes, because it's basically a drop in replacement requiring little to no in-game changes (minor ones really) and very little backstory changes to canon. It fixes _tons_ of plot holes involving the discrepancies between jump technology and everything else and other holes involving simultaneous discovery of the technology, it's evolution throughout time and how it works.

It's a clean solution (cleaner than anything we use now) and it doubles as being completely novel. Nobody else uses bose-nova's to teleport, and it's not even that crazy considering what actually happens in reality.


my idea for fixing SPEC is much less clear cut. SPEC's dirty tentacles are all over the game. There is no way of fixing SPEC without seriously altering the game, not to mention changing some backstory. Because of this, it requires a serious collaboration between developers and the even-higher-ups on what a decent and practical solution could be. Basically, we need something like SPEC, especially early on (like now), because we have no content to fill in transitional periods between locations. We also know what is wrong with spec from a developer standpoint in-game. We also know what is wrong with spec from a theoretical functional standpoint. We also know what is wrong with spec from a gameplay player perspective. So we have all of these things that are wrong with spec, but have yet to really put it in a list and then figure out what needs to change to correct it, and then we have to finally think of a pseudo-technology that can be inserted to explain this new mode of travel.

If i take my interstellar mode as an example, the two negatives to my idea of using stations around various important locations within a system to allow in-system jumping, would be a destruction of scale (same way spec destroys scale, only worse) and no real way of traveling outside of these pre-defined routes within any practical time. Though, to be fair, the scale issue is going to be a problem with every form of FTL for in-system travel.

Though, in-system issues are a different topic. For now i'm just pushing for this as the VS interstellar form of travel.
Ed Sweetman endorses this message.
jackS
Minister of Information
Minister of Information
Posts: 1895
Joined: Fri Jan 31, 2003 9:40 pm
Location: The land of tenure (and diaper changes)

Re: A new take on wormholes

Post by jackS »

the Bosenova does not seem a particularly likely candidate to harness for transportation.

the following text is quoted from http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/g ... 10723.html
The explosion corresponds to a tiny amount of energy and continues for a few thousandths of a second, the researchers report. A small chilly remnant of the condensate is left behind, surrounded by the expanding gas.

About half the original atoms mysteriously vanished.

"The 'missing' atoms are almost certainly still around in some form, but just not in a form that we can detect them in our current experiment," Wieman told SPACE.com. "The two likely possibilities are that they have formed into molecules of two rubidium atoms stuck together, or they have gotten enough energy from somewhere to fly away fast enough that they are out of our observation region before we look for them."

He said there are possible atomic physics mechanisms that would release a
lot less energy than observed, or a lot more, "but nothing that matches what we are seeing." The likely answer, he said, is that there is an as-yet undiscovered process that releases energy and involves interactions of atoms at these extremely low temperatures.

"The theoretical calculations of what would happen in this situation predict behaviors that are totally unlike what we've observed," Wieman says, "so the basic process responsible for the bosenova must be something new and different from what has been proposed."

The bosenova explosion is on such a small and cold scale that Wieman rules it out as a potential energy source.

"The amounts of energy involved in all this stuff we see is infinitesimally small compared to any normal scale, so it could never be usefully harnessed," he said. "For example, the amount of energy contained in the motion of one room-temperature gas atom moving in the air is about 100,000 times larger than the total energy contained in the entire bosenova explosion that we see."
Likewise, it has been a good decade or so since I last took any classes covering quantum physics, but I don't think quantum teleportation (at least what we currently call as such) does what you want it to do (allow for FTL). Unless my understanding is completely incorrect, the information channel between the two endpoints is still limited to <=C, even if the teleportation itself can (post-communication) occur instantaneously over arbitrary distance.

I am not averse to something other than "wormholes" being the basis of the jump network. However, to clear up a few statements in the above thread that do not accurately represent the existing canon:
  • Jump drives on ships do not create wormholes.
  • The wormholes are created, maintained, and manipulated by vast machines produced by the TWHON and their species-precursors. These installations are located in deep space, and after a means to locate them is derived, are eventually settled by the Legion in later time periods. They should (and this is _not_ currently implemented properly at all in-game) always appear in unidirectional pairs (one incoming, one outgoing). Jump drives merely act to negotiate for transit via manipulating the mildly anomalous region surrounding a "closed" jump node.
  • That there exists an inexpensive means to, under restricted conditions, warp space is THE fundamental magical conceit of the VS Universe
  • The same underlying conceit is used for shields, numerous weapons, and both forms of FTL. I find no great discrepancy of scope between jump technology and the rest of the tech deployed, and imagine that such a gulf was presumed because of a misunderstanding of the previous list item.
  • The Aerans did not jump deep into Rlaan space
  • The Aeran convoy that started the Rlaan-Aeran war used SPEC (or, if the very name disturbs you, FTL#2) to go deep into Rlaan space before attempting to use the jump network to transit the rest of the way along the presumably lax interior lines.
  • A second form of interstellar-capable FTL is highly desirable (re: comment on two FTLs being inelegant)
  • If there is only jump-style FTL, the defender's advantage is so pronounced that the interstellar war demanded for the VS setting becomes untenable. If there is a convenient hyperspace-style (anywhere-to-anywhere) FTL mechanism, the attacker's advantage is so pronounced that the interstellar war demanded for the VS setting becomes untenable. We very intentionally, even in incarnations of the VS engine where intra-system transit was instantaneous, had canon discussions about whatever the second FTL mechanism was that would allow for bypassing the presumably fortified jump node without rendering defense impossible, nor interior lines irrelevant.
Bosenovas appear to be an option with the converse problems of wormholes: wormholes do what we want them to do, but almost certainly can't be created as we would need to use them. Bosenovas can be created as we need to use them, but almost certainly don't do anything we want them to do. I imagine it's a matter of personal taste as to which bad science is easier to swallow. The current VS magic glue is all reliant on some means for warping space on the cheap. If we're going to start changing the mechanisms at play for our magical conceits, such as FTL, I'd rather see them all replaced wholesale with a new magic glue than try to make piecemeal patches. If we really can't live with space warping, then we should ditch the entire concept completely and replace it with something else. This will, however, be a more substantial rewrite.
safemode
Developer
Developer
Posts: 2150
Joined: Mon Apr 23, 2007 1:17 am
Location: Pennsylvania
Contact:

Re: A new take on wormholes

Post by safemode »

jackS wrote:the Bosenova does not seem a particularly likely candidate to harness for transportation.
Couple things about that.

1. They dont know where the other atoms went. They only assume it's still hanging around because to say otherwise would be risky for a scientist.
2. The explosion contains very little energy because most of the energy is taken with the missing atoms. The energy comes not from the magnetic field but from the vacuum of space itself. We can posit that as the condensate collapses to a critical mass, because it cannot reduce its energy level anymore, yet it must because of the collapse, it ceases to exist instantly in that space. Since matter-energy is not created nor destroyed, it has to pop up somewhere else and is recreated at the other nexus.

edit:
to back up such an assumption about needing to pop back up and how it pops back up. look at hawking radiation. Hawking radiation occurs because information cannot be destroyed. A black hole cannot radiate energy from inside the event horizon to outside of it, and the information is inside.
Now, space is a jumble of temporary fake particles that pop into and out of existance constantly. What happens with hawking radiation is that the information, needing to exist because the universe demands it, arises out of these temporary particles at the surface of the event horizon, creating a pair of real particles that are entangled, one on each side of the event horizon. No energy is created or destroyed because the net energy between the two particles in the universe is 0, despite the radiation leaving with a lot of energy (the other particle has negative energy, which is how the net energy of the black hole decreases due to hawking radiation ...or something like that.).

So in a similar vein, i'm saying that teleportation in this situation would work in a similar manner. The information being destroyed must be preserved, there is no way to do so by converting into heat because there is not enough energy in the condensate to do so (we wrap ourselves in condensate) so the universe teleports us to the other pole,releasing energy in the only way left and preserving the information and because we're treated as a single quantum entity, we are recreated as such. The leap of faith really only has to do with us hitching a ride in a bubble of condensate, but it's a _much_ smaller leap of faith than wormhole travel.

end edit:

Nothing in that quote negates that from happening necessarily. It's obvious that the physics we have right now is unable to explain it, and my explanation can fit the evidence with little in the way of leaps of faith. Comparitive to any other FTL anyway.
Likewise, it has been a good decade or so since I last took any classes covering quantum physics, but I don't think quantum teleportation (at least what we currently call as such) does what you want it to do (allow for FTL). Unless my understanding is completely incorrect, the information channel between the two endpoints is still limited to <=C, even if the teleportation itself can (post-communication) occur instantaneously over arbitrary distance.
The way we consider quantum teleportation now is by transporting this information across space. Hence it's limited by C. Basically, anything we would want to teleport would require information in addition to quantum states that have to be altered. Quantum states can be altered instantly, the position and organization of atoms and such so far cannot. This is your information channel that is limited by C.

I'm avoiding that by using a condensate, which behaves like a single quantum entity. I'm positing that because quantum effects are in control of a condensate, that we wouldn't need to communicate any additional information across space about it to teleport it. It would simply be destroyed and recreated instantly, like a single quantum particle. we would not have to worry about transporting any information across space about the process. It's destination is determined already and the mechanics of how teleportation works on the quantum level takes care of the rest. just like how the mechanics allow the spin of an entangled particle to affect the other no matter where it is, it's obvious that there is a force in the universe that we still dont understand that does not traverse space in the normal 3 dimensions. It's also easy to believe that quantum teleportation operates in much the same way as how this force is transferred from one entangled electron to the other. While a person may not know when to observe or what to observe without conventional communication from the other scientist at the other electron, with teleportation, you dont need to be told when to observe, or what to observe, or anything (when you're dealing with a condensate ...which i say operates like a single quantum particle as far as teleportation is concerned).

Hence, we are not limited to c
I am not averse to something other than "wormholes" being the basis of the jump network. However, to clear up a few statements in the above thread that do not accurately represent the existing canon:
  • Jump drives on ships do not create wormholes.
  • The wormholes are created, maintained, and manipulated by vast machines produced by the TWHON and their species-precursors. These installations are located in deep space, and after a means to locate them is derived, are eventually settled by the Legion in later time periods. They should (and this is _not_ currently implemented properly at all in-game) always appear in unidirectional pairs (one incoming, one outgoing). Jump drives merely act to negotiate for transit via manipulating the mildly anomalous region surrounding a "closed" jump node.
  • That there exists an inexpensive means to, under restricted conditions, warp space is THE fundamental magical conceit of the VS Universe
  • The same underlying conceit is used for shields, numerous weapons, and both forms of FTL. I find no great discrepancy of scope between jump technology and the rest of the tech deployed, and imagine that such a gulf was presumed because of a misunderstanding of the previous list item.
Indeed, that changes a lot. Wormholes being entirely synthetic, how would anyone "discover" how to use them without direct information passed down from one species to the next since the Ancients...who were told by the TWHON? The physics behind opening a wormhole naturally wouldn't apply here, so what means would we have to grok the protocol for opening one of these wormholes? I dont see how it would happen by accident.

I'm not trying to be pedantic or knit picky, this falls under the believability of parallel discovery of a technology that would have to be fundementally identical between numerous species. What's more is that this discovery would be like reverse engineering a communication protocol you've never observed being used and that you weren't even aware was a protocol (because nobody at the time knows that the wormholes are synthetic and controlled by deep space machines).
[*]The Aerans did not jump deep into Rlaan space[/*]
The Aeran convoy that started the Rlaan-Aeran war used SPEC (or, if the very name disturbs you, FTL#2) to go deep into Rlaan space before attempting to use the jump network to transit the rest of the way along the presumably lax interior lines.
[*]A second form of interstellar-capable FTL is highly desirable (re: comment on two FTLs being inelegant)[/*]
If there is only jump-style FTL, the defender's advantage is so pronounced that the interstellar war demanded for the VS setting becomes untenable.
If there is a convenient hyperspace-style (anywhere-to-anywhere) FTL mechanism, the attacker's advantage is so pronounced that the interstellar war demanded for the VS setting becomes untenable.
We very intentionally, even in incarnations of the VS engine where intra-system transit was instantaneous, had canon discussions about whatever the second FTL mechanism was that would allow for bypassing the presumably fortified jump node without rendering defense impossible, nor interior lines irrelevant.
[/list]
Indeed, a second means of travel is necessary. And yes, there would have to be very practical limitations to that travel such that it allows for the #1 means of FTL to have a purpose, and to make FTL#2 have it's niche. It's a very difficult problem to make these limitations match physics. As far as i can think, nobody really has a method of FTL that doesn't contradict themselves to tie a plot together at some point. Star trek did it with having ships able to chase eachother going warp speed (how many times have you seen the enterprise closing in or being left behind by a Borg cube?...Bullshit).

I think the limitations of spec for the most part is good, I just dont think we have a decent explanation of why they exist in the manner they do and I dont think we portray it correctly in game, and i'm not sure if we do portray it and explain it in a manner that doesn't reek of "because we sprinkled fairy dust on it" that it would work as needed in the canon.

I really believe a new discussion needs to be opened up on SPEC. I think overall, it hurts the overall feel of the game because many of it's features have been dictated by a vacuum of content, rather than by what the game needs.
Bosenovas appear to be an option with the converse problems of wormholes: wormholes do what we want them to do, but almost certainly can't be created as we would need to use them. Bosenovas can be created as we need to use them, but almost certainly don't do anything we want them to do. I imagine it's a matter of personal taste as to which bad science is easier to swallow. The current VS magic glue is all reliant on some means for warping space on the cheap. If we're going to start changing the mechanisms at play for our magical conceits, such as FTL, I'd rather see them all replaced wholesale with a new magic glue than try to make piecemeal patches. If we really can't live with space warping, then we should ditch the entire concept completely and replace it with something else. This will, however, be a more substantial rewrite.
I think warping of space is a technology that we just dont have at the time of VS upon the coldest sea. I dont think even fringe physics has a way to explain how distant deep space machines can do it. I dont think we explain the reprecussions of warping space inside a solar system willy nilly. I dont think we any explanation of warping space to do what we want it to do would be feasible with the amount of energy needed to do it in any way that we currently can imagine it be done. That's not to say our imagination wont change with new discoveries, but right now, not even fringe physics offers a means of doing this without IMMENSE energy, and with that comes huge consequences for the space around it. This all equals a massive leap of faith by the player.

I believe we should ditch space warping altogether. And while i'm biased towards my own ideas, I think we can close a lot of these leaps of faith with the bose-nova teleportation. The trick is getting a localized short distance version worked out to replace SPEC. I wanted to think of a way we could do it with minimal impact on the game code, however i dont think that will be possible. My idea operates in a discrete way, it requires a magnetically coupled pair of regions of space near absolute zero, the coldness of which is contained by a particular organization of magnetic field lines creating a nexus of sorts. We could create small stations to generate the appropriate situation (which is how we researched it in laboratories after observing natural occurrences). Though, this negates the free-travel aspect of SPEC.

more thought will have to be put into the answer to SPEC.
Ed Sweetman endorses this message.
safemode
Developer
Developer
Posts: 2150
Joined: Mon Apr 23, 2007 1:17 am
Location: Pennsylvania
Contact:

Re: A new take on wormholes

Post by safemode »

Also, I wanted to point out, that the canon coming after the events in the game (namely the discovery of the deep space machines and the Legion), need not change. Instead of machines that create wormholes, these would be machines that generate massive focused magnetic fields. Placed and self maintained to keep the network of magnetic nexuses that make up the oldest parts of the network from deteriorating, by correcting for changes that naturally occur and were unforeseeable.

Without them, the order of the network would deteriorate over time or with random phenomena like novas and star birth. Though, they only deal with the TWHON section of the network, not any that the Ancients setup prior to their destruction.

Such that the importance of the machines is maintained, and their existance is explainable and their scale and function is sufficiently out of the scope of our current technology despite the underlying output of them being fairly mundane insofar as the physics of it. The black box of technology is dealt with how it produces the output and how it detects the minute changes it needs to make.

and:

in addition, there is something about the Aeran spec'ing to another system that just opens a pandora's box of problems restricting such things from happening all the time. I'm not sure what alternative would not sound like a weak plot device (finding an undiscovered nexus, or such because it would require the rlaan to also not discover the other end). Perhaps it would work better with whatever alternatives to spec are brain stormed. Something has to make this particular action unique, so that it's not feasible to every other warring faction or give the Aeran such a crazy advantage by having some special SPEC better than everyone else.
Ed Sweetman endorses this message.
safemode
Developer
Developer
Posts: 2150
Joined: Mon Apr 23, 2007 1:17 am
Location: Pennsylvania
Contact:

Re: A new take on wormholes

Post by safemode »

I really dont think there can be a satisfactory way of traveling faster than light in normal space. That is to say, I dont think you'll ever find a semi-believable way of traversing the system FTL and navigating it. There is simply no mechanism even fringe that allows you to do so.

The best you can do is drop to a 4th dimension, traverse that, and pop back into the normal 3d universe. That's the most realistic way to do it and keep your niche status.
positives:
1. It would still give you a distance you have to travel, though it would be greatly reduced from normal 3d traversal, hence it wouldn't be good for long distance.
2. It could require a constant energy output to maintain it, so that would also limit distance it can be used. It would still take time to get to your destination, so scale wont be totally destroyed.
3. It avoids the problem of FTL by never having to go faster than it.
4. It avoids altering the universe, by not traversing across it (in the regular 3 dimension).
5. This is a dimension unlike the 3 we are used to. Acceleration in it may be completely novel, and since light does not move in this direction, it cannot be thought of as a speed limit. In this way, conventional thrusters could be ignored completely, and the "spec multiplier" could be thought of as the sole acceleration in this dimension, allowing a means of balance with this FTL travel. This can allow us to create a trade-off system in-game where larger SPEC drives increase mass so normal space acceleration is low, but FTL acceleration is high, and vice versa for smaller spec drives.

negatives:
1. You have to pre-compute your heading prior to activating it. Basically, steering is not possible, but you can stop ahead of time...though at your own risk of popping back into space within something.
2. Ships that use this disappear from radar, and the universe in general. No tracking, no shooting and no chasing. There is no way of knowing where they are going.
3. Requires a feat of technology we have no experimental clues as to how or if is possible. Are there extra dimensions? probably.. Do we have the energy or even physical ability to travel through them? That is the leap of faith.
4. The technology may be too advanced compared to the rest of the tech involved in the game.

This is somewhat like hyperspace only not in the way portrayed by B5 as simply another "space" that behaves much the same as normal space. There would be no up, sideways, or forward you could move in when traveling in this dimension. There are no aliens that inhabit it or getting lost in it etc. Inertia in normal space is preserved when you exit, since there would be no means of dissipating that energy while moving in this dimension, because those directions dont exist.

Navigation could be done by a virtual HUD displaying your estimated location in the system based on your current FTL velocity and the location/orbit of planets and space stations when you activated your FTL drive. You can't steer or change your course, but this would at least allow you to drop out with a good idea of where you will be at and change your direction and resume if you wanted to. This, however, would not help much if your ship is damaged (could give you bogus results) or if you happen to drop out within another ship :)

We could explain opening this dimension by saying it was discovered while developing the bose-nova teleportation. The SPEC drive, like the jump drive, operates mostly on intense magnetic fields. Instead of collapsing a condensate however, the SPEC drive creates a shell tightly around the ship and traps a sliver of space between an outer field only slightly further from the ship. The drive creates ever increasingly intense fields within this sliver and rotates them in opposite directions. What we can say happens is that the sheering effect of the fields creates a layer of magnetic vortexes that cause a true vacuum of space ...dotted all around the ship. This allows the curled up high dimensions that are always being crushed down by the normal 3 dimensions to uncurl and expand. The expansion quickly merges the dots and the ship is then surrounded by this 4th dimension, allowing us to move through it so long as we maintain the intense magnetic field holding the dimension open.

So we've tied this in-system FTL to our bose-nova teleportation by saying that the SPEC was discovered first, via laboratory experimentation in recreating natural bose-nova teleportation. Both use similar technology, though the necessary mechanics of the two dictate two separate drives are required.
Ed Sweetman endorses this message.
Deus Siddis
Elite
Elite
Posts: 1363
Joined: Sat Aug 04, 2007 3:42 pm

Re: A new take on wormholes

Post by Deus Siddis »

safemode wrote:I really dont think there can be a satisfactory way of traveling faster than light in normal space. That is to say, I dont think you'll ever find a semi-believable way of traversing the system FTL and navigating it. There is simply no mechanism even fringe that allows you to do so.
Well, no mechanism yet discovered. I don't think that is saying that much though.
The best you can do is drop to a 4th dimension, traverse that, and pop back into the normal 3d universe. That's the most realistic way to do it and keep your niche status.
I am afraid that having most of travel be outside of 3D space is a really bad idea for gameplay and the feel of traversing space.

So here's an idea, what you could do with that kind of 4th dimensional magical FTL is have it only work if your ship is under the influence of almost no gravity at all, meaning it only works if you are far out towards deep space, like as far as sedna in the sol system; something like a much more finicky version of the current spec model when it comes to gravitational tolerance. Then you just have cryo-sleep as a way for the player to elapse time when traveling to or from the edge of a system, a jump point, planet, station or other location, which would take anywhere from days to a month depending on the distance.

As a slight modification to this, you might allow 4th dimensional travel within a system with large limitations, such as how far it'd take you, how much it would cost and how much control you'd have over your destination. The point of this being a counter to the gameplay-dry way of fighting that would otherwise come to be- extreme range standoff fighting dominated by ultra-long range detection and weaponry. An expensive, blind, single AU jump every once in a while would be enough to put a stick in the spokes of anyone trying to hit you at extreme range, but not enough to be an alternative to 3D space travel and thrusters.

All of this would also help make these pseudo-magical, seemingly extreme energy consuming technologies more believable, as they'd be so picky and rarely useful, though still effective at what they do when in their element.
safemode
Developer
Developer
Posts: 2150
Joined: Mon Apr 23, 2007 1:17 am
Location: Pennsylvania
Contact:

Re: A new take on wormholes

Post by safemode »

Like i mentioned before...

You can't make a temporary situation like a lack of content dictate how the game functions. That's not how you fix the problem of not having content. You also can't enforce an absolute realistic form of travel at the total expense of gameplay. The solution should solve the problem of gameplay while at the same time staying realistic and even add to the gameplay.

Like i also mentioned, you wont be able to solve the issue of getting anywhere in system in a reasonable time without destroying scale.

So you have to invent ways of interrupting people while they are speeding from place to place. Or you have to slow people down and give them a lot of interesting non-repetitive stuff to do during travel.

The reason why I opted for 4th dimension the way i did was because you _cannot_ travel faster than c while traveling in normal 3d space. You just can't. Any suggestion made of a way to do so doesn't stand up to the first 3 minutes of actual thought. If you can't travel across normal 3d space, then you can't interact with the stuff that is. Rather than warp the idea to solve the gameplay shortage, we should warp the gameplay to work with the idea.

The right way to approach transportation is to figure out your inter-system FTL (eg. bose-nova teleportation).
Then figure out your intra-system FTL (eg. dimensional jumping)
Canon is written to reflect these technologies and how they function
Then, with these things laid out and basically written in stone, gameplay is altered and tailored to work around these methods.

So really, you can't fix the in-system FTL without really modifying the game (which has a lot of archaic crap from the WC universe way of doing things).

edit: I dont want to detract from the initial point of the thread, being the replacement of wormholes. It requires much less of an invasive change with the result being a more believable story, and novel method.
My ideas on in-system travel are just off the cuff ideas. There has yet to be (and there's been a long thread on the subject in the off-topic forum) an idea for in-system travel that doesn't require a lot of changes to the game. I dont think we can correct the logic holes in in-system travel without re-designing the gameplay around the travel, instead of the other way around like we've been doing.
Ed Sweetman endorses this message.
RedAdder
Bounty Hunter
Bounty Hunter
Posts: 149
Joined: Sat Jan 03, 2009 8:11 pm
Location: Germany, Munich
Contact:

Re: A new take on wormholes

Post by RedAdder »

While I like this discussion, I also would like to point out what is ok with the current in-system long distance travel:
It gets the player over long distances without the player getting bored.
Also, the explanation that it doesn't work with a gravity well nearby works well as it forces you to slow down near points of interest.

The only thing that doesn't work is that in-system FTL(faster than light travel) is unlikely when thinking scientifically about it.
To fix this, one could limit in system travel to relativistic speeds that is the speed of light. But that would require content to fill 8 minutes of travel time even if only the inner planets of the Sol system are considered, that is mercury, venus, mars and the asteroids.

So I'd rather join a discussion what the content for these 8 minutes could be than starting at the other end.
safemode
Developer
Developer
Posts: 2150
Joined: Mon Apr 23, 2007 1:17 am
Location: Pennsylvania
Contact:

Re: A new take on wormholes

Post by safemode »

If you remove the requirement from in-system travel that it be FTL, then you have a whole lot of options available.

I'm more than open to discussing in-transit content/gameplay ideas. Since no matter what you choose to do, slow down spec (and thus reducing it's wrongness) or replace spec with something less wrong, you are going to need to alter gameplay during transit to make it have any purpose.

It has to be non-repetitive. It has to have a lasting function regarding the game outside of transit.

Obviously, this was the harder thing to think about, otherwise this would have been done in the beginning.

edit:

I'm more inclined towards a slower method ( < c) of in-system travel. Obviously we would need some form of extreme acceleration still, so that would have to be hammered out. With extreme acceleration, we would need a means of explaining away inertia (since any acceleration greater than a few multiples of g, would result in extreme discomfort or death). Solving those two problems would be much easier than figuring out an FTL that is only good for in-system travel.

Once that is figured out, then we can work out how the story fits in. Only then can you determine the type of gameplay you can work around it. But you can get somewhat of an idea of the type of gameplay you'll have to utilize during lengthy transits.

Interactive wireless news feeds that is repeated by surrounding participating ships. Think of them as the futuristic version of bloggers. News is passed on by captains and bounced on repeaters throughout the system and between systems outside of the confines of the "official channels". Here you can learn some things before the official news tells the public, or perhaps the real story of what is being spinned on the real news.
You can choose to monitor only or repeat the news. Repeating the news allows the player's character to participate in contributing news .... and could cause them to be a target by oppressive regimes. Participating could get you lucrative information however.

Running deep scans of the system. Deep scans could be used to discover teleportation (or whatever we use) zones that have not yet been mapped yet by your computer, or maybe anyone. Deep scans would also need to be done to find minefields or floating cargo etc...things without a beacon and are too small for normal radar. Deep scans may also show pirates hiding powered off, waiting to ambush you.


I really think we can make the interactive wireless news feed such an important feature that works in conjunction with the official base-computer news and such that we can suck up the majority of the time during transit with that alone. Sprinkle some pirate attacks, emergencies, etc and you've got a good deal going on.
Ed Sweetman endorses this message.
safemode
Developer
Developer
Posts: 2150
Joined: Mon Apr 23, 2007 1:17 am
Location: Pennsylvania
Contact:

Re: A new take on wormholes

Post by safemode »

The universe that is Upon The Coldest Sea, is a universe full of propaganda and manipulation. The struggle is as much of a military one as it is political. Beholdent to that is the manipulation of the masses by those in power. We can put the player in a situation where they are forced to deal with information that while is official, cannot be trusted at face value all the time. Each faction spins things their own way and as the player explores other systems controlled by other factions, they discover how the same event can be seen in such completely different ways. On top of that, the player is introduced to the wireless feed. A network by captains for captains that exists with the government's knowledge and frequently attacked but is never extinguished due to the sheer decentralization of it. At first glance, it's the truth beneath the blinders that is the official news that the public gets, the un-dilluted news. Over time, however, the player learns that even the wireless feed has a bias and a spin. Surrounding the player is choices that he has to make based on information the player has to decide for themselves is worth using and sometimes, they have to work with information they simply know is false.

In this manner, you have 3 facets to gameplay in VS.
You have a military front, where guns and shields and strategy in occupation is a major factor. In this facet, you have to deal with "random" pirate battles during transit and at locations ...as well as any other enemy factions.

You have a political front, where power struggles within and without factions can change the balance of power in the galaxy and decide the fate of entire species. Here, you have the player make key decisions in mission choosing and operations. Some of these discussions or choices will be done during transit, and researching can always be done during transit.

You have an information front, where knowledge really is power and it's a struggle between the haves and have nots. The player finds themselves in an insanely steep upward battle in learning the truth. Researching and monitoring and participating in the wireless feed and news is done during transit and at locations and can be the difference between being on the receiving end of integral events in the game or being a part of them, shaping them or stopping them from happening. More importantly, can you figure out how to use what you learn to affect that which happens in the other two facets.


That's just an idea of the type of means we'd have available to fill in transit times. If we build a campaign system around those facets and had an AI smart enough, we'd really have something.
Ed Sweetman endorses this message.
MC707
Venturer
Venturer
Posts: 555
Joined: Sun Jan 18, 2009 5:18 am
Location: Quito, Ecuador.
Contact:

Re: A new take on wormholes

Post by MC707 »

After thinking it deeply, I personally think interplanetary traveling can't be done at a speed higher than C. The first time I traveled with SPEC, I was really confused as I know C is the speed of light, so I would have expected that the speed shown should be 0.99 C rather than 97.3 C(relativity - you cannot reach pure Light Speed). I think wormholes can be feasible, as this Wikipedia article shows. Wormhole travel could be even made more realistic by not simply teleporting you but rather showing how you travel through the tunnel.
My Machine: OS: Ubuntu 8.10 (intrepid) 64 bit in a 500GB Maxtor HD @ 7200 RPM, Windows Vista PsyChoses Edition 2009 32 bit in a 500GB Samsung HD @ 7200 RPM CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Quad CPU Q6600 @ 2.40GHz GPU: nVidia GeForce 9400 GT @ 1024 MB RAM: 3891 MB
Earthlings|The End of the Internet?|FreeWebsite
Deus Siddis
Elite
Elite
Posts: 1363
Joined: Sat Aug 04, 2007 3:42 pm

Re: A new take on wormholes

Post by Deus Siddis »

safemode wrote:You can't make a temporary situation like a lack of content dictate how the game functions.
I don't, in fact I always think of VS in terms of what it could become, not so much what it currently is.
That's not how you fix the problem of not having content. You also can't enforce an absolute realistic form of travel at the total expense of gameplay. The solution should solve the problem of gameplay while at the same time staying realistic and even add to the gameplay.
Well it depends on what kind of gameplay you are looking for. For instance, if all action takes place outside of your ship, exclusively, then a long journey really would be boring. But you mentioned intercepting and deciphering loose information, chuck mentioned repairing and maintaining your craft, maybe every now and then you'd find yourself being stalked by a stow-away lifeform that has been hiding in your air ducts. :D Things like this happen more or less inside of your ship and they could potentially fill a long journey with gameplay. We just need this kind of extra content. :wink:
Like i also mentioned, you wont be able to solve the issue of getting anywhere in system in a reasonable time without destroying scale.
There's things you can do to help get the feel of scale across without totally experiencing it, mostly polish type stuff.

For instance, let's say your ship maxes out at 0.5-.75 c and can only accelerate (albeit indefinitely) at 1-10 gs (yes, a sustained 10 gs would normally be fatal, but your teleportation allows for "inertial dampening" since the crew quarters can be accelerated down a rail in the opposite direction of ship acceleration, at the same rate of acceleration, and whenever the quarters reaches the end of the rail, it is teleported back to the beginning of the rail).

To pass the long in-system travel time, you use cryogenics. This does two things, one for gameplay and one for art. For gameplay, it allows for what might normally take many days, to take only many minutes or seconds. On the art side, it helps restore the sense of scale by:

One, making the player break from the controls of his ship (instead of just hitting 'A' and waiting for something to get big in your viewport).

Two, making the player go through a relatively long sequence of events (say 15 seconds) to further break him from what he was doing and from realtime gameplay.

Example: he has to walk to the pod (somewhere in the ship), gets in it, watches it close, hears some rushing air noises and various other technology type sounds, then begins to black out with some motion blur effects (real or faked). Perhaps then in a sort of a remote-viewing dream-sequence he sees his ship traveling through space in elapsed time with motion blur and some dark blue filters and some interesting dynamic camera angles. Then, when the ship arrives or encounters anything interesting, the whole cryo sequence plays in reverse or there about. The player wakes up and returns to his cockpit/bridge.
So you have to invent ways of interrupting people while they are speeding from place to place. Or you have to slow people down and give them a lot of interesting non-repetitive stuff to do during travel.
You can be interrupted and awoken by any of the same things you'd normally encounter regardless of the travel method chosen- passing ships, hostile interceptors, message intercepts, asteroid fields, a disastrous internal explosion in the aft reactor, etc.
The right way to approach transportation is to figure out your inter-system FTL (eg. bose-nova teleportation).
Then figure out your intra-system FTL (eg. dimensional jumping)
Canon is written to reflect these technologies and how they function
My impression from jackS was that the main reason they added intra-system FTL (SPEC) in the first place is because a way of circumventing inter-system choke points was needed. You don't need intra-system FTL. Solar systems aren't that big.
I dont want to detract from the initial point of the thread, being the replacement of wormholes. It requires much less of an invasive change with the result being a more believable story, and novel method.
My ideas on in-system travel are just off the cuff ideas. There has yet to be (and there's been a long thread on the subject in the off-topic forum) an idea for in-system travel that doesn't require a lot of changes to the game. I dont think we can correct the logic holes in in-system travel without re-designing the gameplay around the travel, instead of the other way around like we've been doing.
Well, you've got feedback from Ace123 and jackS, I'm not sure if Klauss cares about canon topics. So your next course of action in trying to get this through is probably to try and get in contact with hellcatv, who apparently hasn't visited this forum since last May, so you might need to bug Ace about bringing this issue up with him via email, if you don't have his email address yourself.
safemode
Developer
Developer
Posts: 2150
Joined: Mon Apr 23, 2007 1:17 am
Location: Pennsylvania
Contact:

Re: A new take on wormholes

Post by safemode »

SPEC has evolved to fit a void in gameplay, rather than force gameplay to be created around spec.

People were bored with WC style cinematic autopilots. At the same time, they didn't want extremely long transits, so time dialation was used.

This wasn't good enough though, some people didn't want to wait 10 minutes to get from planet to planet while nothing happened. Though, when time dialation is pushed to extremes, it caused lots of errors to occur, both in gameplay and in game logic.

So, SPEC is created to give the ship a massive velocity boost without changing time slices. Spec is an improvement, but soon people are upset that it takes 5-10 minutes to get from planet to planet still, and so still use time dialation in conjunction. At some point SPEC capacitors are made infinite, cuz running out adds too much time to the transit.

So SPEC is revamped. Ramp up times are shortened, ramp down times are shortened. The distance SPEC works from a gravity well is shortened, the overall effect is a massive decrease in time to get from planet to planet.

That's what happens when you have pressure on developers to deliver something playable now, when the right solution would have been slower but in the long term the better choice.

Granted, the idea of spec may have come from an idea in canon, but it seems more likely it came about the way described above and was added to canon. In any case, it's nearly impossible to write canon around gameplay instead of the other way around, and you see that problem with SPEC.

I'm not so sure i'd go with a navigatable internal ship setup....as that would basically require a whole new game. But there are plenty of things that can be done that wouldn't require that drastic of a rewrite.
Ed Sweetman endorses this message.
MC707
Venturer
Venturer
Posts: 555
Joined: Sun Jan 18, 2009 5:18 am
Location: Quito, Ecuador.
Contact:

Re: A new take on wormholes

Post by MC707 »

safemode wrote:the overall effect is a massive decrease in time to get from planet to planet.
I think the speed is at the limit right now. It might be extremely fast to move from system to system and from planet to planet with a Franklin, but some people (like me) still use a capital ship like the Cydesdale. In fact, the Ox is extremely slow (from a gaming point of view). It takes humongous amounts of time to use these ships, so slowing down the process of Interplanetary and Interstellar travel would not be such a good idea.
My Machine: OS: Ubuntu 8.10 (intrepid) 64 bit in a 500GB Maxtor HD @ 7200 RPM, Windows Vista PsyChoses Edition 2009 32 bit in a 500GB Samsung HD @ 7200 RPM CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Quad CPU Q6600 @ 2.40GHz GPU: nVidia GeForce 9400 GT @ 1024 MB RAM: 3891 MB
Earthlings|The End of the Internet?|FreeWebsite
Deus Siddis
Elite
Elite
Posts: 1363
Joined: Sat Aug 04, 2007 3:42 pm

Re: A new take on wormholes

Post by Deus Siddis »

Safemode, it looks like the forum has you listed as a mod or admin, so if you don't want the discussion of replacing spec to detract from your topic's purpose of replacing the canon description of how jump points work, you could break this discussion into a new thread starting at this post (as a suggestion):

http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/forum ... 67#p108267

That's what happens when you have pressure on developers to deliver something playable now, when the right solution would have been slower but in the long term the better choice.
I agree, but I think that and your other concern about a lack of content, comes from a larger gap in discussions similar to this, which attack where the game should end up instead of what is the next incremental step (which is also really important to tackle, it just isn't everything).

What would the ultimate, perfect future version of VS play like, given what we know can be done, even if it takes 10 years to get there? What could the player do in it and what couldn't the player do (given what we know can be done today)? How would the gameplay be divided up over different types of environments in the game (example- 20% deep space, 20% around asteroids and planets, 20% inside ships and stations, 20% in the atmospheres of planets, 20% on the ground on planets)?

I'm not sure if SPEC could be properly calibrated or replaced unless we knew what kind of game we were shooting for.

People were bored with WC style cinematic autopilots.
That is because the WC time elapse autopilot had to be used so often to get anywhere in the game.

And that in turn is because wing commander (at least privateer) seems to borrow alot from the star wars universe (including mark hamill :)). In SW, they have insanely fast FTL, to the extent that travel around the galaxy then is like traveling in the world today, rather than travel in the age of the sail or another historical time more or less recent than that. So they spend alot of time making little stops every few hours or minutes, to places not that important or different from each other, basically just visits to modern nations and cites/towns like we have today, some are more primitive and sparse and some are more modernized and dense, and the technology and scenery and biology is not all that different from one to the next.

This popular extremely-space-opera flavor makes travel feel quick, repetive and extremely boring. And it automatically exposes a lack (unless you have 1000 content creators working on making a very diverse feeling galaxy) of content that results in your destination being not that different from where you headed out from. You'll see a few seconds of deep space, and then a settled planet, where you will land at a pre-designated site, and you will find there a bar and some routine, low paying contract jobs. That almost entirely undermines the feel of exploration and space, and not to mention gameplay.

We need to shoot for locations being much bigger, content and gameplay richer, worth hanging around in for longer, and also take much longer to get to and being harder to get to. As an example, you could spend many hours at just Atlantis or Araxia, or a quarter of the game in the Cephid system in general, without getting bored, then going to the next system would be the same level/quality of detail and gameplay. That is the essense of a real space game- fun and hugely vast. And eventually creating such a game would take the pressure off of the inter and intra system travel methods, to be extremely fast.

I'm not so sure i'd go with a navigatable internal ship setup....as that would basically require a whole new game.
Well I'm afraid that to make space worth not skipping over, you are going to need more than even one 'whole new game' added to the mix. Right now, gameplay orbits around memorizing or mapping trade routes, maneuvering heavy ships (a sort of SimSupertanker), dogfighting in lighter ships and choosing upgrades for your ships in general. That is enough to make a fun game, but not even close to what it could be or the kind of gameplay and content you are talking about needing.

However, I don't think internal ship navigation would need to be that much new, it is already partially implemented for large ships (besides your own) and stations. I mean, realtime-3D exploration of ships and stations really would be a new game rolled into VS, but using the existing pre-rendered-frame based point and click navigation would not. You'd just need to add a walk-time delay between the player clicking on where he wants to go in his ship, whilst playing a walk-sound effect (ripped from one of the FOSS shooters for a quick fix), to get the point across, al la the Journeyman Project (a graphical adventure game from the '90s). Then you'd add internal places piecemeal, like the existing mission and upgrade rooms and interfaces, and later things like the suggested cryopod room, or a map room, reactor room, etc.
But there are plenty of things that can be done that wouldn't require that drastic of a rewrite.
But will those things be enough? I don't think an abstract hyperspace navigation mini-game and/or listening to ship-to-ship communications will be enough on their own to fill the would be travel time gap with players.
Deus Siddis
Elite
Elite
Posts: 1363
Joined: Sat Aug 04, 2007 3:42 pm

Re: A new take on wormholes

Post by Deus Siddis »

MC707 wrote:
safemode wrote:the overall effect is a massive decrease in time to get from planet to planet.
I think the speed is at the limit right now. It might be extremely fast to move from system to system and from planet to planet with a Franklin, but some people (like me) still use a capital ship like the Cydesdale. In fact, the Ox is extremely slow (from a gaming point of view). It takes humongous amounts of time to use these ships, so slowing down the process of Interplanetary and Interstellar travel would not be such a good idea.
Actually, that is probably a somewhat unrelated balance issue. Those ships are impossible to maneuver because their conventional thruster levels are set too extremely low for their mass. Trying hacking yourself a Tesla, Vigilance or Thales to get an idea for how agile the other ships in the 400 meter to 2 kilometer long scale are.

No one has yet rebalanced any of the ships large than the 200 meter long mule, if I am not mistaken.
Post Reply