So You Want To/Write a Hard Science Fiction Story With Space Travel: Difference between revisions
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Maybe faster-than-light travel only works between certain [[Portal Network|rare points in space]], and your ships must maneuver in normal space to get to and from them. Maybe FTL movement is impossible within some large distance from a gravity source, requiring your space ships to leave the solar system -- or at least leave Earth orbit -- before they can go FTL. Maybe your space pirates ''can'' jump to hyperspace at the first sign of trouble, but so can your space cops, and they have FTL weapons they can shoot at each other while in hyperspace. |
Maybe faster-than-light travel only works between certain [[Portal Network|rare points in space]], and your ships must maneuver in normal space to get to and from them. Maybe FTL movement is impossible within some large distance from a gravity source, requiring your space ships to leave the solar system -- or at least leave Earth orbit -- before they can go FTL. Maybe your space pirates ''can'' jump to hyperspace at the first sign of trouble, but so can your space cops, and they have FTL weapons they can shoot at each other while in hyperspace. |
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The third problem with FTL travel is more practical: ''we don't know how to do it in [[Real Life]]''. Every attempt to come up with a way to do so has run into intractable problems. Quantum entanglement can occur instantaneously across vast distances, but it can't convey any actual information faster than ''c''. The Alcubierre space warp has a lot of things wrong with it. What wormholes are depends on which type of wormholes they are. The wormholes that general relativity posits in uncharged, non-rotating eternal black holes are Schwarzschild wormholes. If they even exist, they will spontaneously collapse faster than it's possible to traverse them. One candidate is Ellis |
The third problem with FTL travel is more practical: ''we don't know how to do it in [[Real Life]]''. Every attempt to come up with a way to do so has run into intractable problems. Quantum entanglement can occur instantaneously across vast distances, but it can't convey any actual information faster than ''c''. The Alcubierre space warp has a lot of things wrong with it. What wormholes are depends on which type of wormholes they are. The wormholes that general relativity posits in uncharged, non-rotating eternal black holes are Schwarzschild wormholes. If they even exist, they will spontaneously collapse faster than it's possible to traverse them, so they don't make enough sense as a mode of travel. One candidate is [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellis_drainhole| Ellis drainholes] and a special case of Ellis drainhole, called an [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellis_wormhole| Ellis wormhole], but you might want to follow Orion's Arm's example in this case and make sure Ellis drainholes start out with both the wormhole mouths at the same place, and that very powerful ships are required to move the mouths to a useful distance. You, as the writer, will have to ''invent'' a way to travel faster than light, and then cover all the repercussions of the method you come up with. But first, you might want to earn a university-level physics degree before even coming up with the pitch for the story. |
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