Sci-Fi insterstellar travel idea...

[FireNexus]

Maybe a better option would be for the outgoing ship to start the wormhole, and then "ride" it to the destination, with the exit hole "reaching" the target a few seconds before the ship arrives, and the "tunnel" collapsing behind the ship (or even due to the ship's wake).

I wanted to avoid that simply due to the fact that calculation of exactly where to go would prove extremely cumbersome, and possibly downright dangerous. That would, though, make for an interesting plot device.

[Steel]

It makes me think of the Trade Lanes in the Freelancer game, wich accelerated you and made you intangible to asteroids or other ships, although they didn't make the travel instantaneous for the player (for obvious reasons)

Yes, but those were stupid as they went between planets in the same system, and even if those planets are at the exact same (mean) orbital radius then they wont remain fixed realtive to each other so the lanes have to move. That would mean they could potentially have to become hundreds or thousands of times as long over a year... discounting the problems when you would need to fly through the sun.

[Illuminatus Primus]

This is exactly the method I chose in the rewrite of The Humanist Inheritance, after Discombobulated/Metatwaddle pointed out that my previous idea violated conservation of energy.

I've been meaning to tell you about that. Apparently, you can use this new method to violate causality or go FTL: take the new end that opens a light-year away a year in the future and tow it near c on a closed loop a light-year long; you're effectively bringing it back a year. Do it again, and you're creating a time bridge.

How did Maeda violate CoE? Maybe I'm being retarded, I just can't think today.

[Surlethe]

How did Maeda violate CoE? Maybe I'm being retarded, I just can't think today.

I'm not sure, since I don't have the access to background information Disco does. My best guess is that a ship can Maeda to a point which has a different potential than where it started from.

[Junghalli]

Assuming the wormhole is PERMANENT, of course.

Even if it wasn't the set-up could have a significant advantage.

You've basically got two approaches to building a fast starship now, you either build a huge fuel tank with a tiny payload and send it the regular way or you build a huge wormhole generator and send the ship through it. Since the ship doesn't have to carry the wormhole generator it can carry more payload - the wormhole generator may be absurdly huge but you don't have to take it with you, unlike the fuel you use in the conventional approach. We're basically talking about the limitations of a stationary device vs. the limitations of a device that needs to be put on a vehicle. It gets better if the energy used to create a wormhole is a factor of diameter instead of the mass you send through it; you could build a really long thin ship and send a huge mass through it that way. You also only have to build the generator once, because while the wormhole may be temporary you can use the generator to create new ones.

Of course, I am assuming that the wormhole effect (for lack of a better term - these aren't really wormholes we're discussing here) is external to the ship, instead of internal to it.

Yes, but those were stupid as they went between planets in the same system, and even if those planets are at the exact same (mean) orbital radius then they wont remain fixed realtive to each other so the lanes have to move. That would mean they could potentially have to become hundreds or thousands of times as long over a year... discounting the problems when you would need to fly through the sun.

An interstellar version would have the same problem, albeit over a much longer timescale. Stars aren't stationary relative to each other either.

[RedImperator]

After a closer reading, Steel, I noticed your system and mine differ in a crucial way: you have the wormhole egress hanging around in the destination system for however long it takes the ship to travel. This isn't necessary: wormholes can, so far as I understand, connect any two points in spacetime, so a wormhole can simply connect point A/time A with point B/time B directly, without transmitting any information faster than light. This is what I used in the HI revision.

For those questioning the point of such a system, the primary advantage is that you don't have to carry the vast energies needed for interstellar travel with you. A stationary power plant with no mass restrictions and effectively arbitrary heat dissipation capacity can be much more powerful than any shipboard reactor, and a stationary power plant does not need to carry enough propellant to cross interstellar space. The secondary advantage is that you don't have to carry decades of consumables and/or futz with some kind of cryo-sleep/hibernation system for the crew, which is enough of a problem on its own to likely limit real-life interstellar travel to robots.

This is exactly the method I chose in the rewrite of The Humanist Inheritance, after Discombobulated/Metatwaddle pointed out that my previous idea violated conservation of energy.

I've been meaning to tell you about that. Apparently, you can use this new method to violate causality or go FTL: take the new end that opens a light-year away a year in the future and tow it near c on a closed loop a light-year long; you're effectively bringing it back a year. Do it again, and you're creating a time bridge.

I think this problem can be short-circuited by limiting the wormhole's lifespan to the time it takes the ship to cross. Even if it still leaves some hypothetical opening for FTL, I'm willing to swing the authorial fiat stick and declare "The universe doesn't allow causality violations, period. No matter how you fool with your wormhole, it will instantly collapse if you try to violate causality with it, due to principles of physics which were discovered by blah blah in whenever".

How did Maeda violate CoE? Maybe I'm being retarded, I just can't think today.

The ship becomes massless for the transition. Even if it's only temporary, the mass-energy of a starship and its crew has simply disappeared from the universe. Just turning the ship to energy isn't a solution, because then you have an unstoppable superweapon that can also be used to cross interstellar distances.

I suppose I could just say the ship is converted into an equivalent mass of nearly massless particles, like neutrinos (though I wouldn't actually use them, of course), but then I don't know if there's any good reason for them to accelerate anywhere (I suspect not).

[Darth Raptor]

Whenever I write a setting in which FTL works, I just handwave and say that all FTL travel and communication uses the same observational frame of reference. In my harder stuff, I don't even bother. It's "easier" (in that it's actually possible) to engineer people so that they're immortal.

[Admiral Valdemar]

I'd rather just not tinker with FTL, full stop. The idea is really a massive brainbug in sci-fi that doesn't necessarily mean better stories any more than planet smashing weapons do. I'm quite content having high relativistic travel with a more exotic drive based on known principles that utilises cryonics than figure out a way to use wormholes or metric manipulation. Just about every plausible FTL mechanism has been done now anyway, so you'd only be reiterating something done elsewhere given the limited number of ways around the causality issue etc.

I find that space opera taking places over centuries tends to be more grandiose anyway. In SW, for instance, crossing the galaxy in a second hand freighter in under a week just seems to cheapen the idea of space in fiction; removes the danger and vastness.

[Baal]

The obvious solution is not to bother, actually. As it takes information just as long to travel through the wormhole as it does traveling through realspace the concept is already useless for communications and as AV pointed out, the energy requirements of opening the wormhole in the first place are bound to rival if not exceed those of getting a starship across the distance the conventional way. About the only advantage that system has is the travelers not aging en voyage, and you can always use cryosleep for that.

The system would though have excellent application for medical reasons. If someone has what is today an incurable disease then you just send them on one of these traits. When they arrive you hopefully have a cure. If you dont you just send them back.While almost no time would pass for the patient the rest of reality could have decades pass while a cure is developed.

This is of course assuming that this reality does not possess perfect cryo systems that would allow you to just freeze patients and thaw them out when a cure is found.

[Darth Raptor]

I find that space opera taking places over centuries tends to be more grandiose anyway. In SW, for instance, crossing the galaxy in a second hand freighter in under a week just seems to cheapen the idea of space in fiction; removes the danger and vastness.

There's that, and then there's the little known fact that you don't need a whole galaxy for most of the stories sci-fi writers often pen. A realistic future civilization is likely to abandon large planets and their huge gravity wells in favor of artificial habitats. You can have as many of these as you want, so you can still have your gangster planets and your cowboy worlds, they just won't be "worlds" in the conventional sense.

With just a little down-scaling, you could probably shrink most sci-fi settings into a single star system without sacrificing anything thematically. It helps that Star Noun never depicts a realistic pan-galactic civilization anyway.

[Paolo]

I think this problem can be short-circuited by limiting the wormhole's lifespan to the time it takes the ship to cross. Even if it still leaves some hypothetical opening for FTL, I'm willing to swing the authorial fiat stick and declare "The universe doesn't allow causality violations, period. No matter how you fool with your wormhole, it will instantly collapse if you try to violate causality with it, due to principles of physics which were discovered by blah blah in whenever".

Easy way around that. Just postulate a traversable wormhole solution with an event horizon around one of any pair of mouths. This will effectively ensure one-way communication between two space-time regions connected by the wormhole. If causality holds, then physical wormholes--if they exist--will necessarily fall into this family of geometries or something similar.