Hyperspace

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GeoModder
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Re: Hyperspace

Post by GeoModder »

Arioch wrote:The business of scouts exploring new systems is a dangerous one. You can estimate a star's mass pretty accurately just by measuring its spectrum. Learning where the planets are can be trickier. Ideally you'd like to observe the star for at least a few weeks watching for any planetary transits across its disc. If you see any, it's not safe to jump; you're in the plane of the ecliptic, and it's best to seek another route.
I would think that nor the mass of a planet, nor its position in a close(r) orbit (even in the 'jumpline') would be cause of much alarm? Interplanetary space is still pretty volumous around any star.
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Re: Hyperspace

Post by Mjolnir »

GeoModder wrote:I would think that nor the mass of a planet, nor its position in a close(r) orbit (even in the 'jumpline') would be cause of much alarm? Interplanetary space is still pretty volumous around any star.
Something like Jupiter might be cause for concern, but observing for a couple weeks will have a chance of seeing a transit of about 1 in 300, and then only if you're almost precisely in the right plane...and if its dangerous at times other than during the transit itself, for every orbit that transits a star, there'll be a wide range of dangerous orbits that don't. Looking for transits seems very unlikely to help avoid a dangerous jump.

Objects in closer orbit are more likely to transit the star and will do so more frequently (though even Mercury will only do so every 88 days), so if the ecliptic is just a hazardous place to jump into a system it might be worthwhile to check. It seems like you'd be better off deploying a large telescope and imaging the destination system directly. Planets on the dangerous side of their orbits will be less visible that way (mostly showing you their shadowed sides), but you're more likely to be able to determine the ecliptic plane of the target system. A couple weeks of transit should be enough to unfold an occulter and get some good images of the destination system. (Something like this: http://newworlds.colorado.edu/starshade/index.htm)

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Re: Hyperspace

Post by osmium »

I guess it comes down to technicalities, but it would stem from specifically which part of the jump drive does the work and where the expense lies in said jump drive. If you basically cannot separate the components of a jump drive (say like you *can't* a tokamak) than it would depend upon the scaling of cost of jump drive and cost of transporting mass.

I think it might still be feasible depending on the cost structure to absorb the cost of a jump drive into the utility gained by various rail probe / rail torpedo jump systems. Certainly they would be special use devices, but I just can't forsee how you could possible limit the technology such that near instantaneous communication would not be worth the cost, I mean such a system could reduce the time to send a message by an order of magnitude which must be worth something to the Umiak (the Loroi already have their methods ^_^).

Another random question for people, do ships "tugging" another ship along with them have to be physically touching, or does the hyperspace effect drag nearby objects along with. Because you could try to jump a *lot* of "disposable" torpedo crates in with a single low to mid power jump engine by remote charging the engine and throwing a bunch of torpedoes at it and having it jump dragging them all along with it (or perhaps it requires some sort of complicated tethering system to catch the torpedoes first). Regardless you could use such a system to put some targets further into the system than your attack fleet to help screen your arrival (esp for umiak).

-O

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Re: Hyperspace

Post by Arioch »

Page 88 won't be up until later today, but the updates to the FTL page are up now. There are a few new diagrams and illustrations, and it's rewritten to be hopefully more informative.

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osmium wrote:do ships "tugging" another ship along with them have to be physically touching, or does the hyperspace effect drag nearby objects along with.
Only objects within the scope of the jump field will be drawn into hyperspace.

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Re: Hyperspace

Post by Aygar »

Arioch wrote:Page 88 won't be up until later today,
Squeeeeee :)
Arioch wrote:but the updates to the FTL page are up now. There are a few new diagrams and illustrations, and it's rewritten to be hopefully more informative.

Image
osmium wrote:do ships "tugging" another ship along with them have to be physically touching, or does the hyperspace effect drag nearby objects along with.
Only objects within the scope of the jump field will be drawn into hyperspace.
To the rethink'ning.

--Aygar
--Aygar

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Re: Hyperspace

Post by GeoModder »

Even if jovian-mass planets are detected, and are something to watch out for during a jump, I'd say it should be possible to avoid those LoS orbit(s) by jumping out on a slight angle in respect to the destination star. 5 degrees off the ecliptic might not sound like much, but at 5 AU off the destination star it's about a dozen million kilometer out of the ecliptic.
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Re: Hyperspace

Post by dfacto »

I'm not really seeing the danger of gas giants or other planets. Not only does is have to be perfectly in line with your jump vector, but you also have to exit a jump righton top of it. Considering that we're talking about possible planet positions you have to take into account a titanic area. Say the star system is something like 30 AU in radius, you have an area of around 3000 square AU around a star in which you have planets with a negligible size (far less than 1 square AU).

The chances of smashing into a planet are very very slim.

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Re: Hyperspace

Post by icekatze »

hi hi

I don't think the worry is necessarily that you will smash into the planet, rather the planet's gravity well will throw your ship off course and maybe you'll end up flying off into infinity instead. Jupiter has a big enough gravity well that the barycenter between it and the sun actually sits outside of the sun's surface.

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Re: Hyperspace

Post by Mjolnir »

GeoModder wrote:Even if jovian-mass planets are detected, and are something to watch out for during a jump, I'd say it should be possible to avoid those LoS orbit(s) by jumping out on a slight angle in respect to the destination star. 5 degrees off the ecliptic might not sound like much, but at 5 AU off the destination star it's about a dozen million kilometer out of the ecliptic.
This would involve increasing the probability of a misjump. You're aiming to miss a good chunk of the jump zone, after all.

dfacto wrote:I'm not really seeing the danger of gas giants or other planets. Not only does is have to be perfectly in line with your jump vector, but you also have to exit a jump righton top of it.
But you don't know that. We're talking hyperspace trajectories here, not normal-space ones...the presence of masses might have a disproportional effect on objects in hyperspace, notably distorting jump zones in the vicinity and increasing odds of a misjump.

The sun has 1047 times the mass of Jupiter. If the hazard radius scales with the square root of mass (just as one possible scaling) and can be based off the jump distance, Jupiter would have a danger radius of sqrt(1/1047)*5 AU = 0.15 AU. A volume 0.3 AU across would take a good chunk out of a jump zone while the planet is passing by. With a wild-assed-guess of a jump zone width of 1 AU, that's nearly 10% of the jump zone...which could be quite worth making a few extra jumps so you can get into the system and make sure no gas giants are interfering with the jump zones.

And that's just mass, it's possible that frame dragging effects are much stronger in hyperspace, or that magnetic fields can influence objects in hyperspace.

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Re: Hyperspace

Post by dfacto »

But would you even need to take steps to come in at an angle to the ecliptic plane? It isn't as if solar systems are all perfectly aligned. Seems to me that having a planet drag you out of hyperspace is a matter of real bad luck, and then having it actually kill you is even less likely.

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Re: Hyperspace

Post by flarecde »

I imagine planets create the same problem as a longer jump, but in miniature. Much safer to aim to land before you get too close to anything messy, or avoid messy altogether.

Is there a sense of time in Hyperspace? Like, say you overshoot or punch through and are stuck indefinitely, do you know something went wrong, or is it total limbo?

I looked briefly but can't recall if the Umiak allow any servant races serve aboard their ships. I imagine given their susceptibility to Hyperspace, it could be either a boon or bane depending on how much they trusted them.
Reality is nothing, perception is everything.

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Grayhome
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Re: Hyperspace

Post by Grayhome »

A few pages ago Tempo said that her strike group interdicted the attacking Umiak vessels, I am curious to know if they accomplish this by somehow creating an artificial phenomena that prevents vessels from entering Hyperspace via a ship system they possess.

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Re: Hyperspace

Post by flarecde »

I think it's more likely they interdicted them during the real space transit between jump points.
Reality is nothing, perception is everything.

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Re: Hyperspace

Post by GeoModder »

Well, I suppose the safest bet on a jump is landing 50 or so AU out of the primary if LOS goes through the destination's star ecliptic. Most yellow(ish) main sequence stars shouldn't have jovians orbiting that far out.
Talking about primaries, if jovians can already cause this much hassle, then binary star systems consisting of yellow(ish) main sequence stars must be no-go territory in alot of circumstances. Like Alpha Centauri for instance, which is supposedly the main route out of Sol. Say a quarter of their common orbital period they're pretty close to each other, the star's mutual orbit expressed in LOS in respect to Sol seems to come relatively close, and there's the tiny problem of a red dwarf star interfering with any hyperbolic trajectory in hyperspace.
Of course, the latter can be avoided by jumping out to Proxima Centauri first before continuing to the destination system.

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Re: Hyperspace

Post by icekatze »

hi hi

Part of the problem is hidden dangers. A ship based telescope apparently doesn't have the resolution to accurately catalogue and account for all of the objects that might alter the course of the jump. I think that after you've observed a star for as long as humanity has observed Alpha Centauri -likely with giant stationary telescope arrays that you wouldn't be able to bring with you- you eventually get to the point where you know where the dangers are and can plan your jumps accordingly.

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Re: Hyperspace

Post by dfacto »

icekatze wrote:hi hi

Part of the problem is hidden dangers.
In 3d space you have a gravity sphere of the star, and those of the planets. The planets, as mentioned, are in an ecliptic plane (or close to it), and if you are heading towards the star from another angle you have more or less no chance of hitting any "hidden danger". Even entering on a plane with the ecliptic, you have a tiny chance of hitting the gravity well of a planet at the right hyperspace speed to get dragged out.

Honestly, if you're that unlucky to get messed up by a planetary mass you didn't detect, then... sucks to be you, such is the inherent danger of space-travel.

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Re: Hyperspace

Post by Arioch »

flarecde wrote:I think it's more likely they interdicted them during the real space transit between jump points.
That's correct. The vast majority of time required for a multi-jump transit is spent crossing realspace between jump points, and that's where you can be intercepted.

I think the most significant hazards of jumping into a system into the ecliptic plane are 1) the gravity of any large planets perturbing the jump trajectory, and 2) actual collisions in debris fields such as our Kuiper Belt or Asteroid Belt.

Watching for an occultation is not so much about being concerned with the dangers posed by that specific occulting object, but rather that if you see any occultations at all, you know you're in the ecliptic.
Aygar wrote:To the rethink'ning.
By the way Aygar, thanks for the interesting diagrams that you posted. I actually don't remember seeing them on the old forums, though perhaps my memory is not what it once was.

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Re: Hyperspace

Post by Trantor »

Arioch wrote:I think the most significant hazards of jumping into a system into the ecliptic plane are 1) the gravity of any large planets perturbing the jump trajectory, and 2) actual collisions in debris fields such as our Kuiper Belt or Asteroid Belt.

Watching for an occultation is not so much about being concerned with the dangers posed by that specific occulting object, but rather that if you see any occultations at all, you know you're in the ecliptic.
Hm, am i wrong, or isn´t that something that can be easily explored with drones?
sapere aude.

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Re: Hyperspace

Post by Arioch »

Because of the power requirements of the jump field generator and inertial dampers, the smallest possible "drone" is still a very substantial vessel (at the tech level of the Loroi or Umiak) in the 75-80 meter range. Not something that is handy to cart around.

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Re: Hyperspace

Post by Trantor »

Arioch wrote:Because of the power requirements of the jump field generator and inertial dampers, the smallest possible "drone" is still a very substantial vessel (at the tech level of the Loroi or Umiak) in the 75-80 meter range. Not something that is handy to cart around.
But it would be possible to run it unmanned?
sapere aude.

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