Well of Souls Forums

Voitan wrote:However, if say you continued to aim yourself to the next grav well (if at all possible while still within hyperspace) and not exit hyperspace, can you "curve" yourself back to a home system to restart the process all over again?

See

Arioch wrote:No. You're essentially ballistic in hyperspace. There's no way to turn around.

fredgiblet wrote:

Voitan wrote:However, if say you continued to aim yourself to the next grav well (if at all possible while still within hyperspace) and not exit hyperspace, can you "curve" yourself back to a home system to restart the process all over again?

See

Arioch wrote:No. You're essentially ballistic in hyperspace. There's no way to turn around.

Point A to Point B and back is not possible, but circling around by hitting multiple grave wells to eventually return to Point A.

Once you hit a grav well you won't be in hyperspace anymore.

hi hi

I get what you're saying, but since the time elapsed from when you enter and when you exit is essentially zero, all that would happen is that you disappear and then instantly reappear, maybe facing a different direction. If you timed your jump for the exact instant someone else jumped, I dunno, maybe you could cross paths in hyperspace, but that is assuming that hyperspace doesn't have extra dimensions or something.

Voitan wrote:

fredgiblet wrote:

Voitan wrote:However, if say you continued to aim yourself to the next grav well (if at all possible while still within hyperspace) and not exit hyperspace, can you "curve" yourself back to a home system to restart the process all over again?

See

Arioch wrote:No. You're essentially ballistic in hyperspace. There's no way to turn around.

Point A to Point B and back is not possible, but circling around by hitting multiple grave wells to eventually return to Point A.

That's a possible outcome. However if that does happen to a ship. the outcome will be because the ship was very lucky not because that was what the ship intended to do.

At it rock bottom simplest this is like having an extremely myopic aim a bullet ricochet off of 4 four or more plates to return to the start. You can see the location of the first plate but as it is one large fuzzy blob of color the can't determine the angle of incidence. the other plates are even further off in the distance making the location some what iffy and the angle of incidence determinable.

having the bullet return to the starting location is possible, extremely unlikely to happen. Also If you fail at this feat you and you team mates will be draggoed away and tortured for the rest of their lives.

--Aygar

so if you can't bounce back is any reliable way, what happen if you had a Jump drive failure mid way. Say the total time for a jump is 4 secs and the time line work out like so,

0-1 sec, ship enters hyperspace, everything normal

1-2 A hint of problems then drive blue screens.

3+ secs what happens then

A) the ship simply exits hyperspace between system and has to travel vie convention drive ( on reduced power) either to back the original system or to target destination. Also, if this is what happens would the Loroi and Umiak have procedures/ crew survival method to save the crew ( IE cryo or statis systems).

B)the exits i very violent and either the ship is/dones I) break ups or II) surfer heavy damages III) atomized

C) The ship simply winks out of existence( ie is destroyed on the hyperspace drive failure) or is stuck in Hyperspace until the universe ends

I don't think there is a measurable time delay between jump and arrival.

Yeah, you are on a simply flat trajectory between stars with an instantaneous transit time. The drive can't fail mid-jump because there is no mid-jump.

I can see that I need to rewrite the FTL section, as much of the meat of it is currently in the Q&A section at the bottom of the page.

The energy required for jump is significant (proportional to the mass of the object), and the charge must be built up over several minutes. When activated, the jump field generator creates a small rupture in spacetime and propels the ship into hyperspace. After that, the ship is ballistic in hyperspace, depending on the momentum provided by its original vector (and the +hyperspace momentum attained by being thrown into hyperspae) to carry it towards the target; there is nothing more required from the jump field generator or the ship's engines.

So an object that enters hyperspace exits it with the same velocity and vector that it had as it entered.

I wonder if anyone in-universe has thought of strapping low-impulse engines on asteroids, had them gradually build up to Ludicrous Speed and then make a "suicide jump" into an enemy planet? It's an RKV that you don't know is coming until it pops out of hyperspace a couple light-seconds away from splashing your industrial planet.

If an object weren't worried about personal safety, how close to a gravity well could an object get?

If I recall the the inside writeup correctly, the entry zones are well out in the system, in the pluto area. It seems likely that deeper entry jumps are possible, but outside of the capability of the civilizations in question to properly calculate and pull off. Right now in the war I don't think killing enemy planets is really a challenge, the bigger problem is getting to anything worth killing through the several system deep deadzone they've burnt.

The more linear (realspace) momentum you have, the deeper into the destination gravity well you can emerge. The closer you get to the target mass, the more likely you'll be pulled into it (or through/past it), so there is risk involved. A short-jump into Sol could be at around Neptune distance; a deep jump could be at around Jupiter distance. You can jump shorter or deeper, but you increase the chance of missing short or long.

Space is three-dimenional, so most jump links between stars will not be in the same plane as the planets. Therefore collision with planets is not usually a problem (or possible). A jump link that happens to be in the planetary plane will be mostly unusable due to safety factors. But it would be very hard to deliberately hit a planet with a jumping object; jump exit points are not very accurate. Also, since jumps are only between nearby stars, inhabited planets are usually out of reach; in addition to the wide depopulated zone of the no-man's-land, most major population centers are well back from the border systems.

edit: One more thing that I didn't mention: inertial dampers are a prerequisite for jump drive, to prevent the ship and crew from being torn apart during the transition through the "portal" into hyperspace.

There are presumably also easier, more reliable ways to glass a planet than throwing giant rocks around on trajectories that have a 99.999999% chance of failure.

Judging from the graphic depicted, pretty deep in. All the way into the star itself actually. The problem becomes one of accuracy. Hitting a planet (read: small target) from light years away through another dimension for which local and interstellar interference make accurate course projection a figment of one's demented imagination is unbelievably difficult. If you had the technology to pull it off reliably in any fashion you'd likely have the technology to conquer the universe using quicker, saner and safer methods.

I can see the deep-jump method being used as part of an unmanned and automated rapid-message courier... sort of like Pony Express in Space. But without the Pony. Or the man that rides on the Pony.

Right... *crosses Hyperspace-RKV off*

Back to my demented, demented drawing board.

...I need a new hobby.

Heh.

But notice how the Human thinks. "Interesting... how can I use this as a weapon?"

LegioCI wrote:Right... *crosses Hyperspace-RKV off*

Back to my demented, demented drawing board.

I approve of this message and would subscribe to your newsletter.

...I need a new hobby.

No... no you don't

I'm telling ya: warp torpedoes.

A nuke isn't going to take care of those pesky ultraheavies in one shot, so just boot them into hyperspace and make your troubles disappear.

Repost from the previous forums. Here is my best guess at specifics of how hyperspace works with pictures. As far as I know it is still constant with all information provided by Arioch.

On massive wall of text coming up.

If you map our 3+1 dimensional (3 space and 1 time dimension) universe into a 2+1 dimensional membrane in a 3+1 dimensional external space where mass deforms the membrane to create a slope in external spaces 3rd dimension. For future reference the 2 dimensional membrane will be referred to as the ground brane and the external space will be referred to as the space.

Now take a 2 dimensional cross section of the space where x-axis is passes through the target and starting stars and the space's 3rd dimension is the y axis. In the cross-section the ground brane will form a curve leading from the source gravity well to the destination gravity well.

In this figure shows the approximate space time curvature of the solar system ranging from 1 au to 30 au (Earth to Neptune orbits) and neglecting the contribution of any planets.


When the ftl drive in engaged, the mass within its sphere of influence is unstuck from the ground brane (the mass is no longer constrained to remain embedded in the ground brane) and proceeds on a velocity vector that is tangent to the slope of ground brane deformation. This mass is now referred to at the transiting mass. This is shown it the following figure.


While in the external space the transiting mass is affected by gravitational forces as usual (there is an acceleration vector pointing from the transiting mass's position to all other masses embedded in the ground brane). This has the effect of creating a net force pulling the transiting mass back towards the the ground brane.

To re-embed itself back into the ground brane 2 conditions must be met.

1. First the transiting mass must be coincident with the ground brane within a tolerance.
2. Second the slope of the transiting mass's velocity vector must be within the a certain tolerance of the slope of the ground brane's deformation.

This is illustrated in the following figure.


In a the event of a velocity undershoot or a velocity overshoot you are most likely to re-embed inside of a star. The following figure shows why this is (In this graph I simplified by assuming that the star has a uniform density).

As you can see the gravity gradient reverses and eventually zeros out a the center of the of the star. Given that while jumping course correction is impossible. Therefor entering a stable orbit while possible is extremely unlikely. The most likely outcome is that the transiting mass will come to rest in the center of the star. At which point both re-embedding conditions will be met and the transiting mass will re-enter normal space in the center of the star.

--Aygar

there would be fewer questions if the old forum threads were easily accessible.

The thing I find interesting is that Arioch has sort of just said that hyperspace has like a 1 way parallel vector field "gravity" effect. That is to say gravity is (constant?) and always points down, so that you need to attain positive hyperspace velocity, not just open a portal into hyperspace. It seems like it wouldn't be super hard to get into hyperspace, but that it's probably very hard to get back out again.

As for the hyperspace drives, I sort of envisioned them like some sort of catapult spring thing. You spend a good bit of time winding the springs (putting energy into the capacitors or whatever), and then when you hit the big red button it provides significant impulse force in the hyperspace positive direction. This would result in a relatively huge acceleration obviously requiring some sort of dampener to keep people on the ship alive.

-O

osmium wrote:there would be fewer questions if the old forum threads were easily accessible.

Not really, almost nobody reads past the first few posts anyway. I'd bet that if you asked the next new person who shows up if they've even read the entirety of THIS forum they'd say no, and that's not nearly as tall of an order as reading all of the previous forum.