So, I've been quiet a lot lately, due to family necessities such as required computer down-time and such. But I've been active nevertheless, working on a new scifi rpg setting. This is almost just an exercise of my world building skills, but I think it's becoming worthy of at least a campaign.
The next few entries will discuss the setting topic by topic. The first one, this one, is a general introduction.
Post-Terra
The setting is circa 1 500 years to the future. In AD 2544 Earth was destroyed by a massive impact damage. The cause of this was a giant asteroid sent off-course by meddling humans trying to prevent a far-future impact. Several fragments of this asteroid, successfully destroyed by humans, slammed into the moon, sending it spiralling towards Earth.
Evacuations started over 60 years before the impact by UN-headed project Daedalus. However, a scientific breakthrough made FTL travel possible through generated wormholes. An operation to control this technology was unsuccesful and the technology soon leaked ti the world, leading to an uncontrolled diaspora of humanity with everyone who could afford offsystem travel doing so.
Most opted for nearby systems which had some habitable systems. Some, however, made the hard choice and started a long voyage accross the interstellar void for the Cruxis zone, the largest area of habitable life in the galaxy. The Cruxis zone is over 40 000 ly from Earth and is roughly 1200 ly in diameter.
This story is about those brave who successfully made it to the Cruxis zone, known to it's inhabitants today as "known space".
After settling on several promising worlds, humanity once again reached for the stars. Within a few hundred years interstellar trade was flourishing and even the occacional skirmish was seen between the rising stellar nations. Most of these fledgeling colonies controlled only one or a few systems and centered on a single starsystem, but some rose to control more than a hundred systems and inhabiting dozens of planets.
There are of course species native to this zone. The Garm are marsupial sentients who are psychologically quite close to humans. There have been a few wars between the human nations and the Garm but mostly trade and diplomacy have been the key. Garm have been content to stay in their sphere of stars and humans have been content to stay on theirs. The Tanz, named after their discoverer, the Macedonian ship Tanganjika, are silicate-based lifeforms who live amongst the humans, mainly near cooling systems and engines of starships. They work as repairmen and technicians and have a knack for computer hacking. Then there are the Others, the Arachnids or however one might call them. They look nightmarish but their requirements for life are different enough from humans that they do not compete from the same worlds as humans do. Some human-controlled systems may have Other colonies on their outer planets but mainly the two don't interact much.
Technology is based on manipulation of gravity, fusion power and ftl travel. There is no ftl radio, so news travel by courier ships. Gravity technology is used for stl drives, force fields and on-planet building technology. Countergrav cars were experimented upon but they caused more trouble than what they were seen worth and were abandoned. Thanks to gravitic technology, no spin gravity is required on starships or space stations to generate gravity. Thanks to inertial compensation, ships can handle over 100G acceleration rates and military vessels can do even 200-300G. The huge power consumption of these systems are met by advanced fusion power. Most ships have at least two reactors giving the ship ample energy for all needs. Due to the larger consumption rates, the fusion reactors need to be fueled roughly once or twice a year. They use hydrogen and helium as fuel, both being equally acceptable.
The FTL technology works as follows: it can be activated only around the outer limit of a given system, around 15-50 AU from any star. The FTL drive spins up, generating a temporary wormhole between A and B. Systems A and B must be in straight-line connection not going through the system of departure (within the system limit). Currently the technology can maintain only a 4-5 parsec (12-16 ly) wormhole so a cross-zone voyage may well be around 150-200 days of travel, depending on route choice. Interstellar space wormholes are known to be highly inaccurate and unstable so most sane people avoid opening wormholes in interstellar space. Navigation and endpoint calculation is a science known as astrogation and is fairly complex but manageable by a human of sufficient training.
Pre-jump sequence takes around 5-15 minutes. During this time the ship spins up the jumpdrive and shuts down other systems to give the jump maximum accuracy. The astrogator inputs the jump coordinates and the onboard navigation computer makes corrections due to constant travel and After-jump the jump drive needs to cool down for a duration of 1h per travelled parsec after which a new jump can be made. A jump can be detected through gravitic sensors as it generates quite a bit of localized gravitational phenomena. This effect can be devastating up to 1000 km away from the ship entering or leaving and this effect can be seen up to 15 AU away from the jump point. Because of the vast area to cover, detecting incoming jumps is done mainly by deep-space sentry drones who send a warning to the centralized system command through laser pulse.
In my next entry, I will discuss more of the existing major starpowers and write something about the average lesser powers around.
tiistai 14. huhtikuuta 2009
sunnuntai 4. tammikuuta 2009
Exploration of space
A current topic if any. I had some thoughts recently about how hard it might be, even with FTL travel to explore even small regions of space.
A hypothetical setting: a way to travel faster than light has been discovered and a stable jumpdrive-ship built. The maximum speed it can travel is roughly 1 ly / day, vastly more than the speed of light. The drive can be activated in the outer solar system, to where it takes a week or two to travel with the sublight drives.
The practical range of travels with the ship is limited to two months, after which it starts running out of food, air and fuel. 6 weeks of travel is roughly 95% safe not accounting accidents or unforeseen problems.
So around 42-56 lightyears is the maximum range of the ship. The ship can, when entering a system, survey the entire star system in a 1-3 days, depending on the system, with an average of 1,5 days.
It would be logical for the ship, being still first of it's kind, to first make short jumps to nearby systems: Proxima Centauri, Alpha Centauri, Sirius, etc. First to the Centauri system and back, a 9-10 days trip in total. Then a two-system journey, say to Sirius and then Lalande 21185. Sirius is 9 days of hard travel, then about 5-6 days to Lalande 21185 and finally back home, another 8 days. In total, the journey took 21-22 days plus a few days to survey the system.
Now the ship has spent around 5 weeks exploring and has reached 3 systems. A still longer journey is planned out: going by Barnard's Star and Ross 154 to HD 217987. Barnard's star is a little over 5 light years, getting there is 6 days. From there, Ross 154 is about the same distance, 6 days more. Then, to HD 217987, roughly 9 more days. And let us say 6 days of surveying. The total time of this star trek has been 27 days, almost a month. The ship can still travel a little less than doubly this travel, we are approaching the limit. The ship has now seen 6 systems during it's journeys and systems close to Earth are running out. And a roughly two-day survey on each system gives only a slight clue on the planets and their possible habitability. And the usefulness of each system can only be guessed at the moment. But that is not the concern of this exploration vessel.
Now an even longer trek, off first to UV Ceti, Epsilon Eridani, then Wolf 359, then Ross 128 and finally to DEN 0255-4700. The travel takes 9 days to UV Ceti, from there about 7 days to Eplison Eridani, then almost two weeks to Wolf 359, then say a 5 day travel to Ross 128 and finally a 12 day travel to DEN 0255-4700 and 17 days home. The total travel, including the surveys take about 70 days. The ship will be almost running on fumes and the crew a bit tired when they return. And now there has been almost 4 months of exploring. Not so much as such, but so far the ship has explored 11 systems out of the 50 systems within 15 light years from Sol. With the rate remaining the same, within one year there would be around 30-35 exlored systems, within 20 months all of the nearby systems would be explored. But of course the rate would drop and I'd assume that the real time spent to explore all the 50 systems would be somewhere around 2-2½ years. Possibly 3.
Now humanity has explored a roughly spherical volume of space, 15 light years in diameter. The local bubble, the next step, is 300 ly across. With a spherical volume, it would be around 94247 cubic ly. This area might contain somewhere around 10 000 solar systems and assuming rate remaining constant (it wouldn't), it would take around 300 years to explore. After this step, humanity has explored around 1/100th of the distance from the Sun to the Galactic Core.
Of course, while time progresses, there would be more exploration ships, the technology would improve and people would start building colonies and starbases further away from the Solar system. And starships could be away longer periods of time, perhaps even a few years, exploring.
Still, exploring a galaxy might take time. And of course there might be prioritizing. If the priority is in establishing new colonies, surveys might only be done to systems likely to have habitable planets. This would quicken up the exploration a great deal, but a huge portion of stars would be left unobserved.
A hypothetical setting: a way to travel faster than light has been discovered and a stable jumpdrive-ship built. The maximum speed it can travel is roughly 1 ly / day, vastly more than the speed of light. The drive can be activated in the outer solar system, to where it takes a week or two to travel with the sublight drives.
The practical range of travels with the ship is limited to two months, after which it starts running out of food, air and fuel. 6 weeks of travel is roughly 95% safe not accounting accidents or unforeseen problems.
So around 42-56 lightyears is the maximum range of the ship. The ship can, when entering a system, survey the entire star system in a 1-3 days, depending on the system, with an average of 1,5 days.
It would be logical for the ship, being still first of it's kind, to first make short jumps to nearby systems: Proxima Centauri, Alpha Centauri, Sirius, etc. First to the Centauri system and back, a 9-10 days trip in total. Then a two-system journey, say to Sirius and then Lalande 21185. Sirius is 9 days of hard travel, then about 5-6 days to Lalande 21185 and finally back home, another 8 days. In total, the journey took 21-22 days plus a few days to survey the system.
Now the ship has spent around 5 weeks exploring and has reached 3 systems. A still longer journey is planned out: going by Barnard's Star and Ross 154 to HD 217987. Barnard's star is a little over 5 light years, getting there is 6 days. From there, Ross 154 is about the same distance, 6 days more. Then, to HD 217987, roughly 9 more days. And let us say 6 days of surveying. The total time of this star trek has been 27 days, almost a month. The ship can still travel a little less than doubly this travel, we are approaching the limit. The ship has now seen 6 systems during it's journeys and systems close to Earth are running out. And a roughly two-day survey on each system gives only a slight clue on the planets and their possible habitability. And the usefulness of each system can only be guessed at the moment. But that is not the concern of this exploration vessel.
Now an even longer trek, off first to UV Ceti, Epsilon Eridani, then Wolf 359, then Ross 128 and finally to DEN 0255-4700. The travel takes 9 days to UV Ceti, from there about 7 days to Eplison Eridani, then almost two weeks to Wolf 359, then say a 5 day travel to Ross 128 and finally a 12 day travel to DEN 0255-4700 and 17 days home. The total travel, including the surveys take about 70 days. The ship will be almost running on fumes and the crew a bit tired when they return. And now there has been almost 4 months of exploring. Not so much as such, but so far the ship has explored 11 systems out of the 50 systems within 15 light years from Sol. With the rate remaining the same, within one year there would be around 30-35 exlored systems, within 20 months all of the nearby systems would be explored. But of course the rate would drop and I'd assume that the real time spent to explore all the 50 systems would be somewhere around 2-2½ years. Possibly 3.
Now humanity has explored a roughly spherical volume of space, 15 light years in diameter. The local bubble, the next step, is 300 ly across. With a spherical volume, it would be around 94247 cubic ly. This area might contain somewhere around 10 000 solar systems and assuming rate remaining constant (it wouldn't), it would take around 300 years to explore. After this step, humanity has explored around 1/100th of the distance from the Sun to the Galactic Core.
Of course, while time progresses, there would be more exploration ships, the technology would improve and people would start building colonies and starbases further away from the Solar system. And starships could be away longer periods of time, perhaps even a few years, exploring.
Still, exploring a galaxy might take time. And of course there might be prioritizing. If the priority is in establishing new colonies, surveys might only be done to systems likely to have habitable planets. This would quicken up the exploration a great deal, but a huge portion of stars would be left unobserved.
Tilaa:
Blogitekstit (Atom)