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So You Want To/Write a Hard Science Fiction Story With Space Travel: Difference between revisions
So You Want To/Write a Hard Science Fiction Story With Space Travel (view source)
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However, to work as a piece of hard SF with space travel, the writer must go one big step farther: The technology, the mechanics of space travel, the planets, the aliens (if there ''are'' aliens), all the details of that futuristic setting ''must be [[Realism|realistic]].'' The author must take pains to follow the known laws of physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, and planetology, and how they apply to any areas of engineering that will appear in the story. This means the author must ''know'' the laws of physics, chemistry, etc., or have good access to someone who does. While the laws of the author's fictional universe are allowed to deviate from the laws of [[Real Life]] ''on occasion'', the author must be consciously aware of each of those deviations, must have an excuse for them (even if he never tells the reader this excuse, he must have it in his own head), and above all must take pains to ''limit the damage'' that such departures from reality can potentially do to the story.
Since space travel is involved, it's important to remember that human beings have travelled in space for over five decades now. We ''know'' what is involved in getting from the Earth's surface to low Earth orbit. We know what's involved in landing on a rocky world 400,000 kilometers away. We know what effect microgravity has on human bones and muscles. A realistic story involving space travel must take all this accumulated human knowledge into account. The cartoonish world of 1950s B-movie astronauts having a "navigational error" that sends them to an "uncharted planet" with an Earthlike ecosystem inhabited by alien women who speak English is, and should be, a [[Discredited Trope]] -- but so should portraying space travel like anything other than space travel just because it [[Rule of Cool|looks neater that way]] in your head. You'll just have to dispense with the story making artistic sense so the story can make logical, scientific sense, so be ready for a lot of artistic disappointments.
One of the best resources out there for realistic future space travel is the [http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/ Atomic Rockets page], which covers everything from "what designs are on the drawing board for spacecraft capable of crossing interstellar distances within a human lifetime?" to "why should my female crew members not wear skirts?"
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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.
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
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